Haiku published their January 2026 status report to highlight the improvements they made to their open-source OS over the past month. Some of the January highlights for Haiku include:
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Completing the work around new touchpad functionality for Haiku. This work now allows for two-finger scrolling, edge motion, software button areas, and click finger support. Newer Elantech touchpads are now supported too.
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The Realtek rtl8125 driver has been synced with upstream OpenBSD for improving support for some newer networking hardware.
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Haiku has implemented more functionality mandated by the POSIX 2024 specification.
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Fixing some missing locking in the file panel constructor to fix broken open/save panel appearances throughout various apps.
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A disk image menu is finally added to DriveSetup so that disk images can be worked from that GUI without resorting to the command line.
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IPv6 support for telnet as well netstat.
I loved BeOS. Haiku is not BeOS.
Its not even very much like BeOS. That being the case, I don’t quite understand why it exists.
Here. Go read their confused mumble of an explanation.
https://www.haiku-os.org/about/
… Now, what did you get out of that?
Like, if they just straight up said “We don’t like Linux or Mac, and want our own groovy icons”, I could get along with that rational. This vague bullshit about some higher purpose just sounds hollow and lacks meaning.
It was started by a former BeOs developer and has evolved from there. Haiku can run BeOs software that is binary compatible. It exists because they wanted they make their own Operating system.