The desktop operating system Haiku

Haiku® is an open source, light, fast and user-friendly operating system that
is inspired by the “Multimedia Operating System” BeOS™. At the moment
Haiku is still under development and the latest release was Alpha 2 which is
meant to be used only for testing. Unlike many other open source operating
systems, such as Linux or FreeBSD, Haiku sets the focus on personal computing
and the graphic user interface (GUI) is not just an “Add-On” or “additional
windows management system”, but it is an essential part of the kernel.
This thesis analyses Haiku, especially regarding the ease of use, the GUI
and the multimedia capabilities, by giving an introduction to Haiku, an overview
of the history and features of BeOS and a lot of general and technical
information about the architecture, the easy of use, the GUI and some other
aspects of operating systems in general respectively in the special case of
Haiku. In order to recognize the main fields of application of Haiku and the
expectations of the users regarding the further development of Haiku, the
Haiku community has been analysed by doing an online survey that was
answered by more than one thousand persons.