Devuan Rough, KWayland Advances, UT on Linux

A review of Devuan Linux 1.0 Beta was the most interesting bit of news today. Jack Germain said the Debian fork needed more polish to succeed. Martin Gräßlin blogged today that KWayland is now in KDE Frameworks and Liam Dawe reported Unreal Tournament on Linux is shaping up fairly well. Derrik Diener reviewed Solus OS and the changes keep coming in Slackware 14.2 development.

Devuan Linux Jessie 1.0 Beta was released last month and Jack Germain posted a review today at LinuxInsider.com. Germain reported that the Beta installed and functioned properly but the desktop was a bit boring featuring a pretty much stock Xfce. Despite having several desktop choices ticked during the install, only Xfce made it. Germain also said that software management is still in its infancy with Devuan with really no extra software or repositories. But the Beta worked fine as did the Xfce desktop. Germain said that it looks promising and he is looking forward to the next release.

Speaking of next releases, the Slackware-current changelog just keeps getting updated. Some of us hoped 14.2 might be announced by now, but Patrick et al. are continuing to polish up the release. Today the elflibs got rebuilt and mercurial updated. GnuPlot got updated to add libcaca support and a security bug was fixed in libndp as well. Last week the kernel was upgraded to 4.4.10, NetworkManager was upgraded to 1.2.2, and Imagemagick was upgraded to 6.9.4 due to security issues.

Derrik Diener reviewed Solus OS today explaining:

Solus OS is a new Linux operating system that isn’t based on anything. It’s a fresh take on Linux with a message: less is more. No hassling with settings or choices. Everything is taken care of for you ahead of time.

Simple seemed to be the word of the day, but Diener seemed to like what he saw using the new Budgie desktop. The installation was pretty much standard stripped down fair, but all the partitioning is manual. Diener thinks that will scare off the very Windows refugees it's targeting. But it is an original system with an original desktop. Diener said he's sure it'll grow into a solid distribution in time.

In other news:

* Unreal Tournament on Linux is looking pretty good

* KWayland joined KDE Frameworks, Krunner Lives

* Wichita State College to Host Kansas Linux Fest, WSU Coverage