 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 979, 1 August 2022 |
Welcome to this year's 31st issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
The world of software development moves forward at a rapid pace. Some people like to ride the bow wave of progress, staying on rolling release distributions and enjoying being on the cutting edge. Others prefer a more laid back approach, upgrading to stable, point releases after a period of testing. This week we begin with a look at KaOS, a rolling release project which seeks to provide the latest and greatest KDE Plasma experience. Read on to learn more about this independent distribution. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu community gears up for a new point release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS which will introduce minor fixes and updated hardware support. Which approach do you prefer - cautious and stable or cutting edge and modern? Let us know this week in our Opinion Poll. In our News section we talk about the DragonFly BSD team improving the fetch utility's reliability while GNOME works to alert users when Secure Boot has been disabled. Then we explore some questions and answers concerning Linux process management. Specifically we talk about what happens to a Linux system that runs out of memory and share tips on how to terminate an application after a set amount of time. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
KaOS 2022.06 and KDE Plasma 5.25
The KaOS distribution is a rolling release operating system which intentionally narrows its focus to provide one desktop environment (KDE Plasma), with applications built with one toolkit (Qt), running on one CPU architecture (x86_64). The distribution is developed independently and uses the pacman package manager.
The latest snapshot of KaOS ships with KDE Plasma 5.25 which introduces a number of visual changes:
But for most, the biggest news for this release will be Plasma 5.25. KDE Plasma 5.25 redesigns and enhances how you navigate between windows and workspaces. The Overview effect shows all of your open windows and virtual desktops. Gestures on touchpads and touchscreens put Plasma at your fingertips. The dominant colour of your background picture can be applied to all components that use the accent colour.
Titlebars of KDE apps become taller when in Touch Mode, making it easier to press, drag, and close windows with touch. Floating Panels add a margin all around the panel to make it float, while animating it back to look normal when a window is maximized. And Plasma panels can now be navigated with the keyboard, and you can assign custom shortcuts to focus individual panels.
The distribution also offers more flexible disk encryption options at install time and reportedly includes an integrated virtual keyboard on the login and lock screens. The distribution also reportedly ships with a new wireless daemon, IWD, to handle wi-fi networks in the background.
A more visual change in this release is the option to install LibreOffice. The LibreOffice suite replaces Calligra as the default office suite as LibreOffice can now be built as a pure Qt application. Another change includes an update welcome window, called Croeso.
I downloaded the latest snapshot of KaOS which is about 2.9GB in size. Loading the live media brings up a menu asking if we'd like to launch the live session normally or with non-free NVIDIA drivers. I took the normal option and was presented with the KDE Plasma desktop. A panel is placed vertically along the right side of the screen. This panel holds the application menu, task switcher, and system tray.
Once the desktop loads a welcome window appears. This window offers us access to on-line documentation along with the project's support forum. These on-line resources are opened in the Falkon web browser. The welcome window can also open a local guide which gives us some tips about installing KaOS. The welcome screen can also launch the Calamares system installer for us.
Installing
The Calamares graphical installer begins by asking us to select our language from a list. It also offers to show us a list of known issues. (There is just one: the distribution cannot be installed on RAID disks). The installer will also show us a copy of the project's release notes. We're then asked to select our time zone from a map and pick our keyboard layout.
The next screen asks us which package group we want to install. There are three options here: Full desktop with LibreOffice, Full desktop without an office suite, and a minimal KDE Plasma desktop without any extra applications. I decided to go for the full experience with LibreOffice since I'd end up installing it later anyway.
KaOS 2022.06 -- Running the Calamares installer
(full image size: 390kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Disk partitioning comes next. Calamares offers a friendly manual disk partitioning screen. Alternatively we can use guided partitioning which takes over available space and sets up KaOS on a single XFS volume. This surprised me as very few distributions use XFS by default, however it made no practical difference during my trial. The installer will also, optionally, enable a swap partition for us.
We are asked if we want Calamares to install a boot loader, asked to make up a username and password for ourselves, and then shown a summary of actions the installer will take. While the installer works, we are shown a screen with a slideshow that will advance when we click on slides (rather than scrolling through automatically). This slideshow screen not only presents us with features, it also displays a tab we can click to see a detailed log of actions Calamares is performing. I like this as it's less distracting and more informative than most progress screens while tucking away the technical details by default to avoid confusing new users. Once the installer is done its work it offers to return to the live session or restart the computer.
Early impressions
My new copy of KaOS booted to a graphical login screen. There it offered to sign me into the Plasma desktop, either in an X11 session (the default) or a Wayland session. The release announcement mentioned a virtual keyboard would be available, but I did not find a way to activate one, if it was present.
When I signed into the Plasma desktop I was greeted by a new, more feature-rich welcome window called Croeso. This window has several tabs and is intended to help us get started and customize our system.
The first tab in the Croeso window is called Customize and it provides us with a series of buttons which will open desktop settings modules. These modules, which we can also access through the System Settings application, adjust the icons, fonts, themes, and widget styles of the Plasma desktop.
The second tab is called Packages and it shows us six software categories. Inside each category are a handful of popular applications. These are listed with a fairly detailed write-up next to each one and a toggle button to indicate if we want to install the application. We can select however many applications we want to install and then fetch them all in a batch. Clicking the Install button on the Packages window opens a terminal, prompts for our password, and then run the pacman utility to fetch the selected items. It's all fairly easy to use and will make fetching popular programs easier for beginners.
KaOS 2022.06 -- Installing new applications from the welcome window
(full image size: 492kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The next tab is called Wallpaper which simply shows us previews of desktop backgrounds we can download and apply. This worked well enough for me. The following tab is Docs and links us to documentation and the support forums. These resources are opened in Falkon.
The next tab is called Advanced and links us to low level configuration modules for the operating system. Buttons on the Advanced page connect us with the firewall utility, a user account manager, power management, and networking.
KaOS 2022.06 -- Running the firewall utility
(full image size: 1.6MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
There was one surprising item in the Advanced tab. One of the buttons is labelled "SYSTEMD DAEMON". I thought this would launch a tool to manage systemd services and units. However, instead it launches a graphical utility for monitoring system services, packages, CPU, and memory stats. It doesn't seem to be linked to systemd at all.
The last two tabs, About and News, provide an overview of the distribution and give details on new developments and releases. The welcome window is, in short, a one-stop place where we can tweak most aspects of the operating system and desktop as well as fetch new software. I quite like how it is presented.
Earlier I mentioned the Plasma desktop places a vertical panel down the right side of the display. This is, I think, unique to KaOS. We can move the panel if we like, but I adjusted to its placement fairly quickly. I usually like having my panel down the left side with left-aligned window buttons, so it was just a matter of getting used to the reverse.
The Plasma on X11 session worked great during my trial. It was fast, responsive, and attractive. The Wayland session was okay, offering similar performance. However, the mouse pointer would disappear each time it got near an application's window border. This meant the pointer vanished when it was over a titlebar or near a window edge, making it very awkward to close or minimize a window and almost impossible to resize a window using the mouse.
The KaOS release announcement mentioned a few new Plasma features, most of them involving colour or minor visual changes, but one that caught my attention was Overview. This is supposed to provide a GNOME-like overview of applications and workspaces. As far as I could tell, the release announcement didn't mention how to trigger this feature. It also isn't covered in the KDE Help documentation included with the desktop. I did some searches on the KDE website and found nothing about it as well. I did find a few third-party tutorials which talked about what the Overview feature looks like and included screenshots, but no tips on how to activate it. Overview may be a useful feature, but I haven't found any methods or tips on activating it.
Included applications
Along with KDE Plasma 5.25 the distribution ships with a handful of popular and useful applications. I feel it worth mentioning the application menu is nicely laid out. The category and launcher layout is typical of a two-pane layout, but what I like is each application entry features an icon, the program name, and a short description. This makes it quite easy to find applications either by a familiar name, or (if we don't know the name) by a specific functionality.
We are treated to the lightweight Falkon web browser and the LibreOffice suite. Okular is included for viewing documents along with the Gwenview image viewer. The Quassel IRC client is included along with the Seafile sync client. KDE Connect is available for linking our computer to a smartphone. The K3b disc burning software is included along with a few media players. These players include the Haruna media player, mpv, and the Elisa music player. These players worked well for me and shipped with codecs for playing popular audio and video formats.
KaOS also ships with the Dolphin file manager, a system monitor, and text editors. The GNU Compile Collection is included along with systemd which handles init functions. Version 5.17 of the Linux kernel is included.
Applications included with KaOS tended to work well, quickly, and smoothly. I ran into a few exceptions, though usually these were minor problems. For instance, the Konsole virtual terminal window always opened very small, just big enough to show about half the menu bar and no console. I had to resize it each time I launched Konsole, despite having selected the "remember window size" option in Konsole's settings.
While all the default applications worked well with the default light theme, and most worked well with the dark theme (including GTK-based applications) both Konsole and parts of the System Settings panel could not handle the dark theme. Text and background for the window would be shown in the same colour, making it impossible to read with the dark theme enabled.
KaOS 2022.06 -- Browsing the application menu in dark mode
(full image size: 1.6MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
On a related note, when the light theme was used, the system tray icons were hard to see. Many were shown in dark grey on grey, making them almost impossible to identify without hovering the mouse over them to read their tool tips. Adding a splash of colour, larger icons, or using a different icon set would have made the panel easier to navigate.
Software management
Earlier I mentioned that we can easily access popular desktop applications through the custom KaOS welcome window. This is the most straight forward way of acquiring new software.
For low-level package management there is a graphical utility called Octopi. This package manager is split into three panes. On the left is a window which shows packages in a selected category or in a search we have performed. A long list of cryptically named categories is shown in the right-hand pane. At the bottom is a third pane which displays status information.
KaOS 2022.06 -- The Octopi package manager
(full image size: 174kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
In theory Octopi will allow us to find, install, and remove low-level software packages. We can click on a package to queue it to be added or removed and then we can process the batch of actions all at once. In practise this didn't work so well.
I was able to refresh the package database successfully, but any time I tried to perform an action - adding or removing a package - the process would fail with the vague error message: "Command finished with errors." This happened whether trying to perform multiple actions or just one. I tried restarting Octopi and trying again, but it continued to fail.
Switching over to the command line and running the pacman package manager worked. I was able to install or remove packages, even ones Octopi had failed to work with. I was also able to fetch updates, including a massive 300MB batch on my first day with the distribution.
Something I found curious was, a few days into my trial, I went back to try Octopi again. This time it worked perfectly, adding new packages I wanted without any problems. I'm not sure what caused it to start working after two days of consistent errors (even across reboots), but it was nice to have the graphical package manager working.
While most popular applications are included in the KaOS repositories, there are some gaps, particularly in terms of non-Qt applications. We can sometimes work around these gaps by installing Flatpak and using it to install third-party applications. It appears as though Snap support is not included in the KaOS repositories.
Hardware
I began testing KaOS in a VirtualBox environment and the experience was quite good. KaOS integrated well with the virtual machine and the Plasma desktop adapted to the size of my VirtualBox window. The desktop was highly responsive and I ran into no issues.
When I switched over to trying KaOS on my laptop the experience was similar. KaOS ran quickly, the desktop was unusually responsive, and networking functioned well. The one problem I had with KaOS on my laptop is I couldn't get the distribution to produce any audio. Video files, YouTube, and the music player all worked in VirtualBox, but none of the applications or the KDE audio test software could produce any audio when running on my laptop.
This was a problem with another cutting edge distribution recently and I think the common element is PipeWire, the media system which is poised to replace PulseAudio.
KaOS worked well in both Legacy BIOS and UEFI modes and, apart from the audio issue I just mentioned, ran smoothly and was stable throughout my trial.
The distribution used about 685MB of memory when signed into the Plasma desktop and this increased to 950MB when the Croeso welcome window was open. I found this interesting as Croeso has little functionality of its own, it mostly just launches other tools and settings modules, yet it make up a quarter of the running system's RAM consumption. The distribution used 8.2GB of space when freshly installed, not including the swap partition.
Conclusions
When I started my trial with KaOS last week the distribution made an amazing first impression. The live disc is friendly and streamlined, the new KDE Plasma desktop looks amazing, and the welcome window is quite useful. Further, the Calamares installer is set up beautifully. It's possible to install KaOS with all the bells and whistles with about six clicks and a brief pause to make up a password for ourselves. However, we can also do quite a bit of customizing if we want to dig into the settings, the log tab, and partitioning options.
Things continued to be great early on. The welcome window with its direct access to desktop settings, wallpaper, and underlying operating system features is great. I like how clear it is and how easy we can add popular software applications.
The KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop is surprisingly fast, it's slightly toward the heavy end of memory usage compared to other desktops, but not by a lot. The performance is great and the experience was pretty smooth.
All of this polish early on made running into problems, especially significant problems, all the more jarring. The most notable issue I ran into was sound not working on my laptop at all and, in fact, no sound output devices could be detected. This was unusual and there was no easy fix for it in the audio settings.
There were some problems with the Wayland session, particularly with the mouse pointer. This was easy to overlook though as the distribution provides a Plasma on X11 session. Also on the subject of the Plasma desktop, while it wasn't a bug, it was annoying to not be able to find a key or gesture to activate the new Overview feature. Someone will probably (hopefully) share in the comments how to activate it, but it's frustrating finding no tips relating to this in the KDE Help tool or in searches of the KDE website. The release announcement also mentioned an integrated virtual keyboard on the login screen and I could find no evidence of this.
One of the other few issues I ran into was Octopi not being able to complete package transactions. The underlying pacman tool works perfectly, but Octopi failed with a vague error for two days straight before working itself out on the third day. On a related note, KaOS has a relatively small software repository. This can be helped with third-party package managers such as Flatpak, but it's something to keep in mind.
In short, KaOS handles most things very well and looks polished. But every so often I'd run into a problem, like the System Settings and Konsole applications not working with the dark theme or audio not working, and then my workflow would come to a sudden halt while I tried to sort out the problem. It was a mostly amazing experience with some jarring problems that would take me by surprise.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was an HP DY2048CA laptop with the following
specifications:
- Processor: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
- Display: Intel integrated video
- Storage: Western Digital 512GB solid state drive
- Memory: 8GB of RAM
- Wireless network device: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 + BT Wireless network card
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Visitor supplied rating
KaOS has a visitor supplied average rating of: 5.7/10 from 25 review(s).
Have you used KaOS? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
DragonFly BSD fixes 'fetch' utility behaviour, GNOME plans Secure Boot check
People who have used older versions of DragonFly BSD and its close cousin, FreeBSD, have probably run into situations where the fetch command stalls while retrieving a remote file and then fails to resume or abort the download. Matthew Dillon has addressed this on DragonFly BSD: "The -T timeout flag does not always timeout the program. The implementation only tested it during the initial connection and header fetch, not during data transfers. Make the -T timeout apply to data transfers. However, any progress on the transfer resets the timer." This should make the fetch utility more reliable.
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The GNOME team is working on a new feature which will be able to warn people when the computer is booting with the Secure Boot feature disabled. The idea is to be able to alert users when Secure Boot has been turned off which may leave the operating system open to tampering. "Secure Boot is used against several security threats when malware tries to infect the firmware of the system. Users may inadvertently disable or software may intentionally disable the Secure Boot. Consequently, the system is running on an insecure platform with incorrect configuration. If Plymouth could offer a warning to the user, the user could reboot and reconfigure their system or asks for help immediately. This work can be used to check the secure boot configuration and put a red warning image on the screen if the secure boot is disabled. Also, this check can be utterly disabled through the kernel parameter for testing. If the parameter 'sb-check=false' appears in the kernel parameter, the Secure Boot check will be disabled."
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
What happens when a Linux system runs out of memory, terminating processes after a set time
Running-out-of-space asks: What happens on Linux when both memory and swap are full?
DistroWatch answers: When physical memory (RAM) is full, or close to full, Linux will try to move information it's not using at the moment out to an area called swap space. Swap space is a disk partition or file on the disk that can hold a copy of information that was in memory. When this information is needed again later, it's copied from the swap area back into RAM.
Accessing a disk is relatively slow compared to accessing RAM and there tends to be a noticeable lag in system performance when swap space is being consistently used. The more information is dumped out to (and then accessed from) swap space, the more performance tends to degrade.
As swap space starts to fill up one or two things will usually happen. What people have usually experienced is the system will become slower and slower as more data gets passed back and forth to swap space. Eventually the system gets so bogged down it becomes unresponsive until a shutdown is forced.
The other possibility is a process terminates, freeing up space in memory. This can happen gracefully if a process reaches the end of its work and voluntarily shuts down. More often what happens these days is an out of memory (OOM) service is triggered which terminates a process - usually the process consuming the most memory. When this happens more RAM becomes available and performance should gradually return to normal.
There is an OOM service built into the kernel, but it rarely runs, at least not in time to keep a system running smoothly. More often distributions ship with a utility like EarlyOOM or systemd-oom which will step in to remove processes which threaten to bog down the operating system.
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Getting-out-early asks: How can I stop a running program after it has been running for a set amount of time?
DistroWatch answers: Assuming you know when launching your program that you're going to want to kill it after a set amount of time you can use the command line to do this fairly easily. The Bash command line shell, for example, makes this straight forward. In Bash (and most other shells) we can launch an application to run in the background. Then, on the same line, wait a specific amount of time before running another program.
In the following instance we launch the Okular document viewer, wait 60 seconds, and then terminate Okular:
okular & sleep 60 ; kill $!
How does the above command work? The "okular &" part tells Bash to run the Okular application and then immediately come back to find out what we want to do next, without waiting for Okular to finish its work. This is called running a process in the background. Okular will continue to function while we use the shell for other things.
The "sleep 60" part tells Bash to wait 60 seconds. The following ";" symbol means we are going to wait for the sleep command to finish and then do something more.
The "kill $!" part indicates we want to terminate (kill) an existing process. In this case, we're going to kill the process represented by the "$!" variable. The "$!" variable is built into Bash and holds the process identification number (PID) of the last command that we launched. In this case, Okular.
You might be wondering why "$!" refers to Okular in this example and not sleep. The "&" symbol after the Okular command effectively ends one command line and allows us to start another. It's equivalent to running:
okular &
sleep 60 ; kill $!"
Since the second line is interpreted by Bash before it runs anything, the "$!" part is substituted out for the PID of the previous command we ran (Okular, in this case) before "sleep 60" is run.
Above, I mentioned we could use the combination of sleep and kill if we knew right away we wanted to terminate a program after a specific amount of time. But what if we have already run an application and realize later we want to terminate it?
In these cases we can do something similar. The command pidof will find the PID of a running program. Here we find the PID of the running Firefox process:
$ pidof firefox
306078
We can then substitute in this command into the sleep/kill combination we used before. In this situation we allow Firefox to run for ten more minutes (600 seconds) and then terminate it:
sleep 600; kill $(pidof firefox)
Be careful with this approach as, if we have multiple instances of an application open, this can kill all the instances we are running.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
OPNsense 22.7
OPNsense is a FreeBSD-based specialist operating system (and a fork of pfSense) designed for firewalls and routers. The project's latest release is OPNsense 22.7 which includes an updated FreeBSD base and PHP 8: "22.7, nicknamed "Powerful Panther", features the upgrade to FreeBSD 13.1, PHP 8.0, Phalcon 5, stacked VLAN and Intel QuickAssist (QAT) support, DDoS protection using SYN cookies, MVC/API pages for IPsec status and Unbound overrides, new APCUPSD and CrowdSec plugins plus much more. LibreSSL flavour is scheduled for removal at the end of this series and will likely receive no further maintenance. Software failing to work properly starting with Tor will have its plugin removed from the flavour from now on to be able to keep updating the software to their latest versions in the OpenSSL flavour. The next major upgrade will automatically transition to the OpenSSL flavour, but we would encourage everyone to switch between 22.7.x for the least amount of possible impact." Additional information can be found in the project's release announcement.
4MLinux 40.0
4MLinux is a miniature Linux distribution focusing on four capabilities: maintenance (as a system rescue live CD), multimedia (for playing video DVDs and other multimedia files), miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and mystery (providing several small Linux games). The project's latest stable release introduces a number of changes to media support and adds encrypted volume utilities. "As always, the new major release has some new features. Legacy MPlayer with MEncoder are now available out of the box (HyperVC can be used as MEncoder's GUI for transcoding). Many system-wide changes has been done to improve 3D support (both on real and virtual machines). QEMU (with its GUI called AQEMU) as well as TrueCrypt (encryption utility) are now also included. New games: GNOME Mahjongg (available out of the box) and Entombed! (available as a downloadable extension). And finally, a preliminary support for NVM Express interface has been added (currently it seems to work well in VirtualBox)." Additional details can be found in the project's release announcement.
Linux Mint 21
The Linux Mint team have announced a new version of their Ubuntu-based distribution, Linux Mint 21. The new version swaps out the old Blueberry Bluetooth software in favour of Blueman, improvements have been made to the Sticky Notes application to make it easier to identify different notes, and there is a new process monitor which will indicate to the user when automated tasks are consuming system resources. "Automated tasks are great to keep your computer safe but they can sometimes affect the system's performance while you're working on it. A little process monitor was added to Linux Mint to detect automated updates and automated system snapshots running in the background. Whenever an automated task is running the monitor places an icon in your system tray. Your computer might still become slow momentarily during an update or a snapshot, but with a quick look on the tray you'll immediately know what's going on." A more complete list of changes can be found in the release announcement for each edition (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce) and in the What's New documents (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce).
Linux Mint 21 -- Running the Cinnamon desktop
(full image size: 777kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
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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: 2,750
- Total data uploaded: 42.3TB
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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) |
Do you wait for point releases?
This week we will see the scheduled release of Ubuntu 22.04.1. This first point release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will offer security updates, minor improvements, and likely newer hardware support. Some people are accustomed to holding off from installing a new operating system until it hits its first point release or service pack. Is this your preference or do you install new versions of operating systems right away?
You can see the results of our previous poll on running desktop environments on Arch Linux in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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When installing new operating system versions I...
| Install new versions right away: | 559 (34%) |
| Wait for a point release: | 358 (21%) |
| Wait for several point releases: | 82 (5%) |
| I run rolling releases: | 667 (40%) |
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| Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 8 August 2022. 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)
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1100 (2024-12-09): Oreon 9.3, differences in speed, IPFire's new appliance, Fedora Asahi Remix gets new video drivers, openSUSE Leap Micro updated, Redox OS running Redox OS |
| • Issue 1099 (2024-12-02): AnduinOS 1.0.1, measuring RAM usage, SUSE continues rebranding efforts, UBports prepares for next major version, Murena offering non-NFC phone |
| • Issue 1098 (2024-11-25): Linux Lite 7.2, backing up specific folders, Murena and Fairphone partner in fair trade deal, Arch installer gets new text interface, Ubuntu security tool patched |
| • Issue 1097 (2024-11-18): Chimera Linux vs Chimera OS, choosing between AlmaLinux and Debian, Fedora elevates KDE spin to an edition, Fedora previews new installer, KDE testing its own distro, Qubes-style isolation coming to FreeBSD |
| • Issue 1096 (2024-11-11): Bazzite 40, Playtron OS Alpha 1, Tucana Linux 3.1, detecting Screen sessions, Redox imports COSMIC software centre, FreeBSD booting on the PinePhone Pro, LXQt supports Wayland window managers |
| • Issue 1095 (2024-11-04): Fedora 41 Kinoite, transferring applications between computers, openSUSE Tumbleweed receives multiple upgrades, Ubuntu testing compiler optimizations, Mint partners with Framework |
| • Issue 1094 (2024-10-28): DebLight OS 1, backing up crontab, AlmaLinux introduces Litten branch, openSUSE unveils refreshed look, Ubuntu turns 20
| | • Issue 1093 (2024-10-21): Kubuntu 24.10, atomic vs immutable distributions, Debian upgrading Perl packages, UBports adding VoLTE support, Android to gain native GNU/Linux application support |
| • Issue 1092 (2024-10-14): FunOS 24.04.1, a home directory inside a file, work starts of openSUSE Leap 16.0, improvements in Haiku, KDE neon upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1091 (2024-10-07): Redox OS 0.9.0, Unified package management vs universal package formats, Redox begins RISC-V port, Mint polishes interface, Qubes certifies new laptop |
| • Issue 1090 (2024-09-30): Rhino Linux 2024.2, commercial distros with alternative desktops, Valve seeks to improve Wayland performance, HardenedBSD parterns with Protectli, Tails merges with Tor Project, Quantum Leap partners with the FreeBSD Foundation |
| • Issue 1089 (2024-09-23): Expirion 6.0, openKylin 2.0, managing configuration files, the future of Linux development, fixing bugs in Haiku, Slackware packages dracut |
| • Issue 1088 (2024-09-16): PorteuX 1.6, migrating from Windows 10 to which Linux distro, making NetBSD immutable, AlmaLinux offers hardware certification, Mint updates old APT tools |
| • Issue 1087 (2024-09-09): COSMIC desktop, running cron jobs at variable times, UBports highlights new apps, HardenedBSD offers work around for FreeBSD change, Debian considers how to cull old packages, systemd ported to musl |
| • Issue 1086 (2024-09-02): Vanilla OS 2, command line tips for simple tasks, FreeBSD receives investment from STF, openSUSE Tumbleweed update can break network connections, Debian refreshes media |
| • Issue 1085 (2024-08-26): Nobara 40, OpenMandriva 24.07 "ROME", distros which include source code, FreeBSD publishes quarterly report, Microsoft updates breaks Linux in dual-boot environments |
| • Issue 1084 (2024-08-19): Liya 2.0, dual boot with encryption, Haiku introduces performance improvements, Gentoo dropping IA-64, Redcore merges major upgrade |
| • Issue 1083 (2024-08-12): TrueNAS 24.04.2 "SCALE", Linux distros for smartphones, Redox OS introduces web server, PipeWire exposes battery drain on Linux, Canonical updates kernel version policy |
| • Issue 1082 (2024-08-05): Linux Mint 22, taking snapshots of UFS on FreeBSD, openSUSE updates Tumbleweed and Aeon, Debian creates Tiny QA Tasks, Manjaro testing immutable images |
| • Issue 1081 (2024-07-29): SysLinuxOS 12.4, OpenBSD gain hardware acceleration, Slackware changes kernel naming, Mint publishes upgrade instructions |
| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • Issue 1076 (2024-06-24): openSUSE 15.6, what makes Linux unique, SUSE Liberty Linux to support CentOS Linux 7, SLE receives 19 years of support, openSUSE testing Leap Micro edition |
| • Issue 1075 (2024-06-17): Redox OS, X11 and Wayland on the BSDs, AlmaLinux releases Pi build, Canonical announces RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu, key changes in systemd |
| • Issue 1074 (2024-06-10): Endless OS 6.0.0, distros with init diversity, Mint to filter unverified Flatpaks, Debian adds systemd-boot options, Redox adopts COSMIC desktop, OpenSSH gains new security features |
| • Issue 1073 (2024-06-03): LXQt 2.0.0, an overview of Linux desktop environments, Canonical partners with Milk-V, openSUSE introduces new features in Aeon Desktop, Fedora mirrors see rise in traffic, Wayland adds OpenBSD support |
| • Issue 1072 (2024-05-27): Manjaro 24.0, comparing init software, OpenBSD ports Plasma 6, Arch community debates mirror requirements, ThinOS to upgrade its FreeBSD core |
| • Issue 1071 (2024-05-20): Archcraft 2024.04.06, common command line mistakes, ReactOS imports WINE improvements, Haiku makes adjusting themes easier, NetBSD takes a stand against code generated by chatbots |
| • Issue 1070 (2024-05-13): Damn Small Linux 2024, hiding kernel messages during boot, Red Hat offers AI edition, new web browser for UBports, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 released, Qubes extends support for version 4.1 |
| • Issue 1069 (2024-05-06): Ubuntu 24.04, installing packages in alternative locations, systemd creates sudo alternative, Mint encourages XApps collaboration, FreeBSD publishes quarterly update |
| • Issue 1068 (2024-04-29): Fedora 40, transforming one distro into another, Debian elects new Project Leader, Red Hat extends support cycle, Emmabuntus adds accessibility features, Canonical's new security features |
| • Issue 1067 (2024-04-22): LocalSend for transferring files, detecting supported CPU architecure levels, new visual design for APT, Fedora and openSUSE working on reproducible builds, LXQt released, AlmaLinux re-adds hardware support |
| • Issue 1066 (2024-04-15): Fun projects to do with the Raspberry Pi and PinePhone, installing new software on fixed-release distributions, improving GNOME Terminal performance, Mint testing new repository mirrors, Gentoo becomes a Software In the Public Interest project |
| • Issue 1065 (2024-04-08): Dr.Parted Live 24.03, answering questions about the xz exploit, Linux Mint to ship HWE kernel, AlmaLinux patches flaw ahead of upstream Red Hat, Calculate changes release model |
| • Issue 1064 (2024-04-01): NixOS 23.11, the status of Hurd, liblzma compromised upstream, FreeBSD Foundation focuses on improving wireless networking, Ubuntu Pro offers 12 years of support |
| • Issue 1063 (2024-03-25): Redcore Linux 2401, how slowly can a rolling release update, Debian starts new Project Leader election, Red Hat creating new NVIDIA driver, Snap store hit with more malware |
| • Issue 1062 (2024-03-18): KDE neon 20240304, changing file permissions, Canonical turns 20, Pop!_OS creates new software centre, openSUSE packages Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
| • Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
| • Issue 1059 (2024-02-26): Warp Terminal, navigating manual pages, malware found in the Snap store, Red Hat considering CPU requirement update, UBports organizes ongoing work |
| • Issue 1058 (2024-02-19): Drauger OS 7.6, how much disk space to allocate, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop, UBports changes its version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication |
| • Issue 1057 (2024-02-12): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta, rolling release vs fixed for a smoother experience, Debian working on 2038 bug, elementary OS to split applications from base system updates, Fedora announces Atomic Desktops |
| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Issue 1051 (2024-01-01): Favourite distros of 2023, reloading shell settings, Asahi Linux releases Fedora remix, Gentoo offers binary packages, openSUSE provides full disk encryption |
| • Issue 1050 (2023-12-18): rlxos 2023.11, renaming files and opening terminal windows in specific directories, TrueNAS publishes ZFS fixes, Debian publishes delayed install media, Haiku polishes desktop experience |
| • Issue 1049 (2023-12-11): Lernstick 12, alternatives to WINE, openSUSE updates its branding, Mint unveils new features, Lubuntu team plans for 24.04 |
| • 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 |
| • Full list of all issues |
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Happy Linux
Happy Linux was a Chinese Linux distribution based on Red Hat Linux.
Status: Discontinued
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