Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

Just a heads-up for those trying it out, I've found a couple of regressions in Beta 6 that rendered my Haiku system unbootable, until I remembered about hammering the space key during the boot sequence to get to the safe mode menu.

In my case, my ThinkPad X1 (Yoga 3rd Gen) used to boot despite what appeared to be kernel panics, but typing "continue" at the kernel prompt would skip past them and everything would then work fine. In Beta 6, it now hangs at boot instead with no kernel panic warning. Disabling ACPI in the safe mode options gets me past that, and there's a way to disable ACPI permanently at boot via some configuration files - though obviously that isn't desirable.

It also seems there's been some work on USB Audio (yay!), but it now causes a kernel panic on boot if a Focusrite Scarlett is connected. Turning the Scarlett off avoids the kernel panic. The Scarlett has never officially worked in Haiku, but it at least never used to crash the system. In my case, I've reverted back to the USB Audio Scarlett Haiku driver that Claude Sonnet vibe coded for me, and for me that's working. (I can't contribute that code because of Haiku rules against AI code, but hopefully the humans will eventually find time to hand code it and get it working.)

I'm so happy. Haiku to me, is visually the most beautiful operating system out there. The icons, apps, designs. If there be anything that can ever steal the spotlight from Mac; it would be Haiku. And the OS is perhaps the one and only one that remains a tool in the old sense. All other operating systems are now service and signups and telemetry and notifications; this is the last resort remaining for the rest of us. I only wonder sometimes when it is going to become usable. With LLMs I'm wondering can't they be put to find the stability issues and make the solving faster?

Haiku could theoretically fill a niche for music production workflows. Ultra tight MIDI timing and sequencing, low-latency audio and a beautiful desktop. I hope this dream comes true eventually.

Code blooms, Haiku flies

A new release greets the world

Congrats to the team

I would love to give Haiku a try. Indeed, I've looked at it's code before (it's quite good, or was, last time I looked at it). What prevents me is accessibility. To be fair to Haiku, implementing an actually good accessibility stack is genuinely a nightmare that AI isn't going to help much with, were you to ask it to help you with it. Primarily because many accessibility stacks (UIA, MSAA, IAccessible2, AT-SPI, ...) are massive collections of incredibly nasty hacks. I have yet to find an accessibility stack that is actually well-designed, thought out and future-proof. And screen readers are pretty much collections of good code alongside a bunch of app-specific workaround as well which just complicates things.

All of that said, I might fire it up if only to play with it from the console if I can get something like SSH working.

> User interface and user experience improvements

https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta6/release-notes/#:~...

Menu that does different things based on modifier keys seems novel to me, is BeOS or Haiku the first interface where menus take modifier keys into account?

I love the UI style of HaikuOS, so cool to see new ports like Firefox and a Go runtime in this release. Congrats to the team!

Congrats to the team, I adore Haiku from afar and hope they continue to do good work. Had to do a bit of debugging with some code I help maintain for the new release, but it was a fun excuse to mess around with it a bit again.

Tried Haiku on an old laptop. Loved it. Then realized Linux feels just as fast now and has containers. Haiku is cool, but it's losing the lightweight edge.

I wish Haiku all the best. It's always great to see some diversity in the FOSS OS landscape. Hope it finds its niche eventually like the BSDs did after the lawsuit drama.

Still rocking an older Haiku alpha install on a netbook. Might be time to spin up a VM and see how far this beta has progressed.

I tried Haiku recently on a not-super-old PC and was impressed by the speed and the reasonable availability of software. I then wished I could run this on my old Powerbook G4 because nothing else seems to run there anymore with ease, and this seems like the perfect desktop OS for such old machines. And it turns out there is now a fork for PPC: https://github.com/ActionRetro/Tabby-PPC !

(Why a fork? Because it's primarily vibecoded and Haiku won't take the patches upstream. But hey, I'm gonna give it a try anyway.)

Congratulations to the haiku team!

Always love seeing Haiku releases. Brings back memories of trying it out on an old machine, still hoping for a modern browser.

Has anyone tried installing Haiku on old mac 2012 intel and older ? How challenging would that be ?

I wonder if they got it to run smoothly in Qubes yet?

I can't see steve blamer's face without remembering how fun beos was in the 90s.

Me thinking Anthropic released a new version of the haiku model....

Are there usage statistics for Haiku?

Also, for Haiku users: What is the experience like using LibreOffice on it? And i - is it the popular office suite, or is there another one, perhaps more focused on the OS rather than cross-platform?

congrats to waddlesplash and team

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