What’s New

Since the last FOSDEM in 2021, Haiku has had a major release: Beta 3 in 2021. Our third beta release, the first being in 2018, Beta 3 builds upon the improvements delivered in Beta 2 and brings a stack of improvements to Haiku.

Notably, 251 tickets mainly consisting of bug reports were closed during this release cycle.

Haiku stand

Highlights from Beta 3

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

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