Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Haiku still hasn't quite reached that magic Version One Point Zero line in the sand, in part because its developers are setting the bar much higher than that of any other FOSS OS.

Haiku beta 5 arrived in September, but a significant box for this experimental OS was ticked in December, with an unofficial but working and usable port of the Firefox browser – which is called Iceweasel in the Haiku Depot.

Firef- sorry, Iceweasel, WebKit, and LibreOffice all at once? Here you go – click to enlarge

What's new

The Reg FOSS desk is very fond of Haiku, as he was of BeOS itself – as his BeOS 5 review from 2000 shows. Almost exactly three years ago, we reported when Haiku gained support for Windows programs, and then a year later when Haiku beta 4 appeared.

The latest beta has a lot of new features and improvements, as detailed in the release notes. The new features are relatively modest, rather than game-changers, indicating that the OS is very close to daily-driver status, and the slow progress reflects the small team size.

Some of the changes are relatively visible. For instance, the handling of color in the UI has been dramatically simplified, and the OS now automatically chooses contrasting colors for UI elements based on the three main colors you set. This means that if you set dark background colors, it automatically switches into dark mode. The terminal emulator and icon editor have both received significant improvements. The Tracker file manager, based on original BeOS code, now shows read-only drives with a different background. Write-related functions are grayed out.

The icon editor has seen improvements (Screenshots via Haiku)

Less apparent but perhaps even more important are driver improvements. Here, networking has been improved: TCP/IP is now about ten times faster, and there's working TUN/TAP support – a virtual network interface that paves the way for VPN support. Power management has also been improved, a visible sign of which is that if you install it on a computer that can run on batteries, Haiku automatically loads the battery-monitoring app in its system tray.

Power management has also been improved

There's also new FAT filesystem support: the 20th century FAT driver that the Haiku project inherited from the long-gone Be, Inc. has been replaced by code from FreeBSD. That's important today because all UEFI computers need an EFI System Partition, and that's formatted with FAT. Haiku can also read FreeBSD UFS partitions now. There's also new support for USB audio devices.

Among features that users won't see but developers may like, there's support for the FLTK GUI toolkit, experimental support for .NET Core 8 and 9, plus version 15 of the GNU debugger GDB. Debugging is also facilitated by improvements to the strace API and profile tool. POSIX support has improved, and there's now a subset of FreeBSD's kqueue API (which we summarized when reporting on Tcl/Tk 9).

The latest emission includes support for the FLTK GUI toolkit

What is Haiku anyway?

Haiku is something else – both in the colloquial sense, meaning that it's remarkable, extraordinary, outstanding – and in the literal sense that it's unrelated to Windows, Linux, or anything else. It's sleek, slick, and fast to a degree no Linux distro can even rival. It looks great, in a minimal late-1990s sort of way, unlike most other OSes today which either looked washed-out and flat, or functional but clunky and a bit ugly.

Haiku is a single-user OS, just like Windows 95, 98, and ME were – but at the same time, it's able to take advantage of modern multicore processors. (So, no, security isn't one of its core strengths, but there are no viruses or spyware for Haiku anyway.) The 32-bit edition can run original BeOS apps, and because it's a lightweight and efficient OS, a 32-bit PC can run it fine and do useful work. Meanwhile, the more cores and RAM you throw at the 64-bit edition, the more it will use.

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In some ways, it may be easier to explain what Haiku is in terms of what it is not. Unlike Linux and the BSDs, which are text-mode multi-user server OSes that sometimes have some kind of GUI grafted on top, Haiku is an integrated graphical desktop OS; there's no text-mode console underneath. Unlike RISC OS, which only supports 32-bit Arm hardware, Haiku runs on generic x86 kit. Unlike Redox OS, or Genode Sculpt, or many others – even, arguably, 9Front — it's not some strange experimental thing with no apps that's no use to an end user. Unlike the pretty but limited Serenity OS, which only really runs in a VM, Haiku runs very well on real hardware.

There is a terminal emulator, but like on a Mac, you can ignore it: you'll probably never need it. It makes next to no use of cloud services or JavaScript, and there is no "AI" integration of any kind.

Where did it come from?

Some of the things that are a little strange about Haiku compared to other OSes are due to its long and convoluted history. Haiku is the modern open source reimplementation of Be, Inc.'s BeOS, but that means that it has 20th century influences that might be unfamiliar today.

Although BeOS wasn't directly related to either, two significant 1980s computers were primary influences: the Commodore Amiga and the original 68000-powered Apple Macintosh. Like the Amiga, Be's BeBox computer was designed to be a multitasking multimedia powerhouse, but one that was open and friendly to hackers and geeks. And because Be founder Jean-Louis Gassée was previously CTO at Apple, its UI has a strong classic MacOS influence – more so than the modern macOS, which is based on NeXTstep.

Haiku uses the same desktop, Tracker, as BeOS itself: Be published the code before it was acquired by PalmSource.

BeOS was a ground-up effort built in C++, and while Haiku keeps the desktop and some apps, the team had to reimplement most of the rest from the kernel up, often using existing FOSS tools. Even so, it comes from an entirely different line of development than any other OS. It's not directly related to MacOS or OS X, or AmigaOS, Windows, Unix, or anything else – although it is Unix compatible because it implements much of the POSIX API.

The end result is something smaller, simpler, cleaner, and more efficient than anything else around today. Beta 5 feels fast, and we saw no freezes or crashes in testing. Thanks to generic drivers, it will run on a lot of kit, but so far it still lacks hardware 3D acceleration or video playback. It has its own "app store," the HaikuDepot, which contains 4,314 packages – far more than BeOS ever had in its prime. So, for instance, while the built-in web browser WebPositive is rather limited, HaikuDepot contains both Web, the GNOME browser, and now Iceweasel, an experimental but working port of the current Firefox ESR. Sites like Gmail and YouTube just work.

It also has popular apps such as the VLC media player and the latest LibreOffice suite. There's quite a rich selection of development tools, even including FreePascal and the Lazarus IDE.

Haiku is not a power-user OS just yet, and it's not a drop-in replacement for any Linux distro. There is very little commercial software of any kind, including drivers. However, beta 5 feels smoother and more polished than pretty much any Linux distro. If your hardware is supported and the available apps cover what you need, it is awfully close to being ready to be a daily-driver OS. Give it a try. ®