Haiku R1/beta5 has been released

The Haiku Project has released R1/beta5, marking significant advancements in hardware support, stability, and software availability after resolving nearly 350 bugs and enhancement tickets. This beta version is feature-complete but still classified as beta-quality software, meaning it may contain known and unknown bugs. Key improvements include a simplified color selection system with dark mode compatibility, enhancements to the Icon-O-Matic icon editor, and better battery status management through the PowerStatus applet. The Tracker file manager has improved handling of read-only folders, and basic support for USB audio devices has been introduced. Networking capabilities have been enhanced with a new TUN/TAP driver for VPNs and significant improvements to TCP performance, achieving up to 10 times better throughput. The Terminal application has received updates for better data handling, and the FAT filesystem driver has been replaced with a more reliable version from FreeBSD. Additionally, Haiku now supports read-only access to UFS2 and implements a subset of the BSD kqueue API for efficient event handling. The release also includes numerous software ports, such as GDB and experimental .NET versions. Overall, R1/beta5 is considered the most polished and stable release to date, with ongoing efforts to improve POSIX compliance.

- R1/beta5 resolves nearly 350 bugs and enhances overall stability.

- New features include dark mode, improved USB audio support, and better TCP performance.

- The FAT filesystem driver has been replaced for improved compatibility.

- Significant software ports have been added, including GDB and experimental .NET.

- The release is the most polished version of Haiku to date, with ongoing development efforts.