 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1140, 22 September 2025 |
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Welcome to this year's 38th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
On the whole, most Linux distributions run fairly well these days. Linux hardware support is typically wide-ranging and stable, the desktop environments are functional, and the applications provide a vast range of functionality. There are some exceptions, some small projects which struggle due to a lack of testing and some niche projects which focus on one specific area sometimes fall short. However, generally speaking, mainstream Linux distributions are both reliable and capable. Getting a Linux distribution working with our hardware and performing all required tasks rarely poses a challenge. This week Jesse Smith seeks to mix up his work week by installing an alternative open source operating system and seeing if he can make it perform every task, for work and play, that comes up. Read on to hear more about this deeper dive into a non-Linux platform. Then, in our News section, we talk about AlmaLinux enabling an extra repository for improved package compatibility. We also talk about Haiku improving disk access performance while Mageia deals with a service outage, and GNOME releases version 49 of its desktop environment. Our Questions and Answers column this week talks about AI, why some distributions include it, and how to avoid distributions which include it by default. Plus we are pleased to share the release 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:
- Review: An alternative OS for work and play
- News: AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access, Mageia deals with service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support
- Questions and answers: Avoiding the spread of AI services
- Released last week: Murena 3.1.1, SparkyLinux 2025.09, Mauna Linux 25, Omarchy 3.0.1, Security Onion 2.4.180, Tails 7.0, IPFire 2.29 Core 197, DietPi 9.17
- Torrent corner: KDE neon, SparkyLinux, Tails
- Upcoming releases: Pop!_OS 24.04-beta, FreeBSD 15.0-ALPHA4
- Opinion poll: What are your thoughts about NetBSD?
- Reader comments
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
An alternative OS for work and play
In recent weeks I have enjoyed exploring some lesser-known open source operating systems. At the end of August I was playing with Tribblix and then, a short time later, I found myself trying to get Debian's Hurd port running. These experiences got me thinking that, for the most part, getting my tasks accomplished with Linux distributions is a bit too, well, easy.
Not that Linux distributions aren't interesting, many of them are, but (in most cases) if a Linux distribution works well enough to install and launch a desktop environment then I know I will be able to get on-line, consume multimedia, perform my work tasks, and maybe do some gaming. There isn't much of a challenge involved and so I tend not to go into the gritty details of my trials.
On the other hand, when I try out non-Linux operating systems my approach is different. In those situations I'm usually just testing to see if the operating system will boot, get on-line, and maybe perform some basic tasks. I don't expect most non-Linux open source operating systems to do everything I need my computer to do; I just want to see if they can perform some basics, in any environment (either on real hardware or in a virtual machine).
At the end of August I decided to try a slightly different approach. I wanted to see if a lesser-used, open source system could be used to do everything I currently do on Linux. I wanted to see if another operating system would not only get on-line and perform some common tasks, but whether could it be used to accomplish all of my (admittedly niche) day-to-day work?
I put out a request on Mastodon for suggestions of lesser-used, open source operating systems. I quickly received a handful suggestions for Linux distributions, such as Void and Bodhi Linux, but I wanted something not Linux based. And I'd reviewed the suggested Linux distros fairly recently. Tribblix was another suggestion, but I had just finished writing a review for it.
A few people suggested Haiku; it was probably the crowd favourite of the non-Linux suggestions. It seemed to have enough of the third-party software I use to be functional, or at least it offered close alternatives (Icedove instead of Thunderbird, for example). I'd used Haiku previously a few times and was impressed by it performance, though consistently disappointed by the fact it was not set up to be a multi-user system. Still, Haiku looked like it would fit the criteria. I downloaded the latest beta snapshot of Haiku and quickly found it would not boot on my laptop. It would show a splash screen and then crash, dropping to a debug prompt. I talked with someone about this afterwards and they suggested the Haiku crash sounded like a compatibility issue with UEFI, but by then I had moved on in my search.
Someone suggested NomadBSD, but it's not meant to be installed, it's run from a thumb drive and therefore not suitable for this trial. Redox OS and ReactOS were mentioned as candidates. The former I've used recently and it doesn't boot on my laptop. Redox OS is an interesting project and it's making rapid progress, but it's still a long ways short of being something I could use on a daily basis. Meanwhile, each time I've tried ReactOS it hasn't been stable for more than a few minutes at a time, making it unsuited for trying to use it as a work system. I felt like the options were narrowing quickly.
NetBSD was the next most popular option and the project showed a lot of promise. I've used NetBSD previously, though not for long and not in any depth, so it would provide a learning experience. The project has a good collection of third-party software, and it looked like most of my needs could be met using the official repository. I soon confirmed that NetBSD's x86_64 (amd64) build would boot on my laptop and was able to launch the system installer. It looked like I had a good match for my experiment!
I'd like to mention before diving into my experiment that the NetBSD guide is quite helpful and worth bookmarking if you plan to run this portable operating system.
Day #1
I wrote NetBSD to a thumb drive and booted the portable operating system. NetBSD automatically launches its system installer and brings up a series of text-based menus to guide us through setting up the operating system. We are asked to pick our language from a list and our keyboard layout. The installer then asks if we are performing a fresh installation or an upgrade.
NetBSD's installer asks us to select a disk or partition where it can be installed. It then offers to set up partitions inside the given space. (On BSD a section of the disk is a slice and the sub-sections inside it are partitions.) The installer suggests setting up a single, large root filesystem and a swap partition. We can alter this layout and the sizes as desired.
Something I noticed on a few pages of the installer was text for menus/prompts did not always display in the proper places. Sometimes text wrapped around the screen or one line overwrote a previous line. This made it hard to read menu options on some screens.
The next screen asks us to pick software categories to install. The options are: Full, Without X11, Minimal, and Custom. I decided to take the Full collection since I planned to do a lot with this system. The term "Full" in this case is still minimal by Linux standards, providing a bare command line environment and a tiny X11 window manager. As a result it took less than two minutes to copy the entire operating system to my hard drive.
Once its files have copied, NetBSD asks us to perform some configuration tasks. We're asked to make up a password for the root user, enable networking, and choose our timezone from a list. We're given the chance to enable the pkgin binary package manager and the pkgsrc source-based ports system. I tried to enable pkgin and the installer showed it was running a command (using pkg_add) to fetch the binary package manager, but then nothing happened. The installer locked up and I had to use Ctrl-C to cancel the operation, returning me to the list of configuration tasks. I tried once more after confirming, in another terminal, that I was connected to the network, DNS was working, and I was able to ping remote servers. Again, the pkg_add command to fetch pkgin failed and I put aside this step for the time being.
I was given the chance to enable some background services, including NTP and OpenSSH (network time synchronization and secure shell access). I enabled these and the xdm service which provides a graphical login screen. I was also asked to make up a username and password for a regular user account.
The installer concludes by telling us to read the INSTALL document (it does not say where this is located - in a home directory, manual page, e-mail, or on-line). It also suggests we read the afterboot manual page.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Finally, a graphical interface!
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The first time I launched my new copy of NetBSD 10.1 the operating system booted slowly. I could see pauses in the start-up messages indicating OpenSSH was launching and the network time daemon was fetching time information. Eventually NetBSD presented me with a simple, graphical login screen. Signing into my account launched a minimal window manager (ctwm) with a terminal (xterm) open and a clock near the top of the screen. I found there were virtually no other desktop applications installed, other than the xeyes widget and a calculator.
NetBSD ran csh as my terminal shell (we are offered our choice of shells during the install process). By default I could not use my arrow keys to retrieve commands I had previously run in csh when I was signed in as a regular user. When I signed in as the root user, shell history worked and when I tried running the bash shell as a regular user the shell's command history worked.
The default screen resolution was a touch off, set too low, but this could be changed by running the xrandr command line tool and passing it my laptop's screen resolution: "xrandr -s 1920x1080".
Early on I wanted to add more software to my system. Since setting up pkgin had failed during the install process, I checked the on-line FAQ for instructions. It suggested using the built-in pkg_add command to fetch the more capable pkgin package manager. Once I had confirmed I could resolve domain names and ping remote computers I ran the following commands as the root user to fetch the pkgin package manager and install it:
# export PKG_PATH=https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/$(uname -p)/$(uname -r | cut -d_ -f1)/All
# pkg_add pkgin
Nothing happened. Nothing at all. The command simply froze with no output. I cancelled the command (with Ctrl-C) and tried again. This time I ran the pkg_add command with the verbose (-v) flag and, once more, nothing happened. Next, I downloaded the pkgin package manually and tried to install it locally. This worked, eventually, though the process was quite slow.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Exploring software packages with pkgin and editing a text file
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Since I then had the pkgin package management installed I used it to try to refresh the NetBSD repository information and perform a search. This took an unusually long time. It worked, but the first refresh and search took seven minutes. There was a similar pause whenever I tried to install a package, such as Firefox or Thunderbird, where pkgin would pause for a few minutes.
At this point in my trial I was happy to be running a minimal system that was pleasantly light on resources. The base install had required just 1.5GB of disk space (plus swap space) and my graphical interface was using only a few hundred megabytes of RAM. On the other hand, package management was nearly unusable and this meant (since the system was so minimal by default) that it was likely to take several hours, maybe days, to fetch all the programs I would want.
I browsed some NetBSD forums and found similar reports of slow package management and network traffic, though not many solutions. Eventually, I discovered a Reddit thread which explained NetBSD seems to expect an IPv6 connection. When one is not available, the system will wait for IPv6 to timeout before falling back to IPv4. We can either try to force an application to use IPv4 (usually by passing the "-4" flag to affected applications) or change the system configuration in /etc/rc.conf to prefer IPv4. I went with the latter option, which worked, and was able to start installing applications quickly and then browsing the web from my new NetBSD system.
I soon had Firefox, Thunderbird, a text editor, the bash shell, and LibreOffice installed on my system. However, I could not run any of them as a regular user, only when I was signed in as root. This seemed strange as my regular user's PATH variable included the directory where new packages were installed (/usr/pkg/bin). I found that logging out of my regular user account and signing in again fixed the issue. I suspect that some sort of check for the directory (or programs in the directory) is run when we sign in and, if nothing is found, that directory in our PATH is ignored.
I was almost finished my first day of the trial at this point. I installed doas to assist me in performing admin tasks from my regular user account. Then installed the dbus service and the xfce4 meta-package in order to set up the Xfce desktop environment. There is a guide on setting up Xfce, though it mentions editing some files which either don't exist or which are empty which was a little confusing. So, rounding out my first afternoon with NetBSD, I had a working desktop, some basic applications, and a working package manager. It had taken about three or four hours to get this far, but the basics were working.
NetBSD 10.1 -- My first look at Xfce on NetBSD
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Day #2
After I had installed Xfce I discovered a weird issue the next morning. If I tried to login from the graphical login page, my sign-in would fail and return me to the xdm login screen. However, when I signed into my account from a text terminal I could run startx and sign into the Xfce desktop successfully. It's a minor inconvenience, and something is clearly wrong with my setup that causes the session to fail from xdm. However, since there is no error and signing in and running startx manually works, there isn't much with which to troubleshoot the problem.
I did look in the .xsession-error file in home directory and it reports a graphical session is already running and that is causing the xfce4-session process to fail, but the problem isn't triggered from the text console. I decided to put that aside and focus on other things.
My next hurdle was discovering I could not shutdown or restart my computer from within the Xfce desktop. This was fixed by adding my regular user to the operator group. This could be done by editing the /etc/group file and, from then onward, I could shutdown the system from Xfce without providing a password.
I found Firefox was a bit sluggish. It worked and I could stream video with it, but the performance was poor. I installed Epiphany (also known a GNOME Web) and it worked. Epiphany was faster, but some websites were not compatible with it. I had to balance performance against functionality, and switch browsers depending on which website I was visiting.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Running Firefox to browse the Web
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Earlier I mentioned installing Thunderbird and it is one of the few desktop applications I use consistently. It's been the home of my e-mail, calendar, and RSS feeds for over a decade. I often switch desktops, text editors, and web browsers, but Thunderbird is one of the few constants. The version of Thunderbird provided by NetBSD is a bit newer than the version I was running before this trial and I ran into some frustrations with the new interface (connection settings changing their values when I switched between fields, for example), but I got connected and was able to use the application.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Checking e-mail in Thunderbird
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Early in my second day I started wondering about updates to the base system. I could use pkgin to handle third-party applications, but I wanted to check for updates to the underlying core system. It had been a while since I last ran NetBSD and couldn't remember the process (and was aware it might have changed anyway). I found a few pages of documentation which explained how to perform upgrades to new major versions of NetBSD, but little information on applying patches to an existing version.
Though I didn't find any specific documentation about applying binary patches to an existing system, from what I could piece together on forums it looks like the user can simply download new package sets from the NetBSD download mirrors, then unpack the tarballs in their root directory. I checked to see if any new sets or security advisories had been published recently. According to the NetBSD website there have been no security patches for version 10.1. NetBSD 10.1 was published in December 2024. This suggests no problems have been found in the eight months since 10.1 was launched. I'm not sure if this is a positive result from having a minimal, clean base system or a side effect of not enough people looking for vulnerabilities. Either way, I had no new package sets to install.
Next, I turned my attention to multimedia capabilities. There is no audio mixer on NetBSD's Xfce desktop by default so that was something I wanted to address first, to see if my audio controls were muted or set to full blast. I found this guide on adjusting volume from the command line and then installed a simple audio level utility. I found I could stream audio and videos through Firefox. Locally, I was able to install a media player for enjoying video and audio files. These tools all worked well, with the exception of the mixer application. It was the only application on NetBSD which reversed my mouse movements (implementing natural scrolling rather than classic scrolling). This meant I had to scroll up to lower the volume and down to raise it. Otherwise multimedia worked smoothly on NetBSD.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Adjusting the audio volume
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By the end of the second day I had the desktop applications I wanted for work, I could shutdown NetBSD from within the desktop, and multimedia was working. I could check e-mail, browse the web, and edit spreadsheets. One limitation I had run into was Xfce on NetBSD provides only a light theme, there are no dark themes. We can install one manually or, as an alternative, most applications allowed me to adjust their specific themes to suit my preferences.
Day #3
This was approximately the point in my experiment when I would normally say "This is enough functionality for most people." By the end of my second day I had a functioning web browser, an office suite, multimedia, and package management was working. However, I wasn't doing my regular overview of an operating system for "most people", I was specifically looking at NetBSD to see if it could handle all of my computing needs. From here on in, things get a little more complicated because I write code, I script, I run virtual machines, and I analyze the ISO files of Linux distributions. This means I need to be able to mount ISO files and extract information from them, run Linux distributions in a virtual machine, and run scripts in multiple languages to gather data.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Testing the Epiphany web browser
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One of the tools I use on a regular basis is dpkg, a low-level package manager for Debian. This tool is useful for getting package data from the ISO files of Debian-based Linux distributions. NetBSD has a copy of dpkg in its repositories and it's even a version newer than the dpkg which shipped with Debian 12. However, NetBSD's package of dpkg does not work. It fails silently, with no error, when asked to list packages in the database on a Linux filesystem. I tested dpkg from MX Linux on the same filesystem and confirmed the dpkg database was valid and MX Linux was able to extract its information. NetBSD's copy of dpkg seems to be missing a critical piece. The rpm package manager is also in NetBSD's repositories, but I did not have occasion to use it this week.
To extract the information from ISO files it helps to be able to mount them. On Linux this can be accomplished with a simple mount command, but NetBSD's mount implementation does not know how to mount an archive. On NetBSD the mount command complains the ISO file is not a block device. FreeBSD's mount command has a similar limitation and I've learned to work around it. NetBSD's wiki has a page on how to mount an ISO file.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Mounting an ISO file
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To further complicate matters, most Linux distributions place a compressed archive inside their ISO files. These compressed archives are usually in the SquashFS format. While Linux can mount SquashFS archives directly, NetBSD cannot. Instead, on NetBSD we need to install SquashFS utilities and then unpack the SquashFS archive into its own directory in order to read its contents.
This may seem abstract so I want to do a side-by-side comparison. On Linux, if I wanted to extract the package data from a Debian-based distribution then I would download its ISO can run the following commands:
mount distro.iso iso
mount iso/archive.squashfs disk
dpkg --root disk -l > package-listing.txt
umount disk iso
The whole process, when scripted, takes about two seconds. On NetBSD the same attempt looks like this:
vnconfig vnd0 distro.iso
mount -t cd9660 /dev/vnd0a iso
unsquashfs iso/archive.squahfs
dpkg --root squashfs-root -l > package-listing.txt # (this step fails)
rm -rf squashfs-root
umount iso
vnconfig -u vnd0
The process takes about two minutes, mostly because we need to wait while the unsquashfs command runs and unpacks the internal archive.
All of this means I can open and explore the ISO files of Linux distributions, but getting their packaging information directly doesn't work on NetBSD. Instead, I need to look to other, slower approaches. Even the steps in the process which do work take several times longer on NetBSD than they do on Linux.
Another tool I use occasionally which, while not strictly necessary, speeds up my efforts is sshfs. This is a tool for mounting remote filesystems over an OpenSSH connection. This makes browsing and editing remote files easier when the remote computer has OpenSSH enabled, but no traditional network file shares. The sshfs tool is in the NetBSD repositories and I was able to install it. When I tried to connect to a remote computer sshfs reported it could not mount the remote directory. I could use secure shell to connect to the remote machine, so I knew OpenSSH was working (on both my local NetBSD client machine and the remote server), but something was preventing me from mounting the filesystem.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Accessing files through sshfs
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I tried running sshfs in debug mode to see any error messages and the tool reported it could not access /dev/puffs. The NetBSD documentation explains this a bit. The documentation says we should confirm puffs support is enabled in our kernel. (I checked and this feature is enabled in modern versions of NetBSD.) This left file permissions as a likely issue and I confirmed /dev/puffs is accessible to root only. When I ran sshfs as the root user I was able to mount the remote filesystem. This is different from most Linux distributions where FUSE-backed filesystems are typically mounted by regular user accounts rather than root. Anyway, another piece of the puzzle fell into place and I confirmed sshfs worked on NetBSD.
On the third day I tried playing a few games, such as chess and Battle For Wesnoth. These turn-based games worked well enough. Performance was limited when I tried any sort of interactive game, I don't think NetBSD's video drivers were up to the task of rendering more interactive games.
NetBSD 10.1 -- Finishing my day with chess and LibreOffice
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Day 4
By the fourth day my trial was settling into a routine. Some tasks were taking longer than usual, but NetBSD was functional enough for day-to-day computing. I was starting to notice a few quirks though. For example, each time I used the Epiphany web browser I ended up with a core dump file in my home directory. There were packages available for running PHP and Python scripts in NetBSD's repository, but no Thonny code editor (which I use for transferring code to embedded devices).
NetBSD 10.1 -- Booting MX Linux in QEMU
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Since I regularly test new features and distributions in VirtualBox I had hoped to find it available, but it is not in NetBSD's repositories. The operating system does provide a package for QEMU though and there is a documentation page for setting up and running QEMU. Running QEMU worked, to a point. I could boot guest operating systems with it and they would run, but desktop systems tended to be slow. This meant I could use QEMU to boot a distribution and get its package information or see which kernel it was running. However, running a full desktop system with GNOME or Plasma was not practical.
I was beginning to realize that, if I was going to use NetBSD on a regular basis, I'd need to transfer any distributions I wanted to test to a thumb drive and then reboot my laptop. Using my usual archive extraction methods and virtual machines was not going to be practical. This was a workable solution, but it greatly slowed down my progress. On days when several new distributions were released it could mean adding hours of work or, more accurately, periods of waiting to my day.
NetBSD 10.1 -- How I'd like to spend more of my day
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Conclusions
By Day #5 I felt I had a pretty good feel for what would work and what my limitations were on NetBSD. The portable little operating system was, in some ways, more capable than I had anticipated. On the other hand, it had some limitations and problems that were more debilitating than I had foreseen.
My biggest issue with NetBSD was probably hardware support. I didn't mention this near the start of this review as I didn't want to get bogged down in the details, but NetBSD has a few issues in this area. NetBSD is highly portable and it has been made to work on many CPU architectures - NetBSD famously runs on anything from servers to toasters - but it lacks hardware support for devices attached to those CPUs. In particular, wireless networking support is limited and my laptop's wireless card did not function.
This is a known issue and, from what I've read, a common problem for NetBSD users. It almost brought my trial to a very early stop. Luckily, for me and this experiment, I am accustomed to using various methods to get on-line. Anything from phone tethering to Ethernet cables to open source friendly USB wireless cards are in my toolkit. However, with the exception of one gamer I know who uses a network cable plugged directly into his router, I'm the only person I know of who uses anything other than wireless networking. Friends, colleagues, even my grandmother uses wireless and none of them are likely to have an Ethernet cable or open source USB dongle amongst them. My point is: NetBSD has a known weak point in wireless support and this is likely a deal breaker for most people.
People who can get over that first hurdle will likely find their next problem being sparse documentation. Throughout this review I have mentioned NetBSD's documentation and guides and they can be useful. They are also often out of date and thin on details. NetBSD is an operating system which requires a lot of manual work and does not provide much handholding. In these sorts of situations good documentation is essential. Unfortunately, NetBSD's documentation tends to act more as a quick reference for people who already know their way around the operating system rather than providing detailed information for newcomers or people who need to troubleshoot. Instructions are sometimes vague, don't mention specific files we will be using, or assume we know where to find things such as files, repositories, and package sets.
Those were the main stumbling points I ran into, especially early in my experiment. I will say NetBSD does have some strong points in its favour. The operating system is pleasantly small and clean. Almost everything is handled through simple commands and editing text files. What documentation there is tends to be written in clear language, and the package repository is well stocked. Some more obscure software is missing, but the main items, the basics people are likely to use on the desktop or for development, are present.
If I were setting up a simple, general purpose workstation or a server (ideally plugged into a network cable) then NetBSD would probably be a good solution for me. It's clean, simple, and stable. It is the kind of operating system you can set up and forget about until it's time to upgrade in a year or two. (New NetBSD point releases are published around once a year, though they do not appear to have a fixed schedule.) However, getting NetBSD set up and performing all the tasks we want initially can be a challenge.
Throughout my trial virtually anything I wanted to do was never as simple a just "install the package and run it". There was almost always some troubleshooting steps involved, some extra service to enable, a configuration file to edit, a setting to fix. Mounting a FUSE resource has permission problems; using QEMU requires enabling a module; a SquashFS archive can't just be mounted, it needs to be unpacked; Xfce ran from the command line, but not when launched from xdm; networking functioned, though very slowly until IPv6 was disregarded. It's possible to make all of these things work, often with just a few tweaks, but my point is that on most Linux distributions these items work automatically. Even on some operating systems closer to NetBSD, such as FreeBSD, these tasks tend to work without the user performing extra steps.
I suppose NetBSD was the ideal operating system for this self-appointed challenge. Virtually everything functioned, or there was a workaround available, but the operating system made me work for it. I probably spent an extra six or seven hours this week just trying to find ways to perform tasks I'd usually consider basic functionality on a Linux distribution. Usually, in the end, the tasks did work and I could celebrate the achievement, until it was time to try to install the next application or enable the next service and then the process would start over again.
After five days I was happy to return to Linux where even the less hand-holdy distributions tended to do what I wanted with minimal fuss. At the same time, I very much appreciated this chance to explore NetBSD in more depth than I have in the past. It's a platform I've only played with briefly in the past and mostly on a surface level. Getting into its nuts and bolts, squeezing more functionality (and sometimes unusual functionality) out of the operating system was a fun challenge. It has certainly given me more confidence in my ability to work with NetBSD, especially in small server or embedded environments where, in the past, I might not have considered using it in favour of more mainstream options.
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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
NetBSD has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.1/10 from 14 review(s).
Have you used NetBSD? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access, Mageia deals with service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support
The AlmaLinux team have announced they are enabling an add-on package repository for AlmaLinux OS which will make acquiring third-party software easier. "As part of our efforts to continue improving the experience for AlmaLinux users, we are enabling the CRB repository by default. This reduces the friction in using software from Fedora Extra Packages from Enterprise Linux (EPEL).
What is the CRB repository? The CRB repository is an extra collection of packages that have not been historically made available by default for enterprise Linux distributions. A lot of the packages are primarily useful for developing software, but CRB also includes requirements for a number of popular packages (such as the KDE Plasma Desktop) that are not needed for the core enterprise Linux solution set." The extra repository should avoid errors about missing dependencies when installing new software.
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The Haiku operating system gained some significant performance improvements when accessing storage this week, thanks to hard work by developer "waddlesplash" who took on the challenge of making disk operations faster. The results are impressive: "git status has long been, for large repositories, a much slower operation on Haiku than on Linux. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the most significant one is lock contention in disk caches.
Last month, waddlesplash spent a bunch of time refactoring the disk block and directory entry caching logic in the kernel to be able to use atomic operations rather than exclusive locks in the most common cases (reading an already-cached block, and inserting a new entry into the entry cache.) These sorts of changes are tricky to write and tougher to test (any bugs in them that aren't immediately obvious will likely be due to race conditions, and can usually only be found by analyzing code carefully, as all other means of trying to catch them generally change timing enough that they won't occur).
The results are clearly more than worth the trouble, though: in one test setup with git status in Haiku's buildtools repository (which contains the entirety of the gcc and binutils source code, among other things - over 160,000 files) went from around 33 seconds with a cold disk cache, to around 20 seconds; and with a hot disk cache, from around 15 seconds to around 2.5 seconds." Information on this and other changes to Haiku are available in the project's August newsletter.
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Approximately a month after the Arch Linux team reported their infrastructure was suffering from a denial of service attack, the Mageia project is reporting some of their servers are off-line. While unconfirmed at the time of writing, the issue appears to be increased traffic from bots. "As you can see, our blogs are still up and running. However, the servers hosting most of the rest of our infrastructure, like the forums, wiki and bugzilla, are not. I assume we are under attack from bots again, but that needs to be confirmed by one of our sysadmins." The Mageia team is aware of the issue and looking into the cause.
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The GNOME project has released GNOME 49, the latest version of the popular desktop. GNOME 49 introduces several changes, in particular the old video player (Totem) and the old document viewer are being replaced. "In GNOME 49, Showtime replaces the long-standing Totem as the default GNOME video player app, bringing a sleek, modern experience built on GTK 4 and Libadwaita instead of Totem's aging GTK 3 base. The new Video Player prioritizes a distraction-free viewing experience: its chromeless window hides controls during playback and fades them back in only when needed. It supports essential features like adjustable playback speed, multiple audio and subtitle tracks, rotating video, and screenshot capture - all the core functionality users expect. Papers replaces the long-serving Evince as the default Document Viewer. Originally based on Evince code, Papers delivers a modernized design built with GTK 4 and Libadwaita, instead of Evince's older GTK 3 foundation." Additional changes are covered in the project's release announcement.
* * * * *
Cong Wang has posted to the kernel mailing list, introducing multikernel support. "This patch series introduces multikernel architecture support, enabling
multiple independent kernel instances to coexist and communicate on a single physical machine. Each kernel instance can run on dedicated CPU cores while sharing the underlying hardware resources. The multikernel architecture provides several key benefits: improved fault isolation between different workloads; enhanced security through kernel-level separation; better resource utilization than traditional VM (KVM, Xen etc.); potential zero-down kernel update with KHO (Kernel Hand Over)." This approach not only provides potential for running applications isolated from the normal host kernel without the overhead of a virtual machine, it also could provide distributions with a way to upgrade kernels without rebooting the computer and without hacks such as live kernel patching.
* * * * *
These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Avoiding the spread of AI services
Avoiding-the-bots asks: I'm hoping to avoid AI and don't want to use any distributions infected with it. Which distributions are likely to not include AI?
DistroWatch answers: While some people have found uses for AI agents, either as tools or toys, there are a lot of issues surrounding the use of AI. AI agents scape huge amounts of data from the Internet, send identifying information to the companies running them, and frequently report incorrect information as facts. This makes most forms of AI a legal, security, and privacy nightmare, not to mention the environmental concerns.
In short, I sympathize with you wanting to avoid any operating systems with AI agents and tools baked into them by default.
The good news, for people wishing to avoid having AI tools in their operating system, is most Linux distributions and the BSDs do not have a strong motivation to include AI tools. Figuring out which distributions are likely to bundle or recommend AI packages is usually fairly straight forward: AI software is usually a characteristic of commercial software.
There are a few reasons for this and one of the big ones is how a distribution's leaders measure success. Commercial distributions ultimately measure success by whether or not they are profitable. These days the hype around AI has become a big selling point with software vendors using the term "AI" to sell all sorts of services and concepts. On the flip side, a lot of companies are asking for AI services in the products they buy. It's similar to how the term "blockchain" was attached to everything software-related about 10 years ago - companies were afraid of being left behind and software vendors pushed the blockchain concept into any product they could create.
The motivations for creating a non-commercial distribution are different. Projects which are not commercial exist for a variety of reasons - the love of creating and sharing software, providing a useful platform, collecting donations from end-users, striving to build a better operating system, or even striving to build a better world. What all of these motivations have in common is a non-commercial project is likely to be more successful by caring for (and catering to) its end users rather than to corporate clients or a sales team. Most users, particularly Linux (and other open source users), tend to avoid software that is known to collect information on them, report home, introduce security vulnerabilities, or provide inaccurate information.
I think it's fair to say most of us do not wish to be spied on or lied to. As a result, solo developer and community-run projects typically have more motivation to avoid packaging AI than including it. Or, at the very least, there is strong incentive to offer AI only as an add-on rather than as a core feature.
We can see this divide already, though it's still early. Very few not-for-profit and community-run distributions have included any AI-related tools so far, with a few exceptions. However, SUSE, Canonical, and Red Hat have either promoted AI computing or packaged AI tools for their customers.
For people looking to avoid AI services and packages, your best bet is probably to stick with non-commercial projects.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Murena 3.1.1
The Murena team have annouonced a update to their mobile /e/OS platform. The new version, 3.1.1, focuses on bug fixes and minor improvements to the user experience. "Users of the new Fairphone (Gen. 6) will especially benefit, with key features like Mobile Data and VoLTE now enabled by default. The /e/OS Camera has also been enhanced to support 50 MP photos, and installation of /e/OS is now fully supported via the /e/OS Installer. Live Caption becomes more user-friendly as caption text can now be repositioned for better readability and accessibility. For families using /e/OS, Parental Control includes a crucial update. A clear warning now reminds parents to save the security code they define, as there's no way to recover it if forgotten. Third-party app compatibility has been improved on several devices, including the Fairphone 3, 4, 5 and the new Gen. 6. This ensures a smoother and more consistent app experience across these models. Good news for CMF Phone 1 users: /e/OS 3.1.1 brings key fixes that improve your daily experience. USB-C wired audio now works properly, switching between front and back cameras is smooth again, and Wi-Fi calling with sim.de is fully functional. We've also corrected the Murena boot logo display for a cleaner startup look. System updates include a new browser version, an updated microG, and faster fake location switching in Advanced Privacy. App Lounge and Calendar behavior have been refined, and tablet navigation and setup flows are now smoother." The release announcement offers additional information.
SparkyLinux 2025.09
Paweł Pijanowski has announced the release of SparkyLinux 2025.09, the latest release of the project's set of Linux distributions based on Debian's "Testing" branch: "There are new SparkyLinux 2025.09 ISO images available of the semi-rolling line, code-named 'Tiamat'. Changes: packages updated from the Debian and SparkyLinux testing repositories as of September 14, 2025; Linux kernel 6.16.7 (6.16.7, 6.12.47-LTS and 6.6.105-LTS in SparkyLinux repositories); Calamares installer updated to version 3.4.0, installation on an encrypted disk has been restored; Firefox 128.14.0-ESR (143.0 in SparkyLinux repositories); KDE - QuiteRSS replaced by Akregator; LXQt - QuiteRSS replaced by Liferea; GCC 15 (GCC 14 removed); all SparkyLinux graphical components updated to the new testing version. Important: installation on UEFI machines requires an active internet connection; installation via Calamares (menu icon 'Sparky Installer') is recommended on UEFI machines." Here is the full release announcement.
Mauna Linux 25
The Mauna Linux project has announced the release of Mauna Linux 25, a major update of the Brazilian project's desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian's "Stable" branch. The new release delivers a brand-new "GNOME" edition, alongside the well-established Cinnamon, LXQt, MATE and Xfce flavours: "We are pleased to announce the new version 25 of Mauna Linux. Mauna Linux 25, code-named 'Polaris' is based on and is fully compatible with Debian 13.1 'Trixie'. In this new version, we bring the GNOME Desktop, in addition to several updates from both the Debian team and Mauna. The star of this new version is the GNOME 48 desktop, which so many have requested and is now available to everyone. Gnome 48, codenamed 'Bengaluru', arrives with a set of minor new features or improvements, with a focus on user comfort. There are several new features in GNOME 48: notification grouping - it is now possible to stack notifications when they come from the same application, similar to what already happens on Android or iOS; improved image viewer...." See the release announcement for more details.
Mauna Linux 25 -- Running the Cinnamon desktop
(full image size: 990kB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
Omarchy 3.0.1
David Heinemeier Hansson has announced the release of Omarchy 3.0, a significant upgrade to the project's Arch-based Linux distribution featuring the Hyprland tiling window manager and designed primarily for software developers. Unlike the previous releases, this one provides a much larger ISO image, suitable for offline installations. "Omarchy 3.0 is a major upgrade for new installations and a wonderful level-up for existing users. The new ISO image doesn't require internet at all and you can install it in less than two minutes. You can now also install Omarchy on most pre-M MacBooks with support for keyboards, WiFi, and the T1 and T2 security chips. This is a decade-long hardware portfolio that we're trying to cover as well as we can out of the box. Existing installations can upgrade as per-normal using Update, Omarchy. New installations should download the fresh, all-inclusive ISO image before beginning, this is a 7 GB ISO image that includes the entire system for offline installation. Note: Ghostty compatibility requires Ghostty 1.2.0, which is still not released on the Arch repository. New super-fast installation ISO image: add everything needed for new all-inclusive ISO image that doesn't need internet...." Continue to the release announcement for further details.
Security Onion 2.4.180
Doug Burks has announced the release of Security Onion 2.4.180, an updated build of the project's Linux distribution designed for threat hunting, enterprise security monitoring and log management: "Security Onion 2.4.180 is now available and includes several new features, updated components and many quality-of-life improvements. Cancel your own long-running SOC query - Security Onion can now alert on offline agents, if you run a query in Security Onion Console (Alerts, Dashboards, Hunt) that takes a long time, you now have the ability to cancel your own query by clicking the X on the spinner animation. Enable static hostname mapping without reverse DNS lookups - you can now enable static hostname mappings without having to enable reverse DNS lookups. This release updates several components including Elastic 8.18.6, Suricata 7.0.12, Zeek 7.0.10. The Elastic and Suricata updates resolve security issues so we highly recommend upgrading. In the recent 2.4.170 release, we added a new hypervisor feature for Security Onion Pro customers. This release improves on that by allowing you to run the hypervisor on a manager." Read the full release announcement for further information.
Tails 7.0
A major update of Tails, a Debian-based portable Linux distribution that protects against surveillance and censorship, is now available. Tails 7.0 is based on the recently-released Debian 13 and includes GNOME 48: "We are very excited to present you Tails 7.0, the first version of Tails based on Debian 13 'Trixie' and GNOME 48 'Bengaluru'. Tails 7.0 brings new versions of many applications included in Tails. Tails 7.0 starts 10 - 15 seconds faster on most computers. We achieve this by changing the compression algorithm of the Tails USB and ISO images from xz to zstd. As a consequence, the image is 10% bigger than it would be with the previous algorithm. While testing this change, we noticed that Tails on USB sticks of poor quality can also start 20 seconds slower than on quality USB sticks. If you are in a place where counterfeit electronics are common, we recommend that you buy your USB stick from an international supermarket chain, which should have a more reliable supply chain. Included software: replace GNOME Terminal with GNOME Console; replace GNOME Image Viewer with GNOME Loupe; update Tor Browser to 14.5.7...." Continue to the release announcement for more information.
Tails 7.0 -- Running the GNOME desktop
(full image size: 147kB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
IPFire 2.29 Core 197
The IPFire project has released a new update for its operating system for firewalls and routers. The project's new version, IPFire 2.29 Core Update 197, introduces an upgrade to OpenVPN and makes running under light loads more energy efficient. "IPFire will now by default clock down its CPUs. When previously all CPU cores have been running on full clock speed by default, we were able to keep latency to a minimum as they were always ready to process any packets. As modern processors have massively improved how quickly they can clock up and down and CPUs with many cores being widely available, we have now decided to change this based on our benchmark results. Where supported, we will use Intel P-State or otherwise fall back to the new schedutil governor which has recently been introduced into the Linux kernel and has proven to not increase any packet forwarding latency in our benchmarks. When clocked down, systems will reduce their power consumption and therefore lowering the amount of emitted heat. The cpufrequtil package which used to implement this feature has been dropped as it is no longer needed." Further details are offered through the project's release announcement.
DietPi 9.17
The DietPi project, which produces a set of extremely lightweight Debian-based distributions designed primarily for single-board computers, has announced the release of DietPi 9.17. Based on Debian 13, the new version comes with a long list of enhancements: "The September 20rd, 2025 release of DietPi version 9.17 comes with faster and less disk space consuming DietPi backups, a Roon Server early access toggle, solved SPI storage flashing issues, and more. Our images are now shipped without ext3/ext4 journal and instead the dietpi-fs_partition_resize script creates it after the root filesystem has been expanded. This allows smaller images, but more importantly a properly located and sized journal, depending on the final root filesystem size and layout, potentially enhancing performance." Read the full release notes for a complete list of enhancements and bug fixes. DietPi is available for a many popular devices and platforms, including Raspberry Pi, Odroid, PINE64, Radxa, Allo, ASUS, NanoPi, Orange Pi. It is also provided as a live or installation image for standard x86_64 computers and for some RISC-V boards.
* * * * *
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: 3,293
- Total data uploaded: 48.3TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
What are your thoughts about NetBSD?
This week our Feature Story talked about NetBSD, a highly portable operating system which, with some work, can be made to do a wide array of tasks. We'd like to hear your thoughts about NetBSD - do you use it, do you like it, have you tried it in the past. Those of you who do run NetBSD, leave us a comment and tell us what you appreciate about this operating system.
You can see the results of our previous poll on using BCacheFS, an advanced filesystem, in our previous edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Do you or have you run NetBSD?
| I am currently running NetBSD and like it: | 65 (5%) |
| I am currently running NetBSD and do not like it: | 4 (0%) |
| I have run NetBSD in the past and enjoyed it: | 175 (12%) |
| I have run NetBSD in the past and did not like it: | 188 (13%) |
| I plan to run NetBSD in the future: | 146 (10%) |
| I have not run NetBSD and have no plans to try it: | 847 (59%) |
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|
| Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 29 September 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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If you've enjoyed this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, please consider sending us a tip.
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| Archives |
| • 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 |
| • 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 |
| • Full list of all issues |
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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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| Random Distribution | 
SuperRescue CD
SuperRescue was a single very large bootable system-on-a-disk. It's based on the observation that the vast majority of systems allow you to do so much more than the minimal system. Therefore, it isn't for everything, but for most desktop systems, it provides a much nicer rescue environment than your average rescue floppy. It requires an i386 PC with 24 MB of RAM and a bootable CD-ROM. PCMCIA support was implemented but somewhat limited. It was based on Red Hat Linux.
Status: Discontinued
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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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