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.