As is the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.
Yay! My first commit to the repo!
Nice big report!
And lots of new contributors for Haiku!
Time looks bright for Haiku after all that impressive work on Haiku Beta_4!
Thanks alot for your work on the OS itself and for the great documentation Haiku has now!
Lots of good reviews about Haiku Beta_4 now!
Thanks all dev and thanks our great community!
Good year to come for Haiku!
Nice work everyone!
A bugfix for it was mentioned, but not nielx’ actual work on the renewed Network Services Kit. Luckily there’s a detailed blog post.
Also a shoutout for “Mr. Static” Begasus, who tirelessly did most of the static lib removing of the haikuports packages!
\o/
Congrats to all involved! 
Ahoy folks !
Congratulate for the last year’s achievements :
→ R1B4 release
→ addiotinal software layers which enables more applications
→ new XFS filesystem
→ new WiFi drivers
→ AND the tons of fixes which were reported month-by-month !..
… MOREOVER …
\0/ \0/ \0/ 20th ANNIVERSARY of HAIKU development ! \0/ \0/ \0/
Let’s have a brighter new year ! 
What would be in the focus - related to Haiku development - this year ?
What are the plans ?
The plan is to continue fixing bugs and release beta 5
with respet to the font loading changes:
I found #18169 (WebPositive (master) - random crashes) – Haiku but didn’t find any others - are there more?
That’s the main one, yes.
At first I thought that perhaps R1 should be the next objective.
Then I looked at the bug tracker. Does Waddlesplash know he has a job for life here?
That depends entirrly on westher enough donations come in
For beta4 we have closed 400 bugs in a year and a half. For R1 there are 600 to 700 bugs open.
I wish waddlesplash a much longer lifetime than that!
It depends mostly on how many of these bugs are very hard to solve, which extra goals people keep insisting on adding (like 3D acceleration), and how many bugs people continue to find and open (new hardware to support, and so on).
In any case, the counter is now probably in years and not decades of work 
So for R1, every bug has to be resolved? Doubt that there is any software that’s completely bug-free, much less any project with a similar scope as Haiku. If that is really the case, then reaching R1 would be a quixotic effort especially if more bugs are tagged as needing to be fixed for it. Some folks outside of the community looking in do seem to have the same perception, too. Would be great to have a clarification on this matter.
Haiku is mostly fine as it is right now, personally. But it’s getting a bit tiring to see various people say that Haiku R1 is vapourware and the like. Don’t really have a response to that, so I usually end up ignoring all that.
IDK, maybe I’m just tired today and need to sleep on this. 
No, these are the 600 bugs we consider important enough for R1. There are 3000 more we can do later.
It’s just a really big project.
People were super happy to try GMail when it was in “beta”. They made it look cool by requiring that some friend sends you an invitation to get into it (in reality it was just to make sure they didn’t get millions of people creating new accounts everyday).
So the response is easy: version numbers don’t make sense. Chrome is at version several hundreds and each version changes almost nothing. We have taken the opposite route, just like Mac OS which has been at version “X” for 20 years and no one is so worried about it.
You can consider that we use greek letters instead of minor version numbers, because, why not?
Congrats to developers, now Haiku is getting recognition
Haiku received some really positive reviews with the new Beta 4.
Looks much more positive to me than the reviews of the previous versions.
I wonder,however,why so many say that it runs on ARM,or even more precisely,on Apple Silicon.
It doesn’t,there’s ongoing work to make it work in QEMU on ARM,but I think we don’t even have a single driver for ARM based Apple devices yet?
Positive review overall, though the comparisons to NeXTSTEP are a bit unexpected. Haiku is a spiritual successor to BeOS, after all.
There is a comment to that effect made on the linked article; pretty harsh on the reviewers although not without some justification.
Edit: that comment is apparently deleted. If comments are being monitored, perhaps they will correct the article?
Dear @nipos,
It happens as media workers sometimes not journalists so they are not do the basic investigation carefully - so they accept any news as feature not under development but already available as they do not follow the forum about progress till the end or try to find the table about progress on platforms.
That table is available if someone wants to find but it must be saved if one find it or remember how to find it.
Also some of us also creates articles/posts about progress of developments and do not clarify maybe that is still not available publicly but as development and shared for the forum members how it is progressed.
Of course it is available who installed development environment or for those persons who try it out in virtual machine … but you may remember or read already those peoples who wanted to try out ARM(32)/ARM64 versions and just heard or read about Haiku on ARM, but had not take care about how the status is.
There would be a Blog-O-Sphere blog of developers about statuses of specific platforms but you may know what developers would ask about it from us :
– Do you want to read article about Haiku or rather we write a code to fix or enhance the Haiku itself ?
Generally it is right – as they do it in their spare time, but I think actually that is not intuitive or simply find - at least for first time - what platform supported.
For me the way I found this info earlier was that not over download page, so
“Get Haiku !” as of course you can read supported platforms
Supported platforms: x86, 32-bit and 64-bit
So nothing about other - now actually experimental platforms - I understand the logic behind.
So for other platforms, you must find
→ Nightly images tab
where you find the link to
→ Nightly images page
and there you find first the supported, booting x86 variants
and other platforms are at the bottom, just like small characters parts on the contracts.
I understand the logic behind, so it is foolproof in some way,
so only developers or really intersted peoples find the experimental images,
this way basically then much lesser disappointed prober/tester will be cryin’ out loudly : “-Haiku is crap on XY it is really does not run on it !..”
I understand they want to avoid it. But … and there is a but here from my point of view … why not here the summary table about the images of other platforms are capable of ?
It is called as “Haiku Port Status” you can find at
Home → Haiku Guides → Building Haiku → Haiku Port Status
From that everyone can see those others are experimental and developer knowledge/skills required to at leasst achieve to check it at all … I mean that summary table is available only if you read the development section of the docs.
Not even a link on Haiku downloads as other platform statuses
nor on this Nightly images page
the table itself or a link can be found about it.
I had not read what the press get about Haiku until now - but I do not wonder if a journalist or a blogger do not dive into developers’ docs to find it - so writes completely nonsense about Haiku in some point of view - just as happened in the Apple Insider article as where supported versions were both the ARM and even more – I can imagine purely from enthusiasm and not following checking all the brighting details from other sources and compare to the authentic and official Haiku page.
So once time – you have to know that this page or this matrix is existing - so curious people like me or a developer would find it, but not a newbie or a random people who would try out based on rumours about it on other forums/articles. I say rumours, as who hear about it sometimes get infos someone’s memories about an article or forum post and directly goes to download and try out. This way there is countless forum posts about supported/not supported HW/SW/platform , or first boot that does not boot :))
I know there are peoples who first ask without check / find something first itself, so not even the easiest way to find an info helps on it … they will ask about it, because their laziness, but isn’t it obvious if an info is widely available then there is a chance at least to much easier spreading among people?
Those status infos would not be the binary images itself, but the status about them, so they could be available even on the download page to make it clear :
however such experimental stuff exists – noone works on it,
or if someone works on it … it is not available for endusers, but only developers or skilled users.
This is my opinion - I may be wrong about it.
Well, the writer of this article went into the same trap, just the one at Apple Insider : they found some right and some false info about Haiku from the same source and they are from new generation who just publish from personal interests and not learned lessosns about journalism : write down always correct information, data, re-check your sources before publishing.
LOL, such amateurs, really …
From my perspective - they are like those who just posts :
“First.”
He just differs from Apple Insider guy to describes Haiku as NeXTStep-like OS, the UI itself comes from NeXTStep, etc.
Apple Insider guy words and phrases comes back in this article
Their superficiality is
tragic
or
awesome.
Depends on you take it seriously or have fun on it as a sarcastic situation.
I am not certain all the articles are good for Haiku or just those written with focused on facts and true probes and shares their personally checked, carefully formulated, composed materials.
Enthusiasm sometimes too exaggerated and excessive determinations - in such cases - paint (a) ridiculous picture(s).
(Just as Windows and MacOS run for their money after Haiku R1 released - taken from Apple Insider article.
I know it can be taken as exaggerated journalist trick … but honestly … how do you think and feel first when you read it ?)
This is my opinion - I may be wrong.