 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1033, 21 August 2023 |
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Welcome to this year's 34th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
When you're on the go, it isn't always convenient to travel with a computer. Sometimes you arrive at a destination and discover you really could benefit from using your preferred Linux distribution, however you don't have your laptop with you. For situations like these, it's helpful to have a thumb drive with a desktop Linux distribution queued up and ready to go, then any handy computer is a reboot away from running the operating system you need. This week we begin with a look at MiniOS, a Debian-based distribution that is intended to be run live. Read on to learn more about MiniOS and the experience it provides. In our Questions and Answers column we explore system user accounts, why they exist, and whether they can be removed. How many user accounts, in total, are on your main desktop system? Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll. Plus we provide an update on what all of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones are doing now that Red Hat is no longer freely providing source packages for its distribution and we share improvements coming to Haiku. We're also thrilled to wish the Debian project a happy 30th anniversary! Then we're pleased to share a summary of last week's releases and the torrent we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
MiniOS 20230606
One of the more recent additions to the DistroWatch waiting list is the MiniOS distribution. Which has actually been around for a while, in one form or another. The project's website describes the MiniOS distribution as follows:
MiniOS is a lightweight and fast Linux distribution designed for installation on a USB drive. The MiniOS project was launched in 2009 as a Linux distribution for USB drives based on Mandriva Linux. However, in 2013 it was suspended due to the liquidation of Mandriva. The modern version of MiniOS has been released since 2020 and is based on Debian - one of the most popular and stable distributions.
The distribution's website mentions MiniOS is designed to be run from a USB thumb drive without being installed to local storage. In other words, it's a portable distribution for people on the move. There are six editions of MiniOS, ranging in size:
- Flux - A compact version with Fluxbox window manager, 295MB in size.
- Minimum - Based on a previous version of Debian. Compressed with xz to take up less space. The ISO is 305MB.
- Standard - A balanced edition with the Xfce desktop and compressed with zstd for faster performance. The ISO is 515MB.
- Maximum - Offers a full desktop environment plus media player, office suite, virtualization tools, and web browser. 685MB in size.
- Ultra - An all in one edition with many applications installed. 1.3GB in size.
- Puzzle - The system-constructor, in its basic version, is an analogue of the Standard version with the possibility of expanding the system to Ultra functionality. This edition ranges in size from 460MB to 1.5GB.
The first three editions listed above offer both 32-bit and 64-bit builds while the Maximum and Ultra editions are 64-bit only.
I downloaded the current release of the Standard edition which is based on Debian 11 "Bullseye". At the time of writing there doesn't appear to be a version of MiniOS based on Debian 12 "Bookworm" yet.
Early impressions
Booting the MiniOS media brings up a menu offering to start the distribution in Persistent storage or Static mode. There is also an option to load MiniOS into RAM rather than run it from the thumb drive.
MiniOS boots to the Xfce desktop. The version of Xfce is 4.16, a major release behind 4.18 which is what most distributions use these days. The differences in this older version Xfce are small, but there are a few elements which feel outdated now and some features appear to be missing. Still, the Xfce desktop is quite responsive and the environment feels light and snappy.
MiniOS 20230606 -- Exploring the Xfce desktop and its application menu
(full image size: 467kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
Xfce places a desktop panel across the bottom of the screen. Icons are placed on the desktop which will open the Thunar file manager. While the panel itself is dark, most of the distribution uses a lighter theme.
Included software
MiniOS ships with Firefox 102 ESR, the Thunar file manager, and a task manager. There is an entry for an e-mail client in the application menu, but none is installed on the Standard edition. The Mousepad text editor is included along with an image viewer and a remote desktop client.
MiniOS 20230606 -- Exploring the settings panel and running Firefox
(full image size: 491kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
These tools are available alongside the Xfce settings manager, which is a great all-in-one panel for handling desktop settings. The usual GNU command line tools are installed for us along with their manual pages. In the background we find the systemd init software and version 5.10 of the Linux kernel.
Typically distributions which focus on running live, from a thumb drive, place a focus on providing system administration tool. These may be disk partitioning tools, data rescue utilities, or network troubleshooting applications. MiniOS doesn't include any of these in its standard edition. This distribution appears to be geared toward being a portable desktop distribution rather than a collection of sysadmin utilities.
Hardware
MiniOS ran well in the VirtualBox environment I provided for it. The distribution was fast, stable, and presented no problems when I wanted to resize the desktop, play audio, or browse the web. MiniOS could boot whether I had VirtualBox set up to run in Legacy BIOS or UEFI mode. However, the distribution completely failed to boot on my laptop, simply presenting me with a GRUB boot loader prompt.
When running in VirtualBox and signed into the Xfce desktop, the distribution consumed about 420MB of RAM. This was when MiniOS was running from the thumb drive; running the whole distribution from RAM would take more memory.
Configuration
One of the features of MiniOS which intrigued me was the ideal of setting up configuration options which would help create modules and customize the operating system. The project's website explains:
MiniOS differs from most classic flash distributions in that some parameters can be set before boot in a fairly simple configuration file minios/minios.conf, which minimizes the amount of work required when creating your own modules to create embedded systems. Optionally, some of the parameters can be set in the boot parameters.
Details on the configuration file and the options it offers can be found in the MiniOS documentation. This documentation is a little vague on the location of the configuration file, which is called minios.conf. The documentation mentions a copy of the file being placed in /etc/minios, but not where the original file comes from.
There is no minios.conf file in the home directory or in the root directory of the live session. I eventually discovered the original configuration file is stored in the top level of the ISO file. It looks as though this file is copied into the live system's /etc/minios/ directory when the operating system boots.
MiniOS 20230606 -- Checking the settings in the configuration file
(full image size: 456kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
Changing this file isn't immediately straight forward. ISO files are set up to be read-only archives by default and even writing the MiniOS image to a thumb drive retains this read-only nature. This means we need to dig a bit and possibly create a new ISO image to set up a new minios.conf file. There is probably an easier way to do this through the distribution's tools, but I didn't find any clear documentation for dealing with minor configuration changes. The documentation does hint that, "On first boot, it is copied to the /etc/minios folder, then the /etc/minios/minios.conf file is automatically monitored and, when changes are made, overwrites the configuration file on the flash drive, if it is writable." However, I tried this approach and the changes didn't survive a reboot.
When we do edit the minios.conf file, it gives us a chance to customize which services are run, our hostname, and login credentials along with a few other options.
Conclusions
MiniOS seems to do what it sets out to accomplish, being a live desktop distribution with a variety of editions in different sizes. It provides a portable, desktop flavour of Debian which can be quite minimal or fairly robust. While I found MiniOS wasn't able to boot on my laptop, it did a fine job in a virtual machine and offered a smooth experience with no surprises. With this in mind, it's tempting to declare "mission accomplished" and give MiniOS a gold star.
On the other hand, MiniOS's website says the project has been around for over a decade (in one form or another) and, to date, there is very little in the way of useful documentation or infrastructure. There is almost no documentation on the distribution's concept of modules or setting up a configuration file. There is very little in terms of explaining what these optional modules are or why we would want to use them compared to other package/service formats. The discussion forum is almost empty, which feels weird for a project claiming over a decade of experience.
The current release (at the time of writing) is still based on Debian 11 which means the most up to date software in MiniOS is about three years old. This might not be a problem, exactly, but it does make the distribution look dated compared to some other live desktop distributions.
None of these concerns I mentioned is a critical problem, the distribution still accomplishes its core goal. However, it feels like there are some pieces missing - user support, documentation, newer hardware support - which could make running the distribution go from merely usable to a powerful, customized experience.
I'd also like to acknowledge that it seems the project quietly publishes new ISO files semi-regularly. There have been a few updates in the week I've been writing this overview of the project. So it looks like development is quite active. It's not always clear if the new snapshots are offering complete new versions of the distribution or minor fixes as there do not appear to be any release notes. However, I am hoping this activity indicates there were be more improvements and refreshed documentation in the future.
* * * * *
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) |
How Red Hat clones are responding to the company's source code distribution changes, Haiku improves WINE performance, Debian turns 30 years old
A lot has been going on over the past few months in the communities of clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These clones, most of them made available to the public free of charge, recently had to deal with Red Hat changing the way it distributes source code and to whom. Since then a lot has happened, with various organizations scrambling to find solutions or workarounds to losing access to Red Hat's source code in the middle of a release cycle. It can be challenging to keep up with all the developments and the solutions each clone is trying. FOSS Force has a summary of what has happened so far and what the major clones are doing to stay running and compatible with Red Hat's distribution. "I'd been covering this story since before there was an AlmaLinux. Actually, longer than that. I'd been covering this story since CentOS, as a downstream version of RHEL, seemed to have a long future. I had been covering this story since the days when CentOS's existence was proof that Red Hat understood that the vision that gave birth to free software, FOSS, and open-source was about much more than computer software, but was born out of a cultural awakening that transcended the brief revolutionary renaissance that was the 1960s, an awakening that went all the way back to the mystery schools that were still around at the end of the dark ages to protect knowledge from the coming inquisition."
* * * * *
The Haiku team published their monthly newsletter for July and one of the key points mentioned concerns application performance, particularly when running WINE. An overhaul of some code and an implementation of BSD's kqueue() functionality has addressed the concern. "Many years ago, hamishm wrote a partial implementation of such an API, but it was not very well tested, and also Haiku-specific. Last month, waddlesplash dusted off the old patches, reworked them around the kernel refactors that have occurred since then, cleaned them up, and implemented the BSD kqueue() API on top of them. This then required multiple rounds of testing (mostly against the testsuite of libuv, the event-handling backend for node.js and other projects) and rewrites, until the final result was sufficiently robust to be merged (and the implementation, by that point, differed greatly from hamishm's original patches.)
The new API provides only a subset of BSD kqueue: it only supports EVFILT_READ, EVFILT_WRITE, and EVFILT_PROC. There are some other limitations, too (for example, the amount of data readable or writable is not generally returned in the data field.) However, it is already sufficient for libuv, .NET, WINE, and a number of other projects that use like APIs.
(This also crossed off a few items that had been on waddlesplash's personal to-do list for multiple years, and had been requested by kallisti5 and others working on porting Rust applications.)"
* * * * *
The Debian project is one of the world's oldest surviving distributions. It is also one of the largest projects, with around a thousand active developers. Debian is not only a popular distribution on its own, especially in the server market, it is also the basis for many of the world's most commonly used distributions, such as Ubuntu. This week Debian turned 30 years old. "Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named 'The Debian Linux Release'.
He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian laid out guidelines for how this new release would work, what approach the release would take regarding its size, manner of upgrades, installation procedures; and with great care of consideration for users without Internet connection.
Unaware that he had sparked a movement in the fledgling F/OSS community, Ian worked on and continued to work on Debian. The release, now aided by volunteers from the newsgroup and around the world, grew and continues to grow as one of the largest and oldest free operating systems that still exist today." Happy birthday, Debian!
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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) |
Removing system user accounts
Kicking-out-unwelcome-guests asks: Can I delete default users I don't use? Accounts like mail, games, news, nobody?
DistroWatch answers: Almost all Linux distributions (and other members of the Unix family) ship with a handful of default accounts. These accounts are sometimes called service accounts or system accounts. You can see a list of all user accounts on the distribution by looking in the /etc/passwd text file. The file usually begins with the user root, which is the administrator, and typically ends with regular user accounts that people use to sign in.
In between the root user and accounts created after installation there will often be anywhere from half a dozen to about 40 accounts with names such as daemon, games, man, lp, and mail. We cannot sign into these accounts, they exist to own files and run background services.
Typically when a utility or service wants to run in the background or needs to share resources, it will be run with its own special user account. This makes it easier to set up file permissions so that services can access specific files or resources. Giving services their own dedicated user account also means background tasks and network services do not need to run as the administrator where they would have too much power over the system.
In short, these system accounts make it easier to share data, maintain good file permissions, and run background services without granting them too much power. The special accounts have limited access (compared to the root user) and save us from running background tasks as our own user.
These accounts are typically created by packages installed on the system. For example, the PulseAudio package might add a user called pulse and the OpenSSH service package may add a user called sshd. Typically these service accounts will be removed when their corresponding package is deleted from the system.
Some people may look at the list of a few dozen service accounts and wonder if they are really needed or if it might be more secure to clean them off the system. Typically if the accounts are there it means a package has added them and removing the account may break the functionality of the corresponding package. As for the security risk, service accounts almost always have their login shell (the last field in the /etc/passwd file) set to be "nologin" or "/usr/sbin/nologin". This means people attempting to access your computer cannot sign into these accounts. Attempts to sign in locally or remotely will be denied. The account exists to perform specific tasks, but cannot be accessed by people or scripts attempting to break into the operating system.
In short, it is not a good idea to remove these accounts from your system. They don't do any harm, usually perform important background tasks, and cannot be used by attackers to login. It's best to leave them alone.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Devuan GNU+Linux 5.0.0
Devuan GNU+Linux is a Linux distribution forked from Debian in 2015. The project's primary goal is to provide a variant of Debian without the complexities and dependencies of systemd. The project's latest release is Devuan 5.0.0 "Daedalus". The release notes share highlights of the new version. "xserver-xorg-core now uses libseat1 to control rootless startx and access to input and video devices - this has several advantages, the most significant being that it removes the dbus dependency from xserver-xorg-core; libseat1 can use either seatd or elogind as a backend; if you need to override the default choice (autodiscovery), use the LIBSEAT_BACKEND environment variable; if you are using seatd as the backend, ensure the user is a member of the video group - this is only relevant to running startx as a user, X.Org run as root by a display manager is unaffected; users can now enjoy a Wayland desktop without elogind by installing libpam-ck-connector, sway and seatd; ensure the relevant user is a member of the 'video' group and run Sway from the terminal."
siduction 2023.1.0
Ferdinand Thommes has announced the release of siduction 2023.1.0, the new stable version of the project's distribution based on Debian "Sid" (the "unstable" branch) and featuring a choice of KDE Plasma, LXQt and Xfce desktops: "The siduction team is very proud to present an unscheduled release for a special occasion. Debian, whose unstable branch some of us have been following for over 20 years, celebrates its 30th birthday on 2023-08-16 and we think that is worthy of all honor. Debian is the second oldest distribution after Slackware, and is solely supported by the people involved, without a company standing in the background or someone at the top deciding where things go. Debian is considered the 'universal operating system' because of the many architectures supported to this day and the stability of their releases is legendary. The flavours we offer for siduction 2023.1.0 are KDE Plasma 5.27.7.1, LXQt 1.3.0, Xfce 4.18, X.Org and noX. GNOME, MATE and Cinnamon did not make it again this time because there is no maintainer within siduction for them." Here are the complete release notes.
siduction 2023.1.0 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop
(full image size: 5.1MB, resolution: 2880x1800 pixels)
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,899
- Total data uploaded: 43.5TB
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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) |
How many user accounts are on your desktop system?
In this week's Questions and Answers article we talked about user accounts on a Linux system and how some accounts are important for running background services. How many user accounts, in total, are on your distribution?
You can get a quick headcount by running the following command on your distribution:
wc -l /etc/passwd
You can see the results of our previous poll on arranging new windows on the desktop in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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How many user accounts are on your system?
| 1-10: | 852 (62%) |
| 11-20: | 19 (1%) |
| 21-30: | 36 (3%) |
| 31-40: | 198 (14%) |
| 41-50: | 186 (14%) |
| 51-60: | 50 (4%) |
| 61-70: | 6 (0%) |
| 71-100: | 5 (0%) |
| 100+: | 19 (1%) |
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| Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 28 August 2023. 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 1163 (2026-03-09): KaOS 2026.02, TinyCore 17.0, NuTyX 26.02.2, Would one big collection of packages help?, Guix offers 64-bit Hurd options, Linux communities discuss age delcaration laws, Mint unveils new screensaver for Cinnamon, Redox ports new COSMIC features |
| • Issue 1162 (2026-03-02): AerynOS 2026.01, anti-virus and firewall tools, Manjaro fixes website certificate, Ubuntu splits firmware package, jails for NetBSD, extended support for some Linux kernel releases, Murena creating a map app |
| • Issue 1161 (2026-02-23): The Guix package manager, quick Q&As, Gentoo migrating its mirrors, Fedora considers more informative kernel panic screens, GhostBSD testing alternative X11 implementation, Asahi makes progress with Apple M3, NetBSD userland ported, FreeBSD improves web-based system management |
| • Issue 1160 (2026-02-16): Noid and AgarimOS, command line tips, KDE Linux introduces delta updates, Redox OS hits development milestone, Linux Mint develops a desktop-neutral account manager, sudo developer seeks sponsorship |
| • 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 |
| • Full list of all issues |
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| Random Distribution | 
Slimbook OS
Slimbook OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution customised for the Slimbook line of Linux computers assembled in Spain. It offers a choice of GNOME or KDE Plasma desktops on a single ISO image which also includes some custom extensions and utilities. The distribution provides its own repositories for some software, prioritising DEB and Flatpak packages over Ubuntu's snap options. Some of the other interesting features of Slimbook OS include touchpad gestures (enabled by default), Slimbook service notifications, window tiling, the Terminator terminal emulator, a Ulauncher application for fast searching, and a day/night mode switcher.
Status: Active
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| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
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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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