For better promotion and public attention, a usable and stable R1, which should be remake of BeOS R5 with modern functions including WiFi or VPN can be released first, to give the public an impression that the system is not WIP.
At the same time, how is the progress of porting Haiku to ARM64 architecture? It seems that there are no news about it for some time. Or most developers changed to develop on RISC-V and chose to delay ARM port?
Back in ancient times BeOS had similar issues to early Linux distributions like Caldera OpenLinux. It looked great but issues with supporting most common mouse were odd. And for Windows users at a time it was important to get same behavior for writing non-English letters and accents. So not ~+a to get ą but alt+a. And smooth scrolling in web browser.
For modern Haiku I would say there are a lot of projects which may bring attention and more contributors and end users. Like proper Electron apps support. But I’m telling it from perspective of Windows and Linux user.
Google Summer of Code 2025 program is near to a start. I hope to see Haiku there and a lot of projects which are beginners friendly.
And for absolute beginners Haiku running in web browser is easiest way to show how fast it loads and how it looks. And I’m telling friends to check it.
Thank you All for working on Haiku and discussing how to improve it.
For Electron to work Chrome must be ported to Haiku. As it stands today, it will not happen any time soon and IMO I hope it never will.
Could you elaborate? I’m not sure I’ve got this.
Test Haiku online in same fashion as test Ubuntu online.
Is Canonical doing that? or isn’t it just a 3rd party offering the service?
Haiku is a Desktop PC operating system, not a web browser toy. It shouldn’t lose or divert its focus to make an emulated web app, given its lack of developers and small community, if not, it won’t go anywhere. If a 3rd party or a community member wants to have a web-based VM of Haiku, then it’s OK, but not the duty of Haiku devs to maintain it.
Regarding “Electron apps support”, that doesn’t depend on Haiku. Or do you demand Windows or Linux to have first party native Electron support by default? No, because it is a 3rd party software, and its developers should be the ones supporting it, not Haiku devs. Again, if a community member wants to port it to Haiku, it’s OK, but that’s another thing.
Similar websites are available for years now. In the past operating systems were distributed via CDs (for example OpenIndiana/OpenSolaris via postal service). And in modern times a web browser is enough to show how something looks like. As I said I was attracted by different approach in BeOS. And I still find it good looking and data-driven or data-oriented OS philosophy as something worth keeping alive.
When it comes to goals for R1 not my cup of tea. As I’m not the one to suggest anything here. There was “like” word in my first message in this topic.
I suggested joining Haiku project to a developer who is interested in participating in GSoC 2025. What was first question? Do you support modern tools, programming languages and so on. So if you really want to know what I think then that’s it - modern tool like V programming language.
There was/is a project doing exactly that. It was announced a few months ago here on the forum. I have no idea if it is still online. Worked pretty well back then.
Just do a quick search on the forum, shouldn’t be too hard to find.
EDIT: The link is https://www.instantworkstation.com/ . There are many different OS to try out there in the browser, mostly Linux distros and BSD variants, but also a few others, including Haiku. Just make sure use the newer of the 2 options, Haiku R1 beta4 (beta 5 isn’t available there) and not the ancient alpha 4 version which you don’t want to use unless for historical research. 
Thank you for your input. That’s to all of you who replied to my messages.
And I’m writing this to let you know about one more thing. In the past I was a user of desktop BSD OS. Just to see how it works for daily use. And because of that I like the idea of adapting source code from DragonFlyBSD and similar projects. Maybe not Hammer filesystem but I hope you’ll find there more useful system components.
And I’m always spreading Phoronix news about Haiku to other users. More users spreading the word the better.
Me also wanted to share with you this theme meanwhile … just as I red your wish about - knowing it was offered on this forum.
I just had not used the appropriate wording to find. I might have used a bookmark then I was red
I’m happy that @BlueSky found this for you.
EDIT :
Here you are the topic → Instant workstation - use Haiku in web browser
You could continue with the Beta releases - but it makes the OS look like it’s a long way from finished.
R1 B4, R1 B5, R1 B6…
Alternatively, you could have R1 “Preview” releases - which would make it look like the bulk of the OS development is done, and it’s not far off being stable & relatively complete.
R1 P1, R1 P2, R1 P3…
Otherwise, it’s difficult to understand why Redox OS is at Beta 9, when it has hardly any apps, and reviewers agree that it’s only at a demo stage. Yet Haiku has lots of apps, is functional, but is only at Beta 5.
Ahoy @daniel0366 ,
Porting Haiku to other architectures are progressing as a contributor spending time with it … time-to-time, and it is totally depends on affecting developer or developers in rare cases if it is about Haiku. It means : as there’s no central commanding to develop it, it it will happen eventually, so chamging of scope to another architecture is not a good explanation to end of news, any news.
This development not their work, but their free time activities, besides their work and mostly it means one person actively, and if development is meanwhile contains collaborations - those can happen via IRC and mailgroup.
So I assume it’s better to forget about such expectations you may developed regarding Haiku on ARM or Risc-V - based on your sentences - or we can speak about even PPC or MIPS porting as well,
Last time when a new contributor started to work on ARM64 in a VM it was available on Gerrit as reviewed/committed patches and finally in monthly reports where it was explained what was did.
Then I posted about it with enthusiasm … I got an answer from a developer that those patches’ results are not so spectacular for regular members as it would only solved small steps to boot into a newer issue that should be resolved :-))
I am against it, as some of us, I think, enough curious even if we are not developers …
… but I understand to write about it especially with screenshots, videos is time consuming, and better if the developer spends this time with coding as well.
Also some people rather works on a thing than speaks about it - they do not require attention and recognition, moreover glory, but to secure : the OS or app they like, finally works on the machine they use and own personally.
I hope you can accept these points of view and insights related Haiku, which is an open source project actually and not a product.
With patience we can enjoy the journey with Haiku …
and hey !.. here …
there are always brand new, surprisingly poppin’ up persons and developments, which are becoming once some fruitation of long awaited Haiku featues and apps !
As I understand, ARM port is currently suffering from programming mistakes in ARM-specific code that is specific to Haiku kernel architecture. So new developer with ARM experience can’t easily fix it because he/she is not detailed in Haiku kernel internals. Haiku ARM port also has a long history of different developers attempting to work on the port and changing target ARM hardware. So next Haiku ARM developer may not understand intents of previous developer and make more mistakes.
RISC-V port was done mostly by me from “buildable but fully stubbed architecture-specific code” to “functional on real hardware and several emulators.” So it is much easier to work on RISC-V port than on ARM because it is actually working. Next steps are supporting more hardware, writing mode drivers, support vector extension, hardware virtualization etc… It is expected that new more performant RISC-V hardware will be available this year.
The arm (not arm64) has had a long and frightful past. Some history:
The arm port is pretty dead. @geist told me a long time ago to stop focusing on arm and focus on arm64… he was right as usual 
On the bright side, most of the above (namely a single generic arm image w/EFI + DTB) has prepared us for arm64.
I’d be interested in trying out Haiku on one of my Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, mainly to see how fast it is compared to Linux on them. 
Condidering that it doesn’t even boot to desktop in qemu for arm64, probably not that fast
I’d like to have Haiku installed on my Raspberry Pi 3B+, or even a Haiku-RISC OS dual boot if possible. BeOS-Haiku and RISC OS shares a similar history: originally developed to be run on specific hardware (BeBox and Acorn RISC PC), later declined leading to original developing company being closed (Be Inc and Acorn), now revived as open source OS. The difference is that Haiku is a community lead remake of BeOS, but RISC OS is open sourced by the company owning it’s copyright.
However, given that developers are no longer focusing on arm, this may not take place in foreseeable future. As a noob still learning C in university I can’t help much. So I’ll just be a chinese translator like now.
I’ve been playing with RiscOS recently on an RPi 400, and from the Haiku perspective there are some interesting points to this OS:
Sorry, I’ll stop now before this goes too far off-topic. It’s just interesting to compare the way they went, the decisions they made, to the way we have gone. RiscOS is more idiosyncratic than Haiku. Haiku is far more mainstream by comparison.
Having seen the now dead RISCOS media cover the accounts of some of the software vendors - none of them are making a living from selling software. One of the biggest vendors deregistered for VAT as their total sales were under the threshold, which I think was £70,000 at the time - its now £90,000.
Just asking, are people in this community still planning to create a Haikubox?
If yes, probably creating Haikubox base on Raspberry Pi sized SBCs is the best idea, regardless of x86 (Rock Pi), arm64 (Rpi) or RISCV (MILK-V). There’s already 3d printed Rpi sized Bebox case files available online. Did anyone ever tested Haiku on Rock Pi?
Does that platform come with standard devices for ethernet, wifi, audio, touchpad, etc.? That seems to me to be the main issue. You can easily get a computer where Haiku will run on the board, but it will have one or more missing devices that make it kind of useless, and it isn’t easy to predict that in advance with the information available from the manufacturer.
It would have to be x86_64.
I thought the Slimbook mentioned above sounded promising.