Here are a couple of modern operating systems I have been watching for a couple of years.

Both of these operating systems have been created and coded from the ground up. It's amazing how fast SkyOS has been developed. Haiku has been a lttle slower going, but seems to be making ground now.

Neither OS is ready for production release, but they may soon be a great alternative to Windows, Linux, Unix, and OS X. I really love the way the SkyOS team handles finding files and moving around the file system. It seems intuitive and fast.

Haiku is based on BeOS, which was/is my favorite OS back in the day. It truely was advanced for it's time and fits nicely with modern operating systems. I was happy to see this project.

Neither system is based on Linux or Unix, but have some similarities making Unix users feel some what at home, but they both appear to be easy to use, as in OS X easy.

SkyOS is porting many popular and powerful open source applications, which are easily managed and installed via their software managment interface.

Haiku has many open source applications which are already ported, take a look at BeBits for applications, drivers, etc. There are also BeOS software venders still around and these will most likely be available for Haiku as they are running on Zeta. Zeta is a commercial rewrite of BeOS out of Germany, which may also be of interest to you if you don't wish to wait for Haiku to release. Zeta also has live cd, which you can download for free to preview the OS before installing on your hard drive.

SkyOS will most likely be a commercial product, but the price tag and licensing should prove to be a little more friendly compared to Windows.

Haiku will be released free under the MIT license.

If you have been waiting for something different than Windows, can't afford the Apple cost of hardware, and find Linux to much of a learning curve one of these operating systems may be a solution you've been looking for.

Visit SkyOS

Visit Haiku