Linux in The News 5-29-23

The MX Linux developers announced today the general availability for public testing of the beta version of the upcoming MX Linux 23 “Libretto” release.

Based on the upcoming Debian 12 “Bookworm” operating system series, MX Linux 23 is powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series and uses sysVinit as the default init system instead of system, and comes in three editions with the Xfce 4.18, KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, and Fluxbox 1.3.7 graphical environments.

There’s lots of cool stuff in the MX Linux 23 release, including support for swapfiles in the installer and used by default for the “regular” auto installation method, support for PipeWire and WirePlumber for managing audio instead of PulseAudio, as well as the nala command-line APT frontend as the default backend for MX Updater.

The Fluxbox edition has been updated with many new configuration options, special “appfinder” configurations for the Rofi file manager replacing xfce4-appfinder, as well as support for theming Fluxbox using MX Tweak’s theme module.

Among other noteworthy changes, MX Linux 23 brings a more obvious “check media” function to the live boot menus of all three editions and many updated MX apps with various bug fixes and enhancements like support for launching them with individual policy kit configurations.

The final release of MX Linux 23 will probably be out sometime next month after the release of the Debian 12 “Bookworm” operating system series on June 10th, 2023. Until then, you can download the MX Linux 23 beta release right now from the announcement page, where you can also find details on known issues.

With that in mind, please remember that this is a pre-release version that should not be installed and used on production machines. The devs need your help to test the installer using traditional EXT4 and Btrfs filesystems, as well as bug-hunting the MX tools, especially the mx-packageinstaller > popular apps entries.

You can report bugs here.

Fedora Onyx, an upcoming variant of the Fedora Linux operating system focused on offering an immutable system featuring the Budgie desktop environment, has been approved for the upcoming Fedora Linux 39 release.

At the end of April 2023, Budgie Desktop developer and Solus maintainer Joshua Strobl proposed an official immutable / emerging variant of Fedora Linux with the Budgie desktop environment, complementing the Fedora Budgie Spin that was introduced with the Fedora Linux 38 release.

Fedora Onyx aims to offer Fedora Linux users yet another immutable/atomic desktop operating system in the style of Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, and Fedora Sericea, leveraging technologies like rpm-ostree, Podman, toolbx, and Flatpak. An immutable system is never modified after it’s been deployed.

The proposal has been recently approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and Fedora Onyx is now set to see the light of day as part of the upcoming Fedora Linux 39 release, due out in mid-October 2023.

The good news for those wishing to use the Budgie desktop environment on top of their immutable Fedora Linux system is that when Fedora Onyx will be out existing users with ostree installations will be able to seamlessly rebase their systems to Fedora Onyx in the same way they would do using any other official variant.

Of course, Fedora Onyx should also be available as a downloadable ISO image, but we don’t know yet what architectures will be supported at the moment of the release.

Let’s hope that until Fedora Linux 39 hits the public beta channel I will be able to take Fedora Onyx for a quick test drive to give you guys a proper first look and talk more about its benefits over other Fedora Linux spins.

As for Fedora Linux 39, it will offer many other exciting new features like fedora-autofirstboot for all desktop variants to run a predetermined set of tasks during the first boot after installation, such as installing codecs or cleaning up installer packages, and DNF5 as the new default packaging tool.

Fedora Linux 39 will also support the automatic enablement of persistent overlays when flashing Fedora Linux live media to USB sticks and enable DNF/RPM Copy on Write for all variants to reduce the amount of I/O and offsets CPU cost of package decompression.