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Haiku OS Lands Improved Touchpad Support, Still Working Toward Beta 6 - Phoronix (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 week ago by falseprophet@piefed.social to c/operating_systems@beehaw.org
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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:

  • 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.

  • The Realtek rtl8125 driver has been synced with upstream OpenBSD for improving support for some newer networking hardware.

  • Haiku has implemented more functionality mandated by the POSIX 2024 specification.

  • Fixing some missing locking in the file panel constructor to fix broken open/save panel appearances throughout various apps.

  • 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.

  • IPv6 support for telnet as well netstat.

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[-] dbtng@eviltoast.org 1 points 3 days ago

"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."

For me, the new DriveSetup hung during install.
Switching back to the main installer app let it get past whatever its issue was, and it completed the format.

[-] dbtng@eviltoast.org 1 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] falseprophet@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] dbtng@eviltoast.org 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

They have been huffing their own bullshit for the last 25 years.

Contrast this high-sounding fluff ...
"The Be Operating System introduced progressive concepts and technologies that we believe represent the ideal means to simple and efficient personal computing. Haiku is the realization of those concepts and technologies in the form of an operating system that is open source and free."

... with what we see in About this system ...

I haven't dug around under the hood of this version, but the last time I looked, it was radically different from BeOS. I do admit this version looks a lot more like BeOS, they came closer to hitting that mark. It's kind of a pig tho. Not very zippy. DHCP didn't work, haven't got it online yet.

It does run straight from an ISO, so if you want to check this Frankenstein fossil out, its easy to do. https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta5/

(Edit ... It runs much faster installed to a virtual disk, and the DHCP was my fault. I got it going. Installed a couple apps.)

this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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