Haiku OS Beta 6 is out, arriving two years after Beta 5 and 25 years into the project's mission to resurrect BeOS. The headlining additions are real: Firefox and its derivatives now run on Haiku, QEMU hardware virtualization is available via the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (NVMM), and POSIX plus hardware compatibility have been meaningfully improved. ARM 64-bit support is still missing.
The release notes are long because two years passed since the last beta, though nightly builds kept the user base functional in the interim. System requirements start at a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM. YouTuber Action Retro tested the release on dollar-bin laptops from the early 2000s and found that a random Asus from that era booted with WiFi and audio working out of the box.
The full release notes are where this gets interesting, detailing exactly how much POSIX ground Haiku has closed and what the NVMM integration actually enables. Separately, a Nvidia GPU driver port reported good results as of July 2026, which points at where Beta 7's headline feature might land.
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