Haiku OS Beta 1: Simple Is Beautiful

After years of quiet but steady development, Haiku OS finally has its first beta. Here comes a new competitor for the desktop — not just with Windows or OS X, but Linux,too.

The Haiku Project rose from the ashes of the widely-admired but commercially-unsuccessful BeOS. There was a lot to admire: it was clean, lean, ran fast, had great programmer friendliness and had been written from the perspective of end-user access. And then it died, and what seemed like a great project came to very little indeed. Years later, the original BeOS APIs were reincarnated in the Haiku Project — but as a starting point for something with potentially greater reach…