 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1122, 19 May 2025 |
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Welcome to this year's 20th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
For over two decades, the independently-developed GoboLinux distribution has been trying to re-invent the standard Unix file structure and replace it with one that is more modern and logical. Despite its efforts, it has remained a curiosity project rather than a real contender to bring a massive change, and it also seemed rather dormant at some stages. But it recently sprang to life under a new stewardship, as a new official release was announced in early April 2025. How do GoboLinux 017.01 ideas fare in the world of advanced Linux distributions of 2025? Read our comprehensive review to find out. In the News section, Red Hat prepares to launch a new generation of its Enterprise Linux platform, Debian inches closer to the "Trixie" release with the initial release candidate of Debian Installer, and openSUSE initiates a retirement plan for its famous YaST system administration tool. In this week's Questions and Answers, Jesse Smith explains how to run applications which rely on X11 on Wayland, while in the Opinion Poll we would love to hear your opinion about the benefits of a Linux filesystem makeover. Finally, the Site News column brings updates to the list of packages tracked on the distributions' pages, as well as three new additions to the site's database to try out - Loc-OS, MiniOS and Kicksecure. Happy reading!
This week's DistroWatch Weekly is presented by TUXEDO Computers.
Content:
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
GoboLinux 017.01
GoboLinux is an independently-developed Linux distribution with an alternative filesystem hierarchy that departs from established Unix standards, bundling applications into their own directories. Gobo uses Awesome as its default window manager.
It has been about five years since the previous release of GoboLinux. Version 017 was published in May of 2020 and the new release mostly focuses on refreshing packages and providing fixes for issues. The announcement warns of some problems booting in virtual machines:
In a VM environment, installing GoboLinux's bootloader onto a GPT/UEFI setup fails. Please set up an MBR partition table. On a bare metal system GPT partitions work fine in our testing (if in doubt, configure your bootloader manually).
GoboLinux runs on x86_64 processors exclusively and is offered in one edition with the Awesome window manager. The ISO for Gobo 017.01 is 2.3GB in size.
Booting from the supplied ISO brings up a series of text-based menus. These ask us to pick our language from a list and select our keyboard layout from a somewhat more crytpic list of options. We are then shown a text console where we are automatically logged in as the root user. A short welcome message tells us to run the startx command to get a graphical environment. Alternatively we can run Installer to start the install process from the command line.
The startx command did indeed launch the Awesome window manager which places a thin panel across the top of the screen. An application menu sits to the left and a system tray to the right. The Awesome environment was responsive and, at least in some situations, functioned as expected. (I'll share the exceptions later.)
GoboLinux 017.01 -- The Awesome window manager and application menu
(full image size: 147kB, resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
We can launch a system installer from the Awesome interface, it has a menu entry in the application menu.
Installing
Before launching Gobo's custom system installer I think it is important to note the installer does not handle disk partitioning. The distribution's live mode ships with cfdisk and GParted to help us partition the disk. I launched GParted and used it to set up a new partition for Gobo's root filesystem.
Gobo's graphical installer begins by showing us a quick introduction. When I tried to go to the next screen the system installer locked up. In fact, the whole Awesome interface locked up and I was forced to restart the system. After a reboot I dived back into the installer and it worked smoothly, asking me to select a partition to use for the root filesystem. The only filesystem option available is to use ext4. The installer offered to create a swap file for me, but I already had a swap partition set aside for Gobo.
GoboLinux 017.01 -- Running the system installer
(full image size: 140kB, resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
The installer next shows us a list of available packages it can install. By default, everything on the ISO is marked for installation. Something I appreciate about the system installer is it tells us how much space the selected packages will use on the disk (it estimates about 6.24GB for everything).
We are next asked if we would like to install a bootloader and, if so, where. We're then asked to make up a hostname for ourselves, select our keyboard layout from a list, and choose a boot theme. We're also asked to pick our timezone from a list and create a password for the root account. We can then optionally make as many regular user accounts as we want, something I appreciate and would like to see more installers do.
Packages are then copied to the hard drive and we are shown fairly detailed progress information. The process stopped after a few minutes, but didn't indicate if it was successful or if it had failed. After five more minutes of waiting, I checked the system monitor and found the installer was stuck updating GRUB, using 100% of the CPU, but not writing anything to the disk. I killed the GRUB process (grub-probe) and the installer simply re-launched it. After a few more minutes with no progress, I killed the grub-probe process a second time. The installer then reported it has finished its work successfully and I should restart the computer.
This turn of events seemed suspicious as things had not gone smoothly and the installer only finished its work because I had interrupted the process of setting up the boot loader. However, I followed the instructions on screen.
Early impressions
Despite my misgivings about the way the installer was working, GoboLinux booted to a text console where the system announced it was running Linux 6.12 and I was invited to login. I was then able to sign in as a regular user or as root.
No network connection, wired or otherwise, is enabled by default. We need to manually activate a network interface, then either assign static IP settings or run the dhcpcd command to get a dynamically assigned address. This seems like an odd approach as most Linux distributions will automatically enable a local network connection if one is available.
By default, Gobo boots to a text console. We can then sign in and run startx to launch a graphical interface. It seems to be in the Gobo philosophy to default to minimalism and get the user to switch on services or extra features.
Hardware
I found GoboLinux worked well for me in VirtualBox. The distribution ran smoothly and its Awesome window manager was responsive. The experience also started out strong on my laptop. Gobo booted, was able to launch Awesome, and the desktop loaded. My touchpad worked to move the mouse pointer around the screen. However, then I started running into problems.
I could use the touchpad to move my mouse, but I wasn't able to click on anything. Taps didn't register as clicks and clicking my mouse button had no effect. I tried plugging in a USB mouse and it was not recognized at all.
The Awesome application menu doesn't open when the Meta key is pressed or Alt+F1. However, I could open a launch bar by pressing Alt+F2. This allowed me to navigate application launchers using the keyboard. Oddly enough, once I had launched a few programs using this method, my touchpad mouse started working and I could click on buttons and move windows around using the mouse pointer.
On my laptop networking failed to work. The system would show it was scanning for nearby networks, but it never found any. This meant, on physical hardware, Gobo technically ran, but only as a stand-alone machine.
A fresh install of Gobo took up 6.7GB of hard drive space. When signed into the text console Gobo was quite light, using just 84MB of RAM. When I was signed into Awesome the window manager drove memory usage up to 215MB, still unusually light.
During the install process I had opted to create a swap partition. For some reason the swap partition is not activated automatically. I had to manually enable swap and add its entry to my fstab file to made sure swap was enabled in the future.
Included software
The Gobo distribution does not ship with many applications. Firefox is installed for us along with the Audacious audio player. Htop, GParted, and the Vim text editor are also in the application menu. The urxvt application provides the default virtual terminal. Gobo uses zsh as its default shell, though bash is available on the system.
The man program is installed, though no manual pages are included on the distribution. In the background we find the GNU Compiler Collection and the SysV init software. The current version of Gobo ships with Linux 6.12.
There aren't many programs included with Gobo, but what is available generally works. Though sometimes it is not always an easy task to use the included tools. As I mentioned earlier, my network connection had to be set up manually. Awesome doesn't ship with any graphical configuration tools; customizing Awesome settings is handled by one giant text file. As I mentioned above, Gobo defaults to running a text interface and there are no manual pages to assist us.
The distribution has a lot of aliases set up for us. This generally isn't my preference because, depending on the alias, we might run into unexpected, or even dangerous, behaviour. For example, Gobo aliases "sudo" to "sudo -u #0" and I'm not sure why. This basically forces sudo to switch us to the root user account, but that is the default behaviour anyway; forcing the user to act as root seems unnecessary and potentially undesirable. Other aliases included in the distribution are tamer, for example "rm" is aliased to "rm -i" and "cp" to "cp -i", both will ask permission before destroying existing files.
Filesystem layout
Gobo's main feature, its central concept, is a filesystem which is organized differently than other Linux distributions. Directories are given longer, more descriptive names. For example, instead of /etc, /var, and /usr Gobo organizes its files into directories named Data, Programs, and System. Instead of /home we find our personal files under Users. The idea here seems to be that these names are more descriptive and therefore easier to navigate for new users. It's hard to argue against this approach since one of the most common complaints I used to hear from new Linux users was that they had no idea what "bin", "usr", "var", "etc", and "mnt" meant. Giving directories clear, descriptive names feels like a step in the right direction.
GoboLinux 017.01 -- Exploring the filesystem
(full image size: 133kB, resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
People might be interested to know that the traditional directories are still there, still part of the filesystem, they are just hidden. Inside the traditional directories we find symbolic links which point to the Gobo-specific locations. When we look inside /etc we mostly find symbolic links to configuration files stored under /Programs/<Application-Name>/Settings/. The directory /var redirects us to /Data/Variable.
The end result is users see fewer directories and those directories have descriptive names. However, any scripts or applications which try to use traditional Linux pathnames will continue to work.
The other important aspect of Gobo's filesystem is applications are self-contained under /Programs/. In a sense, applications installed on Gobo are portable as all of their files are stored in one place. This has the convenient side-effect of making it possible to un-install an application by simply deleting the application's directory. The idea here is that software management is not only organized in a more human-intuitive manner, but removing old packages doesn't require any special logic or package management utilities.
Managing software
The Gobo documentation mentions that the distribution currently does not offer any binary packages and everything must be built from source code. If there were any binary packages we could fetch them using the command InstallPackage. For example, we could try to fetch Firefox using "InstallPackage Firefox". (You might have noticed, Gobo uses proper-case words instead of the traditional lower-case (InstallPackage vs pacman).
Despite the documentation's warning, I did try to install a few programs using InstallPackage and, while none of the items I wanted were available, the package manager did tell me there were packages in the repository and it kept recommending I install the "fuse" package. The "fuse" package not only exists in the repository, it installed successfully. It was the only package I found through.
For all other applications we need to compile them from source using Gobo's Compile tool. The Compile program accepts a package name and attempts to build the software. Which programs does it know how to build? Some more looking through the project's documentation revealed there is a GitHub repository with a list of "recipes" which Compile can use to build new applications. Unfortunately, GitHub truncates the list of 3,777 recipes to show only the first 1,000 entries. This limits us a bit unless we download a copy of the repository and browse it locally.
Many of the recipes are old, most of them about five years old. Some are younger and have been refreshed in the past year, but most of the recipes have been left unmaintained since GoboLinux 017 was published five years ago.
GoboLinux 017.01 -- Trying to compile software
(full image size: 140kB, resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
I tried to run Compile on a handful of recipe names. This mostly resulted in Compile downloading source code, attempting to build it, then reporting failure. The tcsh command line shell failed to build, as did nmap. The xrandr tool failed (which I had hoped to use to fix Awesome's screen resolution). The Links web browser likewise failed to build. The fish shell, to my pleasant surprise, compiled and installed successfully and I was able to run it.
The Gobo documentation tells us there is currently no way to automatically fetch software updates on the distribution: "Updates: Currently, there is no way to update packages automatically. This used to be done with the Freshen script, which is currently not in working order. Updates thus need to be installed manually via InstallPackage or Compile as appropriate." This means we need to manually check for updates in the GitHub recipe repository and then run Compile ourselves if we want to get software updates, a tedious process which reminds me of running early Linux distributions in the 1990s.
To get rid of old software we can, as I mentioned above, delete the program's directory entirely. Alternatively, we can use a tool called RemoveProgram which will also try to clean up any related files, such as application menu shortcuts.
Conclusions
The release announcement for GoboLinux 017.01 made it sounds as though the project had reawakened after a long nap, feeling refreshed, and with key packages updated. While this is (somewhat) accurate, I feel as though the announcement and release of this ISO image refresh were premature. Most of the recipe repository hasn't been updated, there are (almost) no binary packages, Gobo has trouble working in (some) virtual environments and struggled with my laptop's hardware. The project currently resembles a zombie more than a rebirth.
Perhaps this isn't surprising. While there are some fresh hands working on the project, the developers have a lot of catching up to do. The project's previous major release (before the stalled 017 series) was published in 2016, nine years ago. Only one major upgrade in nine years is an unusually slow pace, even by Slackware's conservative standards. The project's team has a lot of work ahead of them.
And, not to discourage developers from crafting their vision of an ideal operating system, but I wonder if GoboLinux and its unique filesystem still make sense? Around 20-25 years ago when it was common for users to work from the command line and it was common to hear beginners complain about Linux's filesystem layout and short directory names, something like Gobo felt like a breath of fresh air. Gobo, in its early days, was solving a clear and present issues - confusing filesystem layout, confusing directory naming, and files scattered all over the filesystem.
These days Linux is a different beast. Most users never need to touch a command line, or look at files outside of their home directory. Modern package managers and containers make it easy to install software, even different versions of the same software, and remove it without causing any problems. Portable packages have their own, self-contained filesystems that can be wiped clean from the system. In short, the main problems Gobo was trying to solve 20+ years ago have mostly been solved by mainstream Linux distributions - in different, but fairly effective ways.
In short: if we now have portable, self-contained packages and we have containers and most users never need to look at the underlying filesystem then are there any problems left for GoboLinux to solve? Gobo used to be a suitable answer to a series of difficult problems, but I wonder if Gobo awake into a world that no longer needs its vision?
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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
GoboLinux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 5.6/10 from 7 review(s).
Have you used GoboLinux? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 to customers, Debian announces first release candidate of Debian Installer for "Trixie", openSUSE retires YaST
Although not yet officially announced, the brand-new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 is now reportedly available for download from the company's Customer Portal. This is the distribution's first major update in three years. While we are still awaiting the release notes to learn about all the features of this release, some website have already taken an early look at the new release. One of them is Nix Sanctuary which has published a first peak at the RHEL 10 Workstation: "As mentioned earlier, RHEL 10 comes with GNOME 47 and the Wayland windowing system or display protocol. That being said, you can still use X11 applications within the Gnome Wayland session if needed using XWayland. Just make sure the xorg-x11-server-Xwayland package is installed on your RHEL 10 workstation. The workstation installation was clean, not including an office suite, which is what we expected from a professional workstation. A distribution should not dictate the office suite or other applications included in a vanilla workstation installation. The default or pre-installed GUI applications included a web browser i.e. Firefox ESR and Papers, a very good free/libre software application for your PDFs, which is part of the Gnome project. Linux kernel package kernel-6.12.0-55.11.1.el10_0.x86_64.rpm, version 6.12.x, has been updated to enhance its compatibility with hardware and to introduce new features." The official announcement, together with full release notes, should follow later this week.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 - the default GNOME desktop
(full image size: 2,304kB, screen resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
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Another popular Linux distribution preparing a major update is Debian. The upcoming release of Debian 13, code-named "Trixie" doesn't have a release date yet, but the process of "freezing" the Debian repositories to prevent version update is in effect since March. Last week, Debian Installer team started the initial installer test, announcing the availability of the first release candidate of the Debian Installer for "Trixie". Linux Compatible reports: "Cyril Brulebois has announced the release candidate for the Debian 13 (Trixie) installer. The release includes improvements in the base-installer, debian-cd, grub-installer, espeakup, gnupg2, grub-installer, grub-installer-utils, haveged, ethdetect, netcfg, partman-auto, partman-base, partman-efi, partman-partitioning, partman-xfs, rescue, systemd-udeb, tzsetup, user-setup, hardware support, and localization status. The base-installer now excludes *-signed-template packages from kernel selection, while debian-cd improves source package management and updates the Debian-edu-full task file. The kernel ABI is bumped to 6.12.27, and support for win32-loader is dropped. The list of devices supported by the firmware-sof-signed firmware package is updated, and the list of devices supported by the firmware-sof-signed firmware package is updated." Interested testers can download the latest "Trixie" image with the new Debian installer from here: debian-trixie-DI-rc1-amd64-DVD-1.iso (3,788MB, SHA512, signature).
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Anybody who has used the openSUSE or SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions is familiar with the system administration tool called YaST (Yet another Setup Tool), which has formed an integral part of the distribution since its Software und System-Entwicklung (SuSE) days back in the nineties when it tentatively emerged in Nürnberg, Germany. But as FOSS Force reports, the comprehensive and popular utility is about to be retired: "An important piece of Linux history is set to go the way of the passenger pigeon or dodo bird later this year, when SUSE and openSUSE put YaST out to pasture. Widely regarded as a package manager, it's actually more of a Swiss Army knife configuration tool that can be used to install software, configure hardware, set up networks and servers, and more. Exactly what it can do might be determined by the year in which you're using it, as its feature set and role within the SUSE ecosystem have changed over the years. Although not very well known outside SUSE circles these days, from its first appearance in 1995 until SUSE was purchased by Novell in 2004, YaST was one of the reasons why SUSE was considered one of the crown jewels of Linux."
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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) |
How to run applications which rely on X11 on Wayland
X-marks-the-spot asks: With X.Org going away from Fedora and openSUSE how will running programs made for X11 work?
DistroWatch answers: As Wayland support continues to grow throughout the Linux ecosystem and gradually pushes aside the legacy X11 approach to displaying graphics on our screens, what will become of applications stuck using X11 is a natural question. Fortunately, the Wayland developers knew they would need some way to support all of the existing X11-powered applications. The Wayland documentation says: "Being able to run existing X11 applications is crucial for the adoption of Wayland, especially on desktops, as there will always be X11 applications that have not been or cannot be converted into Wayland applications, and throwing them all away would be prohibitive. Therefore a Wayland compositor often needs to support running X11 applications."
The ability to display X11 applications in Wayland sessions is achieved by a compatibility layer called Xwayland. The Gentoo documentation succinctly explains: "Xwayland is an X server for running X clients under Wayland. It is built from a collection of patches to the X.Org server codebase, created and maintained by Wayland developers. Not all software supports, or plans to support, running under Wayland. Wayland compositors can use Xwayland to allow use of such software within their environment."
How does a person go about making Xwayland work, to support their existing X11 applications? The good news is, you probably do not need to do anything! "Normally Xwayland shouldn't need to be started manually; it should be started on-demand by the running Wayland compositor. Once started, there should be an 'Xwayland' entry in the list of running processes."
If Xwayland is not installed on your system already, most distributions will provide a package for it in their repositories. This package is called xwayland in the Debian/Ubuntu family, xorg-xwayland in the Arch Linux family, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland on Fedora, and xwayland in the openSUSE family.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Nobara Project 42
Thomas Crider has announced the release of Nobara Project 42, a major update of the distribution's custom variant of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. The new release replaces Firefox with Brave as the default browser and switches to a rolling-release development model: "Nobara 42 officially released. Changelog: Brave is now the default browser; the Nobara package manager has been unpinned from the desktop and favorites; plasma-discover and gnome-software have both now been replaced with flatpost; flatpost is a new in-house developed one-stop shop for flatpaks - tt is able to handle installation, removal, upgrading and permissions of flatpaks as well as flatpak repository management; Nobara is now officially rolling-release; Mesa has been patched with additional fixes for Wine, Wayland and DOOM: The Dark Ages; GNOME version is 48; KDE version is 6.3.4; Mesa version is 25.1.0; NVIDIA driver version is production 575.144; Linux kernel version is 6.14.6." Read the full release announcement for further details.
Grml 2025.05
Michael Prokop has announced the release of Grml 2025.05, a new stable release of the project's Debian-based live Linux system focusing on the needs of system administrators. This version includes various new packages pulled from the upcoming release of Debian 13, including Linux kernel 6.12.27: "We are proud to announce our new stable release, version 2025.05, code-named 'Nudlaug'. This Grml release brings you fresh software packages from Debian 'Trixie', enhanced hardware support and it addresses known bugs from previous releases. Like in the previous release, 2024.12, live ISO images are provided for 64-bit x86 (amd64) and 64-bit ARM CPUs (arm64). Important changes: this release is based on Debian 'Trixie' as of May 2025; uploaded to Debian - grml-hwinfo, grml-keyring + grml-paste are available starting with Debian 'Trixie'; we use a new signing key for the deb.grml.org repositories; the grml-live build system no longer uses FAI underneath and grml-policyrcd is gone; booting with boot option 'ssh=...' on grml-full automatically announces the SSH service with Avahi (discover it via avahi-browse -d local _ssh._tcp --resolve -t)." See the release announcement and the detailed release notes for more information.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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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 think the Linux filesystem benefits from a makeover?
In this week's review of GoboLinux we talked about the distribution's approach to fixing a common complaint with Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems), specifically how directories are named. It is not obvious to new users what usr, opt, var, and etc mean in terms of organizing files and this naming convention tends to confuse people who are accustomed to seeing directory names such as "Users" and "Program Files".
Do you think the Linux filesystem benefits from a Gobo-style makeover with clearly labelled directories and a more modular structure? Let us know what you think is the best approach to naming directories in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on creating your own distribution ISO image in our previous edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Would the Linux filesystem benefit from a new naming approach?
| No - I like it as it is: | 760 (49%) |
| No - it would be too messy to change now: | 384 (25%) |
| Yes - Gobo has the right idea: | 266 (17%) |
| Yes - but in a different way than Gobo: | 157 (10%) |
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| Website News |
Annual package list update
The list of packages tracked by DistroWatch on the distributions' pages was updated on 16 May 2025. Based on reader's feedback and requests, the following new packages have been added to the tables:
- AppArmor (a Linux application security system)
- Btrfs-progs (a filesystem for Linux with advanced features, focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration)
- Hyprland (a tiling Wayland compositor written in C++)
- JWM (a light-weight window manager for the X11 Window System)
- mpv (a free, open-source and cross-platform media player)
- OBS Studio (a free and open source software for live streaming and screen recording)
- Podman (a tool for managing Open Container Initiative containers and pods)
- Shotcut (a cross-platform (Qt), open-source video editor)
- sway (a tiling window manager and Wayland compositor designed to be a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager)
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New distributions added to database
Loc-OS
Loc-OS is a lightweight, Debian-based Linux distribution with LXDE as the default desktop environment and without the systemd service manager; it uses SysV init to manage the startup and shutdown of services instead. The distribution is designed to be resource-friendly, with low memory consumption and therefore suitable for older or less powerful hardware. The project's goal is to provide a usable and functional desktop experience on older machines while minimizing resource demands.
 Loc-OS 23 - the LXDE desktop(full image size: 2.9MB, screen resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
MiniOS
MiniOS is a Debian-based Linux distribution which strives to be lightweight, modular, versatile and customisable. It comes in three editions, "Standard", "Toolbox" and "Ultra". MiniOS "Standard" is a compact system designed for everyday computing tasks, while "Toolbox" is designed for maintenance, diagnostics and recovery of computer systems; it provides a rich set of graphical and console tools for working with disks and partitions, network diagnostics and administration, data security, data and password recovery, hardware fault diagnosis and testing, as well as other utilities. Finally, the "Ultra" variant of MiniOS provides an extensive set of software tools designed both for maintenance and diagnostics of computer systems and for solving a wide range of general office tasks.
 MiniOS 4.1.2 - the Xfce desktop(full image size: 281kB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
Kicksecure
Kicksecure is a security-hardened Linux distribution based on Debian's "Stable" branch, with Xfce as the default desktop user interface. It is a hardened operating system designed to be resistant to viruses, malware and attacks, and extensively reconfigured in accordance with an advanced multi-layer defense model, thereby providing in-depth security. Kicksecure provides protection from many types of malware in its default configuration with no customization required.
 Kicksecure 17.3.9.9 - the Xfce desktop(full image size: 75kB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
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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, 26 May 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 1159 (2026-02-09): Sharing files on a network, isolating processes on Linux, LFS to focus on systemd, openSUSE polishes atomic updates, NetBSD not likely to adopt Rust code, COSMIC roadmap |
| • Issue 1158 (2026-02-02): Manjaro 26.0, fastest filesystem, postmarketOS progress report, Xfce begins developing its own Wayland window manager, Bazzite founder interviewed |
| • Issue 1157 (2026-01-26): Setting up a home server, what happened to convergence, malicious software entering the Snap store, postmarketOS automates hardware tests, KDE's login manager works with systemd only |
| • Issue 1156 (2026-01-19): Chimera Linux's new installer, using the DistroWatch Torrent Corner, new package tools for Arch, Haiku improves EFI support, Redcore streamlines branches, Synex introduces install-time ZFS options |
| • Issue 1155 (2026-01-12): MenuetOS, CDE on Sparky, iDeal OS 2025.12.07, recommended flavour of BSD, Debian seeks new Data Protection Team, Ubuntu 25.04 nears its end of life, Google limits Android source code releases, Fedora plans to replace SDDM, Budgie migrates to Wayland |
| • Issue 1154 (2026-01-05): postmarketOS 25.06/25.12, switching to Linux and educational resources, FreeBSD improving laptop support, Unix v4 available for download, new X11 server in development, CachyOS team plans server edtion |
| • Issue 1153 (2025-12-22): Best projects of 2025, is software ever truly finished?, Firefox to adopt AI components, Asahi works on improving the install experience, Mageia presents plans for version 10 |
| • Issue 1152 (2025-12-15): OpenBSD 7.8, filtering websites, Jolla working on a Linux phone, Germany saves money with Linux, Ubuntu to package AMD tools, Fedora demonstrates AI troubleshooting, Haiku packages Go language |
| • Issue 1151 (2025-12-08): FreeBSD 15.0, fun command line tricks, Canonical presents plans for Ubutnu 26.04, SparkyLinux updates CDE packages, Redox OS gets modesetting driver |
| • Issue 1150 (2025-12-01): Gnoppix 25_10, exploring if distributions matter, openSUSE updates tumbleweed's boot loader, Fedora plans better handling of broken packages, Plasma to become Wayland-only, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1149 (2025-11-24): MX Linux 25, why are video drivers special, systemd experiments with musl, Debian Libre Live publishes new media, Xubuntu reviews website hack |
| • Issue 1148 (2025-11-17): Zorin OS 18, deleting a file with an unusual name, NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD refines upgrades, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1147 (2025-11-10): Fedora 43, the size and stability of the Linux kernel, Debian introducing Rust to APT, Redox ports web engine, Kubuntu website off-line, Mint creates new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak development resumes |
| • Issue 1146 (2025-11-03): StartOS 0.4.0, testing piped commands, Ubuntu Unity seeks help, Canonical offers Ubuntu credentials, Red Hat partners with NVIDIA, SUSE to bundle AI agent with SLE 16 |
| • Issue 1145 (2025-10-27): Linux Mint 7 "LMDE", advice for new Linux users, AlmaLinux to offer Btrfs, KDE launches Plasma 6.5, Fedora accepts contributions written by AI, Ubuntu 25.10 fails to install automatic updates |
| • Issue 1144 (2025-10-20): Kubuntu 25.10, creating and restoring encrypted backups, Fedora team debates AI, FSF plans free software for phones, ReactOS addresses newer drivers, Xubuntu reacts to website attack |
| • Issue 1143 (2025-10-13): openSUSE 16.0 Leap, safest source for new applications, Redox introduces performance improvements, TrueNAS Connect available for testing, Flatpaks do not work on Ubuntu 25.10, Kamarada plans to switch its base, Solus enters new epoch, Frugalware discontinued |
| • Issue 1142 (2025-10-06): Linux Kamarada 15.6, managing ZIP files with SQLite, F-Droid warns of impact of Android lockdown, Alpine moves ahead with merged /usr, Cinnamon gets a redesigned application menu |
| • Issue 1141 (2025-09-29): KDE Linux and GNOME OS, finding mobile flavours of Linux, Murena to offer phones with kill switches, Redox OS running on a smartphone, Artix drops GNOME |
| • Issue 1140 (2025-09-22): NetBSD 10.1, avoiding AI services, AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access performance, Mageia addresses service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support |
| • Issue 1139 (2025-09-15): EasyOS 7.0, Linux and central authority, FreeBSD running Plasma 6 on Wayland, GNOME restores X11 support temporarily, openSUSE dropping BCacheFS in new kernels |
| • Issue 1138 (2025-09-08): Shebang 25.8, LibreELEC 12.2.0, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, the importance of software updates, AerynOS introduces package sets, postmarketOS encourages patching upstream, openSUSE extends Leap support, Debian refreshes Trixie media |
| • Issue 1137 (2025-09-01): Tribblix 0m37, malware scanners flagging Linux ISO files, KDE introduces first-run setup wizard, CalyxOS plans update prior to infrastructure overhaul, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
| • Issue 1135 (2025-08-18): Debian 13, Proton, WINE, Wayland, and Wayback, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, KDE gets advanced Liquid Glass, Haiku improves authentication tools |
| • Issue 1134 (2025-08-11): Rhino Linux 2025.3, thoughts on malware in the AUR, Fedora brings hammered websites back on-line, NetBSD reveals features for version 11, Ubuntu swaps some command line tools for 25.10, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA support |
| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
| • Issue 1131 (2025-07-21): HeliumOS 10.0, settling on one distro, Mint plans new releases, Arch discovers malware in AUR, Plasma Bigscreen returns, Clear Linux discontinued |
| • Issue 1130 (2025-07-14): openSUSE MicroOS and RefreshOS, sharing aliases between computers, Bazzite makes Bazaar its default Flatpak store, Alpine plans Wayback release, Wayland and X11 benchmarked, Red Hat offers additional developer licenses, openSUSE seeks feedback from ARM users, Ubuntu 24.10 reaches the end of its life |
| • Issue 1129 (2025-07-07): GLF OS Omnislash, the worst Linux distro, Alpine introduces Wayback, Fedora drops plans to stop i686 support, AlmaLinux builds EPEL repository for older CPUs, Ubuntu dropping existing RISC-V device support, Rhino partners with UBports, PCLinuxOS recovering from website outage |
| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • 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 |
| • Full list of all issues |
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Aeon Desktop
Aeon is an immutable desktop Linux distribution based on openSUSE. It is a relatively small, low-maintenance system with automated daily updates, thus recommended for Linux beginners or "lazy developers". Some of the distribution's other features include a custom system installer called Transactional Installation Kit (TIK), a pre-configured GNOME desktop, out-of-the-box support for Flatpak packages, Distrobox configured to launch Tumbleweed containers, and automatic rollbacks to its last working state.
Status: Active
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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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