I kinda feel a modern System 7 [0] like OS could be neat. But with a terminal included.

It was kinda easy to get your head around the OS just navigating through the system folder. The UI was also more consistent than anything we have these days.

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[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7

Not sure if that's old people painting the past rose, but System 7 was not awesome. Cooperative scheduling and lack of memory protection were anachronisms already in 1991.

I think we're talking about different things here. The UI might have been superior in MacOS, but the technical foundations of Unix clearly were. Something OSX tried to (belatedly) reconcile. Nothing stops you from adding an awesome UI on top of Linux (although I'd say UI will always be a matter of personal taste and prior experience).

System 7 was so awesome. I was still developing Macintosh GUI software when it came out. It was great to use, and visually pleasing. And as you say, the user interface was consistent, also discoverable, and things did what you expected. Attributes I miss as GUI software inexorably moves into the browser.

I have some PPC macs that have OS 9 on them, I love the UI. I look for excuses to use them whenever I can.

However, Haiku is gaining a ton of GNU/Linux software. It becomes less interesting to me when people are just porting the same junk to it.

Serenity is far more interesting.

I think Haiku biggest mistake was to try to be a regular desktop OS instead of focusing on a specific hardware like RaspberryPi.

In their defence they’ve been at it since 2002 before any of those fun little pieces of hardware existed.

Well, they were also quite hostile to the idea of targeting the Pi. I remember being involved in a forum discussion where it was dissed as a toy, another around ARM never being a relevant platform, and another about the Broadcom bits being proprietary.

To this day, Haiku has been dragging its feet on the Pi (and yes, I know it’s a community effort, that it requires sponsorship, suitable volunteers, etc. - I’m just pointing out that they dropped the ball in even acknowledging the need for a port).

‘Need’ is a big word to use for something voluntary.

Most of the Linux crap it's QT based, which looks good enough in any OS.

For the rest there are some interesting native tools such as video editors.

But Haiku needs 3 things to get more real life use cases:

- GL/Vulkan for older Intel (both old and new)

- Async USB

- UVC webcams

Serenity is still a very Unix-like OS though.

It is, but it doesn’t use any of the existing open source software, which makes it fun, different, and interesting. Heck, just having a non-blink/non-webkit/non-goanna/non-gecko browser is cool.

Their ports system (which they didn't invent, of course) offers a pretty nice compromise of continuing their "everything from scratch" ethos while letting people have fun porting. And who knows, maybe the ports will allow it to be a practical OS someday.

Agreed.