Occasional Haiku user here, running directly on hardware. "Works" on my ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen (which is an 8th Gen Core i7 device).

To get it working I have to type "continue" at the two kernel panics on startup due to spurious / overzealous Thunderbolt PCI warnings. I also needed help from an Action Retro video to figure out how to setup the UEFI BIOS files on the correct partitions on the bootable Samsung USB stick I use. But it works enough that I can boot into it straight off USB when I want a break from Windows & Linux. They finally added support for the WiFi in my particular ThinkPad. There's basically no bluetooth support, so if you want a wireless mouse and keyboard, something like the Logi Pebble 2 bundle with wireless USB dongle works well.

Haiku has a Go 1.18 port now that mostly works, so that helps. A lot of Qt software has been ported across, though obviously the ideal would be truly native BeOS software.

The main thing I find Haiku lacks is a decent email client. That really prevents productive work for me. There's Claws Mail, but it has enough bugs that I didn't even find it usable, nevermind reliable. There's also some memory or networking issues they haven't tracked down. When I'm using terminal sessions, network responses often have dropped bytes in the output.

Actually the thing I'm really lacking is Claude Code. I ended up building my own minimal TUI API harness / client on Haiku to try and get work done. Haiku's web browsers (like WebPositive) sometimes have problems with the Claude website. I've been wanting to use Claude to help write more Haiku / BeOS software and fix various OS issues - a couple of weeks ago I used the Claude API and $30 API credit to make a USB UAC 2 audio driver for Haiku that works with Focusrite Scarlett devices (both playback and recording). But Haiku's AI policy means I can't contribute those fixes back. Though I understand their desire to keep the source pure and free from any potential copyright liability concerns, especially as they release it under an MIT license.