Haiku R1 Beta 2 - HiDPI support enhancements and more new open source programs

The second beta for Haiku R1 marks twenty months of hard work to improve Haiku's hardware support and overall stability. Since Beta 1, there have been 101 contributors with over 2,800 code commitments in total. Over 900 bugs and upgrade tickets have been fixed for this release.

Please note that this is a beta distro, which means that it is completely completed, but may still contain known and unknown errors. No data loss insurance can be provided.

This version is available on the 32-bit x86 platform as well as on the x86_64 platform. Note that BeOS R5 compatibility is only provided on 32-bit images.

SSE2 is required to use the WebPositive browser. On cars where this is not available, it is recommended to install the NetSurf browser.

Improved HiDPI support - this release makes significant progress in supporting HiDPI monitors (and UI scaling in general.)

Improvements to Deskbar - Deskbar had various improvements. It now has a mini-mode, in which the icons on the shelf extend to the left. You can activate it by pulling the shelf space by the right handle on the blue leaf.

WebPositive enhancements - Haiku's integrated web browser, WebPositive, now uses a newer version of WebKit. In addition, it contains a number of fixes to the Haiku backend, especially to reserve much less memory and repair WebSockets, as well as a variety of crashes.

More ported software - Due to Haiku's relatively robust POSIX compliance, as well as the ports of open source GUI tool kits, more popular open source software has been ported to Haiku since Beta 1 is available in package repositories.

Installation enhancements - The installer now accepts the exclusion of optional packages that are included on the installation media.

NVMe support - support for NVMe, including support for their use as boot devices (although this varies depending on BIOS support.)

Improved and stabilized XHCI support (USB3) - almost all USB3 devices now work properly.

Kernel stabilization and performance improvements - The system is now visibly more stable than it was at R1 / beta1.

Haiku's source code, building tool source code, and optional packages (except closed source) are contained in the release images as packages. _source.