BeOS is pretty neat, Haiku too, and I wish them the best, but never quite had the same appeal to me, primarily because I hadn’t really heard of it until I was in my 20’s. As such I never got to mythologize it in my brain like Amiga.

I do hope Haiku does catch on though; I heard they have a decent browser now, so there’s a shot.

I was a big BeOS user and have my R4 and 5 CD's somewhere. It was impressive to open a bunch of videos or the video cube thing as a demo and watch pulse peg to full CPU while the system and UI remained snappy. Another cool thing was the universal codec where you drop a PNG codec into the codec directory and now all your image programs can open PNGs. I really enjoyed it but the magic died when Palm bought it and I never looked back.

I have always seen BeOS as a spiritual successor to the Amiga.

BeOS fans still exist!