It’s always a lovely day when it’s a Haiku release day – and sadly, those don’t come very often. Of course, Haiku’s nightlies tend to be rather solid so an official release isn’t really a must if you want to use Haiku, but if you were holding out for something more stable: Haiku has just released its fifth beta, Haiku R1/beta5. We’ve covered most of the new features and changes as they were developed, but since it’s been so long since the previous beta, we should cover some of the highlights.
One of the collection of improvements that’s impossible to put in a screenshot is the performance improvements the successor to BeOS has received since the release of R1/beta4, and there are many. There’s a ton of general performance improvements, of course, covering everything from the kernel to applications, including much better throughput in TCP, the network stack, which should lift Haiku’s network performance much closer to that of other, more mature operating systems. There’s also an overhaul of the user_mutex system, and much more.
A great many performance optimizations were done to the kernel and drivers, including batching many more I/O operations, avoiding unnecessary locks on application startup, improved pre-mapping of memory mapped files, reduced lock contention in page mapping, batched modification of the global memory areas table (and a different implementation of its underlying data structure), changes to keep page lists in-order to ease allocations, temporary buffer allocation performance improvements in hot I/O paths, support for
↫ Haiku R1/beta5 release notesDT_GNU_HASHin the ELF loader, and more.
Looking at the end user side of things, the Appearance dialog has been simplified without removing any features or capabilities, and Haiku now also comes with a dark mode. The little power/battery widget in Deskbar has also been overhauled to provide more accurate battery information, and it’ll load automatically if a battery is detected in the system. Tracker (the file manager) and Icon-O-Matic have seen improvements, there’s a rewritten FAT driver, a brand new UFS2 driver, and much more.
There’s also a ton of new application ports from the Qt and GTK world, especially if the last time you’ve tried Haiku was one of the previous betas. Thanks to all of these ports, it’s much more realistic now to use Haiku as a daily driver. Haiku now also offers experimental support for .NET and FLTK, which provides further avenues for ports.
This is just a small selection, as there is so much more contained in this new beta release. If you’ve been running the nightlies this new beta won’t mean much to you, but if you’ve been out of the running for a while, Haiku R1/beta5 is a great place to start to see what the platform has to offer.