The Haiku operating system, an open source remake of BeOS, has gained support for running a number of KDE applications, including the KOffice productivity suite. This was made possible by a native port of Nokia's Qt development framework to the Haiku platform.

The Qt port will significantly boost the availability of third-party software for the operating system. The port is a community-driven effort, meaning that it is not officially supported by Nokia. As portability is one of the principle goals behind Qt, it's unsurprising that a group of enthusiasts was able to make it work on Haiku with little apparent difficulty.

Among the first KDE applications that have been ported are a number of games, the lightweight qutIM instant messaging program, the WebKit-based Arora Web browser, and Nokia's Qt Creator development environment. Haiku users can easily test KDE applications by using the TiltOS package manager.

Back in the day, BeOS had a relatively good widget toolkit and clean C++ APIs for application development. The Haiku developers have rebuilt much of that with the hope that the source code of classic BeOS applications can be recompiled on Haiku and used to create a new base of native software programs. The independent effort to bring Qt to the platform could help fill the gaps while the native software ecosystem is repopulated.