Haiku

Let me start with saying I can not recommend this OS on a 64bit modern hardware for daily use simply because there are better options out there. But for an old 32bit hardware, Haiku maybe the perfect fit.

Haiku is extremely light weight, fast to install and very fast to boot. I did try many light weight Linux and BSD and other systems on my old 32bit Toshiba laptop with 1GB RAM and a 1.2 GHz Intel Centrino Duo CPU and every single one of them was running extremely hot this old little device. Yes I was able to do a lot with Linux and BSD systems if I was able to stand the noise the fans was making as they were running the CPU at 100% even if I was doing nothing but open a notepad. This is with "light weight" desktops like XFCE and Mate.

So Haiku is the one I tried recently to see if it can bring any life back to this old laptop and to my surprise yes It can. Haiku installed in few minutes and boot to the desktop in just few seconds after which I can immediately and instantly open any application while the fans makes no noise at all. The laptop runs really cool even under load. The OS and also the apps are very light.

I can do pretty much anything, browse the web, read and write documents, watch videos, even Youtube and again, without the fans going crazy. It is just so awesome. The window manager of the OS is also very neat, what I like about it the most is that we can tab multiple windows in to one and if we shut the system down while these windows are open, the OS will remember and next time we boot the system it is going to automatically open the windows with the tabs for us. The biggest surprise to me was the Yab programming language which is a basic like programming language for Haiku to develop GUI applications easily. Pretty awesome unfortunately however this programming language seems to be not maintained, according to Github it was updated 6 years ago and this is where I can move on to the negative things.

So, Yab was not updated in the last 6 years, it is still fun to do little programs but question how reliable it is for bigger projects. We also have Paladin which is an other dev tool designed specifically to develop GUI applications using C++, a more powerful programming language but due to missing dependencies I was not able to get it working. It is possible to code in C and C++ using a text editor and use a command line compiler instead of Paladin and the OS includes a decent handbook to get you started with coding, it is a really nice guide for complete beginners but I was getting lot of weird errors and many ports of Linux applications was written in C and C++ also crashes a lot with weird error messages. So at this point, there is a giant question mark how to develop applications for this OS and many applications was not reliable I tried. Maybe the 64bit version provide a better experience regarding stability and reliability of C and C++ applications, tools and Linux ports but I would still argue the benefits Haiku has to offer on a modern 64bit machine compared to modern Linux distributions.

For me the real power would be to use it on a 32bit hardware and with tools like Paladin and Yab it would be even super useful for educational purposes too in less developed regions maybe. But as it stands right now, I can not honestly recommend for anything other than some casual use for reading, writing docs and web browsing and maybe some casual games if you are interested in open-source titles like Tux and similar.

Haiku is a light-weight OS like (but isn't) a tiny Linux distro but it differs from that by being a true noob-proof desktop OS. No need for an admin root password to install ScummVM or to move your cat videos to another drive partition. No need to understand what a 'broken package' is. And never ever having to know what 'Dependency hell' is.

But please, keep in mind that you shouldn't use it as your daily OS until it becomes stable enough, but with how fast the development have became in the past few years thanks to the growing interest, it shouldn't take too long in my opinion.