For all the people who have been following the haiku project, it is truly playing out as a viable alternative to the desktop wars with Linux. In my opinion there were only a few that could have beaten the windows dominance, one was the photonGUI and then the BeOS. Turns out the Mac has won a huge chunk of the market, while BBM is killing the photonGUI slowly but steadily.
Back to the Haiku story, i recently installed it on my own machine and can vouch for the fact that it is pretty decent. To make it something that i want to use consistently, I would want a couple of things [hopefully, I will get sometime to work on them myself] Better browser - can live with FF or chrome or Opera An email client like claws Nicer terminal application Eclipse [This should be possible with JVM working on Haiky finally] VLC / SMPlayer
That completes more or less what I actively use on my windows machines. Lets hope out of this emerges the true windows OSS competitor that everyone is looking forward to.