Where is Haiku headed?

Hi,
I’m new here, encouraged to install Haiku in a virtual machine by some interesting videos on youtube.
I know that one of Haiku goals is to be fully compatible with BeOS.
My question is: are there any further long-term plans? After this “compatibility thing” will this system evolve more or it just be a replacement for old-closed system?
My question is if Haiku is somehow like FreeDos for MS-Dos (or ReactOS for Windows Server 2003) that nothing more (probably) will happen with it after compatibility is reached?

All the best :slight_smile:

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That is an interesting thought, but I think there are plans afoot to keep it up to date, but with only a small team… It’s a nice desktop system now, if it works with your hardware, but still a long way to go also.

I have R1B4 installed on a spare thin client, but use Linux, or BSD, as my main system, & I can’t see that changing any time soon… :wink:

Haiku is so much more than only a BeOS clone already.
The BeAPI as a way to write native applications for Haiku is here to stay,but additionally you can use countless Qt and GTK applications that you couldn’t use on BeOS.
Driver support is already a lot better than on BeOS,which didn’t even have Wifi as far as I know.
The long term goal of Haiku is to make a open-source operating system targeted especially on desktop computers (not servers,like the Unixes…).
It won’t stop when full BeOS app compatibility is done (I think that one is done already?) and it also won’t stop when it’s so good that you never look back at Windows.
There’ll always be some innovation and Haiku will continue to get improvements.

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I Take haiku as a Portable operating system.
haiku is beyond the compatible things now.
libreoffice, blender …
these app are working which is not appear in beOS time.

Ok, you answered my question that project has no feature-limit perspective/goal. It wasn’t clear for me from the main page. Thank you.

Exactly, Haiku was created to preserve the BeOS system, so care was taken to ensure that old programs can continue to be used. Over the years, various changes have been made that differ from the original BeOS. In addition, as already mentioned, languages ​​and environments have already been ported to haiku, which enable the use of QT, KDE and java programs.

Over the years, due to the numerous changes, some compatibilities of the old BeOS have been lost, because at some point you have to look ahead.

Because Haiku was built from the ground up, all parts of the system were reprogrammed. This is also for reasons of avoiding rights relating to the owners of the beos sources. Thus, haiku is free and can be further developed in various directions with the contribution of people (the doors are open).

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Welcome Redysz!

I think this is a bit of a misconception. BeOS-compatibility was the major goal at the beginning of the (then OpenBeOS) project. Simply to have a fixed goal. As it turns out, creating an OS from scratch took quite a bit longer than first naively anticipated… :slight_smile:
The longer it took, the blurrier got the ErsatzBeOS goal.

At least since the first beta, I suspect in most people’s view, Haiku became its own thing. Over the years (decades really) Haiku gained many features that go well beyond BeOS (e.g. localization, layout management, package management, modern hardware support, modern compiler support,etc.).

I don’t think there are official concrete plans, but rest assured, Haiku will continue to grow and evolve beyond compatibility with BeOS.

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It should probably be noted that the 32-bit version of Haiku is BeOS compatible (mostly, I guess). The 64-bit version is not and is not under any constraints to be, as far as I know (which is fairly little).

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The 64bit version will be mostly similar to the 32bit version eventually once it’s 32bit loader and such works… at which point most people would run 64bit as default and install the 32bit binaries in the 64 bit version only if they needed compatability with old binaries.

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