Here are the highlights of what's changed since the release of Ubuntu MATE 24.04: ships stable MATE Desktop 1.26.2 with a handful of bug fixes; switched back to Slick Greeter (replacing Arctica Greeter) due to a race condition in the boot process which results the display manager failing to initialise; returning to Slick Greeter reintroduces the ability to easily configure the login screen via a graphical application, something users have been requesting be re-instated; Ubuntu MATE 24.10 ISO image is now 3.3GB, down from 4.1GB in the 24.04 LTS release - this is thanks to some fixes in the installer that no longer require as many packages in the live-seed; accompanying MATE Desktop 1.26.2 and Linux 6.11 are Firefox 131, Celluloid 0.27, Evolution 3.54, LibreOffice 24.8.2.
Ubuntu 24.10 features the latest Linux 6.11 kernel for improved performance and hardware support, marking a shift to a more aggressive kernel version selection policy going forward. Building on our previous LTS efforts around performance engineering, Ubuntu 24.10 now includes kdump-tools on relevant platforms for automatic kernel crashdumps. The default desktop installation also includes sysprof for application and workload profiling. Ubuntu Desktop delivers GNOME 47 with improvements to performance, user experience and enhanced touchscreen support. The power-profiles-daemon improves power management for AMD CPUs and GPUs while libfprint adds support for many new fingerprint reader devices. Ubuntu Desktop now defaults to Wayland on devices with NVIDIA graphics cards and defaults to the NVIDIA 560 open driver version.
Our default layout has been revised to ensure a smooth transition later to our Wayland offering. The X11 plank dock has been dropped. We have now the budgie-desktop dock styled with our Pocillo theme. The top-bar defaults to a dark bar theme. We now support the Apple image format .heif – such images can be seen through gThumb, Nemo and can be set as a wallpaper via budgie-control-center We now support the Jpeg-xl format .jxl – again such images can be seen through gThumb, Nemo and can be set as a wallpaper via budgie-control-center In 24.04 external DEB packages were installed via gdebi; gdebi has now been dropped in favour of the updated snap-store that handles side-loading of DEB packages. Due to Tilix receiving very little maintenance bugs are creeping in without any resolution upstream.
I'm proud to announce our latest release, Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.10 'Oracular Oriole'. It comes with Cinnamon 6.0.4 and with the same software as in Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04 LTS. The version of Cinnamon used is the same as in 24.04 'Noble Numbat', with a few background pieces of Cinnamon 6.2.0: Cinnamon 6.0.4 - same as Noble; Cinnamon Desktop 6.0.0 - same as Noble; Cinnamon Control Center 6.2.0. Crash fixes: Cinnamon Screensaver 6.2.0 - no changes in the screensaver itself; Cinnamon Settings Daemon 6.2.0 - no major changes; CJS 6.2.0 now uses mozjs115; Nemo 6.0.2 - same as Noble. General: the tradition of the Yaru-Cinnamon theme continues; continuing to use Ubuntu Desktop Installer for the live image.
The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 24.10. Xubuntu 24.10, code-named Oracular Oriole, is a regular release and will be supported for 9 months, until July 2025. Xubuntu 24.10 features the latest updates from Xfce 4.19, GNOME 47 and MATE 1.26. For Xfce enthusiasts, you'll appreciate the new features and improved hardware support found in Xfce 4.19. Xfce 4.19 is the development series for the next release, Xfce 4.20, due later this year. As pre-release software, you may encounter more bugs than usual. Users seeking a stable, well-supported environment should opt for Xubuntu 24.04 instead. Highlights: Xfce 4.19 is included as a development preview of the upcoming Xfce 4.20, it features early Wayland support and improved scaling; GNOME 47 apps, including Disk Usage Analyzer and Sudoku, include a refreshed appearance and usability improvements.
When the file system of the Persistent Storage has errors, Tails now offers you to repair the file system when unlocking from the Welcome Screen. Because not all file system errors can be safely recovered this way, we wrote comprehensive documentation on how to recover data from the Persistent Storage using complementary techniques. Update Tor Browser to 13.5.6. Improve the notification when a network interface is disabled because MAC address anonymization failed. Increase the maximum waiting time to 8 minutes when unlocking the Persistent Storage before returning an error. Hide shown password while unlocking Persistent Storage.
Added scandirat(3) from FreeBSD. Added elf_aux_info(3), designed to let userland peek at AT_HWCAP and AT_HWCAP2, using an interface from FreeBSD. Added missing function wcsnlen(3) to find length of a wide string (i.e. wcslen(3) with a max len argument). Imported libva 2.22.0, an implementation for VA-API (video acceleration API). VA-API provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing. Added the option '-u name' to env(1) to remove a variable from th environment. Various bugfixes and tweaks in userland: Throughout the source tree, add missing error checks to calls of gmtime(3) and localtime(3). Added missing error checks to all calls under libexec and sbin in case of ctime(3) and ctime_r(3) failures when timestamps are far off.
Many in-house scripts and applications have been tweaked and further improved. Some new apps include: antiX TV - antiX streaming tv receiver; antiX Radio - antiX streaming radio receiver GUI for MPV; Finder - Simple yad script to search for everything (Files, Installed apps, web); antiX SAMBA manager - Script for managing SAMBA shares in antiX control centre; antiX equaliser toggle - tool for activating or deactivating pipewire-equaliser Easyeffects; antiX acoustic colours - script allowing to change the acoustic colour of audio output; meld - graphical tool to diff and merge files.
The new release 24.04.1.3 of Starbuntu presents the new update of the libreoffice suite 4:24.2.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.1. In addition, Starbuntu now allows to set the GTK themes of GTK2, GTK3 and GTK4 programs separately or uniform. Moreover, the editor of the app launchers has thoroughly been revised and expanded, and beyond, a problem of the automatic mount of storage devices has been solved.
bslx-6.11.1-1-2024.10.01-x86_64 has been released and is available for download. We were told that the new kernel would provide some performance improvements for Intel and AMD products as well as networking. So far I have noticed that overall performance has been noticeably better. Networking is definitely faster.