Elementary OS 0.3 Freya beta 1 is just around the corner

Are you eagerly waiting for the next version of elementary OS? Lots of people are excited these days as the release of  Freya beta1 is approaching. When someone is asking for a release date some say “it’s released when it’s ready”, others point you to isfreyareleasedyet.com. Have you heared about this website? Many eOS fans have this website as their start page. This site currently shows how many bugs left until beta1 of elementary OS 0.3 Freya. It used to be a lot then it went down to only 7 bugs and stayed there for a while. Then a couple of days ago it was only showing 2 bugs and everyone got so excited. At the moment it shows 7 bugs again which made the fans certainly unhappy as they feel the release will never come. But hey, don’t worry! Beta 1 is just around the corner, indeed!

Why do I say that when the number of bugs increased again? Daniel Foré, one of the people behind this great distro informed the fans at the amazing Elementary Community at Google Plus what is the cause of this and why they don’t need to worry.

Don’t panic.

This happened because we’re closer than ever to release. We had a meeting this morning to sync up on our overall release plan: when we want to release betas and RCs, what features they need to contain, when feature freeze goes into effect, etc.

What’s happening is this: Beta 1 is about to happen. Undoubtedly it will be reviewed and shown off all over the internet. Because of this we want to make sure to land any important features before we launch Beta 1 to make sure they get as much exposure and testing as possible. After Beta 1’s release there will be a soft feature freeze. Which means that all the work leading up to Beta2 will be about fixing bugs, updating packages, cleaning up, setting sane defaults, making things look nice, stabilizing, etc. At that point we’ll be just steps away from releasing an RC and of course the final release of elementary OS Freya to the world.

So cheer up everyone! Freya beta is very near. However it’s just a beta so you’re wondering what’s the fuss about it? Will it be stable or is it coming with plenty of bugs? When is the final version released? I’ll cover these questions in a following article, stay tuned.