Feren OS 2023.07 will be delayed, further

Update: Delay has been extended to an undetermined time, due to college and IRL matters getting in the way of deadlines, and to ensure adequate betatesting time.

Today is Feren OS’s 8th birthday, hooray! However, the initial plan was that I was going to surprise you all today with the official release of Feren OS 2023.07 as a birthday present for the occasion, but as the title of this article implies this will not be the case.

Thus, instead, I am obliged to write this post to inform you of further delays for Feren OS 2023.07. I was holding off this post until today so I could be more certain of a potential release date, but given factors I’ll explain later in this post I cannot be entirely sure about a release date just yet.

When is the new planned release date?

As I just said, I’m not entirely sure yet, so watch this space. Hopefully it will be released during August and not September, but if I need to push the release to September for polishing or release-planning reasons then so be it.

Either way, current target is the second half of August, given the need to factor in required time for the upcoming Beta 1 and 2 to be bug-hunted.

Why is 2023.07 still not ready?

Simple, the Store still isn’t ready — it’s a huge undertaking, and has been reset again for the (hopefully, anyway) final time (now with an actual written down vision for how its backend will work, and so on, instead of my (stupid in retrospect) idea of writing some ideas down and writing its backend code as I go).

Fortunately, this aforementioned reset has also given me an opportunity to clean up the code it will have, as well as introducing more functionality to the upcoming Store than was planned before this reset, so while this means an added delay of a few days or so later on, the Store that 2023.07 will have will be even greater than it would have been if this reset did not happen.

However, my apparent incompetence at planning this thing’s code in prior attempts aside, there is also another reason:

Why isn’t Store ready yet?

Well, to answer this, there’s two reasons, actually. I’ll start off with the minor reason — I’ve had a few days of motivation block making me take care of other things that aren’t the Store, such as completing other 2023.07 tasks that needed to be done later otherwise, or just socialising instead of focusing. Y’know, the relatable stuff.

However, the other, bigger, reason was that I had to attend to matters in real life — matters that, per the unfortunately usual over the past 7 years, were a result of sudden tragic events, and, for me, completely unexpected and unplanned for, and as such led to me losing a week or two’s worth of time I was planning to work on Store during.

Fortunately, if nothing else gets in the way from now on, I should be able to finally complete Store over the upcoming weeks, so keep an eye out for Beta 1 and especially Beta 2 when the time comes.

What will 2023.07 now be called?

To put it bluntly, as per the version naming scheme:

• If it releases in October, 2023.10
• Likely will release as 2023.11, though, in November