Haiku R1 Beta 6 Released After Two Years, BeOS-Inspired Project Turns 25 Next Week

Haiku R1 Beta 5 came out in September 2024 while out today is the long-awaited sixth beta for this open-source operating system inspired by BeOS. This beta release also comes one week ahead of the project's 25th anniversary.

Haiku R1 Beta 6 comes with many new features including many more apps working, such as Mozilla Firefox, a port of the Go programming language, and other software. Haiku R1 Beta 6 also brings support for NetBSD's Virtual Machine Monitor (NVMM) for hardware virtualization with QEMU.

Over the past two years there have also been many performance optimizations, new hardware driver support, and many other low-level improvements to the project. There's also been work on an ARM64 port of Haiku albeit not yet to the same level as the x86 world.

Those interested in downloading Haiku R1/beta6 or learning more about this big milestone can be found via Haiku-OS.org.

Also published today was their July 2026 status report that outlines some of the very latest improvements made to the platform.