I highly recommend it! Even if you haven't had the experience or attachment to BeOS it's a refreshing and fun take on a desktop system. It just "clicks" with me in a way that Linux/Windows/Mac never did. It's truly impressive that they've been going for over 20 years now (I still remember the first screenshot of app_server drawing a window in the early 2000s) and have accomplished so much from scratch. Can't wait to see where the project will go next!

As a teenager reading "PC Pro" magazine BeOS was the operating system I was convinced was going to be the next thing and take over. Sad times!

Haiku and Serenity

Two founts of hope

For computing's future

Serenity is just a Unix clone and not one written in an interesting language either. Id put redox above it simply for being Rust based. Haiku is an entirely different paradigm.

Serenity's starting point is very well described:

"SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems.

Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix."

I think in terms of paradigm, Serenity has a stronger ideology than RedoxOS. It brings BeOS and Mac concepts like a consistent and fully integrated monorepo system and development kits, and a very strong and defined user interface paradigm.

From that perspective I find Redox much less of a paradigm for the end-user, if the main feature is the language the developers used. Orbital does not look remarkable.

The level of productivity of Andreas himself, his videos and the community he managed to built, including growing a few individuals of to major contributors to the point they created a whole browser stack is just outstanding as an open-source case study. Also to me, much more interesting than a programming language used to built it.

Haiku is written in the same language as Serenity, btw.

What I tried to convey in my Haiku but better described!

I'd add to that, Andreas is creating his own memory-safe compiled language to build components for the OS. Jakt has already been used to build things, including its own compiler.

Also I think what makes both HaikuOS and Serenity compelling is the common vision and clear direction: Aiming to recreate then improve BeOS has given HaikuOS project a clear steer ahead, while Andreas' clear guidelines and monorepo has done the same for SerenityOS.