BFS, the kit-based C++ API, and the pervasively multithreaded design behind BeOS's open-source successor.
Released June 9, 2020, roughly two years after Beta 1, Haiku's second beta arrived as much of the world was under pandemic lockdown — with volunteer development continuing largely uninterrupted.
Released December 23, 2022, roughly a year and a half after Beta 3, Haiku's fourth beta continued the project's pattern of steady, incremental refinement toward an eventual non-beta R1 release.
Released September 13, 2024, Beta 5 closed out nearly 350 bug and enhancement tickets, added a full GDB 15 port, and brought USB audio device support to the system.
Haiku runs on POSIX-like conventions and supports plenty of Unix software, but underneath that compatibility layer, it isn't descended from Unix at all — its kernel, API, and core assumptions come from somewhere else entirely.
Installing a package on Haiku doesn't copy files onto disk at all — it mounts the package itself as part of a virtual file system, which is exactly what makes activation and rollback instant.
A complete walkthrough configuring a printer on Haiku using the Print Kit's transport and driver add-ons, from adding the printer through to printing a real test page.
A complete walkthrough using Haiku's ProcessController Deskbar replicant to watch CPU load and memory usage at a glance, and dig into individual running teams when something is misbehaving.
The company behind BeOS — the operating system Haiku would later reimplement as open source — completed its IPO in July 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, years before the open-source project this blog covers even began.
Be Inc. gave away BeOS 5 Personal Edition for free, installable as a single file that lived inside your existing Windows or Linux system. More than 100,000 people pre-registered before it even launched.
A complete walkthrough Haiku's Deskbar (its taskbar/menu equivalent) and its multiple-workspace system — features inherited directly from BeOS, still central to how Haiku is meant to be used day to day.