Haiku is free and open source operating system designed to be compatible with BeOS, a legacy operating system from the 1990s. Haiku itself has been under development for two decades, but it’s still considered beta software (and it only hit that state a few years ago).
While there’s a relatively limited number of native apps available for the platform, one potential solution to that app gap could be on the horizon: a developer has been porting Wine to Haiku, which makes it possible to run some Windows applications on Haiku.
Wine is a Windows compatibility layer initially designed for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems including macOS and BSD. By porting it to work with Haiku, developer X512 has been able to get Windows applications including 7-Zip, Inkscape, Paint, and Notepad++ to run alongside native Haiku applications.
There are some limitations. So far only 64-bit applications are supported, which leaves out many older Windows apps which may be 32-bit only. Some features are still non-functional, including detection for screen size and focus control. And not all Windows applications work with Wine, but you can find a list of thousand of apps that do in the Wine Application Database.
You can find more details about the work-in-progress porting of Wine to Haiku in a thread at the Haiku forum.
via The Register