I just found Haiku R1 Beta 4 exists yesterday, and today read that it has an X11 API interpreter, so I'm going to give it a try over the weekend by chucking an old HDD in my laptop and running it natively ... if it recognises my old laptop's WiFi I'll try it on a longer term basis :-)
Thanks! So far it's really really good and everything works (the WM is so nice), except I can't use HDMI from my laptop which might be a show stopper :-/