Haiku R1 Beta 4 Released With Improved HiDPI, WiFi Updates, Wayland Compatibility Layer

It was back in July 2021 that Haiku R1 Beta 3 was released for this spiritual successor to the BeOS operating system. Now before Christmas and closing out 2022, Haiku R1 Beta 4 has been released as the latest major milestone for this open-source operating system effort.

Given the year and a half since the prior beta, there is a lot in store with Haiku R1 Beta 4. This new version features better HiDPI support for dealing with modern displays, a new "flat" decorator/theme is available, support for thumbnails within Haiku's "Tracker" file manager, support for some USB WiFi devices from Ralink and Realtek, some OpenBSD WiFi drivers have been ported over, USB RNDIS tethering support is added, there is a completely rewritten NTFS file-system driver that makes use of the NTFS-3G library, an AVIF image translator was added, support for booting a 64-bit Haiku installation from a new 32-bit bootloader, and other key enhancements.

Haiku-OS.org screenshot

Haiku R1 Beta 4 also has a working GTK3 port from Haiku Ports and as part of that GNOME Web (Epiphany) is one of the GTK3 applications now working on Haiku. Haiku has also seen new work on GNU Emacs, Wine, and on its X11 compatibility layer.

Also exciting some Phoronix readers will be that in addition to Haiku's X11 compatibility layer there is now a Wayland compatibility layer. This Wayland compatibility layer is more complicated than Haiku's X11 code but is running for an in-process Wayland server for each application. Haiku's GTK3 port is already making use of this Wayland path.

Downloads and more details on today's Haiku R1 Beta 4 release via Haiku-OS.org.