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HaikOS version R1/beta2 has been released! The highlights include improved NVMe, XHCI, and HiDPI support, deskbar improvements, new input preferences, more ported software, better kernel stabilization and performance, and installation improvements. HaikuOS is a free and open source software operating system inspired by the Be Operating System which introduced progressive concepts and technologies that represent the ideal means to simple and efficient personal computing.
From the release notes:
The second beta for Haiku R1 marks twenty months of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability. Since Beta 1, there have been 101 contributors with over 2800 code commits in total. More than 900 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release.
Please keep in mind that this is beta-quality software, which means it is feature complete but still contains known and unknown bugs. While we are mostly confident in its stability, we cannot provide assurances against data loss.
To download Haiku or learn how to upgrade from R1/beta1, see “Get Haiku!". For press inquiries, see “Press contact".
System Requirements:
This release is available on the x86 32-bit platform, as well as the x86_64 platform. Note that BeOS R5 compatibility is only provided on the 32-bit images.
MINIMUM (32-bit)
| RECOMMENDED (64-bit)
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @01:55AM (1 child)
Skimming the Wiki page on it, it bends over backwards to be compatible with an OS that is 20 years past its end of life. What is the main purpose here, nostalgia? Do it because it can be done kind of hobby? Or does it have a forward looking roadmap of where it wants to go and what it wants to be?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @02:32AM
It was originally designed to outright clone BeOS.
At this point, real BeOS compatibility is far less of a concern, especially moving forward since they want to port it to not-x86 (and it helps that very little BeOS software exists).
64-bit builds make zero concessions towards compatibility, and this update in particular is focused on making sure the codebase plays nicely with modern hardware. SSDs, 4K displays and making applications HiDPI aware, etc
As for the point, it's an open source operating system designed from the ground up for desktop use, rather than it being treated as an afterthought (hey, anyone else remember how for almost 20 years, setting up X on Linux was absolutely terrible?).
The UI is largely as polished as Mac OS 9's is (and decent chunks of the interface behave identically, even if they look different) -- so apart from a few bits that are somewhat dated, it's head and shoulders above the experience provided by most of the hodgepodge DEs available on Linux (it helps a lot that the desktop file manager is literally the same one that Be used themselves).
The Be API is pretty nice, and the system is EXTREMELY lightweight on resources.
They aren't joking when they say it runs on a PII with 256MB RAM. You probably won't be able to do anything with the web browser on a system like that (since that's WebKit-based and modern web pages are hell), but the system is still fairly responsive on weak or emulated (not virtualized, but outright emulated) hardware.