The Haiku alpha release has always been a bit elusive. The project has been near the alpha release for a while now, but a number of difficult data-destructive bugs kept it at bay. After an informal coding sprint, the alpha is now just a decision away.
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Member since:2007-12-08
Member since:2006-01-19
Full multi-user support is unfortunately not one of the things that will be in Haiku R1, since that will break a lot of stuff. We created new technical foundations where we couldn't bear with how it worked in BeOS, but could still stay compatible (which is an important concern for our first release), for example interface layout management, new icon engine, automatic screen detection, and many more things in the details. But overall, it has helped the project a lot to stay focussed, that we could always say Haiku R1 targets the features of BeOS R5 only, whenever a discussion would otherwise go out of hand. There had been other project to recreate BeOS, which seemed to have a great head start when they would build on the Linux kernel for example. But somehow, those project never gained the necessary momentum to follow through. So it seems that the Haiku founders (I only came to the project at a later time), set things up quite well.
Member since:
2006-01-19
Haiku does still look similar, but a few month ago I gave the look a serious overhaul, since it looked very dated. I don't want anybody to have the impression they use something from the past, when Haiku is actually quite modernized in many aspects, compared to BeOS. Haiku is not a "retro"-OS. You may view it as such if you don't look closely, but that's not what we Haiku developers have in mind. :-) Unfortunately, it took us much longer to be where we are now, so the OS Haiku is reimplementing is really something from the past, but that doesn't mean Haiku itself is something from the past, since it's meant to be 100% compatible, not 100% the same.