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Hey guys. Apologies for the lack of comms on our side. We've been very heads down and focused on the Q2 update and planning for our first team offsite meeting in June. I'm working on a blog post for this week with more information and planning a regular schedule to provide updates more consistently. Regarding the pace of progress, something to keep in mind. We built Eshtek on a bootstrapped budget to avoid the temptation of taking big VC money and forced to race for an exit. That's how products become enshittified as we've seen with so many over the years. We were very deliberate and intentional in our partnerships and investors. We're in this for the long haul. But doing this still comes at a cost. Yes our Black Friday launch was wildly more successful than we could have hoped, but an influx of cash has a delayed effect to benefitting productivity within a business. Once you get it, you have to make sure it stays (refunds) and you have to be smart about how you spend it (services, tools, people, etc.). Then it takes time to make all of those things work well for you. If we would have taken a couple million back in 2022 when we incorporated, we'd already be at 1.0, but we'd also not have as much control over the business and our vision. I don't blame anyone for their comments. HexOS is very light right now. Apps are badly needed to improve. Fully agreed. We released it when we did to prove the concept and that we have the chops to build this thing. It gave us more than enough capital to get there and we immediately reinvested that extra capital to not only expand our team faster than planned, but to expand our roadmap in ways we haven't even publicly disclosed yet. I guess this is a long way of asking you all to have faith and I will do better at providing more frequent updates and not leaving you in the dark for so long. Thank you.

I believe integrating Home Assistant with HexOS could be a game-changer for the operating system, offering functionality that is sorely lacking in almost all other OS platforms today. A Home Assistant integration would allow users to monitor and manage their NAS more effectively. Imagine being able to track critical metrics such as system uptime, array health, disk health checks, and the overall status of your storage systems — all from within Home Assistant. Furthermore, adding control features would significantly enhance the user experience. It would be fantastic if users could automate tasks like rebooting or stopping/starting applications, VMs, or containers directly through Home Assistant. Additionally, automating disk spin-downs during off-peak hours for power savings would be a powerful and eco-friendly feature. The potential of Home Assistant integration is vast, and it's difficult to fully capture all the possibilities in a single topic. However, the core idea is simple: having such an integration, with continuous updates and new features, would be a major advantage for HexOS. While most other operating systems either lack similar functionality or offer only basic, limited capabilities, HexOS could stand out by providing a more comprehensive, user-friendly, and flexible solution.

This is my biggest concern, especially given that they're intending to allow community app curation. The apps need to be working and working seamlessly before they release "1.0", and given that the curation templates are slated for Q3 this year and launch is also "This year", I am very concerned at their timeline. To me, this is the biggest feature that HexOS has, easy installation of apps & VMs (coming soon tm). Now that Fangtooth has been out a few months, I assume they're probably targeting a 25.10 version as the upgrade path for HexOS, instead of 25.04. To me, even if they miss the 1.0 release this year, that's OK. Don't officially launch it too early, because that's how people become disappointed in the product. All of us are here because we understood that this was a Beta. Community engagement and updates on progress is all that we require.

To me what's become apparent is the offer six months ago was less buy into a beta(I really don't think anybody with a straight face can call no released builds in six months an actual beta) and more a Kickstarter. Given what HexOS as a company has done in the last six months I think bears that out.

I bought into the hype, not because Linus said HexOS said it was good, but because I wanted an OS that gave me a hands-off approach. I knew I was getting access to a paid beta, not a final product. But 6 months in and one of the biggest sells — easy to install apps — still has no developments. What's worse, this is likely the thing that would most benefit from a beta test. Instead, we've only seen tiny updates that don't really give much confidence that this project will ever see a 1.0 release. The MIA for months approach doesn't help either. In these 6 months, instead of settling in with HexOS and moving away from the "complicated" Unraid, I've moved on towards even more advanced setups, deploying 3 servers (and soon a fourth) that are fully headless, and remote. I went further deep into the rabbit hole, learning more about networking, remote management, and CLI. As I gain more skills, HexOS continues to lose its appeal and, at this point, I feel like I will end up with a HexOS license that I'll have no use for, but that I can't share with anyone. If you sell the idea of a "community" and "early access" and ask people to take a leap of faith before a product is even out there, the least you can do is communicate properly. I'm sure your team is stretched thin and no one is asking you to waste developers' time answering queries. But COMMUNICATION IS A MUST. One thing is certain. If I wasn't sure if getting a 99€ license was the right call, getting a second license at the full price is definitely out of the question and I don't really see myself advocating for anyone to do it. That means that buddy backup — the second feature I was really looking forward to — no longer has any value. GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER.

I think it's easy to dog pile when there have been 0 updates for as long as it's been, but yea... I think the new updates to TrueNAS make whatever is going to be included in the next iteration of HexOS more exciting. Although, I wouldn't expect many of these features to be made available to us through HexOS for a while, it would still be nice to push an update in beta stage that allows testing of how it will interact with Fangtooth and give us the option to explore some of these feature updates in the meantime... I am considering migrating to TrueNAS completely at this point and reserving HexOS for my family if/when they get out of beta. Would be nice to at least have a progress report, or some other form of update that communicates the expectations the HexOS team wants to set for the end user. IMO current state expectations are not tempered because they're not established