BeOS 5.0 Pro.

[Heiroglyph]

I've been using the Haiku nightlies for a while now, both in vmware and on an i7 PC and they both have very good uptime.

The "stable" release isn't.  Right now the nightlies are for what will be the next stable release.

I've had maybe two crashes in the past month and I'm working them very hard for daily and development use.

[Heiroglyph]

I'm not sure what you want to accomplish, but unless it's a retro thing, Haiku is IMHO on par with BeOS and runs on new hardware.

I don't have GPU accelerated 3D working, but it's of little use to me ATM.

A few default preferences that drove me nuts that you may want to change:

• Keymap shortcut setting for Ctrl instead of Alt key on shortcuts. (ctrl-C, etc) Haiku defaults to Alt, but I like Windows/Linux mode.
• The mouse setting so that the first click both focuses and sends button events. (Otherwise you click on a background window close button and it only focuses the window)
• Tracker preferences for Show folder location, Single window navigation and show navigator.

After those it's pretty nice.

It's still a love it or hate it look though and the other themes aren't complete.

[Heiroglyph]

I haven't tried it, but I would make sure that you haven't enabled Enlightened I/O.  Haiku won't have a clue how to deal with that, better to fully emulate all devices.

[Heiroglyph]

Grub?  I love eating good grub

Somewhat, it depends on what you need.

[Heiroglyph]

Why do you say that?

I've never used it, but I doubt it used Grub 2.

To me it's one of those "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" things.

[Heiroglyph]

Be was one of the big players in the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit.

The part that didn't get pushed hard enough was control of the boot loader.

Microsoft stipulated that Windows OEM's couldn't install any third-party boot loader on OEM machines.

Be was making deals with big players such as Sony to dual boot Windows and BeOS so that users had the option, but MS put a stop to this.  In order for Sony to not break either contract, they had to install both OS's, but make the user manually enable BeOS as an option.  This was too cumbersome for normal users to really deal with, so it went basically unused by anyone other than those already dedicated to BeOS.

Combined with Steve Jobs returning to Apple and killing the Mac clone licenses, BeOS lost any real chance in both PPC and x86 markets.

The last attempt at staying afloat was in set top boxes (sound familiar?) but it was just too early for the market to support it.

They eventually ran out of cash and sold to Palm who didn't really do anything with it.

Before they went completely under, certain parts of the OS such as Tracker (think Workbench) were open sourced.  This is partially why Haiku has gotten so far in such a short time compared to some other clone OS's such as AROS.

[Heiroglyph]

Although they are still calling them alphas, from what I've seen they have pretty high standards.

They are really close to releasing alpha 3 and the next version will be the first beta.

I've seen worse than the current builds released as final though.  At least on my hardware it's fine for daily use.