[I will get flamed for speaking that way about Gnome and KDE, but they fall a little short, IMHO. This being said, I don't blame the Gnome or KDE teams for it. I blame the gazillions of distributions that add nothing beside a theme or a background picture to the base packages they get from Ubuntu or Red Hat. At least these Haiku guys seem to be adopting a more ambitious approach.]
Why is that?
I think an awful lot of people take on projects solely to make a name for themselves...or because they truly believe they know better than Linus or some other pundit they happen to despise.
A prophecy: The first entity to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of Linux will have an opportunity to compete with Apple directly.
I have used OS X as my primary OS for long periods of time (totaling about 15 months) on two separate occasions and I currently use XFCE. For me, OS X is unusable garbage.
Am I somehow fundamentally defective as a human being? Or do I just have different preferences than you? The latter seems far more likely to me.
Obviously, everyone has an opinion. You are entitled to yours.
Mine is mine and that of most UX people I have spoken to. I have used XFCE, I have used CDE, NextSTEP, the Irix UI, Gnome, KDE, Comice OS, Mint Linux, all versions of Windows, all version of Mac OS...and I happen to believe Mac OS X is the culmination of decades of gradual, tedious, laborious, unoriginal improvement. I just happen to believe it's better than any alternative. I may be wrong. I am not a man of great certainties.
My original point stands: People should spend less time repackaging existing distributions with a different logo and background image, and more time coming up with a UI that can compete with something a proprietary, profit-oriented entity came up with.
Already been done by Google with Android. It's state-of-the-art in the sense that it's a touch-based mobile UI, and it does compete with Apple directly...
Although, if you mean Linux in the sense of a full-fledged traditional GNU/Linux Unix userspace..the closest we've got is probably something like Ubuntu.
> There are literally millions of smart hackers out there
> and only 1 entity has ever managed to put a state-of-the-art
> UI on top of a Unix core: Apple.
On top of that, I've found that most of the problems with KDE (I haven't actually used Gnome much) have been consistently eliminated in newer versions. When I started using KDE around 4.4, I was annoyed by several little details. Somehow, even without any input from me (I'm really lazy), almost all of these little issues were fixed in subsequent versions.
For example, the GTk build of Emacs can only be resized to the nearest character--you cannot have a window that overlaps has half a character off screen in either direction. This actually makes sense for Emacs; certain normal commands and interface elements would not work properly if you could resize that way. Normally, this is not a problem; however, if you used KDE's fullscreen shortcut, it would properly hide the borders and maximize Emacs, but it would leave a strip of desktop visible because Emacs can only be sized to the nearest character. This was a little annoying, but certainly not a horrible problem, and yet it was actually fixed shortly after I found it. Now fullscreen mode fills in any stripes like that with the correct background color, even taking things like transparency into account.
Over all, KDE is still the best desktop environment I've used anywhere. Given the relatively smaller amount of resources behind the project, I'm very impressed.
Citing Wikipedia BeOS page: "It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system."
This is why many argue that Microsoft agreeing to produce Office for Apple back when Apple was nearly bankrupt was far more important to them surviving than the money investment.
I have been using OSX for as long as it was available, and I am starting to get tired of its look, but I am increasingly switching to just running as much as possible in iTerm 2 to be me as operating system agnostic as possible. Adobe software is holding that process back.
I think this is Canonical's current strategy: they're not relying on KDE/Gnome to get their act together, rather they're trying to roll their own with Unity.
They had a shocking start (very unfinished when launched) but they're moving really quickly. I personally find it nice to use now. Still not at Apple levels of state-of-the-art or polish, but if they keep the pace up they'll overtake Win7 before long and within a few years might offer serious competition to Apple.
Nearly every incompatibility we see right now is a result of a hardware company not releasing complete specs. It isn't for lack of coders that suspend/hibernate isn't working universally.
There are enough people working on the big pyramid.
In oss, I think you can make contributions in two ways: refine or invent. To do either of these you have to learn the past.
Even if all the only result is an exact clone of BeOS an entire group of developers will have learned a whole lot about something state-of-the-art at the time it was created. That's knowledge that was previously available only to a tiny group of people.
Not to knock Haiku OS—I just feel that if someone is going to create a desktop OS from scratch, it's a chance to do something really different. I see this as a missed opportunity.
BeOS was state-of-the-art when it was written, in the sense that it took the accumulated wisdom and academic research up to that point as its starting point. And in many ways it is still state-of-the-art.
I also remember that, in its time, BeOS was innovating quite a bit in its pervasive multi-threading ('a thread for each window').
Or were both based on research papers or older systems? If so, I would like to know which these were.
Haiku has always been about recreating R5, just a bit more modern, because it's a goal everyone can agree on and no major design work was necessary.
(An even older one, as it happens! But even that is arguable; change the shell, the terms under which it operates, or even just the available commands, and that's a UI change.)
As far as development: the GNU tool chain exists, and is indeed the foundational tool chain. There's also a high level of de facto POSIX compliance (though neither BeOS nor (current version of) Haiku are multiuser), and many libraries you'd expect are available just fine. Even some large ones, like Qt. This makes porting fairly easy—and much like on OS X, it's easy to wrap a native Haiku GUI around existing tools.
The one bad part of development on Haiku is that the old-world C++ API has resulted in some compiler weirdness. Haiku aims for full binary compatibility...with C++ apps written on GCC 2.95. But developers, of course, want GCC 4. So what happens is that, much like OS X has fat PowerPC/x86 binaries, Haiku has fat GCC 2.95/GCC 4 libraries. This doesn't actually make development a pain, but it requires a bit of heads-up to navigate the linking situation
I remember demo-ing BeOS to a friend by opening a ton of videos at the same time. He replied that Windows did that as well, until he tried it and the system was trashing after the 3rd video. The "pauze" button in the copy/paste progress bar ... a revelation.