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.

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).

Other news

• For the first time since 2014, we have a long term contract for a full-time developer. Waddlesplash is working on various areas of the operating system, ranging from the USB stack to an X11 compatibility layer to run more Linux/BSD applications.
• For the first time ever, the Haiku desktop is booting on non-x86 hardware thanks to the efforts from X512 of porting Haiku to RISC-V. There are ongoing efforts for the ARM port as well.
• An X11 compatibility layer allows to recompile X11 applications and libraries with few modifications. This allowed us to get a working GTK port, for example.