The big news first: a timeline has been set for Beta 2! If all goes well, it will be released by the end of May. Of course, this means everyone has been scrambling for last minute changes this month instead of stabilizing everything. We are now in “soft freeze”, and the branch will be created on Friday.
Yes, an actual almost release date for Haiku’s second beta release.
Seems that with this, and ReactOS’s recent announcement, all the open-source OS families(*nix, NT/ReactOS, BeOS/Haiku, AmigaOS/MorphOS) have moved onto modern compilers, finally.
The historical timeline (taken from web.archive.org):
Version, Release date:
R1/alpha 1, September 14, 2009
R1/Alpha 2, May 10, 2010
R1/Alpha 3, June 20th, 2011
R1/Alpha 4.1, November 14th, 2012
R1/beta1, September 28th, 2018
Planned:
R1/beta2, May 30th, 2020
Without the huge space between alpha and beta. every release needs one or two years.
But nice to see, that there is constantly progresss.
Well, the thing is, the reason there was such a large time between those 2 is due to constant massive feature creep that happened in the meantime.
But rebuilding the packaging and distribution of apps in such an significant way is paying off nowadays by simplifying a lot of things.