This weekend I installed Haiku on my old Thinkpad X40. It’s fast and surprisingly stable. Emacs, VLC works like a charm. Computer to slow for web browsing. The BeProductive office suite is a masterpiece of application at a 9MB download; although not open source.

Then I installed Haiku on my XPS13 under KVM/Qemu. Everything runs blazingly fast. I’m thinking of maybe using that install for organizing my photos. The metadata functionality built into the BeFS is great for that.

I must say that I am really impressed.

Haiku is a good example of prioritising the user experience over benchmarks. Under the hood, broadly speaking, it is running at about 60% the speed of Linux on the same system. But in action it feels so much quicker than anything else.

That is not to say that they aren't focusing on performance gains, just that they have ensured the user experience is the top priority.

Oh, now you say that, I could install it on a very old VAIO I have around...