To me BeOS was and is still the best looking desktop OS ever, and it was so fast, it felt so good. I think in 2000ish (when it was released freely) I used it on my PC pretty much exclusively for a few months.
I wish that there was some edict from KDE Project management telling everyone working on the Plasma desktop to spend a week in Haiku or something.
The amount of indirect "open a dialog box, click 6 tabs down, then enter a value" stuff in KDE that is a single drag in Haiku drives me mad.
GNOME 3 was trying to built a clean modern minimalist desktop without all the clutter inherited from the design of Windows... But all they know is, very visibly, Windows and KDE.
RISC OS is that clean legacy free desktop. It's unlike anything else, built from scratch by a team not interested in what the rest of the world was doing.
And it's still alive and still updated and works well on modern hardware. Several separate efforts are building 64-bit replacements today.
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
It runs on all Raspberry Pi models up to the 4, and runs really well. As of version 5.30 it supports the Wifi chip in the Pi so it can connect to WLANs.
The owners of the IP are RISC OS Developments Ltd (ROD) and they have an enhanced version -- free on the Pi -- called RISC OS Direct, with an IPv6 stack and a modern WebKit browser:
https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/
They also sell more capable hardware for it.
There is another fork of the OS that is still proprietary. That's owned by 3QD. They used to sell upgrades for real Acorn-compatible kit but there's none of that that isn't vintage now, so it focuses on a software emulation that runs on modern x86 machines:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3...
Search the Reg for "riscos" and you'll find interview with the original core team, looks at the last couple of FOSS releases, the Moonshot effort to go 64-bit and more.
I know almost nothing about it, so I will give your links a read.
Uh, legacy free? I'd argue the opposite - it's got tons of legacy baggage - cooperative multitasking, and a lot is written in old ARM assembly language. It's disk limitations, filetypes.
> And it's still alive and still updated and works well on modern hardware.
I am quite impressed that the bounties that are put out to improve it get funded. (to be clear, this is not sarcasm , there's tens of thousands of pounds £s donated). I've tried in on my Pi, and it's super snappy, if a little odd.
Me, after a third of a century fighting modern preemptive OSes models on Unix, I'm over it, but I'm in a minority.
But what I'm talking about here is the UI design. KDE and GNOME are so accreted in layers of legacy junk that the original shape is hard to discern any more.
RISC OS isn't. It's unlike anything else.
The other thing is that it says right at the start of the BeOS Book - and this is carried across to Haiku - is that you shouldn't have a spinner or hourglass. It should do *something*, it shouldn't make you wait.