The Long-Awaited Haiku Operating System Beta Should Be Days Away

The Haiku operating system has been in development since 2002 as an open-source BeOS-inspired platform and nearly a decade since they reached the alpha stage for their first release, they are nearly ready to deliver the beta.

While they have delivered a few Haiku R1 alpha releases since 2009, the beta release has remained elusive but over the next week that should finally materialize. Last month we were elated to hear the beta should come in September with their release schedule putting that R1 Beta 1 milestone between 10 and 18 September. That appears to remain on track for likely seeing the official beta release over roughly the next week.

They pointed to that timeline again in their monthly activity report published this week but noted they are not strict deadlines so there is still the chance for further delays. Those wanting to help test these near-final beta images can do so here.

Haiku development activity pointed out by this monthly newsletter includes merging the SDHCI MMC driver that was developed via Google Summer of Code, ARM architecture work, a variety of fixes, ReiserFS support on Haiku 64-bit builds, experimental Zstd compression work for Haiku images rather than Zlib, and initial WhatsApp Web support for Qt-based browsers.