It’s always a lovely day when it’s a Haiku release day – and sadly, those don’t come very often. Of course, Haiku’s nightlies tend to be rather solid so an official release isn’t really a must if you want to use Haiku, but if you were holding out for something more stable: Haiku has just released its fifth beta, Haiku R1/beta5. We’ve covered most of the new features and changes as they were developed, but since it’s been so long since the previous beta, we should cover some of the highlights.
One of the collection of improvements that’s impossible to put in a screenshot is the performance improvements the successor to BeOS has received since the release of R1/beta4, and there are many. There’s a ton of general performance improvements, of course, covering everything from the kernel to applications, including much better throughput in TCP, the network stack, which should lift Haiku’s network performance much closer to that of other, more mature operating systems. There’s also an overhaul of the user_mutex system, and much more.
A great many performance optimizations were done to the kernel and drivers, including batching many more I/O operations, avoiding unnecessary locks on application startup, improved pre-mapping of memory mapped files, reduced lock contention in page mapping, batched modification of the global memory areas table (and a different implementation of its underlying data structure), changes to keep page lists in-order to ease allocations, temporary buffer allocation performance improvements in hot I/O paths, support for
↫ Haiku R1/beta5 release notesDT_GNU_HASHin the ELF loader, and more.
Looking at the end user side of things, the Appearance dialog has been simplified without removing any features or capabilities, and Haiku now also comes with a dark mode. The little power/battery widget in Deskbar has also been overhauled to provide more accurate battery information, and it’ll load automatically if a battery is detected in the system. Tracker (the file manager) and Icon-O-Matic have seen improvements, there’s a rewritten FAT driver, a brand new UFS2 driver, and much more.
There’s also a ton of new application ports from the Qt and GTK world, especially if the last time you’ve tried Haiku was one of the previous betas. Thanks to all of these ports, it’s much more realistic now to use Haiku as a daily driver. Haiku now also offers experimental support for .NET and FLTK, which provides further avenues for ports.
This is just a small selection, as there is so much more contained in this new beta release. If you’ve been running the nightlies this new beta won’t mean much to you, but if you’ve been out of the running for a while, Haiku R1/beta5 is a great place to start to see what the platform has to offer.
I think it’s time to pull a T420 out the scrap pile and slap haiku on it for a daily drive for a week or two
It’s the perfect Haiku laptop in my opinion. I donated my last T420 to a fellow BeOS/Haiku enthusiast across the city, as the last beta ran well enough on one of my newer desktops to make the Thinkpad redundant. I’ll be spinning the new beta up in just a few minutes.
I would recommend the Falkon browser if you are going to give that a shot. For me, it really made Haiku a lot closer to daily drivable.
I running haiku on my T410. Works very solid, only wifi crashes sometimes.
Writing this on WebPositive, just updated to Beta 5 running on an Acer Extensa 2540-39D1 where everything works, video, wifi, touchpad. Touchpad is a bit quirky but tap to click and even gestures work.
I loved BeOS back when it was still around and am thrilled that Haiku still keeps it going. So far, I’ve only run it in a VM, but I always keep a Haiku VM around to play around with and enjoy every moment of it.
It sounds like you are ready to run it on bare metal! Not that there is anything wring with using a VM, and I think there was a Summer of Code project to optimise Haiku for virtualisation.
I’ve thought about running it on a spare PC I have lying around, but haven’t yet because I mainly use it to experiment with Linux distros. I guess it wouldn’t be that far-fetched to try Haiku on it too.
I do hope that timing aligns correctly. From the looks of it Windows may soon be so locked down/restricted and too Linux like that it can no longer be usable as a daily driver (except for gaming). Haiku will be my operating system of the future.
Whilst I share your apprehensions about Linux, the greatest threat comes from systemd. There are many non-systemd distributions that are still strong and untainted: Void, Devuan, Slackware are the major ones.
I have been meaning to see how Haiku has progressed; to see it can used as a web browser.
Haiku has quite a few web browsers. The one that I think works the best right now is Falkon ( from KDE ). It works as well as it does on Linux ( perhaps better ). If Falkon works for you, Haiku may work for you too.
I tried the to boot the haiku-r1beta5-x86_64-anyboot.iso image on Libreboot and HP laptops, but it just didn’t get seen by either. Is this common?
With SeaBIOS (this works for me) or just via GRUB?
I like to refer to £inux as it has become so business driven and in the service of big capital that it deserves a currency sign in the same way as Micro$oft. Systemd is perhaps a symptom of this trend.
Haiku by contrast represents a refreshing alternative for the rest of us.
This sounds very “old man yells at cloud”. Of course popular OSes will be business driven. When ther’s a good platform, there’s a buck to make. See: “UNIX”.
LOL. I swear some of y’all must be bots. That word salad doesn’t even make remote sense.
I just wanted to make sure I understand your statement. When you say “…too Linux like that it can no longer be used as daily driver…”, you are talking about Windows and not Linux. Is that correct?
Does anyone even use Haiku as their daily driver? I am intrigued to find that the OS is in constant development yet probably hardly anyone I know has even heard of it.
Haikus are able to dive deep into kernel and driver optimizations, revealing that no matter what efficiencies one brings to the system, things could be intricate. They remind us of how precise refinements can also spearhead change-as just how fine attention can make all the difference with specialized services from staindoctors.com.au
just don’t try to use it under Windows Hyper-V unless you like mousing upsides down