 DistroWatch Weekly |
| Tip Jar |
If you've enjoyed this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, please consider sending us a tip.
(Tips this week: 1, value: US$3) |
|
|
|
 bc1qxes3k2wq3uqzr074tkwwjmwfe63z70gwzfu4lx  lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhhxarpw3jkc7tzw4ex6cfexyfua2nr  86fA3qPTeQtNb2k1vLwEQaAp3XxkvvvXt69gSG5LGunXXikK9koPWZaRQgfFPBPWhMgXjPjccy9LA9xRFchPWQAnPvxh5Le paypal.me/distrowatchweekly • patreon.com/distrowatch |
|
| Extended Lifecycle Support by TuxCare |
|
|
| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Poll (by Friar Tux on 2023-02-27 01:43:15 GMT from Canada)
My OS uses Timeshift and, by default, it is turned on. HOWEVER, it is the first thing I remove as I find it totally useless - my opinion, folks. I find it just as quick, but easier, if my OS goes belly-up, to simply reinstall it and pull the files I'm working with/on from my external backup - notice I did not say cloud backup - which I also strongly dislike due to having had too many issues there, too.
Jesse, you're right about elementary OS not making it obvious that it's free. I tried to download it to try out but cancelled when the "give us money" dialogue popped up. I may give it another try, though. If I use it I can always donate.
2 • Timeshift (by Ingkata on 2023-02-27 02:11:37 GMT from Australia)
I had to use Timeshift today because of a flaky install I did last week. It's got me going again perfectly.
3 • Garuda boot environments (by Heinrich on 2023-02-27 02:16:07 GMT from United States)
Garuda also offers BTRFS boot environments out of the box.
4 • Haiku (by Toran on 2023-02-27 03:13:19 GMT from Belgium)
Very interesting OS and easy to install. Works perfect. But lacks my main software being OBS-studio. What a pity. I was told Haiku has no drivers for webcams either. I use my webcam a lot.
5 • NixOS and boot environment (by sumire on 2023-02-27 04:36:00 GMT from France)
NixOS natively supports ZFS & boot environment and works out of the box. You can roll back the previous system at any time, and you can select the previous system configuration in grub without worrying about the system rolling failure.
6 • deb packages (by Kleer Kut on 2023-02-27 04:38:54 GMT from United States)
As far as I know, Ubuntu isn't using 100% purely snaps, they still use deb packages out of the box. Before the people of the Ubuntu podcast went their separate ways, they explained the reason they haven't opened up the snap store is because of their experience with Launchpad. It was initially meant to be in house, people wanted it open, people wanted everything fixed, and after they spent substantial money paying people to do that few people used it. Probably because the people crying the loudest weren't even Ubuntu users, much like the vocal minority of people against snaps.
Canonical would be more than happy to open source the snap store if someone else pays for the labor to clean up the code and make it user friendly. I'm not particularly for or against snaps, but subtle disingenuous phrases like "community editions to support Snap packages exclusively" is unnecessary.
7 • Boot environment (by Bobbie Sellers on 2023-02-27 05:34:01 GMT from United States)
I use PCLinuxOS and every version even the community versions will come up in a boot
environment. It can be used to fix boot problems with the installed systems and recover
backup files to the main install. One can hardly afford to be without such a valuable tool.
bliss - on the ever-faithful Dell Latitude E7450, PCLinuxOS 2022
KDE Plasma 5.27.1 Kernel Version: 6.1.14-pclos1 (64-bit)
KDE Frameworks 5.103.0 - Qt Version: 5.15.6
Graphics : X11 - Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 5500
15.5 GiB of RAM CPU 4 × Intel® Core™ i7-5600U CPU @ 2.60GHz
Actually 2 real cores and 2 virtual cores.
8 • No Snaps on Red Hat’s distros, no Flatpaks on Canonical’s (by Heinrich on 2023-02-27 05:34:09 GMT from United States)
Until Red Hat starts supporting Snaps on Fedora and its spins and on RHEL, I won’t be casting any stones at Canonical for not including Flatpaks out of the box. They’re easy to enable for anyone who wants them, and Snaps are easy to remove.
9 • Boot environments on Manjaro (by Captainkats on 2023-02-27 06:10:14 GMT from Greece)
Manjaro does use boot environments on its GRUB menu, didn't have a chance to use it though just yet.
10 • Boot environment (by Dr.J on 2023-02-27 07:58:58 GMT from Germany)
If they work, I think boot environments are a good idea - even if they are very rarely used. I have built something similar myself for my host system - in the rare case an upgrade really destroys the entire system and a software downgrade is no longer enough. I have a second operating system installed and regularly make images of the partition with the operating system from there. So if something goes completely wrong, I can restore the image, it only takes a few minutes. But this happens very very rarely, mostly a software downgrade or a correction of configuration files is enough.
In addition my main system runs in a virtual machine and I take a snapshot of it before every upgrade/update.
11 • snapshots in mint (by bingus on 2023-02-27 08:04:56 GMT from United States)
doesn't Linux Mint have a snapshots feature that it asks the user to set up upon the first boot? not sure how it's implemented.
12 • Canonical is hillarious (by Unpleasant truth on 2023-02-27 08:14:13 GMT from Ireland)
Still waging losing war with flatpaks. Not with Redhat anymore. Flatpak is universally accepted but Canonical is like a small child doing things just in spite.
Losers.
13 • Boot environments (by Romane on 2023-02-27 08:15:01 GMT from Australia)
AS @1 says, often it is easier and simpler and quicker just to do a re-install. Even booting to an "older" working environment doesn't solve the issue at hand - why did ir go belly-up? - and relies on either the developers doing the "fix" (relatively quickly, one would hope) or the user applying certain technical know-how to fix it; nether of which option suites me.
I always have another dual-boot system on hand, so if my primary system goes whoopsie I know not to update this alternate desktop yet. I keep all my data files on their own partition, so it is a very simple case on a re-install, to mount this under my /home// placement, and all my data files are as I left them, ready for use. If the re-install imports the same "oops", there are other distros which can be installed as a temporary replacement till the issue is fixed
When a new Kernel is installed, I make sure I can boot into it first and that all works as expected, If OK, then immediately delete the previous Kernel - no point hanging onto it if the new one is fine.
As an example, my preferred desktop environment is KDE Plasma. I run Debian Testing. For the first time in just over a decade, Plasma on Testing has remained functional. Every other time, I have simply swapped to my Xfce environment when Plasma became non-functional and continued as normal. When the Plasma environment is working properly again, I swap back.
14 • 11, timeshift and GRUB (by Someguy on 2023-02-27 08:39:21 GMT from United Kingdom)
Yes, Mint now has Timeshift (manual) and always has had GRUB via On/Shift (albeit needing a tedious, not to say knowledgeable, deployment beyond many punters). Sometimes use the Timeshift but, thanks to Jesse, delete old bootcode with apt autoremove. None of the above was useful when an electrical glitch destroyed both disks during a Clonezilla operation! Notwithstanding, never had need for a reversion. Just want stuff that works - lost interest in background code in '80's with 8-bit machines; prefer to leave the internals to the experts to get on my work!. Notwithstanding, still preserve interests in the HW.
15 • BE alternatives (by AdamB on 2023-02-27 09:18:52 GMT from Australia)
I voted 'no' in the poll because I don't use any Boot Environment equivalent on Linux.
For the last couple of years, I have had an experimental installation of GhostBSD. In that time, GhostBSD has managed to kill itself a couple of times during major updates, and its Boot Environments didn't help, so I had to re-install. GhostBSD did survive the last major update, so I will observe it with interest - I like to have alternatives.
For Linux, I always keep my data on a separate partition; server applications will have their data files on a separate partition also. I sometimes back up a system partition to a separate drive, using fsarchiver for an ext4 source partition, and btrfs send|receive for a btrfs source.
As a previous poster has said, if your data files are on a separate partition, it is likely to be quicker to just re-install the operating system - or even install a different distro.
16 • Snapshots (by PJ on 2023-02-27 10:02:22 GMT from Ireland)
I'm accustomed to boot environments with FreeBSD on my TrueNAS box and would like very much if the Linux had this built-in so it came with my preferred distribution: Linux Mint. I stopped distro-hopping years ago and don't need it badly enough to switch to OpenSuse.
Meanwhile, Timeshift works perfectly as an equivalent to a Windows system restore (for those not familiar with it). I was already using it and considered it essential when Clement Lefebvre opted to include in the Mint distribution.
Sometimes I try out a few packages and rather than uninstall them all one by one and trust that nothing got left behind I just run Timeshift to put the clock back. It's fast and has always worked for me. I make sure there's a current snapshot before doing anything on any computer I work on for friends and family.
It's worth trying out even if you don't run Mint.
17 • Haiku (by pedal-to-the-bare-metal on 2023-02-27 10:51:10 GMT from Germany)
Many promising alternative OSs have ended up in the dustbin. Some of their devs die trying, some go crazy, some turn to religion. Even Google dropped its Vault "secure OS on-an-SD-Card", and has recently cut back on Fuchsia development.
So what is there for Haiku? The devs want it to be a legacy OS compatable with the old BeOS. But they also want it to be the next public use OS after Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, when ppl suggest a "modern" feature, it is met with the "legacy" mindset that says "we can't have that yet". e.g., non-native apps, multi-user system, AI, security, etc. This is a recipe for s-l-o-o-o-w and troubleprone development.
Linus showed us the right way: you have to curse and swear a lot to get things done!
18 • @ #1: Let's give credit where credit is richly deserved. (by R. Cain on 2023-02-27 10:56:48 GMT from United States)
In comment #1, it is stated,
"...Jesse, you're right about elementary OS not making it obvious that it's free..."
Jesse Smith did not write this story / review; Christine Hall, THE driving force (no pun intended) behind FOSS Force, did.
At the very beginning of the review, it is clearly stated: “Feature Story (by Christine Hall)”
At the very end of the review, it is clearly stated, “Christine Hall is a writer and the Managing Editor for FOSS Force, a publication dedicated to covering news and events in the software world, with a focus on open source software.”
And, from FOSS Force itself:
“Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux.”
Very good review, Christine; very thorough and very well written, as usual.
...And an outstanding job of partnering, Jesse. I sincerely hope this relationship with FOSS Force continues.
19 • boot environments (by frc_kde on 2023-02-27 12:57:40 GMT from Brazil)
I voted "Yes", because I have openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Running openSUSE (Leap, Tumbleweed) for 6 years now, and I have booted into a previous "snapshot" 3 or 4 times. - It was wonderful.
But my real insurance is to "multiboot" a few distros. - If some distro breaks, just restart and run another distros, in one minute.
Arch, Debian testing, Mageia, Manjaro and MX Linux (all with KDE and the same configurations) are 100% functional just now. - Still exploring and learning more on Slackware and Redcore, but they are useful too.
20 • Boot Environments & Snap (by dragonmouth on 2023-02-27 13:11:50 GMT from United States)
Boot Environments:
Since my /home directory resides on its own partition (separate disk), like Friar Tux, I find it easier to re-install rather than restore. That is not to say that I do not appreciate automatic backups.
Snap:
Ever since Canonical came into being, they have tried to become the controlling force in and of Linux. Unfortunately, their efforts such as Unity, Mir, etc have been rejected for the most part by the Linux community. Now they are attempting to force Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distro users to use Snap packages by offering nothing but. Unfortunately (luckily), Canonical is not Microsoft and Mark Shuttleworth is not Bill Gates so they cannot "mandate" anything. Linux ethos to the rescue.
21 • Ooops (by Friar Tux on 2023-02-27 13:27:45 GMT from Canada)
@18 (R, Cain) I stand corrected. Not sure why I said Jesse... it WAS Christine that wrote it. My apologies to both Christine and Jesse.
22 • Flatpaks (by unpacker on 2023-02-27 13:50:29 GMT from Germany)
Recently looked into installing an alternative browser. Deb package from the repository was 200-300 MB in size, as usual. Corresponding Flatpak alternative was over 3 GB!!! No thanks. If anything is bloat and a waste of bandwidth, then this.
23 • Flatpak vs Snap (by Jesse on 2023-02-27 14:27:57 GMT from Canada)
@8: "Until Red Hat starts supporting Snaps on Fedora and its spins and on RHEL, I won’t be casting any stones at Canonical for not including Flatpaks out of the box. "
There are two main differences here. 1. On the Fedora side it's just one distro. Red Hat isn't preventing other distros or spins from using Snap, only its own. On the Ubuntu side, Canonical is dictating that other distributions, with their own governing bodies, are not allowed to ship Flatpak support.
2. Several of the Ubuntu community editions (at least four of them, so half of them) chose to use Flatpaks over Snaps because that is what both the users and developers wanted. Canonical is now telling them they're not allowed to ship Flatpak support anymore and must ship Snap, even though the users don't want it. There is no equivalent in the Red Hat community of spin-offs or clones adopting Snap and Red Hat demanding those projects drop Snap is favour of Flatpak.
24 • @23 (by Denethor on 2023-02-27 14:45:54 GMT from Greece)
I have to disagree with you Jessie on this, although I have no love for Canonical (nor Redhat).
First I want to clarify that I don't use neither snaps nor flatpak. I use kubuntu mainly as well as some pure debian installations and when there is no .deb package to find for a particular program, I use appimage (very rare case).
Anyhow, the official ubuntu distributions are those who requested to be "official" and thus benefit in so many ways from Canonical's ubuntu brand, the infrastructure and what not. Therefore, there are not completelly independent distros and Canonical has a saying about them. If they don't like it, they can go really independent and loose all the benefits from Canonical, they do have a choice.
Redhat does not support any other distros as Canonical does so its their attitude cannot be compared.
In addition, I would like to note that I am not sure the users, as you claim, chose flatpak on those community editions...I would rather think its the developers decision more.
Finally, as I read in numerous sources, snap is deemed to be a superior system in comparison with flatpak. The fact that Redhat has more resources and thus influence on FOSS, does not make it better.
Anyhow, they both suck in my mind for so many reasons...
25 • @23 - bloat vs bloat (by Andy Prough on 2023-02-27 15:01:48 GMT from United States)
@Jesse - "On the Fedora side it's just one distro. Red Hat isn't preventing other distros or spins from using Snap, only its own. On the Ubuntu side, Canonical is dictating that other distributions, with their own governing bodies, are not allowed to ship Flatpak support."
It's like watching a sumo wrestling match. May the fattest and most resource wasting distro/universal package manager combination win. None of it really has much of anything to do with GNU/Linux - just massive amounts of duplicative libraries and services bolted on top of it.
26 • ElementaryOS (by Don S on 2023-02-27 15:05:02 GMT from United States)
I decided to give ElementaryOS a try when it was released via KVM. Initially, I was really surprised with it. Fast install; great "First time" screen; snappy. Updating was quick, but still kept having a notification for "System updates are available" (there were none). When I noticed their browser wasn't Firefox, I thought I'd install it.
I kid you not, a simple 'sudo apt install firefox' took just over seven minutes. The VM was allocated 4-cores (on an AMD 3600); 6gb ram; sitting in my VM folder on a NVME Samsung 970 drive. Most other distributions I try with lower resources have it installed within seconds.
It was so bad, I thought there was something wrong, and wiped the vda and re-installed Elementary again, same result. I don't know if it's Snap (probably) or something wrong with the system, but I tried another non-Snap package and it was installed within a few seconds. If that's the case with a common program like Firefox, they have some serious work to do.
27 • Boot environments (by grraf on 2023-02-27 15:26:42 GMT from Romania)
There is no point for it, I have my data backed up and keep 2 kernel versions and a live usb the most i ever had to do was chroot and fix my issues from the terminal usually either 'downgrade' a kernel or gpu driver causing issues and at one time had to manually edit some grub files...
I'm using an EFI bios &EXT4 partitions and despite often occurring power outages i never had problems with data loss/corruption unlike back in my windows usage days or that one stupid attempt to use the back then heavily praised BTRFS that resulted in actual data corruption due to a power outage.
28 • My vote was no... (by tom joad on 2023-02-27 16:29:34 GMT from Sweden)
I use Mint Cinnamon. It doesn't have to my knowledge any boot environment options. Whatever.
After I finish doing a complete, with updates, install or re-install I immediately setup Timeshift, I set it to two monthly, two weekly and one daily. Some might think that is over kill so to speak. Maybe. Next I do an on demand right then of the brand new install. I save that on demand to another separate location; hard drive, zip drive, the cloud. And along the way I will copy various timeshifts to a separate location. I do that once a week or when I think of it.
That takes very little time and it is easy to do.
I have cloud storage for the rest of it. There is always a Mint boot drive with me too.
Can I recreate everything? No. But I can get 99% of it back. And I am ok with that.
29 • Boot environment (by David on 2023-02-27 18:12:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
PCLinuxOS provides a tool to make your own installation medium with just the things you have in the versions in which you have them. Run that and put the result onto a USB stick and you have the solution on hand to any disaster. You can decide whether to include /home, but I backup that with rsync regularly. In fact, if you behave sensibly, updates seldom cause trouble. The latest Python required two programs to be re-compiled, and that was done within 24 hours.
30 • Snapshots (by Robert on 2023-02-27 19:14:49 GMT from United States)
On my main system I use LVM snapshots for when an upgrade goes wrong. Had to use it a couple times. Not as convenient or powerful as btrfs/zfs snapshots are supposed to be, but it works.
My server runs Opensuse Leap with automatic btrfs snapshot, but I have not had to use them. I hope I never do, since on a previous desktop install of Tumbleweed attempting to restore from a snapshot left the system more broken than when I started.
31 • Berryboot, a boot environment/ARM minidistro for launching other distributions (by K.U. on 2023-02-27 20:31:50 GMT from Finland)
In the context of boot environments, I would like to mention Berryboot,
which provides install, boot, backup and filesystem check&repair of Linux distributions on some ARM devices.
Berryboot makes it possible to install multiple Linux distributions on an sd-card and provides boot menu on ARM computers which don't natively support installing multiple distros on the same device.
In the past, I used to recommend Berryboot as an easy to use tool to transform any Allwinner A10 based Android tablets and netbooks to Linux devices.
Unfortunately, we losed this opportunity, because support for this was discontinued due to lack of popularity and developer power.
I blame missing publicity on Linux mainstream media for this.
Currently, Berryboot supports only Raspberry Pi devices. I would welcome to see a review of Berryboot here in DW.
See more info here: https://github.com/maxnet/berryboot
32 • Boot Environments (by Reyfer on 2023-02-27 21:46:32 GMT from Venezuela)
May I ask, what happens to your boot environments when the drive is not accessible, or dies, or breaks or whatever? That is why I have actual backups on an external drive.
33 • Expanded AppCenter content (by Shadow53 on 2023-02-28 04:10:24 GMT from United States)
I didn't see a comment mentioning this -- I think what Christine ran into was that installing a package from Flathub adds the new remote to AppCenter, and subsequent refreshes will include all of those packages in the "store" view.
34 • boot environments (by fenglengshun on 2023-03-01 06:23:18 GMT from Indonesia)
I first encountered it on Garuda Linux and liked it quite a lot. The problem was that when grub broke last year, you still need to use the ISO to chroot and fix the boot environment.
For that reason I went to Manjaro, and they do have boot environment with btrfs-snapshot if you use btrfs when you install (though they don't show grub by default).
I think this has started to spread more and more, and it seems be strongly adopted by many Arch-based distro. It's an interesting development that's probably needed for Arch-based given how sometimes things break (last time I had openssl breaking, had to revert to a btrfs snapshot and redo the update).
35 • boot flatpack snap (by Trihexagonal on 2023-03-01 08:06:51 GMT from United States)
I use UFS file system with FreeBSD and it doesn't offer boot environments, neither would I use them if it did. I used ZFS once and it was more trouble than it was worth IMO.
I rebuild FreeBSD from scratch when there is a version bump and have never had a problem I couldn't fix with an update or ports/pkg when I mix them..
I'm still using the initial build of Kali Linux 2021.3 build from almost 2 years ago on that box, never had a problem I couldn't fix with rolling updates, update at least twice a week, enjoy using apt/apt-get and wouldn't use anything else.
Default configurations work for me and I can work with default configurations.
36 • Spiral offers boot enviroments too (by aasami on 2023-03-01 15:03:56 GMT from Slovakia)
I was surprised to see that Jesse didn't mention more distors supporting boot enviroments out of the box. One that wasn't mentioned still is relatively new SpiralLinux, that Jesse has reviewed few months ago. Althought he didn't mention this feature in his review and even wondered what sets it apart from LinuxMInt, MX Linux or SolydXK. So there you have the distinction.
Boot enviroments are very usefull, when you experiment with different settings in your system or some customization turns unexpected ways. I'm glad i have it.
37 • Haiku (by Dave Postles on 2023-03-02 18:32:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'm running Haiku from a USB stick as an experiment. I've downloaded some useful apps that I use in Linux (including QGIS). I have two principal issues: there is no antivirus app like Clam(TK) and the version of LyX doesn't have export to .pdf (but that's true of MXLinux too). It's quite useful, but I wouldn't use it for downloads.
38 • Under-rated distros (by Gary W on 2023-03-03 01:38:09 GMT from Australia)
I missed the cutoff last week, so I'm posting today :-)
I agree with people's perception of Void, an interesting and well-performing distro. But its repo doesn't have all the creature comforts of Debian-based distros, so it's not really for me.
No one mentioned PCLinuxOS, which had its place in the sun but is now overshadowed. It's my fallback when I can't enjoy MX (which is definitely not under-rated).
But the most under-rated distro I've tried is EXE GNU/Linux, packaging Devuan with the Trinity Desktop Environment. Memory used is 51Mb before logging in to the GUI, and only 99Mb after, making it particularly suitable for under-spec hardware like my original eee701 laptop. A great effort deserving more attention (for people who can do without bleeding edge DE like GNOME and KDE).
Number of Comments: 38
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
| | |
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Archives |
| • Issue 1121 (2025-05-12): Bluefin 41, custom file manager actions, openSUSE joins End of 10 while dropping Deepin desktop, Fedora offers tips for building atomic distros, Ubuntu considers replacing sudo with sudo-rs |
| • Issue 1120 (2025-05-05): CachyOS 250330, what it means when a distro breaks, Kali updates repository key, Trinity receives an update, UBports tests directory encryption, Gentoo faces losing key infrastructure |
| • Issue 1119 (2025-04-28): Ubuntu MATE 25.04, what is missing from Linux, CachyOS ships OCCT, Debian enters soft freeze, Fedora discusses removing X11 session from GNOME, Murena plans business services, NetBSD on a Wii |
| • Issue 1118 (2025-04-21): Fedora 42, strange characters in Vim, Nitrux introduces new package tools, Fedora extends reproducibility efforts, PINE64 updates multiple devices running Debian |
| • Issue 1117 (2025-04-14): Shebang 25.0, EndeavourOS 2025.03.19, running applications from other distros on the desktop, Debian gets APT upgrade, Mint introduces OEM options for LMDE, postmarketOS packages GNOME 48 and COSMIC, Redox testing USB support |
| • Issue 1116 (2025-04-07): The Sense HAT, Android and mobile operating systems, FreeBSD improves on laptops, openSUSE publishes many new updates, Fedora appoints new Project Leader, UBports testing VoLTE |
| • Issue 1115 (2025-03-31): GrapheneOS 2025, the rise of portable package formats, MidnightBSD and openSUSE experiment with new package management features, Plank dock reborn, key infrastructure projects lose funding, postmarketOS to focus on reliability |
| • Issue 1114 (2025-03-24): Bazzite 41, checking which processes are writing to disk, Rocky unveils new Hardened branch, GNOME 48 released, generating images for the Raspberry Pi |
| • Issue 1113 (2025-03-17): MocaccinoOS 1.8.1, how to contribute to open source, Murena extends on-line installer, Garuda tests COSMIC edition, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera Linux drops RISC-V builds |
| • Issue 1112 (2025-03-10): Solus 4.7, distros which work with Secure Boot, UBports publishes bug fix, postmarketOS considers a new name, Debian running on Android |
| • Issue 1111 (2025-03-03): Orbitiny 0.01, the effect of Ubuntu Core Desktop, Gentoo offers disk images, elementary OS invites feature ideas, FreeBSD starts PinePhone Pro port, Mint warns of upcoming Firefox issue |
| • Issue 1110 (2025-02-24): iodeOS 6.0, learning to program, Arch retiring old repositories, openSUSE makes progress on reproducible builds, Fedora is getting more serious about open hardware, Tails changes its install instructions to offer better privacy, Murena's de-Googled tablet goes on sale |
| • Issue 1109 (2025-02-17): Rhino Linux 2025.1, MX Linux 23.5 with Xfce 4.20, replacing X.Org tools with Wayland tools, GhostBSD moving its base to FreeBSD -RELEASE, Redox stabilizes its ABI, UBports testing 24.04, Asahi changing its leadership, OBS in dispute with Fedora |
| • Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
| • Issue 1107 (2025-02-03): siduction 2024.1.0, timing tasks, Lomiri ported to postmarketOS, Alpine joins Open Collective, a new desktop for Linux called Orbitiny |
| • Issue 1106 (2025-01-27): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta 6, Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 5, detecting whether a process is inside a virtual machine, drawing graphics to NetBSD terminal, Nix ported to FreeBSD, GhostBSD hosting desktop conference |
| • Issue 1105 (2025-01-20): CentOS 10 Stream, old Flatpak bundles in software centres, Haiku ports Iceweasel, Oracle shows off debugging tools, rsync vulnerability patched |
| • Issue 1104 (2025-01-13): DAT Linux 2.0, Silly things to do with a minimal computer, Budgie prepares Wayland only releases, SteamOS coming to third-party devices, Murena upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1103 (2025-01-06): elementary OS 8.0, filtering ads with Pi-hole, Debian testing its installer, Pop!_OS faces delays, Ubuntu Studio upgrades not working, Absolute discontinued |
| • Issue 1102 (2024-12-23): Best distros of 2024, changing a process name, Fedora to expand Btrfs support and releases Asahi Remix 41, openSUSE patches out security sandbox and donations from Bottles while ending support for Leap 15.5 |
| • Issue 1101 (2024-12-16): GhostBSD 24.10.1, sending attachments from the command line, openSUSE shows off GPU assignment tool, UBports publishes security update, Murena launches its first tablet, Xfce 4.20 released |
| • 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 |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
|
| Random Distribution | 
Haydar Linux
Haydarlinux was aimed to be the first Arabic Linux distribution that has the full Arabic support, by supporting Arabic in both localized and enabled faces. Haydar Linux will give all Arabs the best way to enter the Linux world with ease and stability.
Status: Discontinued
|
| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
|
|
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
