Fedora-Based Ultramarine Linux Designed for Ease of Use

Ultramarine Linux 38 is based on Fedora 38 and is offered with either the Budgie, KDE Plasma, Gnome, or Pantheon desktop environments. This latest release adds something special to improve performance.

That boost comes in the form of the System76 CPU schedule that prioritizes processes. The one caveat to this is that only the Gnome version automatically detects an application in use. However, all four editions do include various tweaks to the system to ensure users get as smooth an experience as possible. This includes improved startup and shutdown times.

As well, Ultramarine includes the latest versions of the included software. You'll find Flatpak supported by default, and there are even non-free software titles that can be installed.

Preinstalled software includes Firefox, LibreOffice, Clapper audio/video player, the basic Gnome apps (Software, Weather, Files, Maps), and plenty of utilities to get you by. Thanks to Flatpak support, you can easily install third-party, proprietary software such as Spotify and Slack.

The big appeal to Ultramarine Linux is its performance. All of the tweaks the developers have done make a big difference, and Ultramarine Linux outperforms a lot of similar Linux desktop distributions. The second you start using it, you'll notice the speed.

Download an ISO http://(https://ultramarine-linux.org/download/) now. You also can migrate Fedora to Ultramarine Linux with the help of a script you can download with the command wget https://ultramarine-linux.org/migrate.sh. Give the command executable permissions with chmod u+x migrate.sh and then run the script with sudo ./migrate.sh.

Debian 12 Has Finally Been Released

Debian marches to a beat that so many other Linux distributions follow. Over the decades since it was first released in 1996, Debian has developed a reputation for being one of the most stable operating systems on the market. Part of the reason for that is the development team takes their time between releases.

Unlike Ubuntu which releases every six months, a new version of Debian happens yearly (sort of). So you can bet plenty of effort has gone into each release to make it rock solid.

With the release of 12.0 (aka "bookworm"), you'll find updates to several desktops, such as Gnome 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, and Xfce 4.18. No, these are not the latest versions of each but that's how Debian rolls (keeping everything as stable as possible).

Other software updates include Apache 2.4.57, BIND DNS Server 9.18, Cryptsetup 2.6, Gimp 2.10.34, GnuPG 2.2.40, Inkscape 1.2.2, GNU C Library 2.36, LibreOffice 7.4, Linux kernel 6.1, MariaDB 10.11, NGINX 1.22, OpenJDK 17, OpenLDAP 2.5.13, OpenSSH 9.2p1, PHP 8.2, Python 3.11.2, Samba 4.17, and more. Overall, there are 11,089 new packages found in Debian 12, for a total of 64,419.

There also is improved support and management of non-free firmware as well as support for UEFI on ARM64 architecture.

Debian is available for nine different architectures including 32/64-bit PC, ARM64, ARMv7, 64-bit little-endian MIPS, 64-bit little-endian PowerPC, and IBM Z.

You can read the full release notes for Debian 12 here and download an ISO from the official Debian download page (https://www.debian.org/download).

Armbian 23.05 Now Available

Armbian is almost at its 10-year anniversary and has announced the release of version 23.05. This release is based on Debian and created specifically for ARM and RISC-V architecture. Version 23.05, nicknamed "Suni," is based on a completely refactored build framework that has been in the works for the past three years.

According to the project website, "…many ARM-focused Linux distributions are essentially Armbian under a different name! We are committed to streamlining complexity and offering an exceptional solution for the community."

The latest version of Armbian offers several improvements which include Armbian bookworm-based images for the latest updates from Debian, i3 support, improvements to the armbian-installer, an optimized package base, consistent application packages, improved Ubuntu-based assemblies, fast and safe updates, the inclusion of the armbian-gaming script, and plenty of bug fixes and security patches.

Users without ARM or RISC-V hardware can download a Ubuntu-based image for AMD/Intel machines. This version has much of the Ubuntu-ness removed (such as the removal of Ubuntu Pro and Snap).

Read the detailed changelog to see what is new to Armbian 23.05 and download an ISO image for installation on the single-board computer of your choice. On the download page, you'll also find links for AMD64 images.