As I talked to many attendees about various things like our package management, scheduler update, WebPositive progress, Wi-Fi, ASLR/DEP, and anything else I could think of, and there was an overwhelming positive energy about Haiku by those who saw it in action. By far the most common question I got was “When will the next release be out?”. In the past, I would say the most common question is “Why would I ever choose Haiku over any existing Linux distribution?”, so it is nice to see that there was a lot more positive energy about Haiku, as well as excitement about the next release.
The lack of stable releases is major mistake on the devs part. Release early, release often is a way to spark interest, get media attention and most importantly, get *new* users to try your product and hopefully like what they see and become a part of the community.
Sending people to download nightly builds never works.
Gilboa
I agree. And I also understand why some Linux people are interested in Haiku: it’s not at all as messy as Linux. The few times I’ve given Linux a serious try (Ubuntu, Mint, Bodhi etc) I always get’s frustrated over how “Linux” it feels. I bet others feels the same, but uses Linux anyway due to lack of serious alternatives.
I agree that having newcomers test a nightly build that crashes all the time will not make them many new adepts.
However I think what they need as much is to build a release that allows people to do something “useful” while testing it. Poking around with glgears wears fast…
BUT nowadays a stable browser would allow users to do *so* much that Devs should benefit from that.
A solid browser allows users from word processing to listening music, through web-mailing and socializing.
Couple the Beos ultra fast boot (I assume Haiku dind´t loose that?) with a good browsing experience, maybe some buzzword and you just might start to build a niche.
I think people might be interested in a splashtop OS and today´s users aren´t scared to use something that is not Windows nor Mac-classic.
Haiku will be making a release early next year.
Package management was quite a radical change and we needed a year to get Haiku back to our definition of alpha status. We wanted to make a release earlier this year, but there were still a few issues to iron out first.
Once Alpha 5 is out we will be jumping over to the Beta phase, which will be released on a much more regular basis.
The concept of the Beta phases is considered by the Haiku development team to be more about applying spit and polish than compared to what is done in other projects. So our first full release (R1) is not too far away!
I fully understand your point (I follow the developer wiki from time to time), however, please note that having no official releases for more than a year hinders the project’s efforts to get media and users attention.
I wonder if Haiku should not follow Cyanogenmod’s milestone-like timed release schedule.
Unlike Linux distributions that usually have the man power to execute a 6 month release schedule, having semi-official milestones takes less of QA effort, but should give the project more media coverage and user testing.
– Gilboa
What happened with the guy who created a big debate about hosting Haiku on top of Linux? He was supposed to show a proof of concept. This made big news over here last month.
He never turned up.
But it did result Cosmoe OS getting a bit of TLC:
https://github.com/Ithamar/cosmoe