However, Haiku "is replicating what has already been accomplished": Building an OS from scratch instead of in an evolutionary manner.

"But as a user, I don't care so much about all that," Aßmus admits. "I can make a choice for a platform to install on my computer. I make a choice for particular applications, ideally only one for each task I need to perform."

However, in Ubuntu, for example, "that may mean that under the hood, multiple redundant, alternative system components and application frameworks are installed in parallel," Aßmus says.

"Qt and GTK are an obvious example, but it goes much farther and deeper. That the system actually feels so uniform on the surface, I consider a huge achievement.

"That sort of bloat and redundancy is what the Haiku project tries to avoid at all costs. For any given piece of system functionality, we try to provide only one implementation, one backend. Multiple APIs may map to this single implementation, but the system remains lean and clean."