With booting from USB I meant "USB Stick", if that is not possible with ArcaOS5 there is no improvement since the last 9 years. You must be joking - or I totally misunderstand what you have written
As Lewis reported at Warpstock, this is definitely on Arca Noae's list. As he also said, not everything on the list is guaranteed to make it into the first GA release. It's unknown at present whether or not this particular item will make it.
It's true, there are procedures to make booting from USB stick work. However, these procedures are quite tricky to abstract sufficiently that a general 'plug and play' solution can be implemented.
Getting something to work on my system is one thing. Arranging things so that it will work on any system (without extensive system-specific fiddling) is something else. It's things like this which make the seemingly-simple because quite complicated to achieve.
At OS/2 User Meeting 2013 we had a guy attending, who showed a bootable OS/2 Warp 4 (4.52) Stick with that programs like the OS/2 commander and others already worked.
DFSEE has a bootable USB Stick for years, that boots on almost any machine that allows booting from USB. I think FreeDOS is used for this. If one would Combine this stick - that is fully capable of partioning a media and so on - with a set of clones on a persistant area on the same stick, I would see no reason why this should not work. Once the choosen clone starts for the first time, it can install all the necessary rest of the needed stuff from the stick or via ANPM.
That way would avoid finding a solution for OS/2 booting from USB itself. Yes, I know, this is not the way AN goes and that's OK.
Nothing about ArcaOS is TOP SECRET. I have no idea where you got that notion from. Lewis and David both gave fairly detailed roadmap presentations at both Warpstock events last year. If you want more recent information from Arca Noae, by all means ask them. They have a contact email address.
I'd say the reason you're not getting a great deal of concrete information from threads like this is that this is simply the wrong place to ask. Most of the people here don't have exact answers, and those that do know more don't feel it's their place to make announcements on Arca Noae's behalf.
Well, I repeat myself just to make it clear: the reason for this can be seen in another thread here I started some time ago.
I thought it might be of Interest for not only me but a lot of users what is going on during beta stage. For this reason I decided not to contact AN as I know the have no time for this and they already said before that they have no time to Monitor the Forum. So I thought, instead of having a lot of People bothering AN with mails a Forum is a good place to ask about such a Thing and discuss it. In that thread some others already jumped in with some additional questions - that seemed to me to be the Logical and normal way of using a Forum. And another fine thing on a Forum is, that it is normaly also allowed to speculate a bit or to "dream" or to just ask other users what experiences they have.
In Addition I Point to your own Statement there
http://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php/topic,1291.msg12109.html#msg12109 that I might have misunderstand "closed beta test".
Anyway, it does not make sence to talk about this anymore as I did not want to persuade anyone about something, I just would have liked to have some easy Information about wether there are three drivers in the beta testing or not, and in the end I got it. Thank you very much!