Potabi 1.0 Dev Log: The Final Tasks

With the recent release of Beta-4 1.0A, Potabi is well on its way to being ready to release to the public. Beta-4 was a very difficult release to manage, especially with the concerns of our new ports system. What's in store for Potabi 1.0? What else is left to do? What are the last 3 betas? When are we dropping the A? What will be the final preparations for 1.0? What is Potabi 2.0 going to look like?

Potabi 1.0 will essentially be very minimally different to our model: FuryBSD. I wanted to clarify something. No, Potabi is not "based on GhostBSD" as people like RoboNuggie in his 2-for-1 video you should 100% watch, even with this small mistake. That doesn't mean GhostBSD should gain no credit, since its builder is so similar to FuryBSD's, we actually did use some code and files from their project to fix certain issues we were having with FuryBSD's builder. Potabi 1.0's goal in release, as development continued, became less about "getting something perfect" and more so "getting a decent enough start." Potabi 1.0 will certainly be a little rough around the edges, because things changed rapidly as the project kinda grew from a side-project to my main project.

What else is left? Really, not a lot. While the 20 day release rule applies - every release has a soft-deadline of 20 days post previous release - we can possibly even expect me to spend a lot of time doing cleanup and still see the release well before the 60 day estimated deadline. Unless something goes horribly wrong, we can easily see a release early to mid December. There are three betas remaining, and technically beta 5 will be the last "alpha" release. I will explain what that means in a bit. So what are the last 3 betas?

Beta 5: This will be the first installable system. Essentially, this is when Potabi is fully ready for Distrowatch acceptance, as this release will be the first to actually function as intended for the 1.0 release.

Beta 6: This will be the first "true beta". Again, I will explain that in a bit. Beta 6 will officially be titled Beta-6 1.0 Luna. This is actually the biggest of the last 3, as it includes three whole checkboxes, unlike 5 and 7 which only have one checkbox each. I know, a ton in comparison.

Beta 7: This actually is a bug fix for a UEFI error with XORG. The solution isn't too clean, but no reason it shouldn't work. This will not be considered 1.0, but rather Beta-7 1.0 Luna.

Wait, so why did Beta 6 and 7 drop the "A"? This was explained in an older version of the website, but admittedly we needed to explain this a little better. The "A" essentially meant "alpha". Betas 1 through 5 are all more accurately "alpha" software, but we considered them betas. This will continue as the versioning scheme, but we will do a better job in the future explaining what else.

The final preparations for 1.0 Luna will be very minimal. It's just cleanup from Beta-7, and that's really it. We may add a couple applications as we see fit from the package repos, but nothing too special. We are skipping the Beta 8 release as it would be easier to put it on pause for 2.0 and not fight to delay the 1.0 release by a couple months for FreeBSD 13.1 - which was a release requirement originally but we decided against it.

Potabi 2.0 has no set release date, but it will certainly be big. The focus for Potabi 2.0 is in CoreNGS, and POSSIBLY (no immediate promises) the Dear ImGUI rewrite of the Ayras desktop environment. We are still figuring out what is the full list of things we want for Potabi 2.0 Fenn.

Wait... when are the mobile and server editions releasing? The simple answer is: No idea. For each of them, it's going to involve a ton of work than we have already completed. Since 1.0 will of course have point releases, it could even be that these versions will release in different point releases. Server would be the easiest to do, but that will still need focus from me, the only dev in the Potabi System project, and one of the two in CoreNGS. For mobile, it's even worse. I have no idea what to do for the mobile release, and even then I cannot promise much without financing for the project. Potabi Mobile might actually be tons of work, and we only plan to support Pine64 hardware as we have a strongly positive relationship with them. We will see what happens.