 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 776, 13 August 2018 |
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Welcome to this year's 33rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Last week we discussed a Linux distribution called Secure-K OS which runs from a USB thumb drive and can be used as a portable operating system for secure on-line communication. This week we jump over to the BSD community and explore another live, portable system called NomadBSD. NomadBSD is based on FreeBSD and strives to provide a live desktop environment for basic computing tasks and data recovery. Read on to hear more about this portable flavour of FreeBSD. In our News section we talk about Debian finding and preparing to squash more bugs while openSUSE extends life support for openSUSE 42.3. The team behind the Librem 5 phone, which is designed to run a GNU/Linux operating system, has been working with upstream projects to improve the mobile user interface and we have details on their progress. Plus we cover NAS4Free changing its name to XigmaNAS. In our Questions and Answers column we discuss the theoretical upper limits of Linux memory and storage capabilities. Plus we are happy to share last week's releases and the torrents we are seeding. The Opinion Poll this week asks, since we have already reviewed Linux Mint 19 this year, whether our readers are interested in hearing about Linux Mint Debian Edition 3, which is expected to be released soon. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
NomadBSD 1.1
One of the most recent additions to the DistroWatch database is NomadBSD. According to the NomadBSD website: "NomadBSD is a 64-bit live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery."
The latest release of NomadBSD (or simply "Nomad", as I will refer to the project in this review) is version 1.1. It is based on FreeBSD 11.2 and is offered in two builds, one for generic personal computers and one for Macbooks. The release announcement mentions version 1.1 offers improved video driver support for Intel and AMD cards. The operating system ships with Octopkg for graphical package management and the system should automatically detect, and work with, VirtualBox environments.
Nomad 1.1 is available as a 2GB download, which we then decompress to produce a 4GB file which can be written to a USB thumb drive. There is no optical media build of Nomad as it is designed to be run entirely from the USB drive, and write data persistently to the drive, rather than simply being installed from the USB media.
Initial setup
Booting from the USB drive brings up a series of text-based menus which ask us to configure key parts of the operating system. We are asked to select our time zone, keyboard layout, keyboard model, keyboard mapping and our preferred language. While we can select options from a list, the options tend to be short and cryptic. Rather than "English (US)", for example, we might be given "en_US". We are also asked to create a password for the root user account and another one for a regular user which is called "nomad". We can then select which shell nomad will use. The default is zsh, but there are plenty of other options, including csh and bash. We have the option of encrypting our user's home directory.
I feel it is important to point out that these settings, and nomad's home directory, are stored on the USB drive. The options and settings we select will not be saved to our local hard drive and our configuration choices will not affect other operating systems already installed on our computer. At the end, the configuration wizard asks if we want to run the BSDstats service. This option is not explained at all, but it contacts BSDstats to provide some basic statistics on BSD users.
The system then takes a few minutes to apply its changes to the USB drive and automatically reboots the computer. While running the initial setup wizard, I had nearly identical experiences when running Nomad on a physical computer and running the operating system in a VirtualBox virtual machine. However, after the initial setup process was over, I had quite different experiences depending on the environment so I want to divide my experiences into two different sections.
NomadBSD in VirtualBox
When running Nomad in a virtual environment, the operating system offered slightly different results almost every time it booted. The first time, Nomad booted to a blank graphical environment with a working mouse pointer. There were no desktop elements and both left- and right-clicking produced no results. I could switch to a text console which showed a stream of messages saying "pushing table, processing notify events, popping table" over and over. The text consoles did not respond to keyboard input.
On the second boot, Nomad loaded a minimal desktop environment. A panel at the bottom of the screen presented me with a logout menu and a system tray. Right-clicking on the desktop brought up an application menu. Trying to open more than one application caused the system to lock up.
NomadBSD 1.1 -- The default desktop and application menu
(full image size: 634kB, resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
On the third boot, the desktop was displayed again, but the mouse pointer did not work at all.
The fourth time I launched Nomad the system booted and displayed the desktop. The graphical environment worked for about a minute, then the operating system froze and would not respond to any input.
I eventually found that Nomad would never run for more than a few minutes before locking up. Trying to run more than one application at a time would also bring the system immediately to a halt.
Despite the project's website mentioning VirtualBox integration, and the existence of a display configuration tool in the application menu, I could not get Nomad to display a desktop at a resolution above about 800x600 pixels. I noticed that when Nomad was displaying its minimal desktop, my host computer's CPU was always running at 100%, but when Nomad was displaying a text console my host's CPU idled around 5%.
Physical desktop computer
At first, Nomad failed to boot on my desktop computer. From the operating system's boot loader, I enabled Safe Mode which allowed Nomad to boot. At that point, Nomad was able to start up, but would only display a text console. The desktop environment failed to start when running in Safe Mode.
Networking was also disabled by default and I had to enable a network interface and DHCP address assignment to connect to the Internet. Instructions for enabling networking can be found in FreeBSD's Handbook. Once we are on-line we can use the pkg command line package manager to install and update software. Had the desktop environment worked then the Octopkg graphical package manager would also be available to make browsing and installing software a point-n-click experience.
Had I been able to run the desktop for prolonged amounts of time I could have made use of such pre-installed items as the Firefox web browser, the VLC media player, LibreOffice and Thunderbird. Nomad offers a fairly small collection of desktop applications, but what is there is mostly popular, capable software.
When running the operating system I noted that, with one user logged in, Nomad only runs 15 processes with the default configuration. These processes require less than 100MB of RAM, and the whole system fits comfortably on a 4GB USB drive.
Conclusions
Ultimately using Nomad was not a practical option for me. The operating system did not work well with my hardware, or the virtual environment. In the virtual machine, Nomad crashed consistently after just a few minutes of uptime. On the desktop computer, I could not get a desktop environment to run. The command line tools worked well, and the system performed tasks very quickly, but a command line only environment is not well suited to my workflow.
I like the idea of what NomadBSD is offering. There are not many live desktop flavours of FreeBSD, apart from GhostBSD. It was nice to see developers trying to make a FreeBSD-based, plug-and-go operating system that would offer a desktop and persistent storage. I suspect the system would work and perform its stated functions on different hardware, but in my case my experiment was necessarily short lived.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Visitor supplied rating
NomadBSD has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.8/10 from 39 review(s).
Have you used NomadBSD? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Debian tackles bugs, openSUSE extends life of 42.3 release, update on the Librem 5 phone, NAS4Free renamed to XigmaNAS
The Debian team has become very good at finding bugs and potential problems in their software packages. While discovering these issues is good, it means that more effort is required to get the distribution fixed up and ready for release. There is some concern this will delay the release of Debian 10 "Buster" unless volunteers put more effort into squashing bugs. A post titled Buster is headed for a long hard freeze states: "We are getting better and better accumulating RC bugs in testing. This is unfortunate because the length of the freeze is strongly correlated with the number of open RC bugs affecting testing. If you believe that Debian should have short freezes, then it will require putting effort behind that belief and fix some RC bugs - even in packages that are not maintained directly by you or your team and especially in key packages." Some statistics on the current list of known bugs are also provided.
* * * * *
The openSUSE team is extending the life cycle of their distribution's 42.3 release. openSUSE 42.3 was originally scheduled to reach the end of its supported life in January 2019, but this date has been pushed back to June 2019. A post on the openSUSE News page reads: "The last minor version of the Leap 42 series was scheduled to be maintained until January 2019, but that has changed thanks to SUSE committing to additional months of maintenance and security updates. Leap 42.3 is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack (SP) 3 and SUSE has agreed to keep publishing updates for Leap 42.3 until June 2019. This means the extended End of Life for Leap 42.3 will increase the total lifetime of the Leap 42 series to 44 months. Users of the openSUSE Leap 42 series are encouraged to use the additional months to prepare the upgrade to Leap 15, which was released in May."
* * * * *
The Librem 5 is a smart phone being designed to run open source software, such as a GNU/Linux distribution with a GNOME-based desktop interface. The Librem 5 is still in development and is expected to be released sometime in 2019. At the moment the developers are testing new designs and filling in gaps in functionality which will hopefully be included in the corresponding upstream projects. "Some more bugs were fixed in libhandy too as well as more preparation for GTK+4. One of the issues found and fixed was memory leak was found and fixed. Also there was a bug found and fixed in HdyColumn where the wrong width was being used for column height calculation. If you are following the librem-5-dev email list, then you may have seen that libhandy v0.0.2 has been released too! Nobody likes unsolicited ads so Better ad blocking was suggested to upstream to be used with Epiphany and is undergoing discussion. The phone will ship with an SMS app which also has E2EE messaging. We are working with the Fractal project upstream to get encryption implemented, but it’s not clear whether the Fractal 1-1 successor app (GNOME Messages) will have all the things we need by launch." More details can be found in this blog post.
* * * * *
The NAS4Free project makes a network attached storage (NAS) operating system based on FreeBSD. The project is in the process of changing its name to XigmaNAS. The wiki and forums have already been moved to their new domain and the project's main website will soon follow. Details on the process and the reason behind the name change can be found in this forum thread.
* * * * *
These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Maximum storage limits on Linux
Filling-up-all-available-space asks: What is the maximum upper limit for disk and swap space? Just how much stuff can Linux hold?
DistroWatch answers: There are theoretical limits on the amount of disk, memory and swap space you can access with a Linux distribution. In reality though we are likely to run into practical limits (such as the cost of equipment or physical room size) before we run into the theoretical restrictions of the Linux kernel.
The amount of memory Linux can access can vary from one processor architecture to another, so you will run into different memory size restrictions depending on the number of registers in your CPU and how big they are. On a x86_64 processor, which most modern desktop and laptop computers have, I think the maximum amount of memory Linux can access is defined by 44 bits. Which should provide an upper limit of about 16TB of RAM. Or about a thousand times more than the average laptop has at my local electronics store.
The amount of data we can write to disk storage will vary quite a bit depending on which file system we are using. The commonly used ext4 file system has an upper limit of around 1EiB, which if memory serves is a million terabytes. Another file system, called XFS, is often used by enterprise-class distributions and can store up to 8EiB of data. If that's still not enough, the advanced Btrfs format provides up to 16EiB of storage. In this arena ZFS probably has the highest theoretical limit with 256 trillion YiB of storage. A yobibyte (YiB) is a trillion, trillion bytes. At this point one might wonder if the ZFS developers were just making up new numbers to drive home just how much storage space their file system could handle.
I'd like to point out that the above file system storage limits are for just one file system. We could mount multiple massive file systems and/or attach additional storage over the network via a NAS. You're probably going to run out of money for new hard drives before reaching the upper limit of data we can write to attached file systems.
The maximum limit of swap space is a little less mind boggling. The maximum amount of swap space we can use will again vary by hardware architecture, but the mkswap manual page offers some pretty good estimates. The maximum number of swap areas (files or partitions dedicated to swap space) is 32. The maximum number of pages in a swap area is about 4 billion. A page's size can vary, but will typically be 4,096 bytes. So the maximum amount of swap space is probably 4,096 bytes per page, multiplied by about 4 billion pages in a swap partition, multiplied by 32 swap spaces: 512TB.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
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: 978
- Total data uploaded: 21.1TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll |
Review of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3
The Linux Mint project maintains two main branches of its distribution, one based on Ubuntu and the other based on Debian. Earlier this year we reviewed Mint 19 which is based on Ubuntu 18.04. With a new version of Linux Mint Debian Edition due to be released soon, should we review the Debian-based edition too, or is covering the available features in one branch of Mint enough?
You can see the results of our previous poll on using portable operating systems in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Review of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3
| Yes - review LMDE 3: | 2075 (80%) |
| No - do not review LMDE 3: | 162 (6%) |
| No preference: | 353 (14%) |
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| DistroWatch.com News |
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 20 August 2018. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. 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)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Archives |
| • 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 |
| • Issue 1095 (2024-11-04): Fedora 41 Kinoite, transferring applications between computers, openSUSE Tumbleweed receives multiple upgrades, Ubuntu testing compiler optimizations, Mint partners with Framework |
| • Issue 1094 (2024-10-28): DebLight OS 1, backing up crontab, AlmaLinux introduces Litten branch, openSUSE unveils refreshed look, Ubuntu turns 20
| | • Issue 1093 (2024-10-21): Kubuntu 24.10, atomic vs immutable distributions, Debian upgrading Perl packages, UBports adding VoLTE support, Android to gain native GNU/Linux application support |
| • Issue 1092 (2024-10-14): FunOS 24.04.1, a home directory inside a file, work starts of openSUSE Leap 16.0, improvements in Haiku, KDE neon upgrades its base |
| • Issue 1091 (2024-10-07): Redox OS 0.9.0, Unified package management vs universal package formats, Redox begins RISC-V port, Mint polishes interface, Qubes certifies new laptop |
| • Issue 1090 (2024-09-30): Rhino Linux 2024.2, commercial distros with alternative desktops, Valve seeks to improve Wayland performance, HardenedBSD parterns with Protectli, Tails merges with Tor Project, Quantum Leap partners with the FreeBSD Foundation |
| • Issue 1089 (2024-09-23): Expirion 6.0, openKylin 2.0, managing configuration files, the future of Linux development, fixing bugs in Haiku, Slackware packages dracut |
| • Issue 1088 (2024-09-16): PorteuX 1.6, migrating from Windows 10 to which Linux distro, making NetBSD immutable, AlmaLinux offers hardware certification, Mint updates old APT tools |
| • Issue 1087 (2024-09-09): COSMIC desktop, running cron jobs at variable times, UBports highlights new apps, HardenedBSD offers work around for FreeBSD change, Debian considers how to cull old packages, systemd ported to musl |
| • Issue 1086 (2024-09-02): Vanilla OS 2, command line tips for simple tasks, FreeBSD receives investment from STF, openSUSE Tumbleweed update can break network connections, Debian refreshes media |
| • Issue 1085 (2024-08-26): Nobara 40, OpenMandriva 24.07 "ROME", distros which include source code, FreeBSD publishes quarterly report, Microsoft updates breaks Linux in dual-boot environments |
| • Issue 1084 (2024-08-19): Liya 2.0, dual boot with encryption, Haiku introduces performance improvements, Gentoo dropping IA-64, Redcore merges major upgrade |
| • Issue 1083 (2024-08-12): TrueNAS 24.04.2 "SCALE", Linux distros for smartphones, Redox OS introduces web server, PipeWire exposes battery drain on Linux, Canonical updates kernel version policy |
| • Issue 1082 (2024-08-05): Linux Mint 22, taking snapshots of UFS on FreeBSD, openSUSE updates Tumbleweed and Aeon, Debian creates Tiny QA Tasks, Manjaro testing immutable images |
| • Issue 1081 (2024-07-29): SysLinuxOS 12.4, OpenBSD gain hardware acceleration, Slackware changes kernel naming, Mint publishes upgrade instructions |
| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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| Random Distribution | 
Element
Element was an Ubuntu-based distribution for home theatre or media-centre personal computers featuring a ten-foot user interface and designed to be connected to a HDTV for a digital media and Internet experience within the comforts of a living room or entertainment area. Element comes pre-loaded with dozens of applications that will allow listening to, viewing, and managing music, videos, photos, and Internet media.
Status: Discontinued
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Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
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| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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