Welcome to the Haiku stand!

Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.

Haiku @ FOSDEM

We will be demonstrating all the neat features that makes Haiku special for us: indexed metadata in the filesystem, x-ray navigation, sliding tabs and window grouping.

We also want to hear from people testing Haiku, how it worked for them, or not. We will guide you to create bug reports.

We will walk curious people into installing Haiku in a VM or on real hardware.

And we love stories of fond memories of BeOS and how Haiku brings those back.

People interested into coding can also meet our developers, see where they can learn to program their own application, or write a recipe for HaikuPorter to port an existing one.

And you'll see the faces of some coders you maybe already know from the IRC channels.

Haiku in 2022

Since last FOSDEM we had a Beta3 release last July which fixes 251 bugs from Beta2 and adds 1248 commits to it:

  1. The installation process is now much smoother.
  2. Package management received performance and stability improvement, and can now resume interrupted downloads.
  3. We switched to Python 3.7 as the default Python version.
  4. The user interface received improvements on dark color theme, scaling, and localization.
  5. The font overlay and fallback system was fixed.
  6. WebPositive automatically uses dark mode according to the current system color scheme.
  7. The WebKit version used by WebPositive was updated.
  8. A BeControlLook allows apps to match the BeOS R5 interface closely.
  9. The POSIX compatibility received many fixes and additions, including mlock/munlock, posix_fallocate and ppoll calls.
  10. Some optimizations were done in frequently used API calls.
  11. Czech translation is now available, making Haiku available in 28 languages.
  12. We improved several drivers, and added support for SD/MMC on PCI (SDHCI).

The RISC-V port is now booting to desktop and has nightly images available.

We hired one of our developers to work full time on the operating system. Consider donating (external link) to support this in the long term.

A partnership with Freewear.org (external link) allows us to provide new merchandise with a clear indication of hom much money gets to Haiku. This includes limited edition T-Shirts celebrating 20 years of existence for Haiku!