I ran BeOS back in the day (even have the developer book!) and I've been trying Haiku on and off over the years.
It's been interesting. The browser isn't quite all there yet but might be considered serviceable, and you can sort of get a working dev environment going on it (not many modern runtimes, though, nor a way to run Linux binaries that would let me do Clojure).
It's certainly worth keeping an eye on, although there were some weird decisions - for instance, I remember a thread on ARM support where whomever was tackling that was completely dissing the Raspberry Pi, and yet today, if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi...
> if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi
The pi is such a great device for this. If I were working on any niche operating system (or building one from scratch), I'd target qemu first, and the pi second. It may not be the nicest hardware out there, but it is a single platform that loads of people have, that allows trivial disk swapping (upside of no onboard flash -> everything on swappable SD card), and is dirt cheap.
Last time I tried Java was two years ago. A few months back I installed it on KVM to check out the state of WebPositive, but didn’t actually get to try coding anything since the browser couldn’t load my webmail.
It's been interesting. The browser isn't quite all there yet but might be considered serviceable, and you can sort of get a working dev environment going on it (not many modern runtimes, though, nor a way to run Linux binaries that would let me do Clojure).
It's certainly worth keeping an eye on, although there were some weird decisions - for instance, I remember a thread on ARM support where whomever was tackling that was completely dissing the Raspberry Pi, and yet today, if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi...