Armbian 26.8 is a major quarterly release featuring 787 merged pull requests and significant updates across the project. Highlights include Linux 7.1, a rewritten installer, Armbian Imager 2.0 with new Qualcomm flashing support, bootable UEFI ISOs, U-Boot 2026.07, improved wireless drivers, and broader ARM and RISC-V hardware support. The release also promotes 14 boards to standard support and introduces a modernized Debian Trixie-based CI and build infrastructure, while extensive cleanup and upstreaming work reduces long-term maintenance and improves reliability.
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.
This release presents the new version 151.0.7922.137-1 of the web browser Google-Chrome-Stable. In addition, among other things, Starbuntu has improved its 'Open With' routine as well as its message program for new update opportunities and its app for connecting to remote sources.