Since the last FOSDEM in 2020, Haiku has had a major release: Beta 2 in 2020. Our second beta release, the first being in 2018, Beta 2 builds upon the improvements delivered in Beta 1 and brings a stack of improvements to Haiku.

Notably, 900 tickets mainly consisting of bug reports were closed during this release cycle.

Highlights from Beta 2

• Improved HiDPI support
• Deskbar improvements, with a new mini mode as well as improvements to the "auto-raise" mode
• A new input preferences consisting of Mouse, Keyboard, Touchpad and Joystick preferences
• WebPositive now uses a newer version of WebKit, and contains a number of fixes to the Haiku backend which help fix crashes as well as significantly reducing its memory usage.
• Even more ported software
• Installation improvements - Installer now gives you the option to exclude optional packages when installing Haiku, plus DriveSetup now displays more information about connected drives.
• NVMe support
• Significantly enhanced and stabilized XHCI (USB3) support
• Kernel stabilization and performance improvements - with quite a lot of reproducible (and less reproducible) kernel crashes resolved, and some low-hanging fruit related to system performance resolved. The system is now noticeably more stable than it was at the time of Beta 1.
• Emulated Meta-key in Terminal