Hi, Mike...
But I can understand his opinion about AN focusing on industry. I guess things might be different if you had brought up in your newsletter a continuous stream of progress updates about the new AOS5.1, the long time ago announced WiFi drivers and so on. Staying in the dark as an outsider leads to guess-working about whats going on. Better communication from AN might be the key to overcome such guessing.
Whenever the question arises about us not providing enough updates, I answer that with the question:
If we are still working on things, what should we say in a blog post?
In other words, we've said that we are working on ArcaOS 5.1, UEFI, GPT, WLAN drivers, and other things. Nothing has changed. We're still working on these things, and nothing has reached the point of us being able to release it as finished product. I could put that in a blog post every week, but then our blog posts would go from being few and informative to being frequent and redundant, saying nothing of any value.
We haven't gone out of business. We are processing new orders every day. We have released a steady stream of updates to USB, ACPI, and other things, including releasing a new NVMe driver (again, not for any commercial customer in particular, and not even prompted by a request from a commercial customer). I fail to see how or why anyone would get the impression that we had somehow shifted our focus from individual and small business users to large enterprises.
Again, to reassure everyone reading here:
Arca Noae remains committed to keeping OS/2 running on as many modern, bare metal systems as possible for as long as possible, whether those systems are owned by individuals at home or at school, or by businesses, small or large. Our driving force is just to keep OS/2 viable for those who need it or want an alternative to the ever-more-invasive mainstream OSes and the Powers behind them (Big Tech).
Sigurd, my friend:
We looked from what we know and what we can have access to today. The things I mentioned above are things we would like to have had, may be "exaggerated expectiations" from both of us.
I can understand about exaggerated expectations. Arca Noae's human development resources are limited. Whereas IBM could put a dozen or more engineers on a single task, we have a dozen or so tasks for a single engineer. This kind of flips the development cycle on its head. We have a queue of projects running in order to get to the next release. GPT was a major part of getting us off the ground (though GPT is by no means a requirement for UEFI - far from it). UEFI has been a monumental task, and then integrating that with the traditional BIOS install which we have had since ArcaOS 5.0, so that one ISO can boot under both environments and the installer can intelligently provide the correct options for the booted environment (correct options=ESP selection, as the ESP is necessary for UEFI boot, but makes no sense under traditional BIOS), has taken an enormous amount of time and effort. It is not easy to re-imagine the OS/2 installation process with UEFI involved, as it's decidedly un-OS/2-like.
Somewhere in that work queue is continued USB3 development as tickets are submitted about this and that not working under a given controller (and USB technology itself - not the drivers we have on OS/2, but the specs and mis-application or ignorance of them by hardware manufacturers - continues to be an ongoing uphill slog). Behind that - and I do mean at the end of that list of priorities - is WLAN support, which really is moving along (though not ready for even a technology preview, yet).
The ordering is simple: First, be able to boot the machine. Next, be able to connect it to things, such as USB and LAN. If there are already supported drivers for wired networking, that's an acceptable workaround using bridge devices until such time as we can focus more attention on WLAN driver development. Otherwise, we'd be "all dressed up with nowhere to go," because who cares about a Wi-Fi driver when the computer can't boot or the display is black?
I understand that what's important to some may not be what's important to others or that on a scale of want-like-need-urgent, people will have many of the same things placed in different categories ("I have no working video, so video is urgent, while Wi-Fi is something which would be nice to have;" or, "My computer boots, video is fine, but I have no working keyboard or mouse - and only a single xHCI controller, so working USB is urgent.")...
Again, I fully understand the amount of work which goes into organizing a meeting of any type, and at a certain point, it's normal to stop and reassess the amount of time and energy vs the return on that human investment - for all concerned. I just don't know that ArcaOS 5.1 or Wi-Fi driver availability today would really make much of a difference in that picture (though it would give you more topics to cover, and considering that we really do anticipate 5.1 to be GA in the next couple of months - yes, we're that close - you may indeed have lots more to discuss by the time November rolls around).
ATB
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because to buy the maintenance program after expired was more expensive than just purchasing the whole OS again.
