 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 908, 15 March 2021 |
Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Technology steadily moves forward and software leaps forward faster than most. Sometimes the march of progress leaves older utilities and programs behind, but other times entrenched software sticks around for a surpringingly long time. We talk about older packet filters hanging around after they have been replaced in our Questions and Answers column. Which packet filter do you use on your home computer to manage your firewall? Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll. Before talking about firewalls, we begin this week with a look at Solus, a rolling release desktop distribution. Solus is an independent Linux distribution that can run a number of desktop environments, including its very own Budgie desktop. Read on to find out how the latest version of Solus performs. Solus is not the only distribution making progress, other open source projects are moving forward with their own developments. In our News section we discuss Canonical adopting Flutter for future desktop application development while the Void team warns about performance issues with newer kernels. Meanwhile developers are successfully testing Rust-based core utilities on Debian and the Haiku project is polishing its desktop applications. We wrap up this week's edition with a list of last week's releases along with the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (14MB) and MP3 (11MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Solus 4.2
Solus is an independently developed, rolling release distribution. The project uses the eopkg package manager, which has its roots in the PiSi package manager. The distribution is available in four editions, one of which runs the Budgie desktop which was created by the Solus team. The other three flavours feature the GNOME, KDE Plasma, and MATE desktops. These four editions all run on 64-bit (x86_64) machines and range from 1.7GB to 2.0GB in size.
I decided to focus on the Budgie edition as it seems to be the flagship of the distribution's efforts. The new Solus 4.2 release included some key changes. For instance, the release notes mention the system tray for Budgie has been completely rewritten. We are also told the volume control now has a mute button. One big change is the way in which desktop icons are handled. The release announcement mentions past versions of Solus relied on an older version of the Nautilus file manager to handle desktop icons, but desktop icons are now handled by Budgie rather than relying on a third-party solution.
Live media
Booting from the Solus media brings us directly to the Budgie desktop and the system plays a short audio clip to indicate it is ready to be used. A panel sits at the bottom of the display. The application menu sits to the left of the panel. A small collection of quick-launch buttons are placed just to the right of the menu. A system tray and logout button are located on the right side of the panel. On the desktop we find icons for opening the GNOME Files file manager and launching the system installer. The application menu uses a two-pane approach with categories on the left we can click on to explore and specific application launchers shown on the right. There is a search bar built into the menu to help us locate specific programs.
The Budgie desktop defaults to using a dark theme. Most panels and menus are black with white text. Highlighted items and folder icons are displayed in blue. The background is soft blue. All of this made Solus visually appealing to me right from the start.
Installing
Solus uses a graphical system installer which looks to be unique to this distribution. There is a list of steps the installer will take shown down the left side of the window and we can use this to track our progress. The rest of the window guides us through configuration steps.
We begin by picking our language from a list. The installer then offers to find our location in order to automatically guess some other key bits of information. We are then asked to confirm our keyboard layout and time zone. I found that when I accepted the location check my time zone was guessed correctly, but the keyboard layout was not. However, if I denied the location check the keyboard layout was correct while the time zone was not filled in.
We are next offered the options of guided or manual partitioning and it looks as though the guided option will take over the entire hard drive. The manual partitioning screen can only format existing partitions and assign them mount points. If a suitable partition is not available we need to exit the installer, arrange partitions using a tool such as GParted (which is included on the live media), and then re-launch the installer. The installer itself does not include manual partitioning options. This process works, though I found GParted appeared to lock up for a minute or two while it was applying its changes to the disk.
Assigning mount points in the Solus installer is not a clear process. We need to click on a partition, in a specific field, to assign a mount point. This is not explained for us and it is not clear that one part (though not another) of the partition entry is interactive.
Solus 4.2 -- Assigning mount points in the installer
(full image size: 528kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
After this screen we move on to making up a hostname for the computer and optionally installing a boot loader. Then we advance to creating a user account for ourselves. The installer can make multiple user accounts, the first of which is granted administrator access. Packages are then copied to the hard drive and, when it is finished, the installer offers to restart the computer.
Early impressions
My new copy of Solus booted quickly. The distribution brings up a graphical login page. Text is displayed in white on a light background which makes it difficult to read. I found when multiple user accounts existed they are all listed on the login screen. My account was always highlighted by default, but I could not select it. To sign in I had to select another user account then move back to mine before it would let me put in my password. I reboot rarely, but this was a speed bump every time I started the computer.
Signing in brought me back to the Budgie desktop. The file manager icons are still on the desktop, though the launcher for the installer is, naturally, gone. Shortly after signing into Budgie a notification appeared letting me know package updates were available. This pop-up includes a link we can click to open the software centre and display available updates.
Solus 4.2 -- Exploring the application menu while running Firefox
(full image size: 671kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Software management
When I opened the software centre from the update notification the software manager showed me 11 available updates, 281MB in size. At first, trying to install these updates brought up a password prompt box. I was unable to click on the box, enter my password, or click the visible Cancel button. At this point I could not interact with the software centre's window either. I eventually closed the software centre and re-launched it. Then tried to apply the waiting updates again. This time the password prompt was responsive and the new packages were downloaded successfully.
The software centre has six tabs down the left side of the window. These are: Home which shows software categories we can browse; Updates, a page that just shows a list of available new packages we can install; Installed, a list of installed packages we can remove; Third-Party, non-free software from unofficial repositories such as Android Studio, Slack, and Skype; Search which helps us find software by name; and Settings where we can adjust the frequency of checks for updates and other options like whether we want to download screenshots when viewing information about applications.
Solus 4.2 -- Browsing the software centre
(full image size: 375kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Searching for software worked well and browsing categories went smoothly. The software centre's interface was fairly responsive. New packages can be queued for installation with a single click. There were problems I kept running into though. Typically these issues came up when trying to install new applications, either from the official repositories or from the third-party collection. Often times when I tried to install a new package I would be prompted for my password, but the password box would not let me click on it or type my password. Closing the software centre and then relaunching it usually cleared the issue and the next time around the password box would work.
When I tried to install Spotify I ran into two errors. The first was the inactive password prompt and the second was an error indicating the desired package could not be fetched. This was followed by the software centre locking up and I had to kill its process. I also tried multiple times to install Slack, Falkon and VLC. The Slack process gave me the most trouble. Again the initial password prompt failed. After terminating the software centre and re-launching it, I tried again. This time I was not prompted for a password at all, the software centre just indicated Slack was being downloaded. This proceeded for a minute and then the software centre locked up and its process had to be killed from the command line because the window's close button did not respond.
I started keeping track after a while and found 75% of the time I tried to install software or updates, the software centre failed, unusually resulting in the interface locking up and requiring a trip to the command line to kill its process.
Should we wish to explore other forms of package management, Solus ships with both Snap and Flatpak frameworks. This gives us access to a wide range of portable packages. There are no Flatpak repositories enabled by default, but the default Snap repository from Canonical is available.
Hardware
I began testing Solus in a VirtualBox environment. Budgie performed fairly well, but was occasionally sluggish. I also found that Budgie's window manager process tended to spike in CPU usage occasionally, even when the desktop was calm. The desktop automatically resized dynamically to fit the VirtualBox window which was pleasantly convenient.
When I switched over to running Solus on my workstation the distribution ran quickly. I no longer ran into any sluggish behaviour (Budgie offered good responsiveness) and I no longer encountered CPU spikes, which I suspect were caused by software rendering when hardware capabilities were not directly available.
Solus worked well with my hardware and I found both the desktop and underlying operating system were pleasantly stable. Solus consumed 575MB of memory to log into Budgie, which is about average for mainstream Linux distributions. Its disk usage was also typical, about 6.1GB were required for the root partition.
Applications
Solus ships with a relatively conservative collection of applications. Looking through the application menu we can find Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice. There is a Calendar application, the HexChat IRC client, and an image viewer. The Rhythmbox audio player and GNOME MPV media player are included along with codecs to play popular media formats.
Solus 4.2 -- The desktop calendar and GNOME Files applications
(full image size: 74kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
There are also a large number of configuration tools for tweaking the desktop, power settings, setting up user accounts, and on-line services. These configuration modules are available both through the application menu and the desktop's settings panel. The Budgie settings panel appears to be GNOME's settings panel and, at a casual glance, there do not appear to be any Budgie-specific modifications or features.
The Solus Budgie edition uses the GNOME Files file manager, the systemd init software, and ships with version 5.10 of the Linux kernel. These, along with a few small tools, such as a system monitor and text editor, mean that the application menu remains uncluttered while basic desktop functionality is provided.
I went looking for a way to adjust where some launchers appear in the application menu. I also hoped to find a way to disable the need to click on a software category in order to see the launchers in that part of the menu. However, I was unable to find a way to customize the Budgie menu. I could, on the other hand, pin open applications to the quick-launch bar which made accessing commonly used programs faster.
Solus 4.2 -- The settings panel
(full image size: 425kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
One feature which performed inconsistently was the screenshot application. Sometimes if I pressed the Print Screen button on my keyboard I would hear the satisfying "shutter" sound and a new screenshot would appear in my Pictures directory. However, sometimes a "boop" error sound would be played and no image would be saved to the Pictures directory. Still other times no sound would play at all and no snapshot would be taken. I did not find any pattern as to when the shortcut key would work and when it did not. Launching the screenshot utility from the application menu and taking snapshots through the utility always worked.
Conclusions
In a lot of ways running Solus felt, to me, to be similar to running Artix Linux just before I started this review. The two projects have a number of things in common. They are both rolling releases, both use dark themes, both ship with a fairly small collection of software we can build on. I feel as though Artix places more focus on being lightweight with better performance while Solus places more emphasis on looking pretty and having features like a modern-looking notification area.
Solus 4.2 -- The applets and notifications panel
(full image size: 718kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
The Budgie desktop, which I usually don't use apart from when I am reviewing Solus, mostly worked well. I like its layout and style more than GNOME, but also appreciate that it imports a number of useful tools from the GNOME family (like the settings panel) which lend more functionality and polish to the Budgie experience.
Like Artix, Solus finds a good balance between offering just enough applications to get started without overly cluttering the application menu. There is enough functionality to get people started browsing the web, writing letters, and importing appointments into their calendar, without needing to wade through a massive collection of software.
On the whole, Solus performed fairly well for me and gave me the tools I wanted. The system was stable and, while not super fast, worked smoothly enough. There are two areas where I feel Solus could be improved. Performing manual partitioning could be a nicer experience. Even if the installer just had a button to launch GParted and restart the installer this would save the user from finding and launching GParted manually and then opening the installer again. After that, assigning mount points does not feel clear. I think an obvious drop-down menu or button would be better than making the user click along a highlighted bar looking for the spot that reacts. These are minor issues, but the installer is a big part of a person's first impressions.
The other area I felt needed improvement was the software centre. I had terrible luck with managing software. Downloads sometimes failed, the password prompt worked less than half the time, sometimes the centre would simply lock up mid-action and need to be closed. The layout and organization of the software centre is great, but a successful transaction rate of 25% is devastating to the user experience.
On the other hand, I do applaud the Solus team for trying to provide portable packages, such as Flatpak and Snap, along with popular third-party applications many users will want. New Linux users are often interested in running Spotify, Slack, and Skype so it's nice to see these readily available.
On the whole I think Solus is doing well. There are some key areas that can be polished, particularly software management and desktop performance, though otherwise the distribution offers a solid, useful, and attractive experience.
* * * * *
Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card, Ralink RT5390R PCIe Wireless card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
* * * * *
Visitor supplied rating
Solus has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.4/10 from 172 review(s).
Have you used Solus? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
Haiku polishes applications, Ubuntu to get Flutter applications, Rust coreutils running on Debian, Void warns about performance hits on newer kernels with default settings
The Haiku team have been hard at work, improving their operating system. The project's latest activity report mentions driver improvements, ongoing work to get Haiku running on ARM processors, and improvements to existing applications. "kerwizzy added a fullscreen mode and an option to save pictures to Mandelbrot. Jaidyn Ann fixed the DNS settings in Network preferences to disable some buttons when they would do nothing. mt fixed memory leaks in MediaPlayer and ProcessController, as well as other problems found by the clang static analyzer in various places in the kernel, the FreeBSD driver compatibility layer, and the filepanel command line tool. nephele switched the default search engine in WebPositive from Google to DuckDuckGo." The report also mentions improvements coming to Haiku running on EFI-enabled computers.
* * * * *
The 9to5Linux site is reporting that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is shifting its development efforts to use Google's Flutter toolkit to create desktop applications. "Now, the company behind Ubuntu is writing another page of history by targeting Flutter as the default UI (user interface) framework for building their own Ubuntu apps, which will work across a wide-range of hardware and configurations. Canonical already announced last month that they are re-writing their Ubuntu Installer for future Ubuntu releases in Flutter. This will allow Canonical to provide a consistent installer experience across the entire Ubuntu product portfolio." Further information on Canonical adopting Flutter can be found in the 9to5Linux article.
* * * * *
The coreutils package contains a collection of basic commands which handle navigating directories, moving, removing, and copying files. These core programs make up the basis of most UNIX-like operating systems, including Linux distributions. There are different implementations of the coreutils package with one of the most popular being the GNU implementation which is written in C. Recently an effort has been made to reimplement the coreutils package in the Rust language which offers some memory protection benefits. The Rust coreutils package now runs on Debian. "Rust/coreutils is now available in Debian, good enough to boot a Debian with GNOME, install the top 1,000 packages, build Firefox, the Linux Kernel and LLVM/Clang. Even if I wrote more than 100 patches to achieve that, it will probably be a bumpy ride for many other use cases. It is also a terrific project to learn Rust." Additional information on the coreutils package written in Rust and how it works on Debian can be found in this blog post.
* * * * *
In February the Void team reported they would be switching from the LibreSSL cryptography library to OpenSSL, which is more commonly used among Linux distributions. Following this news, the Void project undertook a massive rebuild of packages which rely on OpenSSL and also made some adjustments to kernel hardening. The new kernel changes can cause older computers to run more slowly and suffer from longer boot times. "As a consequence of these changes, Void's default kernel command-line now omits the slub_debug and page_poison options. There is a chance that your existing system still has the old options enabled. They still work in newer kernels, but have a performance impact more in line with init_on_free=1. On older hardware this can be quite noticeable. If you are running a kernel series older than 5.4, you can keep them (or add them) for extra security at the cost of performance; otherwise, you should remove them." Details on both changes can be found in the Void project's news post.
* * * * *
These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Packet filters and legacy technology
Cleaning-out-the-cruft asks: According to Wikipedia, iptables
superseded ipchains; and the successor of iptables is nftables.
However, on CentOS we still find iptables 1.4.21 in
CentOS 7.8 and iptables 1.8.2 in CentOS 8.2. So why is iptables
still around in modern distribution releases?
DistroWatch answers: I have a few answers to this question. First, when talking specifically about CentOS 7.8, the reason iptables is still in use there is nftables requires version 3.13 of the Linux kernel. The CentOS 7.x series ships with Linux 3.10. This means nftables will not run on CentOS 7.8 and iptables would be the most modern tool in the packet filter series available.
But why does CentOS 8.x, which uses version 4.18 of the kernel, still include iptables? The main reason is probably that iptables still works perfectly well and has been around for two decades. Virtually every Linux system administrator who has been in the work force at some point since the year 2000 will be familiar with iptables, but nftables has only been around for about six years (or one major version of CentOS/RHEL).
This means there is a cost associated with upgrading and adopting the new technology. Administrators need to receive new training, old scripts and programs that used iptables would need to be updated to use the new nftables syntax, which is entirely different from the iptables syntax. Any organizations running multiple versions of enterprise-level distributions (such as CentOS and Debian) would need to write different tools and scripts to handle firewall rules on CentOS 7 and CentOS 8 if they wanted to use nftables whenever possible. That is a nightmare for administrators and a lot of duplication of work.
Basically, adopting nftables (especially in enterprise environments) will be a non-trivial amount of work and may require implementing multiple tools to do the work, along with re-training people. There is a cost involved in upgrading. On the other hand, what benefit does nftables provide over iptables? For most people there is almost no benefit to switching to nftables. Looking over the list of features nftables provides we can see some behind-the-scenes perks and philosophy changes, but from a practical point of view, administrators and end-users are almost never better off using nftables over iptables.
What it comes down to is there is little incentive to upgrade, but a notable cost to adopting nftables, at least in bigger organizations. On the other side of things, what is the benefit or cost to keeping iptables around and shipping it with systems which can also run nftables? The benefit to keeping iptables around is that people can migrate at their own pace, legacy tools work, and mixed-version environments continue to work smoothly. The cost to keeping iptables is a few kilobytes of storage space to keep the package on the hard drive, something almost nobody will notice.
In short, switching to nftables is (relatively) expensive with minimal benefit while keeping iptables available on the operating system costs almost nothing while providing several benefits, including a smoother transition to nftables in the future and it avoids breaking existing scripts.
The same argument applies in a lot of cases where one new, incompatible tool tries to replace an old one with an established ecosystem. The Python project is probably the best example of this. Python 2 became entrenched and, since Python 3 was not backward compatible and did not provide much benefit over Python 2, developers were very reluctant to switch. Many distributions kept both versions of Python in their repositories and supported both versions for over a decade (approximately 2008 to 2020) because developers saw few reasons to upgrade, but plenty of reasons to ignore the newer version. Upgrading even trivial Python projects to the new version of the language was more effort than was usually justifiable and this kept Python 2 around for five years after it was originally going to be discontinued.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,361
- Total data uploaded: 36.7TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Which packet filter do you use?
In our Questions and Answers column we talked about different approaches to setting up a network firewall. There are a number of tools on Linux distributions and the BSD flavours which can be used to filter network packets. On the Linux side the underlying filters are ipchains, iptables, and nftables. In the BSD communities there are a few different packet filters, including pf, ipfw, and ipf. Which of these do you use on your system?
You can see the results of our previous poll on writing custom shell scripts in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Packet filters
| I use ipchains: | 7 (1%) |
| I use iptables: | 367 (34%) |
| I use nftables: | 61 (6%) |
| I use pf: | 70 (6%) |
| I use ipfw: | 28 (3%) |
| I use ipf: | 1 (0%) |
| I use another open source firewall: | 104 (10%) |
| I do not use Linux or BSD: | 16 (1%) |
| I do not use a firewall: | 355 (33%) |
| Other: | 69 (6%) |
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| Website News |
New distributions added to database
Venom Linux
Venom Linux is an independently-developed, rolling-release distribution inspired by CRUX. It targets experienced Linux users. Venom uses runit as the main init system and BSD-like ports as software packages which are managed by a custom package management tool called scratchpkg (written in compliance with POSIX standards). The distribution offers a simple graphical desktop built around the Openbox window manager and a text-mode system installer.
Venom Linux -- Running the Openbox window manager
(full image size: 3.9MB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 22 March 2021. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • Issue 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Issue 1045 (2023-11-13): Fedora 39, how to trust software packages, ReactOS booting with UEFI, elementary OS plans to default to Wayland, Mir gaining ability to split work across video cards |
| • Issue 1044 (2023-11-06): Porteus 5.01, disabling IPv6, applications unique to a Linux distro, Linux merges bcachefs, OpenELA makes source packages available |
| • Issue 1043 (2023-10-30): Murena Two with privacy switches, where old files go when packages are updated, UBports on Volla phones, Mint testing Cinnamon on Wayland, Peppermint releases ARM build |
| • Issue 1042 (2023-10-23): Ubuntu Cinnamon compared with Linux Mint, extending battery life on Linux, Debian resumes /usr merge, Canonical publishes fixed install media |
| • Issue 1041 (2023-10-16): FydeOS 17.0, Dr.Parted 23.09, changing UIDs, Fedora partners with Slimbook, GNOME phasing out X11 sessions, Ubuntu revokes 23.10 install media |
| • Issue 1040 (2023-10-09): CROWZ 5.0, changing the location of default directories, Linux Mint updates its Edge edition, Murena crowdfunding new privacy phone, Debian publishes new install media |
| • Issue 1039 (2023-10-02): Zenwalk Current, finding the duration of media files, Peppermint OS tries out new edition, COSMIC gains new features, Canonical reports on security incident in Snap store |
| • Issue 1038 (2023-09-25): Mageia 9, trouble-shooting launchers, running desktop Linux in the cloud, New documentation for Nix, Linux phasing out ReiserFS, GNU celebrates 40 years |
| • Issue 1037 (2023-09-18): Bodhi Linux 7.0.0, finding specific distros and unified package managemnt, Zevenet replaced by two new forks, openSUSE introduces Slowroll branch, Fedora considering dropping Plasma X11 session |
| • Issue 1036 (2023-09-11): SDesk 2023.08.12, hiding command line passwords, openSUSE shares contributor survery results, Ubuntu plans seamless disk encryption, GNOME 45 to break extension compatibility |
| • Issue 1035 (2023-09-04): Debian GNU/Hurd 2023, PCLinuxOS 2023.07, do home users need a firewall, AlmaLinux introduces new repositories, Rocky Linux commits to RHEL compatibility, NetBSD machine runs unattended for nine years, Armbian runs wallpaper contest |
| • Issue 1034 (2023-08-28): Void 20230628, types of memory usage, FreeBSD receives port of Linux NVIDIA driver, Fedora plans improved theme handling for Qt applications, Canonical's plans for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1033 (2023-08-21): MiniOS 20230606, system user accounts, how Red Hat clones are moving forward, Haiku improves WINE performance, Debian turns 30 |
| • Issue 1032 (2023-08-14): MX Linux 23, positioning new windows on the desktop, Linux Containers adopts LXD fork, Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ form OpenELA |
| • Issue 1031 (2023-08-07): Peppermint OS 2023-07-01, preventing a file from being changed, Asahi Linux partners with Fedora, Linux Mint plans new releases |
| • Issue 1030 (2023-07-31): Solus 4.4, Linux Mint 21.2, Debian introduces RISC-V support, Ubuntu patches custom kernel bugs, FreeBSD imports OpenSSL 3 |
| • Issue 1029 (2023-07-24): Running Murena on the Fairphone 4, Flatpak vs Snap sandboxing technologies, Redox OS plans to borrow Linux drivers to expand hardware support, Debian updates Bookworm media |
| • Issue 1028 (2023-07-17): KDE Connect; Oracle, SUSE, and AlmaLinux repsond to Red Hat's source code policy change, KaOS issues media fix, Slackware turns 30; security and immutable distributions |
| • Issue 1027 (2023-07-10): Crystal Linux 2023-03-16, StartOS (embassyOS 0.3.4.2), changing options on a mounted filesystem, Murena launches Fairphone 4 in North America, Fedora debates telemetry for desktop team |
| • Issue 1026 (2023-07-03): Kumander Linux 1.0, Red Hat changing its approach to sharing source code, TrueNAS offers SMB Multichannel, Zorin OS introduces upgrade utility |
| • Issue 1025 (2023-06-26): KaOS with Plasma 6, information which can leak from desktop environments, Red Hat closes door on sharing RHEL source code, SUSE introduces new security features |
| • Issue 1024 (2023-06-19): Debian 12, a safer way to use dd, Debian releases GNU/Hurd 2023, Ubuntu 22.10 nears its end of life, FreeBSD turns 30 |
| • Issue 1023 (2023-06-12): openSUSE 15.5 Leap, the differences between independent distributions, openSUSE lengthens Leap life, Murena offers new phone for North America |
| • Issue 1022 (2023-06-05): GetFreeOS 2023.05.01, Slint 15.0-3, Liya N4Si, cleaning up crowded directories, Ubuntu plans Snap-based variant, Red Hat dropping LireOffice RPM packages |
| • Issue 1021 (2023-05-29): rlxos GNU/Linux, colours in command line output, an overview of Void's unique features, how to use awk, Microsoft publishes a Linux distro |
| • Issue 1020 (2023-05-22): UBports 20.04, finding another machine's IP address, finding distros with a specific kernel, Debian prepares for Bookworm |
| • Issue 1019 (2023-05-15): Rhino Linux (Beta), checking which applications reply on a package, NethServer reborn, System76 improving application responsiveness |
| • Issue 1018 (2023-05-08): Fedora 38, finding relevant manual pages, merging audio files, Fedora plans new immutable edition, Mint works to fix Secure Boot issues |
| • Issue 1017 (2023-05-01): Xubuntu 23.04, Debian elects Project Leaders and updates media, systemd to speed up restarts, Guix System offering ground-up source builds, where package managers install files |
| • Issue 1016 (2023-04-24): Qubes OS 4.1.2, tracking bandwidth usage, Solus resuming development, FreeBSD publishes status report, KaOS offers preview of Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1015 (2023-04-17): Manjaro Linux 22.0, Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0, Arch Linux powering PINE64 tablets, Ubuntu offering live patching on HWE kernels, gaining compression on ex4 |
| • Issue 1014 (2023-04-10): Quick looks at carbonOS, LibreELEC, and Kodi, Mint polishes themes, Fedora rolls out more encryption plans, elementary OS improves sideloading experience |
| • Issue 1013 (2023-04-03): Alpine Linux 3.17.2, printing manual pages, Ubuntu Cinnamon becomes official flavour, Endeavour OS plans for new installer, HardenedBSD plans for outage |
| • Issue 1012 (2023-03-27): siduction 22.1.1, protecting privacy from proprietary applications, GNOME team shares new features, Canonical updates Ubuntu 20.04, politics and the Linux kernel |
| • Issue 1011 (2023-03-20): Serpent OS, Security Onion 2.3, Gentoo Live, replacing the scp utility, openSUSE sees surge in downloads, Debian runs elction with one candidate |
| • Issue 1010 (2023-03-13): blendOS 2023.01.26, keeping track of which files a package installs, improved network widget coming to elementary OS, Vanilla OS changes its base distro |
| • Issue 1009 (2023-03-06): Nemo Mobile and the PinePhone, matching the performance of one distro on another, Linux Mint adds performance boosts and security, custom Ubuntu and Debian builds through Cubic |
| • Issue 1008 (2023-02-27): elementary OS 7.0, the benefits of boot environments, Purism offers lapdock for Librem 5, Ubuntu community flavours directed to drop Flatpak support for Snap |
| • Issue 1007 (2023-02-20): helloSystem 0.8.0, underrated distributions, Solus team working to repair their website, SUSE testing Micro edition, Canonical publishes real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 |
| • Issue 1006 (2023-02-13): Playing music with UBports on a PinePhone, quick command line and shell scripting questions, Fedora expands third-party software support, Vanilla OS adds Nix package support |
| • Issue 1005 (2023-02-06): NuTyX 22.12.0 running CDE, user identification numbers, Pop!_OS shares COSMIC progress, Mint makes keyboard and mouse options more accessible |
| • Issue 1004 (2023-01-30): OpenMandriva ROME, checking the health of a disk, Debian adopting OpenSnitch, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1003 (2023-01-23): risiOS 37, mixing package types, Fedora seeks installer feedback, Sparky offers easier persistence with USB writer |
| • Issue 1002 (2023-01-16): Vanilla OS 22.10, Nobara Project 37, verifying torrent downloads, Haiku improvements, HAMMER2 being ports to NetBSD |
| • Issue 1001 (2023-01-09): Arch Linux, Ubuntu tests new system installer, porting KDE software to OpenBSD, verifying files copied properly |
| • Issue 1000 (2023-01-02): Our favourite projects of all time, Fedora trying out unified kernel images and trying to speed up shutdowns, Slackware tests new kernel, detecting what is taking up disk space |
| • Issue 999 (2022-12-19): Favourite distributions of 2022, Fedora plans Budgie spin, UBports releasing security patches for 16.04, Haiku working on new ports |
| • Issue 998 (2022-12-12): OpenBSD 7.2, Asahi Linux enages video hardware acceleration on Apple ARM computers, Manjaro drops proprietary codecs from Mesa package |
| • Issue 997 (2022-12-05): CachyOS 221023 and AgarimOS, working with filenames which contain special characters, elementary OS team fixes delta updates, new features coming to Xfce |
| • Issue 996 (2022-11-28): Void 20221001, remotely shutting down a machine, complex aliases, Fedora tests new web-based installer, Refox OS running on real hardware |
| • Issue 995 (2022-11-21): Fedora 37, swap files vs swap partitions, Unity running on Arch, UBports seeks testers, Murena adds support for more devices |
| • Issue 994 (2022-11-14): Redcore Linux 2201, changing the terminal font size, Fedora plans Phosh spin, openSUSE publishes on-line manual pages, disabling Snap auto-updates |
| • Full list of all issues |
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