Both Haiku and SerenityOS seem to have enough momentum to potentially become viable contenders for the Open Source Desktop someday.
Both of them highlight how much nicer a vertically integrated user experience can be as well as how much lighter weight a modern desktop can be as well. They also demonstrate that it does not take dozens of corporate paid engineers to do it ( not that I would turn them away ).
Haiku has a long lead over Serenity in terms of hardware support and now app compatibility ( with the new X11 and Wayland stuff ). That said, having to drag along binary compatibility with BeOS must really be slowing Haiku down at this point.
I am looking forward to using one or both of them in the future.
It seems that both are struggling with drivers and more advanced system states, both are in a far worse position than Linux desktop was in the mid to late 2000’s…
And this is really where it’s difficult to get any real progress without massive industry backing.
So I’m not sure how either will become a contender for any real word desktop use without someone at the scale of Google putting their weight behind them.
I like RedOx too although it's going to be quite some work before it runs on a reasonably wide variety of hardware. Haiku was fun to play around a few years back, I remember being able to write a toy gui app in an afternoon with no particular dev experience (although some programming knowledge). Indeed everything seemed well integrated and coherent.
Both of them highlight how much nicer a vertically integrated user experience can be as well as how much lighter weight a modern desktop can be as well. They also demonstrate that it does not take dozens of corporate paid engineers to do it ( not that I would turn them away ).
Haiku has a long lead over Serenity in terms of hardware support and now app compatibility ( with the new X11 and Wayland stuff ). That said, having to drag along binary compatibility with BeOS must really be slowing Haiku down at this point.
I am looking forward to using one or both of them in the future.