The 2022 August ISO refresh is ready for download. Built from Manjaro stable branch as of 2022-08-20. Available with the latest LTS Linux kernel 5.15 or the slightly older one, 5.4 LTS. This release is exciting because it marks the debut of a brand new tool, Colorizer, in development for half a year, now in beta. What is Colorizer? A set of scripts that allow you to easily and conveniently adjust the colors of many elements of the desktop, in the form of a set of dynamically generated menus. Current functionalities: Openbox theme coloring; coloring of the menu, panels and the entire set of Mabox tools; Conky coloring (as well as managing the Conky set and easy position change); creating themes for PyRadio; interactive HTML help; and finally, everything above can be generated automatically after each wallpaper change according to its color palette.
We are proud to announce the release of Neptune 7.5 'Ada', the first service release of the Neptune 7 series. This version comes with the updates provided by Debian 11.4 'Bullseye' that offer the latest and greatest in terms of security. We updated the Linux kernel to version 5.18 to provide better support for modern hardware and fixed some bugs with existing hardware support. We put effort in optimizing the performance of Neptune by providing tweaks to kernel that improve the write speed on USB thumb drives. Neptune 7.5 also provides a new solution for a complete system backup called Timeshift. It allows you to save a whole snapshot of your system and restore it even if your system is totally broken. You can even restore from a live system as long as you have the backup saved somewhere accessible. Some slight tweaks make it easier to work on the terminal.
It is with great pleasure that we announce the release of Linuxfx version 11.2 22.04. This release is now based on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. Support for .exe and .msi applications has been improved with Wine 7.15, kernel 5.15 is also present in this release, improving support for more modern hardware. We updated KDE and the entire application base, which is now downloaded directly from the Neon repositories. WxDesktop, all its tools and themes have also been updated. Support for android games and apps has been improved.
In the last version, we ended up not testing the Kernel for compatibility with Nvidia drivers, which resulted in an unsuccessful installation for users. With this change, we brought Kernel 5.18 (current Debian default) with full compatibility with Nvidia drivers. Along with this small update, some Debian packages were also updated, among them Libc6 (2.33-8 -> 2.34-3).
This is a release where quite a few changes that have long been wanted finally can be implemented. The longest wanted of those is the final removal of Python2 from KaOS. The default install has been Python2 free for quite some time, but some major packages had still required it to build, now the last one of those, QtWebEngine, has been patched to build against Python3, so now KaOS is completely Python2 free. Second is the move to Pipewire (away from PulseAudio) as the default sound/low-level multimedia framework. A switch had been planned for a while, but there were some issues on a Wayland session, so it had to wait. Those are now all resolved, and you will see Pipewire as the default on this ISO. For those who still prefer PulseAudio, the installer Calamares now has a module added (KaOS only), that gives users the option to select which sound server they prefer (with Pipewire set as default). Third is the removal of QtWebKit. Upstream Qt abandoned it some ten years ago, but a fork picked up maintenance. Unfortunately, that maintenance stopped a few years ago, so it is time to move away from QtWebKit. All that still depended on it are now ready to move to QtWebEngine. A couple could not do that move, thus they were removed from the repositories.
From now on, Amarok Linux will become a Rolling Release Distro, so that we can provide our users with always up-to-date applications and at the same time keep the system up to date with important updates. Another change was in the Desktops, which now will be just two, which are LXQt and MATE, which provide lightness and a fluid Desktop, both for modest computers and for modern computers. Amarok Linux is now based on Debian Testing, which also brings stability and security to the system, as well as more recent and updated packages, of course always undergoing a check by the Debian team, in order to always provide us with packages with stability and without possible bugs.
ExTiX 22.8 is based on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)! Ubuntu 22.04 will be supported until 2027. The best thing with ExTiX 22.8 is that while running the system live (from DVD/USB) or from hard drive you can use Refracta Snapshot (pre-installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu system. So easy that a ten year child can do it! One other very good thing with this version of ExTiX is that it is quite light. The ISO file is of only 1820 MB, which means that you can run the system super fast from RAM. When the boot process is ready you can eject the DVD or USB stick. Use Boot alternative 3 or Advanced options… >> load to RAM.
From the release notes: First, I have to tell y'all that, so far, the 5.19 kernel is quite a bit speedier at booting up than its predecessor. Even KDE/Plasma seems to be a little faster when starting up. Also, with this release, you may notice (or not) that I've included fewer desktop themes to try to get the size of the iso image down below 4gb. That required a remix of artwork packages 8 and 9 (which is why you're getting both updates). I've also added 3 new packages - udftools, qemu-img and rclone; all useful if you need to use the live system disk for system rescue. I'll be going over what packages are included in the live system for the next release to try to get the image size down another 200mb or so - I am aiming for minimal impact, so i have to go through the packages carefully. Unfortunately, as bugs are fixed and features added, software grows. The current package list for the live system is actually smaller than the original, because some packages simply disappeared over time as they became unnecessary, or no longer needed as a dependency. Despite a shorter package list, the 64-bit image file has grown by about 800mb over the past few years. The kernel package itself is now approaching 200mb plus the associated firmware packages - it used to be about 75mb. In any case, I felt I needed to give y'all a heads-up that a few packages are going to have to be stripped out to get the size down a little.
It is a quarterly updated point release of Sparky 6 'Po Tolo' of the stable line. Sparky 6 is based on and fully compatible with Debian 11 'Bullseye'. Changes: system upgraded from Debian and Sparky stable repos as of August 11, 2022; PC: Linux kernel 5.10.127 (5.19.1 and 5.15.60-ESR can be installed from Sparky unstable repos); ARM: Linux kernel 5.15.32-v7+; Firefox 91.11.0.0esr (103.0.2 and 102.1.0esr Mozilla builds can be installed from Sparky repos as the 'firefox-sparky' and 'firefox-esr-sparky' packages, but they use a new user profile, so your bookmarks, passwords, settings have to be synchronized from the Mozilla account); Thunderbird 91.10.0; VLC 3.0.17; LibreOffice 7.0.4; LXQt 0.16.0; Xfce 4.16; Openbox 3.6.1; KDE Plasma 5.20.5; small improvements.
Intel vm_exit paths are guarded against Post-Barrier RSB predictions, AMD Microcode updated to 202204, SMBIOS 3.6 support, BHYVE VMs can be capable of auto-destruct (useful for testing)