I'm pretty biased -- I've followed BeOS/OpenBeOS/Haiku for forever. I can wait a little longer for it to mature and start getting fancy. After R1 it will be taking for a more adventurous development path.
BeOS is the only modern OS I've used other than Windows and OSX that feels like a fully baked os. It's hard to explain, just other alt oeses miss certain polish you grow used to. Back when I was in high school, it was mindblowingly fast than windows. We're talking 5 second boot on a PII. These days, a well maintained Windows 7 install on decent hardware is almost as peppy.
I don't see how unless someone adds a FreeBSD style Linux binary layer I once saw Haiku becoming the Android of netbooks, but with Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich, that ship is already sailing. There was an official Macromedia Flash player for BeOS, but not much chance of Haiku getting supported within the next decade or so.
They ported over Gnash and you can get it to work in the Firefox port with some work. Eventually the author or someone else will step up to the plate and work on that or something similar. Yeah, kind of sad that they couldn't jump on the netbook bandwagon quicker -- it does run extremely well on my Acer Aspire One (wireless and everything). It's a niche operating system though, so it will live on through whatever hardware regardless. That's pretty much what separates it from the other ones is that it's a niche with a strong (though, small) community. It didn't die in the 90s or early 2000s, so that's a good thing. One of those things where patience is a virtue. After the release of R1 is where everything will start to get interesting.
Dude, gnash? Really? That's not a viable alternative to flash on any OS :P Also the Firefox port on Haiku is ancient. The only modern browsers on there right now are Aurora and Webpositive. Aurora is pretty full featured but it's a Qt app not native, and Webpsitive is still in the design stages.
