25 years of Haiku

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For those who are using today the Haiku operating system, it would be interesting to know how long and why :slight_smile:

Tomorrow is a special day, as Haiku turns 25, so if you are interested take a few minutes to answer these 3 questions.

  • How long have you used Haiku?
  • What first brought you to the project?
  • And what keeps you around?
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I started using BeOS a few months after Be closed down and I’ve never gone away… although I lost a lot of drive to actually do anything when package management came in, as while I understand the benefits of it, I find it makes it very hard to actually play around with stuff.

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  1. Since the release of BeOS R5PE
  2. Interest in alternative operating systems
  3. Porting, been doing that since BeOS and never stopped.

EDIT: still love hunting down new challenges to port, and so far still find new things to tackle. :slight_smile:

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  1. My forum profile exists since December 2020,so it’s almost 6 years now.Wow,it really didn’t feel this long.
  2. I found Haiku when I researched alternative open-source operating systems for a German blog about open-source software.I wrote a whole series of articles about it,then I decided to get more involved with Haiku because I really like it.
  3. Haiku is something special,unique and it makes using computers fun again.I want to see how it makes progress and contribute my part to it (well,currently I’m rather inactive,but that will change again).
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Actively for 3-4 Years, Intermittendly before that.

I first found out about Haiku a couple years Ago, Then treated it like “just another linux distro” and felt super lost, with questions of “why is pkill not supported??” Through engagement in IRC those questions eventually faded. But the systems super sleak and responsive design made sure I stick around :slight_smile:

I really like programming for Haikus GUI, it reminds me a bit of layout-as-code I can do in flutter for example; Some parts (like some C++ stuff) is suboptimal, but I don’t think other OSes with C are really ahead there either.

I love how small fixes to the UI can be submitted to a single repository, contrary to Linux where I always found contributing dounting, as I had no clue where all the repositories are that do all the things needed for Haiku there is mostly just one repo, one bugtracker, one review tracker.

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  • How long have you used Haiku?

  • Off & on for several years, mainly beta 4 & 5

  • What first brought you to the project?

  • I like to investigate new Operating Systems

  • And what keeps you around?

  • Because it is an interesting alternative operating system, which installs super fast.

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I was dabbling with Haiku when Magnusoft was still in business with Zeta, once they were shut down I switched over to Haiku as my daily OS and never looked back.

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I bought BeOS 4.5.2 in 2001 or so. Then BeOS BuzzCD, then BeOS Pro. 5.0.3

Was mainly a hobby running a http and mail daemon off my static IP.

Things really took off when OpenTracker and its SVG icon support. To me, that brought the real beauty of BeOS to life. And got a little time with BeOS Dano/PhOS albeit unstable at times, to experience the magic of the snake trails on tracker. If there was one thing I miss in Haiku, it’s the snake trails. No other operating system, or window manager has ever had anything like that and it was truly unique. Hint hint :slight_smile:

I eventually parted ways and stuck with Ubuntu occasionally trying Haiku in Qemu and as a dual boot option, but could never could get mouse/keyboard to work in dual boot.

In 2019 I found ClearLinux OS which reminded me of BeOS. It was blazing fast and had a clever way of overlaying the system so you could do things with with it unlike traditional Linux distros: run a user as root without the system fussing much, rm -fr /etc and still boot up with a working system.

ClearLinux OS was halted by Intel in 2025 so then I tried Cachy Linux. Cachy is great, I dig the Intel Haswell v3 cpu enhancements. Just as fast as ClearLinux but with more software support.

I eventually decided to give Haiku another go in the early days of 2026 after founding out about @X512 nebula driver.
And the rest is history.

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  1. Since the release of BeOS R5PE but later bought the Pro edition, still have it :slight_smile:
  2. Interest in alternative operating systems
  3. Love the simple and fast system on older hardware. I was active member of the Hungarian BeOS User Group, maybe some of them are here too :wink: After my daughter born in 2011 I didn’t follow closely the development and the news about Haiku but since last year I have some more time to play around.
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  • How long have you used Haiku?

A few years off and on, I gained a lot more interest around October 2025.

  • What first brought you to the project?

Someone mentioned that Haiku is surprisingly responsive on hardware that even Linux struggles on, but lamented that a lot of low-cost “born e-waste” laptops from the early-to-mid 2010s use eMMC storage, which Haiku doesn’t yet support (my first contribution was tested on such a laptop).

  • And what keeps you around?

It’s fun to use, has features rarely seen in other operating systems (like a built-in kernel debugger for when things go wrong), and the kernel code is significantly easier to understand than Linux.

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Not sure when I started running it, but it wasn’t Haiku - OpenBeOS. 25 years wouldn’t surprise me, I’m pretty ancient.

Be came to the university I worked at, for a demo. I order a last generation BeBox and started with DR8 or thereabouts, and Code Warrior. Used it at work, too - MailIt, NetPositive. Back then, stuff like that was right up there.

When Haiku came along, or whatever it was called, the step forward was big. Normal network stuff that expected Berkeley sockets, generally clean implementation of stuff that I suspect was pretty hacky in BeOS.

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I originaly purchased versions of BeOS for Intel from version R3 up to Pro Edition 5.0. My invoice for R3 dated April 14, 1998, shows I paid $69.95. Be had actually messed up my order and inadvertently charged my account twice. After an email exchange, they credited my account and promised to send a Be T-shirt (I never did get that T-shirt!)

How long have you used Haiku?

I didn’t have any serious installs of Haiku until Beta 5 in late 2025. It was wonderful to see how well it worked! I’ve now have it installed it on both a desktop and a laptop alongside Pop_OS! Cosmic Linux.

What first brought you to the project?

After Be, I kept up with OpenBeOS and then Haiku, joining this forum in July of 2008.

And what keeps you around?

The fun of using Haiku, it’s speed and sipmplicity. I eventually hope to find time to work on some native apps!

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What first brought you to the project?

I remember installing/testing BeOS 5 PE on my Windows Me install because the later was too unstable. If I remember correctly I got an install CD from a magazine.

It was both a shock (so snappy/capable!) and sad moment as I almost immediately learned Be had just abandoned its OS.

A few months (years?) later, I discovered on Usenet the new OpenBeOS community and I have been a member since then (initially lurking on Freelists).

How long have you used Haiku

So I have been an very occasional user/tester/non-dev-contributor almost from the beginning. Probably for more than 23 years.

Haiku has been my regular secondary OS for the last 10 years (always using nighties since the advent of package management and its rollback capability).

And what keeps you around?

It is stable enough, and light enough to run on the old hardware I use.

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  • Off and on for 10 years. Started with BeOS R5 on my Daystar Genesis
  • BeOS was super fun to use and Haiku builds on that with modern technology
  • Haiku is a tinkerer’s OS.. not quite Mac, not quite Linux but somewhere in-between
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  1. I had a BeOS Demo CD at one point. I think it might have been R3.2. I remember liking it, but couldn’t do much with it at the time. Once R5 came along I used it more seriously. I’m not sure when I first used Haiku itself.
  2. See above :slight_smile:
  3. I’m a bit of a lurker these days. I like the idea of an alternative OS, but I eventually picked Mac OS X in 2003 and although it’s fallen a long way since, it’s still the best of a bad bunch for actually getting work done. I typically stick my nose back into Haiku every time there’s a new beta.
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1 - First I tested that original BeOS with some old hardware and liked it a lot. Then I found Haiku and tried that, it may have been some alpha release. Then I have been running it in virtualization only, because I didn’t have appropriate hardware for it. Now I have t460s Thinkpad just for Haiku and i use it as my everyday computer.

2 - I have always been interested about different operating systems. I used to try about everything back then..

3 - It is cool retro looking OS and it is simple and fast.

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Difficult to say. When did OpenBeOS become Haiku again? :slight_smile:
I tried the first replacement kits on BeOS and know that I bought my first notebook specifically for running Haiku natively. My current notebook has been running Haiku for over 12 years, and the first one for at least 10…

I discovered BeOS in the German c’t magazin in IIRC September 1996. Didn’t have the money to spend on a BeBox or a Mac clone, so I waited until 1998 for the x86 version.
After Be Inc.'s very short life compared to Haiku, it was either Zeta or OpenBeOS. I was “camp OpenBeOS” from the start. :slight_smile:
OpenBeOS became Haiku, and only 25 years later, here we are. :slight_smile:

I’ve been running BeOS/Haiku for soon 30 years. It shaped my computer usage over all this time, and I don’t feel comfortable in any other system. Haiku’s main point for me is its consistency. While extending and refining looks and features, I’m able to pretty much use the system just like 25 years ago.
Compare this to the ever changing, but generally declining, UI of Windows from 2000 through XP and Vista to 11.
Consistency, transparency, longevity. Vive Haiku!

Thanks for the thread, @DigitalBox.

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I’ve been following the Haiku project since 2004 or so, but only started using it at Beta 4. Direct usefulness aside, it’s a unique operating system, and we need that sort of thing more than ever. But what keeps me here is the community. People make Haiku valuable in the end.

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For about 3 years now perhaps, on and off on different machines. Makes computing fun anf interesting again.

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