Linux in The News 11-6-23

With the development cycle for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) opened, Canonical has now published the first daily build ISO images for early adopters, application developers, and general public testing.

The first Ubuntu 24.04 LTS daily builds are here and, as expected, they’re based on the previous Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur), which arrived last month on October 12th.

Being based on the previous release, these first daily builds ship with pretty much the same core components and application versions as the previous version. As such, you should not expect much from them.

During the six-month-long development cycle, the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS daily builds will be updated with some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software, such as the upcoming GNOME 46 desktop environment, Mesa 23.3 graphics stack, and probably Linux 6.8 kernel series.

Under the hood, you should expect GNU/Linux technologies like GCC 13.2, GNU C Library 2.39, Ruby 3.2, and others. We’re also expecting Canonical to ship more Snaps and other new features that will be revealed in time.

Without further ado, you can download the first Ubuntu 24.04 LTS daily build ISO images right now from the official website. Daily builds are also available of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and many of the official Ubuntu flavors. They are supported on 64-bit (amd64) and AArch64 (ARM64) platforms.

However, please keep in mind that these are pre-release versions and that they may contain bugs and other issues preventing you from having a stable Ubuntu desktop or server experience. Therefore, please DO NOT install them on a production machine!

The final release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) is expected on April 25th, 2024. Until then, we will be able to test drive the beta version on April 4th, 2024, and the Release Candidate (RC) version on April 18th, 2024.

The LXQt project announced today the release of LXQt 1.4 as the latest stable version of this lightweight desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions written in Qt.

LXQt 1.4 is here almost seven months after LXQt 1.3 and it looks like it’s the last update to be based on the Qt 5 open-source application framework. The devs are already porting it to Qt 6 and the next LXQt release should be fully ported if everything goes according to plan.

New features and improvements included in LXQt 1.4 are an updated file manager (PCManFM-Qt) that now lets users add terminal commands, support remembering the state of the split view when restoring the tabs of the last window, introduces the ability to remember the password and anonymity settings of the mount dialog, and features an SVG icon.

LXQt’s terminal emulator, QTerminal, received support for audible bells, a Falcon color scheme, and support for PUTTY-style mouse button swap. On the other hand, LXQt’s image viewer, LXImage-Qt, now has minimal support for color spaces and ImageShack has been removed as an upload option as it now requires a paid subscription.

Other than that, LXQt 1.4 improves the LXQt Panel by addressing some old issues related to checking and clearing of urgency and window cycling with the mouse wheel in the taskbar, and by introducing a new option to the custom command plugin for displaying the output as an image.

The LXQt session has been updated as well in this release to improve the DBus activation environment to offer better support for third-party apps that set DBusActivatable to true. Other LXQt components received fixes too and language translations have been updated in LXQt 1.4.

For more details and further reading, you can check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for the LXQt 1.4.0 packages and update your installations as soon as they’re available.