If all goes to plan, Beta 3 will be released sometime after the 24th of July. Note that the release will only happen when everything is ready, so there are no final dates and the timeline may change to account for delays.
The Promotion Team is currently investigating Beta3 DVDs and USB sticks to order: the Inc. has been notified and quotes have been requested from two possible services.
A lot of other software projects would’ve called these betas final releases. Haiku is a lot more stable, capable, and usable than the beta label indicates.
I like the industrial quality approach. It can add delay if you are resource contrained but all things being equal the quality is worth it. Given the time the competition have had to polish their OS perhaps the extra time to get it right is for the best. A rubbishy first experience can put people off and lead to bad reviews which could ruin further interest.
Competition? Are we talking competition as in Windows and MacOS? Or are we talking competition as in Linux distros? Or are we talking competition in the sense of projects like ReactOS, AROS, and FreeDOS?
Haiku, IMHO is very far removed from any of those projects. Proprietary software had much more money and mqan-hours to throw at software development. Linux distros are more collections of software, rather than one monolithic, internally developed OS. Haiku is probably closer to the latter category, in that it’s an open-source OS completely developed under one banner. But then is is really a “competitor?” Eh… I just feel Haiku deserves a category on it’s own.
Please stop nitpicking and escalating and reframing. I really do not have the time for grandstanding or office politics or overblown egos.
As much as I enjoy OSNews, this is one of the worst forums for this kind of ‘quoting a single point’ type argument. I understood what you meant.
I’m still confused as to what you mean by “competition” though.
I agree, Haiku’s polish is fantastic, but what exactly are you comparing it to? It’s unfair to compare it to proprietary software, and yet it’s also unfair to compare it to a bundle of 3rd party packages (IE Linux)
> “competition”
Active desktop operating systems that are not Haiku.
HollyB was making a very simple point. “People nowadays are used to a certain level of polish in a desktop operating system, so I think it’s good that the Haiku developers are spending extra time on polish instead of rushing out a release.”
A few months ago another release milestone was posted here on OSNews and I decided to try it out. I was pleasantly surprised (last time I tried as a few years ago) but Haiku suffers from the Sailfish and Windows Phone problem: after 30 minutes of browsing and clicking on some system apps I thought: OK what now? While the OS is superb, there are very few applications beyond the Calculator and the theapot demo.
OSes like FreeDOS and ReactOS all have at least some niche and applications for it.
Personally I think that people who love Haiku should concentrate more or making applications to make the OS viable.
Have you looked at the HaikuDepot package manager? It’s not as robust as the Debian and Fedora Linux repos, but it’s full of useful and quality software.
I’m thinking a DosBox port would help. Wiki says VirtualBox runs on Haiku. While not native it opens the door to more things. Thunderbird and LibreOffice run on Haiku too? QBitorrent has a port. No Firefox but Webpositive. No VCL.
The QT port brought a lot of software to Haiku, albeit non-native. KOffice, and at least one QT based Webkit browser are available as far as i’m aware, as well as a whole plethora other software