This release is built around two new in-house projects: aufs-ng and xfwm4-gl. aufs-ng is our new union filesystem, written from scratch to replace aufs, which PorteuX has relied on since day one. It keeps the same on-disk format and the same mount command grammar, so everything keeps working as before. It's around 5,000 lines instead of Aufs's 28,000, and it uses the kernel's modern I/O passthrough, which means much less filesystem-wide locking, considerably faster copy-up thanks to in-kernel splice instead of page-by-page buffering, and it tracks inodes only, so a warm system uses about a third of the memory. It's the default from now on. xfwm4-gl is our fork of xfwm4 that finally brings OpenGL compositing to Xfce in X11, with XRender kept as an automatic fallback. Compared to XRender it draws about a third less power and delivers roughly 10% more frames per second to applications.
CuerdOS 2.1.1 “Skycatcher” brings several small updates, including replacing OnlyOffice with LibreOffice, updating Cuerdtools to Qt6, and refreshing the ISO images. It also fixes an issue with the config-updates-skycatcher package in the GNOME ISO. The LabWC edition has been discontinued.
Two years after the release of Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid', Vanilla OS 3 'Reunion' is now available. Our mission remains the same - to make Vanilla OS simple, stable and secure. With Reunion, we're bringing users together across architectures, and offering everyone an experience that works out of the box. Vanilla OS 3 now officially supports ARM64 devices with UEFI firmware, opening the door to a wide range of hardware, from single-board computers to ARM-based laptops and workstations. To make this possible, all images are now multi-architecture, and every package includes ARM64 builds. The experience on ARM64 is identical to what you'd expect on AMD64, with no compromises in functionality. Security and transparency remain at the core of Vanilla OS 3. Most images (except NVIDIA images due to kernel modules) are now fully reproducible, meaning the build process always produces bit-for-bit identical images from the same sources.
When creating new disk layouts, the installer will pick the biggest sector size a disk supports, and for people wanting to encrypt their disks with LUKS, the installer now uses LUKS2 with argon2 encryption and the same sector size as the disk. Previously, this would default to 512 on disks that supported the more optimal size of 4096. A new default kernel:laptop: Traditionally, Garuda Linux has shipped with linux-zen for many years, mostly due to being more stable than alternatives that were around during the time we chose it as our kernel of choice. This is going to change starting with this release - linux-garuda is the excellent Linux CachyOS many of us already used, ensured to always build against the NVIDIA drivers via DKMS before updating.
We are delighted to announce the release of FydeOS 23 'Chromatic Cadence'. This release upgrades the underlying Chromium OS platform from r144 to r150 and introduces a new Android subsystem framework, refreshed system apps, and enhanced remote desktop capabilities for enterprise devices. FydeOS 23 focuses on strengthening the foundations of the operating system. These changes provide a more robust base for future improvements to app compatibility, system maintenance, and enterprise device management. FydeOS 23 upgrades the Android subsystem across all editions to Android 13 and introduces fyDroid, a new implementation for supporting Android apps on FydeOS. We plan to make fyDroid fully open source. Going forward, we will continue to develop this framework, progressively update its Android version, and improve app compatibility, performance and security.