You should blame NVidia for that. Their proprietary, non-free drivers don’t exactly work on GNU/Linux, either. Well, they do, but they are far from being perfect. In fact, they are very problematic and even the reverse-engineered “nouveau” driver works better - except in 3D. Of course they didn’t bother providing drivers for Haiku and their firmware is proprietary, thus preventing anyone to do NVidia’s job. I guess posting something like “your drivers and non-free closed-source policy makes me depressed” in Nvidia forums might be more productive for that matter.
Booting up is pretty quick and shutting down is eyblink-fast for me, both in real installation and on a VM. I am guessing your problems are related to the hardware incompatibility.
Both my Corsair and another, much better mechanical keyboard work as expected, including the multimedia keys I bother using. For the latter, did you try Preferences → Shortcuts?
Both should install very quickly, the fact you report such long installation times reminds me a non-Haiku related problem I had in the beginning, and it was resolved by the community here.
As for performance, I think you should switch to nightly builds. They work much better for me in general.
I rarely use it (prefer gzipped tarballs) but yes, 7-zip is there. @nephele already covered that.
Yes there is. It’s called QuickLaunch. Just bind it to a key combination and you are set. To do that use Preferences → Shortcuts.
Well, it depends on your definition of “proper”. It seems that what you are missing is what I would call the exact opposite of a “proper” file manager - image preview was only invented to slow down the system when browsing a directory full of images. Anyway, to each his own, but I would recommend Midnight Commander. It might not be a looker, but its features easily put any eye-candy file manager into shame. You may need a few hours to get used to it and configure it (it’s highly customizable, including the looks). But it quickly pays off. For images, just bind images to an image viewer in MC. This will work much faster for previewing as well, compared to the automatic preview feature in any file manager with bells and whistles.
I’m not a Haiku developer, just a humble user. But trust me, try nightly builds instead of beta4. Many things have been changed since the beta release, and bet this will solve at least some of your problems. Of course, nightly builds are supposed to be testing and thus potentially unstable, but I switched to nightlys a few months ago and never regretted it. As a Fortran (modern) / C / C++ developer, literally everything I need is there and works out of the box. Not to mention that using nightlys helps contributing to bug hunting - although nightlys are actually surprisingly stable.
Last but definitely not least, I understand your frustration - of course there are issues. But I think that, although this wasn’t probably your intention, your report is full of negativity and basically nothing positive, which is unfair, i might add. There is a whole lot to like in Haiku.