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 [1]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.



[1] https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/waddlesplash/2026-02-12-haiku_activity_contract_report_january_2026/