The excellent answer by @[email protected] already presented the cool features of the file system. There are a bunch of other interesting features found throughout the OS.

Pervasive multithreading and multitasking makes Haiku very reactive and fast, even under load. Back when BeOS came out, the killer demo was playing several videos simultaneously without stutter. This is of course less impressive today, but you can fell this all over the OS when using it.

Window management has two really cool features called Stack and Tile. Enabling you to stick windows together, so they move as one. On top of that you can put several windows from different applications together into one tabbed window bar . It’s super cool and unique.

The biggest difference when using it compared to the big desktop operating systems today is that it gets out of your way and just lets you do things. Using it will make you realize how cumbersome the current desktop has become. Of course there are some security downsides, as there’s no pervasive sandboxing, rights management, and so on.

Running on real hardware can be difficult because of a lack of drivers. I highly recommend trying it in a VM (VirtualBox, qemy, UTM) first. The increasing number of ports (mostly FOSS stuff you know from Linux) make this operating system actually practically usable. The ports don’t take advantage of the Haiku specific features, but are great overall. Especially the KDE apps are a good fit.

Some people say it’s ready to be a daily driver even it’s still in beta, others say it’s what Linux used to be .