ANNOUNCEMENT: The Future of DumaOS: Version 3.0

[SwiftCookie]

Lol I don't understand why people are getting so angry about the time it's taking to release 3.0. I swear people take for granted just how much the Netduma guys communicate with their consumers about problems and feedback. Looking forward to the possibility of testing it out in beta, should be great!

[Stealth_01]

Am I the only one that thinks not giving a completion date for the software is probably the best thing they could do right now? I think people have forgotten the endless amounts of shade and criticism the company had to face during the dumaOS release for the R1. Shit was insan, so i dont blame them for being so secretive.

And if i was to guess when it will release, i'd probably say by the latter end of the year or early next year... just because of my past experiences with the company and timeframes. 

[raf1212]

On 2/7/2020 at 8:49 AM, Od1n said:

So you play with a 200€ controller that has features such as super precise analog sticks, trigger stop and paddles giving you a HUGE advantage over regular controller players yet you complain about XIM users?
Guess you re one of the people who always find something to complain about unless they have ALL the advantages for themselfs.

 

And sure go buy the XIM, youd not be the first to realize that a mouse doesnt turn you into a Shroud. Just like with a controller you have to grind for years to become good.

but you made me laugh, go play it xim,

[Netduma Alex]

18 hours ago, Stealth_01 said:

Am I the only one that thinks not giving a completion date for the software is probably the best thing they could do right now? I think people have forgotten the endless amounts of shade and criticism the company had to face during the dumaOS release for the R1. Shit was insan, so i dont blame them for being so secretive.

And if i was to guess when it will release, i'd probably say by the latter end of the year or early next year... just because of my past experiences with the company and timeframes. 

My estimate would be long before that, but you're right, we're being secretive for now.

We learned from past experiences that it's better to under-promise and over-deliver than to over-promise and under-deliver! Similarly, it's better not to promise a release date which we then have to miss because of an unexpected bug. Some of the new features we're adding are quite complicated, and have a high possibility of bugs being found during testing.

[kssxs]

I just saw this post, as I haven't been on the forum in quite a while.  I've also asked for an update with regards to the issue of missing IPv6 support, here:

 

https://forum.netduma.com/topic/27284-ipv6-current-and-future-support-level/

 

Other Duma users, please add your voice to that request if possible!  Ultimately, I'd like to request that, if it's not already being considered or being worked on as part of this particular update, to have fully functional IPv6 support as part of this major 3.0 update.

 

Please and thanks!

[Od1n]

On 2/10/2020 at 2:11 PM, Netduma Alex said:

We learned from past experiences that it's better to under-promise and over-deliver than to over-promise and under-deliver! Similarly, it's better not to promise a release date which we then have to miss because of an unexpected bug. Some of the new features we're adding are quite complicated, and have a high possibility of bugs being found during testing.

Thats nice but you should still consider to upgrade your communication channels. The biggest backlash that netduma received wasnt about the over-promissing or missed release dates but about giving only 2 statements within 3 years. Everyone was completely left in the dark!

I used to regularly read and post in this forum when Iain and Luke used to post here too and shared their thoughts and development progress (regardless of it they made progress or not). Nowadays i read the forum maybe once every 5-6 month as i can be certain not a single announcement on the progess has been shared since my last visit.

This could easily be changed by giving out monthly update announcements...

 

Also curious to see if we will ever get those over-promissed features like anti-spike or anti-jitter, last time we heard about those was like 2+ years ago...

Iain showed lab results of +5ms spike with 100% maxed out up- and download...

[Netduma Alex]

2 hours ago, Od1n said:

Thats nice but you should still consider to upgrade your communication channels. The biggest backlash that netduma received wasnt about the over-promissing or missed release dates but about giving only 2 statements within 3 years. Everyone was completely left in the dark!

I used to regularly read and post in this forum when Iain and Luke used to post here too and shared their thoughts and development progress (regardless of it they made progress or not). Nowadays i read the forum maybe once every 5-6 month as i can be certain not a single announcement on the progess has been shared since my last visit.

This could easily be changed by giving out monthly update announcements...

 

Also curious to see if we will ever get those over-promissed features like anti-spike or anti-jitter, last time we heard about those was like 2+ years ago...

Iain showed lab results of +5ms spike with 100% maxed out up- and download...

A monthly update is something we could certainly consider... The problem is that we have lots of stuff that can't be talked about openly until it's ready to be announced. One month, the update might look very sparse because most of the stuff we were working on can't be discussed.

In the past, when the company was much smaller, having direct updates from the developers was feasible. Now we have many projects, many features, and many developers. It's just not practical to report everything every month.

[AnnonymouS]

19 hours ago, Netduma Alex said:

A monthly update is something we could certainly consider... The problem is that we have lots of stuff that can't be talked about openly until it's ready to be announced. One month, the update might look very sparse because most of the stuff we were working on can't be discussed.

In the past, when the company was much smaller, having direct updates from the developers was feasible. Now we have many projects, many features, and many developers. It's just not practical to report everything every month.

If so, why have we not seen anything come out for a long time. I have been here on this forum from the beginning of the R1 and you know that. I wished you guys would have stayed on your own instead of teaming up with Netgear . That way you would be in control to do want you want to do. All you guys needed was to have your own line of routers and more staff to carry it out.     

[SwiftCookie]

Just now, AnnonymouS said:

If so, why have we not seen anything come out for a long time. I have been here on this forum from the beginning of the R1 and you know that. I wished you guys would have stayed on your own instead of teaming up with Netgear . That way you would be in control to do want you want to do. All you guys needed was to have your own line of routers and more staff to carry it out.     

I read that IPV6 isn't supported properly in DumaOS yet either? If your device uses IPV6 none of the bufferbloat features work....

[Netduma Fraser]

7 hours ago, AnnonymouS said:

If so, why have we not seen anything come out for a long time. I have been here on this forum from the beginning of the R1 and you know that. I wished you guys would have stayed on your own instead of teaming up with Netgear . That way you would be in control to do want you want to do. All you guys needed was to have your own line of routers and more staff to carry it out.     

We are still doing what we want to do, our vision hasn't changed at all. None of our features have been denied by NG or anything like that. As we have so much going on it takes time to develop these features/updates. I realize the frustration now but I think you'll be impressed with 3.0.  

7 hours ago, SwiftCookie said:

I read that IPV6 isn't supported properly in DumaOS yet either? If your device uses IPV6 none of the bufferbloat features work....

That's not strictly true but it is true we need to do more to make them compatible yes.

[Od1n]

On 2/11/2020 at 5:17 PM, Netduma Alex said:

A monthly update is something we could certainly consider... The problem is that we have lots of stuff that can't be talked about openly until it's ready to be announced. One month, the update might look very sparse because most of the stuff we were working on can't be discussed.

In the past, when the company was much smaller, having direct updates from the developers was feasible. Now we have many projects, many features, and many developers. It's just not practical to report everything every month.

Even if things are still confidential you can give out monthly updates that contain informations like

- very persistant bug has been found that gave us troubles for weeks now

- new feature we cannot unveil yet is currently being tested, things are looking very good

- for next month we want to refine our congestion interface and discuss new features

All it requires is a 5-10 minutes meeting once a month with the netduma staff to define the boundaries of what will be shared and what not. It really isnt a huge effort but will greatly please your community. You will get much less ETA questions that way. Overall it might require 1 hour per month to pull this off, and its not really hard to keeping certain things confidential while still sharing the general development progress.

 

[Od1n]

2 hours ago, Netduma Fraser said:

We are still doing what we want to do, our vision hasn't changed at all. None of our features have been denied by NG or anything like that. As we have so much going on it takes time to develop these features/updates. I realize the frustration now but I think you'll be impressed with 3.0. 

But does that vision go hand in hand with what the customer wants?

It took 3 years to come up with DumaOS which is bascially just a nicer looking modular OS but with pretty much 0 new features. The post release roadmap was to deliver modular feature add-ons in short succession. But that has long been droped and now (for whatever reason) everything has to be bundled into one new DumaOS 3.0 which totally works against the initial modular approach. So why again have we waited 3 years for DumaOS then?! I start to get the feeling that the main driving factor for DumaOS was Netgear and that there MUST be a reason for why those "over-promissed" features havent been released individually yet. The original R1 OS may have had some expansion bottlenecks, but at least it was WAY more responsive and easier on the CPU. I mean the new DumaOS isnt even mobile compatible, and its 2020!

And to come back to my first sentence about what the customer wants, i could care less about another overhaul of the netduma interface or its traffic monitor. The R1 is a gaming router and not a device for network engineers who need to track down traffic sources. So why would a gamer need a traffic history in the first place? People who need that buy different routers with far more monitor capabilities. The idea of the R1 is to activate congestion control and forget about lag and all the complicated stuff.

And talking about congestion control, last year some really impressive progress has been made in terms of congestion control. And it will not take that much longer until you can natively use those with Linux. So the R1 will soon get some severe and free competition that doesnt require you to reduce your bandwith to 70%. Im curious to see who is faster with the release, but deep down i already know the answer. Plus im not even sure if the R1 congestion control can beat Googles congestion control from 2016, Iain didnt include it in the benchmarks from 4 years ago.

Netgear isnt stupid, when taking the congestion control out of the equation there isnt all that much that separates the R1 from the competition. Geo filtering becomes less and less important as more and more games use dedi servers plus dont enforce world wide lobbies. And the VPN function kills the R1 CPU plus most competitive shooters straight up ban you for VPN-ing anyway.

After 4 years you guys better have some REALLY good features in the oven. Luckily it is no longer our job as the community to make pressure but for the first time the competition will now do that. And maybe you will listen more to what they have to say than what we had to say over the last 4 years...

[Netduma Fraser]

You definitely raise some good points with monthly updates, I'll let Alex answer that though as the updates would likely come from him.

I don't want to say too much but if our vision wasn't what you wanted then it would be, you'll see what I mean. The initial DumaOS version was a huge over haul of the software, even if it looked just like a reskin with a few new things or existing features done differently, that really paved the way to this update. We're not going against the modular approach, you'll see. We can't just include features for gamers, gamers have families, they have data caps etc. As much as they may want the gaming features if we didn't provide other things then they may go elsewhere. We're finding a good balance. I am very confident you'll be pleased with what you see.

[lilstone87]

Well I see a lot of people are upset, with how long/delayed updates have taken for their XR routers. I owned the R1 from the very early days, and I bought the XR500 early on as well. To be honest, I haven't used either of them very much. They have collected a lot more dust, than uptime. Overall most will say I wasted my money, and I can understand them saying that, and I won't argue that.

Also I have known a couple of the original ND guys since they started up as a company. They do WANT to make things better for US as GAMERS. At the same time, they were a startup company, and I'm sure they're still a pretty small company overall. Still they have made it this far, and I'm happy for them. I know some are likely angry with them partnering with Netgear. Which I can understand that as well. But for them as a company, it was their best decision, to help grow themselves as a company, going forward.

As for these XR routers, it was a hard decision for me to buy the XR500. For me at the time, I had the money to buy it, so I did. However before buying the router, I knew "Netgear's" history, when it came to their routers. Which is, they're very slow with pushing firmware updates for their routers. I have owned close to 15 routers in the last 10-12 years, several netgear routers. As of right now, I won't buy another netgear router, due to how slow they're with updates. As they don't post beta build's, and such, unless you're a beta tester for a select router, and you only get updates for it.

As of right now, with the main routers you can buy in many stores, and such. The brand I feel is best for routers at the moment is ASUS. As they actually push firmware updates pretty often, as of the last couple months, I feel some of their build's are buggy, for me at least, the wireless drivers they're using, causes me random short disconnects to my Galaxy S9+ phone. Still even with some of their bugs, with faster updates being pushed. There's a guy named RMerlin, who makes build's for a lot of their newer routers, fixes some of the smaller bugs, and add some other features as well. Plus he pushes newer build's pretty often as well.

Finally I want to say, if Netgear truly wants to help gamers with routers, with gaming type features. They have to learn to work much faster with updates. Averaging 6+ months for every firmware update, at this point in time, is piss poor, and not good enough. My phone gets updates so much faster, and more often. There's zero reason, for a router company to not be faster, and more steady with firmware updates. As for the XR line of routers, I won't place blame on ND. As I'm sure they only work on/handle a certain part of the firmware for these routers. Even with that said, as people on these forums repeatedly have mentioned. With the current firmware for these routers, there are minor annoying type bugs, which should of been worked on, and fixed, in a timely manner. That's not happening, and NG should be ashamed of themselves for being so slow with updates. As I type this, if someone asked me about buying a Netgear branded router, I would tell them to stay away. This isn't a me HATING them as a company. It's just me calling things out like I see them, nothing I said in this post is a lie.

[Guest Killhippie]

On 2/13/2020 at 3:05 PM, lilstone87 said:

With the current firmware for these routers, there are minor annoying type bugs, which should of been worked on, and fixed, in a timely manner. That's not happening, and NG should be ashamed of themselves for being so slow with updates. As I type this, if someone asked me about buying a Netgear branded router, I would tell them to stay away. This isn't a me HATING them as a company. It's just me calling things out like I see them, nothing I said in this post is a lie.

My RAX120 has received three updates in the last 3 months recently from Netgear but that will change. The things is as routers get older they don't get new features so much, and mostly get security patches. The R7800 has great support on SNB from Voxel, lots of add ons from Kamoj and with updated packages in code that Netgear cant be bothered to do. Asus have their own issues, radio failures and hardware issues being the most prevalent from what I have seen on forums when things do go wrong. Netgear make great hardware not so great firmware, Asus great firmware but more hardware failures possibly, you really cant win and the new Amplify Alien is sending data  back to the mothership even after turning the option off as it wants some info on you , so that's gone down like a ton of bricks.

 With AX steaming full speed ahead all the current routers XR routers are heading down obsolete avenue in the next year or so probably, as the R1 which is obsolete now really hardware wise. I just wish more time was spent on security and patching and adding features when fully baked.  I mean the XR500 does not support PMF (Protected Management Frames) yet most high end routers do. I guess when you outsource firmware like Asus and Netgear and don't look to closely at at what's being written but just watch the cash flow this is what happens. Router companies care about money not security and keeping code up to date and stable just goes out the window. (Asus at least patch older routers for longer) As for IoT devices security is as tight as a someone's ass with diarrhoea it seems. This is mad when we live in an age of data leaking out of every port or orifice on a device followed by a massive data dump somewhere for the flies to get at. <sigh> I do wonder if it will ever get truly fixed sometimes.

[Master Kief]

I've now owned the XR500 for 1.5 years and to this day:

• No IPv6 without killing off the QOS.
• No USB printer support.
• Incorrect network activity stats.
• No control over VPN settings.
• Bugs and glitches in the management GUI.
• Very questionable QOS performance is some games.
• Very poor update support.

At this point this product should be considered as abandonware. Netduma's/Netgear's lack for transparency with such a vocal community is truly disturbing.

There are other manufacturers with devices out there that have a much more active support than Netgear/Netduma and according to my preliminary research, as good, if not better implementations of QOS and AQM.

I am no longer actively using this router and will soon be totally replacing it. Hats off to those of you who will be sticking around for the long haul, still beta testing a 2 year old AC router.

[jb68]

Even though Updates are slow, it's still by far the best and stable router I have ever owned.

[Guest Killhippie]

2 hours ago, jb68 said:

Even though Updates are slow, it's still by far the best and stable router I have ever owned.

Worst router I've owned sadly because so much basic router functionality just does not work the way it should , maybe that's why its so stable for some but most have massive issues with the XR500. The best was the R7800 followed now by the RAX120. My First router was a  DG834 v1 in 2003 below and it didn't even have Wi-Fi and before that we had the squashed frog speedtouch ADSL modem when 500 Kbps was lightning fast. I started off with 56k modem built into my computer and you coudnt use the phone when you were online and fibre was to help you use the loo

[N3CR0]

12 hours ago, Killhippie said:

 I started off with 56k modem built into my computer and you coudnt use the phone when you were online

I remember that. I be like I'm downloading so no one use the phone!!!

And then the phone would ring *facepalm*

And if something was more than 1Mb in size, I just didn't bother downloading it lol.

[Guest Killhippie]

8 hours ago, N3CR0 said:

I remember that. I be like I'm downloading so no one use the phone!!!

And then the phone would ring *facepalm*

And if something was more than 1Mb in size, I just didn't bother downloading it lol.

Ah the good old days hey. Yep big downloads just didn't work, I tried to install SP1 for XP over that 56k modem, i lost days to that thing  when the phone started ringing lol

[RiotControll]

On 2/8/2020 at 2:03 PM, Netduma Fraser said:

I am confident it will resolve most of the issues that people currently have. 

Huh, that's a very bold/optimistic statement.

[SwiftCookie]

8 hours ago, RiotControll said:

Huh, that's a very bold/optimistic statement.

That's a good thing...

[RiotControll]

On 2/7/2020 at 8:49 AM, Od1n said:

Just like with a controller you have to grind for years to become good.

Sorry to break your illusions, but COD is especially a very connection depending game. You can give literally a monkey a controller and he will do go good if he has a (huge) connection advantage over the rest of the lobby.

[Flomsen]

Please add me to the R1 list 🙏

[Nalsano_]

Je suis partant pour la beta fermée (duma os 3.0) (xr500)