Despite December being the holiday month, Haiku’s developers got a lot of things done. A welcome addition for those of us who regularly install Haiku on EFI systems is a tool in the installer that will copy the EFI loader to the EFI system partition, so fewer manual steps are needed on EFI systems. Support for touchpads from Elantech has also been improved, and the FreeBSD driver compatibility layer and all of its Ethernet and WiFi drivers have been updated to match the recent FreeBSD 15 release. Of course, there’s also the usual long list of smaller fixes, improvements, and changes.
As for a new release milestone, beta 6 seems to be on the way.
Not quite. There has been some discussion on the mailing list as the ticket list gets smaller, but there’s still at least some more regressions that need to be fixed. But it looks like we’ll be starting the release process in the next month or two, most likely…
↫ Haiku’s December 2025 activity report
To be fair, though, Haiku’s nightly releases are more than able to serve their duties, and waiting for a specific release if you’re interested in trying out Haiku is really not needed. Just grab the latest nightly, follow the installation instructions, and you’re good to go. The operating system supports updating itself, so you’ll most likely won’t need to reinstall nightlies all the time.
The most reliable way to try Haiku now would be to install the current beta then update it in a month or so when the new one comes out. The nightly builds tend to be very good, however the official advice is still to persevere with the betas.
For my part, I would rather Haiku ditched the “beta x” naming (Haiku quality is perhaps too good to be considered Beta) and went with simply year.month numbering as does Genode and others; so 26.01 if released now. But, when I suggested this in the forum they suggested the need for this may be passing as this should be the last beta, and we will presumably be onto a different way to manage minor updates after R1.