First thoughts on Haiku
October 11, 2026

I have been using Haiku on my Thinkpad Peter (named after Robin Williams' character in the movie Hook) exclusively* for about a day and a half now.
Overall, I am quite happy with it, and I will keep using it for a while. However, there are a few points that would presently keep me from making it a daily driver in the longterm:

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1. Graphics drivers/performance - While I am fine with not throwing big 3D workloads (i.e. modern games) onto the laptop, I would prefer it if it didn't lag and tear as much as it does, for example while scrolling websites or even just moving the Audacious window while playing music with a Winamp skin. I mean, sure, it's just an Intel HD Graphics 520. But I am sure it can do better than that. I don't expect it to run smoothly while running a Haiku port of Doom Eternal, but I wouldn't mind playing old adventure games in ScummVM without tearing.

2. WiFi drivers/reliability - I was glad that the particular WiFi card I have in Peter (Intel Wireless 8260) originally ran without further fuss, but it just ceasing to work suddenly for no apparent reason and not coming back up ever is annoying. (It doesn't seem to be a hardware-side issue either - for testing purposes, I booted Linux Mint Debian Edition off a USB stick, and it happily connected to my home WiFi. Haiku still didn't want to cooperate with the WiFi modem afterwards.) 
UPDATE - While I do not quite know how, why, or what broke it in the first place... after some seemingly unrelated tinkering in the BIOS of the laptop, WiFi came back. \*shrug\* 
UPDATE 2 - Welp, that didn't last long. Back to being non-functional again. Easy come, easy go.

3. HiDPI support more or less does not exist. There are workarounds by manually setting the font and icon sizes in the settings to make everything larger, but some applications handle this better than others. As such, it can't really be recommended on anything smaller than, say, a 13-inch laptop with a higher resolution than 1080p.

Aside from that... frankly, I think it's pretty much there.
Sure, it would be nice to have a port of Steam on there, as well as a Signal client, and personally I would love a Syncthing client, but those are just nice-to-have software, and might come as soon as the userbase is there.

And to highlight some of the immediate benefits I picked up on with Haiku:

1. It feels very 90s, in a good way. It is very minimal in both aesthetics, as well as requirements, and doesn't try to bug the user every five minutes because an update just became available, or something is asking you to rate it on the Haiku Depot, or they are trying to sell you on LibreOffice 365 or whatever. It is pretty much perfect for digital detox, or as a distraction-free writing machine, or maybe even a kid's first computer.

2. It is very easy on your hardware, which makes it perfect for lower-powered machines that might not have the grunt to run modern Windows, but where Linux might not be wanted. Again - ideal to upcycle an old-but-functional machine as someone's first computer without either throwing them into the deep end of Linux, or exposing them to Microsoft's BS.

3. The important apps are already in the Haiku Depot. There are ports of Libreoffice, a few different Firefox forks as well as the in-house offering WebPostive, VLC, GIMP, Audacity, Audacious, Nextcloud... pretty much a "Best Of Linux" with the exception of Steam. Though there is no shortage of games: Doom (of course), Cave Story, ScummVM, OpenRCT, VVVVVV, OpenTyrian, Dolphin, PPSSPP,... just to name a few.

4. Onboarding is incredibly easy. Frankly, the biggest hurdle is partitioning the drive before the installation (which does require the user to manually do it, but that is done through the GUI and can be done in as little as five steps), but from there on, the OS installs in no time at all, and (if it has no issues with the hardware) it just goes. Using it feels very familiar to me as someone who grew up with Windows, with the benefit of being able to create tabbed windows of mixed applications (grab the yellow handle of one application with the mouse, hold the Super key, and drag it onto another window's handle), with the biggest difference being that the "taskbar" is somewhere between Windows 7 and earlier (Windows get grouped by application, but by default retain the application name label - this can be changed in the settings), and that the "titlebar" is only as wide as it needs to be to display the window title, and sits at the top left corner of the window, with the close button on the far left, and the Maximize button on the right.

So, yeah. While I overall have some notes for improvement, I absolutely could see myself daily-driving it at some point in the future, after some more improvements went into it. Huge kudos to the team that has been tirelessly working on Haiku for the past years, I hope y'all keep up the good work!

Where will I go from here?

Well, I will keep using Haiku for now, but in longterm, I might pave over it and give NetBSD a go. However, not permanently - if NetBSD suits me, I would replace my Arch Linux install on Andrew (my primary notebook, named after Robin Williams' character in Bicentennial Man) with it, and then I will continue my experiments on Peter. Maybe I will try to Hackintosh it, or I will try to install ReactOS on it... In general, it will be my testbed for weird or interesting OSes, while I will use Andrew as a more stable machine for daily computing.

\* Except for when I had to transfer a few files from Andrew to Theseus, then from Theseus to Peter. And admittedly, I do sometimes use my phone to browse the web in bed. Bad habit, I know.