Developer mindset is a finicky thing. Haiku has been around for 20 years, actually boots on large amount of hardware, now even has ports for Qt, GTK, X11, Wine and loads of other applications people are already familiar with. This year I handed over old Acer Aspire to a friend in need, slapped Haiku on it and he has a working computer. By all fairness, Haiku is already actually 'useable'.

But majority of indie OS mindset was suddenly captured over past couple of years by SerenityOS. It is a good project in itself, but goes to show 1.0 does not matter for capturing Dev mindshare.

SerentityOS really shows the power of community engagement. The project is extremely open and welcoming. The project releases often. There are official demos videos of progress both from the project leader and a community showcase of other contributors. There are developer interviews, office hours, and an active discord server. The founders now famous opening catch phrase is “hello friends” and other contributors now mirror that in their videos. The founder says that he is building the system primarily for himself but he very clearly sees the value in the community and comes as as extremely grateful for the attention and engagement. There are major contributors that basically learned C++ to contribute to the project and the founder trumpets that like a proud father.

ReactOS on the other hand is very opaque and unfriendly. The website goes without updates for months. There is a sparsely populated forum that is filled with hostility and frustration from the inner circle. The current release ( made not that long ago ) is based off a branch that the main development moved off of years ago. There is a wiki that shows what is appearing in the next release but it has not been updated since June 28. Most of the project discussion happens at chat.reactos.org but I am not sure how you are to know that even exists. To me, it feels like the project attitude towards the community is that they are useless freeloaders. People better than you are busy doing important work that you would not understand. Don’t bother them.

Another aspect of the end-user focus is that SerenityOS has an emphasis on producing working software that is useful. Despite its alpha state they are redesigning dialogue boxes and controls to be easier to use. Animations and subtle GUI effects are celebrated as are small usability features in applications. Despite it being a project goal to build everything from scratch, there is a large ports collection and some of the most notable live streams show the founder porting popular programs and games. While ReactOS cannot even bother to get a browser working, SerenityOS is creating one from scratch.

I have a huge respect for the ReactOS achievement but it is no great mystery why a project like SerenityOS has had more momentum. In my view, the way the ReactOS project is managed has absolutely held it back. I could say the same for projects like GNUstep unfortunately.

Projects like Haiku have not bottled quite the same magic as Serenity but Haiku is very community friendly and it shows. Haiku is also pragmatic and, while the goal is to mimic BeOS and to offer an alternative app platform they have built compatibility layers in order to port over apps. They even run WINE. Haiku also has a browser ( not totally from scratch ) and there is already a port to RISC-V. Despite not being at 1.0 yet, there has been a lot of emphasis on creating a working end-user experience.

A lot of these projects require the rare resources of people willing to do the work for free.

HaikuOS is a hobby project, it doesn’t have the industry relevance to be serious enough for a solid release.

Gnu Hurd’s only benefit is having a micro kernel. Minix, QNX, and possibly other actively developers OS’s have that market. It hasn’t been updated in 6 years and will fade. There’s already Linux anyway.