Operating Systems News Archives

Over four years after the debut of OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 and in the interim since also working on the ROME rolling-release platform, OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 finally debuted today.

The ReactOS project today published their latest newesletter that outlines development progress made in recent months for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows device drivers and application/user-space software.

Tucked away within the October 2023 monthly status updates for the Linux Mint project is word they have begun working on their Wayland support.

OpenWrt 23.05 has been released as the newest feature release for this embedded Linux distribution that is popular for use on networking devices.

Redox OS, the open-source Rust-written operating system led by developer Jeremy Soller, has been drafting some exciting plans for the rest of this year and moving into 2024.

The Linux Mint project has released an "Edge" ISO of Linux Mint 21.2 that is intended for users of new PC hardware where it's unable to boot the current Linux Mint release due to its older kernel version.

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired a longtime contributor to this "open-source Windows" project to spend the next five months working on the ReactOS GUI setup mode as an alternative to their classic text-based setup mode.

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 6 has been released as the latest version of this Linux Mint derivative that is based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu.

As part of the effort for enabling UEFI support with ReactOS, an open-source operating system re-implementing binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows, a development build of ReactOS is up and running on Valve's Steam Deck handheld game console.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 "LMDE 6" is now available in beta form for this desktop Linux distribution spin from the Linux Mint crew derived directly from Debian packages rather than Ubuntu.

Manjaro 23.0 "Uranos" has been released as the latest version of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.

Armbian 23.08 is out as the latest quarterly update to this Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for use on Arm single board computers and other devices.

For those with extra time over the US Labor Day holiday weekend, Linux From Scratch 12 has been published for those wishing to hand-roll their own Linux system build from source. Linux From Scratch 12.0 is accompanied by the Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) 12.0 release too, including the systemd variant, for further extending LFS installations with more packages.

The CentOS ISA special interest group (SIG) has been evaluating the performance of CentOS Stream in the event its x86_64 baseline were to be raised from x86-64-v2 to x86-64-v3. Currently CentOS Stream 9 targets x86-64-v2 but in upping the support requirements to x86-64-v3, it would allow the ability to engage AVX/AVX2 by default and make use of other newer instruction set features. The x86-64-v3 baseline roughly correlates to Intel / AMD CPUs from 2015 and newer.

Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a student developer took the initiative in working on an automated Gentoo Linux system updater to help begineers and ease the roll-out of security updates to users.

While the release cycle dragged on for several extra months, available this weekend is the release of Mageia 9 for this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva that in turn was an evolution going back to the glorious Mandrake days. Mageia 9 is a nice update pulling in many package updates along with other fundamental changes like shifting to SQLite for its RPM package database.

OpenMandriva developers today formally announced the release of their rolling-release OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 Linux OS installation images, which are also being treated as a release candidate for the OMLx 5.0 non-rolling distribution variant. Making OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 more exciting is that they are now offering separate install media as well that features the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment in its current experimental state but is being offered by OpenMandriva as a "technical preview" around the future direction of the desktop.

Distrobox as the open-source project allowing easy access to running other distributions/apps via Podman and Docker has merged support for ChromeOS.

OpenELA has been announced as the Open Enterprise Linux Association that brings together CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE for collaborating around RHEL-compatible Linux distributions.

Rhino Linux has rolled out of beta as a community-based, rolling-release Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu.

Clément Lefèbvre shared today as part of the monthly status update for the Linux Mint project that they'll be releasing an "EDGE" ISO to help in running this desktop Linux distribution on newer hardware.

Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles.

The release candidate for Mageia 9 is now available for this Linux distribution that's an offshoot long ago from Mandrake/Mandriva lineage.

Linux Mint 21.2 has been released today as the newest update to this Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based Linux distribution known for its Cinnamon desktop environment and other Linux desktop focused refinements.

With all the news in recent weeks following Red Hat's decision to limit access to RHEL sources that in turn lead to changes for AlmaLinux, finding new ways to obtain sources at Rocky Linux, interesting statements from Oracle, and even SUSE forking RHEL. The public RHEL sources now will basically be the upstream CentOS Stream code for which future Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions are ultimately based. The CentOS Project issued a new statement on Friday.

While Solus is still working toward its new approach based on Serpent OS and other significant fundamental changes to the Linux distribution, shipping today is Solus 4.4 as the latest incremental update to this Linux distro popular with enthusiasts.

ReactOS is the open-source OS that's striving for Microsoft Windows software and driver binary compatibility that is 25 years in the making. ReactOS has been making steady progress while still considered in alpha form. Most of the ReactOS successes and user tinkering has been with the 32-bit build of the OS while they have been making steady progress recently on the x86_64 (x64) port.

AlmaLinux, the popular community-oriented distribution that was established following Red Hat's decision to discontinue development on CentOS (non-Stream) and is backed by AMD and other organizations, is trying to chart its path forward following Red Hat's latest curve ball.

Linux Mint as the popular desktop Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu LTS releases and known for their Cinnamon desktop is out today with their 21.2 "Victoria" beta release for testing.

Distrobox is the open-source project for quickly and easily firing up other Linux distributions as containers on your desktop. Distrobox is a delight to use if needing to try different Linux distributions on your system or wishing to leverage different distributions for specialized workloads.

Serpent OS started out as a new Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty, the same developer that rose to fame for starting the Solus Linux distribution prior to a hiatus. Serpent OS was getting off the ground when the surprise full-circle announcement came in April that Solus Linux would build off Serpent OS.

Mageia 9 beta 2 has been released with this Mandriva/Mandrake-lineage Linux distribution nearing its next major release.

Earlier this month Red Hat released RHEL 9.2 and at the same time they also released RHEL 8.8 for those continuing to rely on the stable RHEL8 series. AlmaLinux managed to provide a same-day release of AlmaLinux 9.2 while now one week later they have also shipped AlmaLinux 8.8.

The OpenBMC Linux Foundation collaborative project providing an open-source operating system / firmware stack for server baseboard management controllers (BMCs) is out with version 2.14. The OpenBMC release management still seems to be in a bit of disarray with OpenBMC 2.13 also having been released yesterday, but at least the code continues moving along.

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 and AlmaLinux 9.2, Rocky Linux 9.2 is now also available as this alternative community-supported flavor of RHEL.

AlmaLinux 9.2 is now available for this community-driven, freely-available alternative to upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2. The AlmaLinux crew managed to deliver this release just hours after Red Hat reached general availability on RHEL 9.2 and RHEL 8.8.

Alpine Linux 3.18 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built with musl libc and Busybox while being popular for embedded and container use-cases.

Last year the Pop!_OS software developers at System76 introduced system76-scheduler as a Rust-written user-space daemon intended to auto-configure CFS and dynamically manage process priorities. They've added various features to improve the Linux desktop responsiveness and performance while today they rolled out system76-scheduler v2.0 as the latest iteration of this process scheduler.

Building off December's release of Manjaro 22.0, this Arch Linux based distribution is out now with its next iteration.

Joshua Strobl and original Solus project founder Ikey Doherty are both becoming re-involved with the Solus Linux distribution and moving ahead will be built off the SerpentOS project that Ikey has been independently working on the past few years.

The CentOS Project has sent out a reminder of end-of-life dates for CentOS Linux 7 and CentOS Stream 8.

The CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is focused on providing new packages and features atop CentOS Stream for use by hyperscalers like Meta and Twitter have now established a "hyperscale-intel" repository for Intel-optimized packages.

OpenMandriva ROME 23.03 has been released as the "rolling release" flavor of this Linux distribution whose roots trace back to the beautiful days of Mandrake Linux.

Out today is a new version of the Proxmox Virtual Environment as the hyper-converged infrastructure software with hosted hypervisor.

Trisquel 11 is now available as the latest major release for this one of a few Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved Linux distributions that is "100% libre" and meets all of the fully free software requirements. Trisquel 11 is re-based against Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while making various other changes in the process.

Serpent OS as the new Linux distribution project by Solus Linux founder Ikey Doherty has made public its build infrastructure as it begins building more packages and opening up packaging work to outside contributors.

AWS released Amazon Linux 2023 "AL2023" as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution that is available to Amazon EC2 customers.

One of the newer Linux distributions that has been making waves is Vanilla OS as an immutable and atomic version of Ubuntu Linux that aims to provide a pleasant Linux desktop experience, close to upstream, and is augmented by the growing selection of Flatpak packages. Now though the project has decided to move from Ubuntu Linux as its base over to Debian Sid.

Armbian as the Ubuntu and Debian based Linux distribution that is optimized for single board computers primarily in the ARM/AArch64 and RISC-V space is out with its first major update of 2023.

The Gentoo project has provided a 2022 recap that highlights all of their interesting milestones achieved over the past year for this traditionally source-based Linux distribution that has long been popular with enthusiasts and power users.