Welcome to the April 2020 activity report!
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.
Typo: “… chipsets nezer than SandyBridge …” and “experimenting with muiltiple display”
Extra typo:
This is used in various places (replicant handles, …) to fix drwaing glitches.
Pull requests to fix typos and improve the report are welcome.
So the iso is going to be bigger than 700mb?
As always, great report and thank you for hard work.
The beta releases are bigger, yes. This is because we have to include all the sourcecode on them for compliance with the GPL (a few things we ship with Haiku are under the GPL and we take a safe approach to handling that). We may someday remove this restriction but it means:
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.
Do anybody know, how many betas are planned?
Or existing currently no plannings for it?
Such news gives a showing in the future and remembers on the past. 
Oh, as I currently see at
http://web.archive.org/web/20020118173550/http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/
on Sat, 12 Jan 2002, the Haiku app_server was born.
So it is since 3.5 month full age.
Happy 18th birthday app_server!
There is no planning in terms of number of releases. The goal is currently to have a new beta every year, until we run out of bugs to fix (or decide the remaining bugs are not worth fixing or not important enough). Then we make an R1 release.
On the website you can see that since beta1 there were 830 closed bugs (they are now in the beta2 milestone): https://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap
And there are 1161 remaining open. However, you have to keep in mind that there are new bugs being open all the time, and some are significantly easier to solve than others. So it’s a bit difficult to give an accurate estimation.
My advice is: don’t wait for R1, it’s fine to use the “beta” versions. They are not perfect, but they are usable. We just don’t want to set expectations too high, we know Haiku is far from being ready and we keep working on it.
Is it possible to tell authors provide MIT licensed ProcessController?
I think we already tried to find contact information or something like that to ask, but failed.
Thanks, I do hope someday you only need a CD to burn an iso like it used to be in 2008. I do have a few blank DVDs but not many.
Do sources really have to be on same support?
I mean, otherwise we could have an CD1 with Haiku and CD2 with sources and few extra softwares that are commonly used.
Are CD/DVD still actual in 2020? They are terribly slow and have low capacity. Many modern PC have no CD/DVD drives.
Still have one (external) here, but it hasn’t been used in years 
I use my cd/dvd drive a lot in order to rip cheap CDs bought from Amazon. I will shortly try to install Haiku on an old Thinkpad X30 which won’t boot from USB sticks. The CD player in the dock is the only way to do it - as far as I can tell.
A lot are chosing Haiku because it is still a light OS, a lot want to revive their old (BeOS) computer…
But if you have a modern PC, you can read CDs in a blue ray drive if you want…
Also a lot of peope don’t have access to fiber to home connexion.
Even in France, there are still places where people have to go visit their neighbours to have a working ADSL line or tonality with their mobile phone. Granted it is not common case but still.
So you need an iso anyway to allow offline installation. I’m not sure that it would be different to only have to manage USB keys?
