I have been able to reproduce 100% of the time. This is a brand new installation of Haiku R1 Beta 4. I open up HaikuDepot for the first time and it just get stuck on “Fetching remote repository data”.
While the HDS server does seem to have some performance isstes at the moment, it doesn’t completely stall normally. I suspect network config issues. Maybe try another network card to emulate?
You can also try starting HaikuDepot from Terminal, see “–help” for parameters. “-v trace” will output all kinds of stuff, which may point to the issue (though maybe not in case of a misconfigured network).