Haiku: The Alternative OS Grows Up [NEWS]

The Open Source, BeOS inspired Haiku releases Beta 3, hires full time developer.

It’s been a big — nay, huge — month for Haiku, the Open Source alternative Operating System inspired by the fabled BeOS.

I’ve made no effort to conceal my admiration for this system. It is beautiful, light, and truly fun to use. It brings just the right combination of “retro feel” and “modern capabilities” to desktop computing.

But, like any project run by a small team, there were certainly some areas that needed improvement before I could use it as my “daily driver” OS.

With that in mind, I was pretty jazzed to see that the rag-tag group of nerds behind Haiku released the “Beta 3” version of the OS… bringing an absolutely mammoth number of improvements and fixes. Including:

• A better installation process

• Improved hardware drivers, with a focus on:

  • improvements to Wi-Fi networking to match FreeBSD 13

  • audio drivers, mass storage, USB

  • performance on NVIDIA graphics cards (GeForce 6200-GeForce Go 6400).

• Greater POSIX compatibility

More hardware drivers and the (many) stability fixes being the most exciting stuff for me. After using Haiku Beta 3 for a few days, I am absolutely blown away by how much progress the team has made with this release.

Hardware support is still not as impressive as, say, Linux. But it certainly is so much better than in past releases. Enough of an improvement that Haiku Beta 3 is now usable on a wide variety of my hardware. Not every computer I have is running Haiku well (I can’t seem to get it running on my little Microsoft Surface Go, which is currently running Debian Linux)… but certainly big improvements.

In fact. The recent improvements to the core Haiku OS — coupled with the massive explosion of Linux software that has been ported to Haiku — has resulted in Haiku being 100% usable for me as my primary system (with the exception of video production, which is still a weak area due to the Haiku lack of 3D GPU support).

To top all this off, Haiku has now hired their first full time developer.

From the announcement:

“In the past Haiku, Inc. has hired contributors as contractors for specific projects, such as the package system or working on WebKit and our WebPositive browser, but this is the first time someone has been hired for a more open-ended position for general improvements.”

The new developer in question, known by the handle “waddlesplash”, has been a frequent guest on my shows over the years — having been interviewed by me several times about the state of Haiku. To say he knows his stuff would be a massive understatement. Big thumbs up from me.

This development bodes incredibly well for the future of Haiku.

Seeing this level of success and forward momentum from alternative Operating System projects (read: not Windows, Mac, or Linux — the three big systems with massive company resources) brings a major smile to my face.

I wish I could reach through the screen and high five every single Haiku contributor. They’ve earned it, and then some.