 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1108, 10 February 2025 |
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Welcome to this year's 6th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Different Linux distributions often run many of the same applications and use the same technologies, but how well do they co-exist on the same hard drive? Can they share the same storage devices, such as swap space? In this week's Questions and Answers column we talk about whether Linux distributions can share swap space and whether there are any risks to using one swap partition across multiple operating systems. In our News section we talk about Peppermint OS trying out a new base using the Void distribution. We also share news that GTK is removing support for legacy technologies while Alpine Linux is seeking a new host for the project's infrastructure. TrueNAS is merging its CORE and SCALE branches into one Linux-based edition and we share details below. We also talk about Red Hat's plans to include more AI tools in the Fedora distribution. What do you think about AI image generators, chat bots, and coding assistants being included in Fedora? Let us know your opinions in this week's Opinion Poll. Before we get into that, we take quick looks at two young projects, the innovative Serpent OS project and an atomic distribution in the Fedora family called Aurora. Read on to learn what these projects offer. Then we're 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!
This week's DistroWatch Weekly is presented by TUXEDO Computers.
Content:
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
Serpent OS 0.24.6
A few weeks ago a colleague messaged me and asked about my opinion on Serpent OS, an independent distribution with its own package manager, atomic updates, and a series of optimizations. Unfortunately, it had been two years since my last experiment with Serpent, so I wasn't in a good position to offer insights into the distribution. As a coincidence, the project's creator messaged me that same week and said they'd recently published a new alpha snapshot and the project was coming along well. Maybe it was time to take another look at the project and take Serpent off our waiting list?
Serpent OS is an independent distribution and the project's website offers highlights of its design:
- Built from the ground up with performance in mind, featuring optimized compilation settings and efficient system architecture.
- Atomic updates and stateless design. Atomic updates without reboots.
- Our atomic package manager [moss] swaps the entire /usr directory during system updates, ensuring a stateless, bulletproof upgrade process. Updates either succeed completely or not at all.
- Modern desktop experience with sane defaults and thoughtful integration, making Linux accessible without compromising on power.
Serpent offers a GNOME edition only, though the documentation reports we can install the COSMIC desktop as an alternative. On the subject of documentation, there isn't much. There are some instructions for downloading and writing Serpent OS to removable media, but that's about it. I didn't find anything about installing the distribution or using the project's new package manager.
Serpent runs on x86_64 only and requires the host machine boots with UEFI enabled. I downloaded the project's ISO file which is 1.6GB in size.
I tried several times to get Serpent OS to boot on my laptop. However, the distribution didn't start up, didn't show any error messages, or any status messages at all. After the UEFI boot screen the display would go blank and nothing would happen. This is virtually identical to my experience from two years ago. The distribution also didn't boot in VirtualBox, which I tried in order to rule out hardware incompatibilities.
The project may have made progress in the past two years on its custom package manager and atomic approach, but the basics - such as booting and providing documentation - remain missing. To be fair to Serpent OS, the project is still labelled as being in its alpha development phase. Hopefully the missing pieces are put into place as the distribution progresses toward its beta and stable releases.
* * * * *
Aurora
Let's move on from an independent project in its alpha stage to a young project which is based on Fedora and is declaring itself "stable". I'm talking about Aurora, which is based on Fedora's Kinoite. It's an immutable distribution featuring cutting edge software in its base and using a combination of containers and Flatpak bundles to provide desktop applications. So what is the difference between Aurora and its parent?
Vanilla Kinoite is a very stock experience. Aurora includes many enhancements and tweaks, like included drivers for various printers, network adapters, game controllers and more as well as included codecs. Aurora also features tweaks to enhance your battery life on a laptop.
The project's website also goes on to say Aurora features a "lightly customized KDE Plasma" and that the distribution only needs to be installed once: "The system only has to be installed once. Updates of your apps and the system [are] handled in the background for you."
Aurora 2025 -- The application menu
(full image size: 1.6MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The distribution's website also makes brief mention of a few additional technologies, Warehouse for Flatpak management and something called Starship which runs in the terminal. An application called BoxBuddy for managing containers is also referenced. None of these technologies are discussed at length or explained on the website, but it got me interested enough to have a look around.
Aurora's download page is interactive and asks us for the model of our laptop or desktop computer, which GPU our system runs, and whether we want to install the regular or Developer edition. I really don't like this approach of having different ISO files for different hardware (of the same architecture). It means if someone either doesn't know which graphics card they use, or they have multiple computers with different cards, they will need to download multiple ISO files. This is just awkward. Most distributions simply include multiple GPU drivers in one ISO file. One might assume the Aurora project is trying to save space in the ISO archive, but this seems unlikely since the download (with just one set of GPU drivers) is a massive 6.5GB in size. This is about double what other mainstream Linux distributions require when they ship all possible driver combinations.
I'd also like to note the ISO doesn't have a version number in its filename, or a GPU tag. The filename is simply aurora-stable.iso. This further inconveniences users who are downloading multiple copies as they need to rename each one to something like aurora-stable-nvidia.iso and aurora-stable-intel.iso to keep track of which is which.
It probably feels like I'm harping on small issues with Aurora at the start of this review rather than summarizing important issues at the end, but one more thing which bothered me at the beginning of my trial was a lack of documentation. There is a site set up for Aurora's documentation, but it's very minimal. It would have been nice to at least learn a little bit about the project's main features, the bits which set it apart from Fedora's Kinoite edition. These are all minor complaints, but first impressions are important and Aurora was not off to a good start.
Installing
Booting from the Aurora media jumps us straight into the Anaconda system installer. There is no live desktop session to help us test the distribution with our hardware. Anaconda sometimes identifies the distribution as being Fedora, other times the system is referred to as Aurora. Anaconda offers us a hub screen where we can click on modules which help us configure the operating system. There is a hub for picking our timezone, another for setting up a user account, and another for choosing the keyboard layout. There are also modules for connecting to a network and partitioning the disk. I've mentioned before that I'm not a fan of Anaconda's awkward disk partition manager, but for people who just want to dive into the distribution there is a guided approach which will take over the whole disk and set up a Btrfs volume for us.
Anaconda completed its configuration steps, successfully copied the operating system to my hard drive, and offered to restart the computer.
Early impressions
My new copy of Aurora booted to a graphical login screen. We have one session option: KDE Plasma 6 which is running on Wayland. There is no X11 session as a fallback.
The desktop presents us with a dark theme by default. A thick panel is placed across the bottom of the screen. This panel holds our application menu, task switcher, and system tray. It also floats slightly above the bottom of the screen in a questionable use of screen real estate. There are no welcome windows or first-run configuration wizards in Aurora. We are given the Plasma desktop and the system gets out of the way so we can explore or get to work.
Plasma offers average performance, it's neither snappy or laggy. The desktop has a minimal amount of visual effects and mostly stays out of the way. The exception being the lock screen which kicks in after five minutes of inactivity. This can be changed in the desktop's System Settings panel.
Hardware
When running Aurora in a VirtualBox environment the distribution ran well. Performance was average, the system was stable, and the desktop dynamically adjusted its resolution to match the virtual machine window.
When I was testing Aurora on my laptop the experience was mostly good. My wireless network card was detected, audio worked out of the box, and the system was fairly responsive. My touchpad detected taps as clicks.
I ran into one issue with the installer when setting up Aurora on my laptop. When I clicked the button to connect to a local wireless network, Anaconda popped up a window which listed networks close to me. I tried double-clicking network names and then tried selecting a network followed by pressing Enter. Nothing happened in either care. There were no buttons or other controls in the window along with the network names. After a minute I realized what had happened was the list of network names was quite long and the window listing the networks had expanded downward - extending off the bottom of the screen rather than introducing a scrollbar. It's not possible for the user to resize the window which lists available networks and I couldn't get it to rise far enough up the screen to reveal the Ok or Connect button at the bottom of the window. Eventually, I managed to get Anaconda to connect by selecting my network and then typing Alt+O (for Ok or Connect) and proceeded.
Aurora 2025 -- The Dolphin file manager
(full image size: 2.2MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Once installed, Aurora took up about 12GB of disk space, which is unusually large, about 50% bigger than most mainstream Linux distributions. The project also used a lot of RAM, about 1.5GB (1,500MB) which is quite large by Linux standards. A lot of this is due to Plasma 6 which requires about twice as much RAM as its predecessor, Plasma 5.
Included software
The Aurora distribution does not ship with many desktop applications and several of the ones it does offer are installed as Flatpak bundles. Looking through the application menu we find the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird, KDE Connect, and the Haruna media player. Aurora includes codecs for playing audio and video files, though sometimes video elements would not show up in the Haruna player. I could hear the audio tracks from videos, but about half the time there would be no images from the video. During the other half the videos played well. What made this more unusual was the same video would sometimes fail to work and other times would play perfectly. When I switched from using Haruna to VLC all videos played properly.
Exploring the application menu further, we're given a document viewer and an image viewer along with a contact manager. There is a utility for managing the firewall and the Dolphin file manager. The KDE System Settings panel is included to configure the desktop environment and the KDE Help documentation is provided.
There are some less common applications too such as the ptyxis virtual terminal, BoxBuddy for managing containers, and Flatseal for tweaking the sandbox settings of Flatpak bundles. There are a few text editors and the Pika Backup utility.
In the background we find the GNU command line utilities, the GNU Compiler Collection, and manual pages. The distribution uses the systemd init software and runs version 6.11 of the Linux kernel.
As I mentioned above, several of the included applications are offered through Flatpak bundles. The image viewer, clock, contact manager, document viewer, e-mail client, and Firefox are all installed as Flatpak packages.
Software management
There are a lot of different approaches to managing software packages on Aurora and there is a bit of overlap across some of the tools. Let's start with Discover, the KDE software centre. Discover is a modern software centre which provides a list of categories down the left side of the window along with buttons for accessing updates and settings. Over on the right we find applications in the selected category or search results. We can click on an application icon to bring up a description of the software and install new items with a single click. Discover does not ask us for a password when installing packages. Discover pulls in software from firmware repositories and Flathub only, it does not handle RPM packages on Aurora.
Aurora 2025 -- The Discover software centre
(full image size: 1.3MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Aurora includes a second software centre, called Warehouse, which is geared toward managing Flatpak bundles and Flatpak repositories. The application begins by showing us a list of installed Flatpaks and it provides buttons to either launch a selected application or remove the highlighted bundle. I found by clicking on a small box icon in the upper-left corner I could see options for exploring other options. For example, one screen would allow me to add new Flatpak repositories. Another screen would let me select a Flatpak repository and then perform searches for items in that repository.
Warehouse works, but its interface is slower and it takes more steps to burrow down through the options to find and install software. For example, to fetch VLC, I'd need to click the box icon, select the install option, select the Flathub repository, search for "vlc", click the application I wanted, then click install. When using Discover I could just type "vlc" into the search box and then click the Install button next to the VLC entry which appeared.
Aurora 2025 -- Fetching packages with Warehouse
(full image size: 2.0MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
I found Warehouse processed actions in batches. We can select multiple items to install, but while Warehouse is fetching new bundles it locks its interface. This is in contrast to Discover where we can continue to browse and install items while Discover is fetching new packages.
Aurora ships with Brew, a command line utility for working with Homebrew. Homebrew is mostly used on macOS in order to expand its software offerings, but it can work on Linux too. I didn't use Brew during my trial as it seemed redundant with all the other, more commonly used Linux software sources.
When new Flatpak updates are available an icon appears in the Plasma system tray. Clicking this icon opens the Discover software centre and selects the Update tab. This screen displays a list of available Flatpak updates we can select and install.
Aurora 2025 -- Running the System Update tool
(full image size: 2.7MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Next there is a System Update launcher in the application menu. Clicking this icon opens a terminal window where we are asked for our sudo password. Then a bunch of text scrolls by and we are asked if we want to quit, open a shell, or reboot the system. It's hard to tell exactly what is going on in this window. It looks as though the System Update tool is checking for Flatpak, Brew, and system image updates and fetching them. However, the text doesn't explicitly say what steps are being performed. The output seems to indicate all updates are then installed, but I also sometimes saw warnings about out of date Flatpak bundles persisting on the system. It's hard to tell from the output if these are abandoned Flatpaks no longer receiving updates or items which are not being handled by the System Update utility.
While not exactly a software management tool, I feel BoxBuddy is somewhat related to the various package managers. BoxBuddy is a friendly, desktop application which makes it easy to set up and access Linux containers. When we launch BoxBuddy we can click a Plus (+) icon to make a new container which will contain a minimal installation of a Linux distribution. We can then select which distro we want to fetch from a long list. There are dozens of entries with options ranging from Arch Linux to Void with lots of options in between such as Fedora and AlmaLinux OS. In most cases there are multiple versions of each distribution. Once we select a distribution the container is created and the new distribution fetched. When the process completes we are given a terminal window which is running a shell inside the container. BoxBuddy also creates a launcher in the application menu which will open a terminal inside the container for us.
Aurora 2025 -- Setting up a new container with BoxBuddy
(full image size: 2.1MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Once a BoxBuddy container has been created we can use it to run tasks, install traditional Linux packages, and run desktop applications. Any desktop programs run from the container show up on the host's desktop. The containers share our home directory so that any files we create on the host or need to access from inside the container are present.
I really like BoxBuddy. There are a lot of container managers out there, but most of them are offered as command line tools. There are not a lot of great point-and-click container solutions and I liked how simple BoxBuddy is to use.
Other observations
I think that's all of the software managers available to us. Next, I'd like to share some other observations about Aurora. The distribution uses an immutable filesystem for the root and /usr directories. Files under /etc can be altered in order to adjust configuration information and /var is writable as it is where logs, cache, and home directories are kept. (Home directories are stored under /var/home.)
The Aurora website mentions something called Starship which runs in the terminal. I was curious about this and I think what the website is talking about is a combination of a minimal shell prompt and a greeting message which appears when we open a terminal. The welcome message tells us we can use the brew command to manage command line packages (from the Homebrew repository). We're also told we can run a program called ujust to perform some common actions.
I had not used ujust previously. This tool is a sort of convenience tool or system manager which seems to be geared toward developers. Some of the actions ujust can help us perform include setting up containers, enabling the Cockpit admin panel, and installing system updates. There are more actions and most of them seem to be simple (if lengthy) commands that ujust can trigger using short commands, similar to using shell aliases.
Conclusions
At the start of this review I mentioned a number of issues I have with Aurora. Things like a lack of documentation, multiple ISO files, unusually large ISO files, a lack of a live desktop environment for testing, and not a lot of descriptive writing about the distribution's special features. I also ran into a few minor issues with the Anaconda installer.
With all of this said, once Aurora was installed and running, the experience was mostly good. The distribution appears to be trying to make it easier for Linux enthusiasts, experienced desktop users, and developers to access more tools faster. These goals are, in my opinion, accomplished. While Aurora is a bit of a pain to set up (much like its parent), once it is running it offers some nice conveniences, such as enabling Flathub inside Discover, BoxBuddy, Brew and shortcuts like ujust.
I wouldn't say there is a big difference (yet) between running Fedora Kinoite and using Aurora, but there are some little improvements, some nice shortcuts, and quicker access to more software.
Aurora is still a young distribution and I feel it hasn't really come all the way into its distinct form at this time. However, it is introducing some nice tools for developers and I especially appreciate the BoxBuddy container manager which facilitates setting up test environments.
* * * * *
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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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removing legacy technologies, Red Hat plans to put more AI tools in Fedora, TrueNAS merging CORE and SCALE, Alpine seeks new host
The Peppermint OS project has published a blog post in which the team unveils plans for the 2025 calendar year. Two of the key elements are preparing for Debian 13 "Trixie" as an updated base and experimenting with Void as an alternative core: "A few months ago, we started to incorporate a Void base into our build pipelines. While testing has generally yielded positive results, we're working on the challenges that come with a true rolling release. Rest assured, all our builds, regardless of the base, maintain the consistent look and feel of our main releases, featuring the Xfce desktop environment. Although we don't have a PepVoid release yet, it's a project we're actively developing. With Debian Trixie on the horizon, we've been conducting thorough tests to prepare for its stable release. We're excited about the possibilities this new version brings and are working to ensure a smooth transition."
* * * * *
The GTK software is used to build desktop application and, even complete desktop environments. GTK is the basis of the GNOME desktop as well as many desktop applications built for Linux (along with some other platforms).There are plans to streamline GTK and drop support for older platforms and technologies in GTK version 5: "The old GL renderer has been removed. This may be unwelcome news for people stuck on very old drivers and hardware. But we will continue to make the new renderers work as well as possible on the hardware that they can support. The X11 and Broadway backends have been deprecated, as a clear signal that we intend to remove them in the GTK 5. In the meantime, they continue to be available. We have also deprecated GtkShortcutsWindow, since it needs a new design. The replacement will appear in libadwaita, hopefully next cycle." The What's News in GTK report goes on to mention support for older versions of Windows (prior to Windows 10) will also be dropped.
* * * * *
Christian Schaller has published a blog post in which he talks about new changes coming to the Fedora distribution and related technologies. The post highlights work going into a wide range of projects, including Flatpak, Wayland, GNOME Software, and Firefox. Schaller also touches on hopes for getting more AI-related tools into Fedora. "One big item on our list for the year is looking at ways Fedora Workstation can make use of artificial intelligence. Thanks to IBM's Granite effort we now have an AI engine that is available under proper open source licensing terms and which can be extended for many different usecases. Also the IBM Granite team has an aggressive plan for releasing updated versions of Granite, incorporating new features of special interest to developers, like making Granite a great engine to power IDEs and similar tools. We been brainstorming various ideas in the team for how we can make use of AI to provide improved or new features to users of GNOME and Fedora Workstation. This includes making sure Fedora Workstation users have access to great tools like RamaLama, that we make sure setting up accelerated AI inside Toolbx is simple, that we offer a good Code Assistant based on Granite and that we come up with other cool integration points."
* * * * *
The TrueNAS team have announced plans to merge two of the project's branches - CORE, the original FreeBSD-based platform; and SCALE, the Debian-based platform. Going forward TrueNAS will offer a Community Edition branch which will replace both of the previous editions. "The Fangtooth is a deep sea fish with two outsized teeth, the largest of any ocean fish in proportion to their body. It's also the code name for the next version of TrueNAS, the successor to the very successful TrueNAS Electric Eel. For TrueNAS, the two teeth of the Fangtooth fish represent CORE and SCALE, combining together with the goal of unifying both CORE and SCALE versions into the common TrueNAS Community Edition (CE). TrueNAS Fangtooth will be an upgrade for both SCALE 24.10 and CORE 13.x users, introducing new features for both Community and Enterprise users." The Community Edition will be based on Linux. Details on the new edition and a list of new features can be found in the project's blog post.
* * * * *
Some of our readers may be familiar with Equinix, a company which provides digital infrastructure and hosting. Even if you are not familiar with the company, you've probably heard of a few of the open source projects which are hosted on their infrastructure: Alpine Linux and freedesktop.org. The latter maintains many projects such as X.Org, Wayland, PulseAudio, and PipeWire. Unfortunately, for these projects, Equinix is ending their hosting agreement. A post on the Alpine website explains: "We are deeply grateful to Equinix Metal (formerly Packet.net) for their longstanding support, which has been essential to Alpine Linux's ecosystem. However, with Equinix sunsetting their bare-metal hosting service, this critical support will soon end. Their contributions have been invaluable, and we thank them for helping keep Alpine Linux reliable and efficient. This change poses a significant challenge, as it impacts key infrastructure hosted with Equinix. To ensure continuity, we must now find alternative hosting solutions." The freedesktop.org website shares a similar statement.
Both projects require many terabytes (TB) of disk space and hundreds of terabytes of bandwidth per month and are putting together migration plans while asking for donations from their respective communities. It's a common scenario in the open source world, where projects used on millions of computers struggle to raise enough funds to keep their servers running.
* * * * *
These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Sharing swap space between distributions
Sharing-is-caring asks: Is it possible to share swap space between multiple distros? Is it safe?
DistroWatch answers: Yes, it is possible to share the same swap partition across Linux distributions. Whichever distribution is running will keep track of where it writes data to the swap partition and ignore anything else in the swap space. Assuming each distribution is only running one at a time and you're not sharing a swap partition between two operating systems running in parallel, perhaps on virtual machines, there will be no problems with two distributions sharing the same swap space.
The question asked if sharing a swap partition is safe and I'm guessing the concern is with information leaking out from one operating system to another. This could happen, but it can happen whether the operating systems are sharing the same swap partition or if they're using separate swap partitions. Whichever operating system is running has full access to your hardware, meaning data written to one distro's swap partition can be read by another distro.
Let's say you have one trusted distribution (called Distro A) and one distribution with untrusted software running on it (Distro B). When Distro A is running it might write sensitive information, such as a password, to swap space. When Distro B runs, a malicious program could scan the swap partition and find the password. This is true whether the two distributions share the same swap space or not. Any partition connected to the computer will be visible to both distributions and therefore still vulnerable to malicious programs running on Distro B.
If you're concerned about one distribution reading and compromising security by reading data left in your swap space, you can detach the swap partition and wipe it clean just before you shutdown your computer. Let's look at an example.
First, we need to determine on which partition our swap space is located. We can do this with the swapon command:
$ swapon -s
| Filename | Type | Size | Used | Priority |
| /dev/sda2 |
partition | 2047996 | 2816 | -2 |
In this example we discover the swap partition is located at /dev/sda2. We will detach this swap partition with the swapoff command:
$ sudo swapoff /dev/sda2
Finally, we overwrite the swap partition (sda2 in this example) with random data. We can do this with the dd command:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda2
At this point, if we restart the computer, whichever distribution we boot will not be able to see what was previously written to the swap partition.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
PorteuX 1.9
PorteuX is a Linux distribution based on Slackware Linux, inspired by Slax and Porteus. The project's latest snapshot is PorteuX 1.9 which fixes a number of issues, adds CUPS supports to GTK3, and updates the kernel to version 6.13.1. The release announcement offers the details: "Fixed x265 encoding not working; fixed procps applications not displaying their own versions; fixed minor Xfce 4.20 issues that haven't been released upstream; improved support to some network devices; improved 0050-multilib-lite stripping; improved GCC build flags to include additional optimizations; added GPT compatibility to the Linux installer; added Docker support; added CUPS support to GTK+ 3; moved expat package from 002-gui to 001-core to fix network when booting only with 001-core; removed from 002-gui: fuse; removed from 002-xtra: mp4v2; updated Linux kernel to 6.13.1; updated NVIDIA driver to 570.86.16; updated Cinnamon to 6.4.6 (current only); updated GNOME to 47.3 (current only)...."
Univention Corporate Server 5.2-0
Univention Corporate Server is an enterprise-class distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. The company's latest release is Univention Corproate Server (UCS) 5.2-0. Some of the highlights of the new version focus on single sign-on and block list filters: "The central interface to the local system configuration Univention Config Registry (UCR) checks and validates input values now according to the type stored. This avoids errors before they occur. The validation can also be deactivated if necessary. Single sign-on & Single logout now enable conditional authentication flows (e.g. B. by network areas) and secure on-boarding and offboarding processes through OpenID Connect & SAML. Massive time savings for IT administrators in the configuration of the Active Directory Connection with new ones Allow and Deny filters for tailor-made synchronization. Block lists for attributes in the Univention Directory Manager (UDM) prevent the entry of incorrect data such as the use of already assigned mail addresses." Additional information can be found in the release announcement and in the release notes.
* * * * *
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: 3,154
- Total data uploaded: 46.5TB
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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) |
Distributions with AI tools included
In our News section this week we talked about Red Hat looking for more ways to integrate AI functions into GNOME and the Fedora distribution. The focus appears to be on coding, but also presenting users with more ways to interact with AI models.
What do you think of this move? Would you welcome AI chat bots, coding assistants, and similar tools into your distribution?
You can see the results of our previous poll on trying the Orbitiny desktop in our previous edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Would you welcome new AI tools into your distribution?
| Yes - install assistants by default: | 81 (3%) |
| Yes - but only as an add-on: | 505 (17%) |
| No - I do not want AI models in my OS: | 2429 (81%) |
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|
| Website News |
New projects added to database
iodéOS
iodéOS is an Android-based operating system (in the LineageOS family) which ships without Google trackers or proprietary applications. iodéOS monitors, in real-time, connection attempts from your apps and allows you to see the identities of all recipients and the quantity of data they wish to collect, block (if you want) malicious recipients (advertisements, malwares, spams, statistics & trackers), and measure how privacy-respectful your apps are.
iodeOS 6.0 -- The home screen running Trebuchet
(full image size: 620kB, resolution: 1080x2400 pixels)
* * * * *
New distributions added to waiting list
- Shebang. Shebang is an Artix GNU/Linux-based distribution offering. Shebang uses the Openbox window manager and ships with a wide range of media playing packages.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 17 February 2025. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Weekly Archive and Article Search pages. 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 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 |
| • 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 |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
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| Random Distribution | 
Archcraft
Archcraft is a minimal Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. The project provides a graphical user interface using minimal window managers rather than full featured desktop environments. Archcraft is installed using the Calamares system installer and includes the yay package manager to facilitate fetching software from the Arch User Repository.
Status: Active
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| TUXEDO |
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| 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.
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