Haiku R1 Beta 6: The BeOS-Compatible OS Ships for the Project's 25th Anniversary
Translated by a model; the original is in Russian.
Haiku, the open operating system carrying forward the ideas of the legendary BeOS, has received another beta release. The previous one, the fifth beta, came out in September 2024, so the new release had been nearly two years in the waiting. The timing is symbolic: the project's 25th anniversary is just a week away.
What's new
The headline change in the sixth beta is a noticeably expanded list of working applications. Among them, Michael Larabel points to the Mozilla Firefox browser, as well as a port of the Go programming language. Virtualization support has also arrived: Haiku R1 Beta 6 can work with the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (NVMM), which makes it possible to use hardware virtualization together with QEMU.
Over the past two years the developers have made a host of low-level improvements: they optimized performance and added drivers for new hardware. Work is also underway on a port of Haiku to the ARM64 architecture, though in terms of maturity it still lags noticeably behind the familiar x86 world.
The long road to R1
Haiku remains a project with an unusual fate: for decades the system has been inching toward its first stable release through a succession of betas, each of which is already perfectly usable day to day. The anniversary underscores the persistence of a small community that stays faithful to the ideas of BeOS — an operating system whose commercial history came to an end back at the turn of the century.
Anyone wishing to try out Haiku R1/beta6 can download it from the Haiku-OS.org site. Published alongside it is a project status report for July 2026, listing the platform's most recent changes.
Source: Phoronix
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