Debian is 33, Haiku is 25, and neither is standing still

This is a quiet time of year in tech circles – perhaps explaining why, 25 and 33 years ago, the people behind two ambitious operating system projects kicked them off. Debian Last weekend, the Debian project turned 33 years old. The Linux kernel first appeared in September 1991, so it was not quite two years old when Ian Murdock announced the new distribution. (Indeed, the term "distribution" itself hadn't really caught on yet – his announcement only uses the word as an adjective.) Sadly, Murdock died in 2015, before his project became one of the world's most widely used forms of Linux in the world. We examined the project's history and success when it turned 30, and it continues to thrive. It's not the oldest maintained distro: that distinction goes to Slackware, which is about a month older – it turned 30 that July. Slackware remains actively maintained, although it has not produced a new release in a while. The Register's own Slackware enthusiast Richard Speed looked at version 15.0 back in 2022. Since then, we have had Debian 12 in June 2023 and Debian 13 a year ago. And in case you're curious, as far as this vulture can see, the first release The Reg covered was Debian 2.1 in 1999. Haiku beta beckons Meanwhile, the Haiku OS project keeps on going. The Desktop on Fire blog celebrated with an article on 25 Years of Haiku. Its development was prompted by Palm buying Be in August 2001, as The Register covered at the time. A couple of days later, an email modestly titled "OK, let's start" set the OpenBeOS project in motion, as this history of project milestones describes. Doubters might note that after a quarter of a century of work, there's still been no Haiku OS 1.0 release. Fair, but this is not a Linux distro – it is an entirely new OS built from the ground up. Although it now boasts impressive Unix compatibility, it remains quite different: for a start, it is written in C++ rather than C, and its 32-bit x86 version is also BeOS binary compatible. That matters less today, however, because Haiku has developed a substantial software catalog of its own. The latest activity report from Haiku's dedicated paid developer "Waddlesplash" discusses the possibility of a new version any time now: "Are we beta6 yet? We have a definite release timeline now: a branch should be made by the end of this week, with a target release date of mid-August. Keep an eye on the forums for details to come about how you can help test!" Never mind the version number: the project continues to make impressive technical progress. A PowerPC port has been in the works for more than five years, and in July YouTuber ActionRetro demonstrated an AI-assisted build running on the architecture. This joins a preliminary Arm64 port that was demonstrated back in May. Not Haiku, but adjacent Several Haiku-adjacent projects are also making progress. The cross-platform BeOS-derived programming toolkit Cosmoe, which we covered in June 2025, is still in active development. Its source code is available on GitLab, and it now builds and runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS. Another project with overlapping goals, although no apparent direct relationship to Cosmoe, is VitruvianOS. V, as the team calls it for short, is a port of the Haiku display server and desktop to run on a Linux kernel. Porting the BeOS desktop onto a Linux kernel has been tried before – the first such effort we saw was called BlueEyed OS, back in 2003. V seems to be unconnected with either BlueEyedOS or Cosmoe, but it's making impressive progress all the same. The Reg FOSS desk first heard about V when the project announced version 0.3.0 back in March. At the same time, we read an interview with Dario Casalinuovo, its primary developer, but we couldn't get it running. However, V is making headway. Since its public debut, the project has produced another half-dozen releases: it is now up to version 0.6.0, which gets considerably further in our testing – it boots to a very Be-like startup screen, with a language selection dialog and the choice to run a live environment or start installation. Sadly, that's as far as we can go. The idea certainly has potential. Linux has enviable hardware support now, and given the rivalry between X11 and Wayland, we admire how V sidesteps the dispute: it does not attempt to be either. Instead, it replaces both with a new system based on BeOS's clean design from 1995 – when the original XFree86 Linux X11 server was only about three years old. ®