Some musings on HaikuOS
Okay, accuse me of being a fanboy and suffering from an affliction of low expectations, but I am happy to see that HaikuOS is not only continuing to mature, but that at least one bug that has vexed me as a tinkerer, the inability to restart the terminal after you close it, has been apparently fixed. I have actually booted HaikuOS natively in the past on my now dead Compaq Presario which used to be my whipping PC for whenever I needed to do something experimental. It's got a ways to go, but HaikuOS may be really usable on some meaningful level in another six months to a year now that it has become part of the Google Summer of Code. Why should non-geeks care? Because Linux suck as a desktop, and Vista, while beautiful, is suffering from a control freak mentality and I/O performance problems. HaikuOS is open source, it's fast, and like BeOS, it just works (when HaikuOS works since it is still technically in an alpha state).
You don't need to install any new operating system to try it out. Just get the VMWare Player, and download my zipped copy of HaikuOS. VMWare Player will let you try it out without even restarting your PC. It won't be running as a native operating system, since it's in a virtual machine, and it will be slower than it is when booted natively, but it's still an interesting OS to try out. And one of the best parts about this is that you don't need to worry about whether or not you break anything ;)
