The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS kicked off 2026 by making many improvements to its kernel, device drivers, and user-space software.
Haiku published their January 2026 status report to highlight the improvements they made to their open-source OS over the past month. Some of the January highlights for Haiku include:
– Completing the work around new touchpad functionality for Haiku. This work now allows for two-finger scrolling, edge motion, software button areas, and click finger support. Newer Elantech touchpads are now supported too.
– The Realtek rtl8125 driver has been synced with upstream OpenBSD for improving support for some newer networking hardware.
– Haiku has implemented more functionality mandated by the POSIX 2024 specification.
– Fixing some missing locking in the file panel constructor to fix broken open/save panel appearances throughout various apps.
– A disk image menu is finally added to DriveSetup so that disk images can be worked from that GUI without resorting to the command line.
– IPv6 support for telnet as well netstat.
They ended their January 2026 report by noting that many issues have been fixed but there still is more fixing to be done before the long-awaited Haiku r1 beta 6 release.
