Trying to figure out the state of Haiku in 2026

So, I was a Be evangelist back in the day, and briefly involved with OpenBeOS way back when. I’ve been feeling the nostalgia bug and have been trying to play around with Haiku, but I’m having a heck of a time wrapping my head around the current state. It seems like there is a lot of development still going on, and I’ve been playing with a nightly a bit in a VM as well as on an old laptop that seems pretty well supported, but I also feel like I’m missing something.

Some specific questions:

Are people really using HaikuDepot? It seems both astoundingly slow and crashes pretty regularly.

If not, how are you all installing and updating software? And where should I be looking for native applications?

What’s the state of audio and video media playback? I got audio sorta working on the laptop, but only sometimes.

What’s the best way to set up a development environment for it? Both applications and the core OS.

I saw an article that Rust and Go have reasonably recent versions available, but can’t find them?

I also have a general list of software that I was wondering if a port or native build is available:

Syncthing

Bitwarden

Tailscale client

Calendar sync via CalDAV

People sync via CardDAV

Slack/Matrix/Discord clients

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