When comparing Haiku vs Garuda Linux, the Slant community recommends Garuda Linux for most people. In the question“What is the best laptop OS?” Garuda Linux is ranked 10th while Haiku is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Garuda Linux is:
Uses vram, and a zen kernel.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very fast
Pro Beta has been released
After about 6 years since the alpha version, beta has been released on Fri, 2018-09-28. Check here for release notes.
Pro Only need 512mb ram
Pro Stability
Pro Runs perfectly on old Hardware
Pro Super-fast
Uses vram, and a zen kernel.
Pro Themes
The dr460nized KDE theme is awesome.
Pro Easy entrance to Arch Linux
Filled to the brim with lots of quality-of-life changes and optimizations that are simple enough for long-time Windows, long-time Mac users, and Arch newbies to understand. Though, it also leads to bloat or not necessarily helpful extra software. If you're not into the "bloat" added in, try checking out the barebones version, you'll need to know a lot of things bout Arch to fully use barebones.
Pro Highly customized interface
You already have most of the customization done for you out of the box.
Pro Unused RAM is wasted RAM
It takes just a bit more RAM than Manjaro. Edit: This statement is only true if it helps the user and since this could be running on a low end machine this will not.
Cons
Con No one uses it
It's a very niche OS that no one uses.
Con Unfinished
It's still in beta and quite unstable. Making it unsuitable for developing applications of any kind.
Con Language support is terrible
Con Small community
It is important when developing to be familiar with tools that other developers use. You can make any utility in any language you feel like, but if it's in an esoteric language that no one can read targeting a small platform that no one uses, then it was just something you did as a hobbyist, not as a developer.
This is not to say that Haiku isn't a great operating system to hack around on. Just don't delude yourself into thinking you're doing it to get familiar with tools that you need to know to be a better developer.
Con UI quite different to other OSes
Con Needs a lot of RAM
Minimum is 4GB, for most Linux distributions it's 2GB or less.