openSUSE Leap 42.2 Approaching with RC, Meet Maui 1

The openSUSE project today announced the release of Leap 42.2 Release Candidate 1 with less than one month remaining before final. On the other side of town, Dustin Kirkland announced Ubuntu kernel hotfixes and the Hectic Geek reviewed recently released 16.10. Jack Germain said Maui 1 "is stable and easy to use" and Sebastian Kügler blogged on "Plasma's road ahead."

openSUSE Leap 42.2 Release Candidate 1 was released today with updated Plasma 5.8.1 that Douglas DeMaio said "provides several commits to provide a more stable performance for KDE users." He continued saying that 5.8 has users excited about KDE's rebirth and new-found stability. He said this release is appropriate for developers and system administrators thanks to its SLE SP 2 base, OpenStack client, and other software stacks. For users, openSUSE offers several popular desktops besides Plasma including GNOME, Xfce, and Cinnamon. Other features include Linux 4.4.24, Xorg 7.6 (Server 1.18), Wayland 1.9.0, GCC 4.8.5, Firefox 49, GIMP 2.8.18, and LibreOffice 5.1.5.2. Release Candidate 2 should arrive on or about November 2 and the Final is scheduled for November 16, 2016.

Canonical today announced their newest service: Canonical LivePatch Service that allows users to upgrade their kernel without rebooting. It's actually one of their enterprise/commercial services, but they're offering to community users as well for no cost for up to 3 machines. After that you'll need to subscribe. Dustin Kirkland, who made the announcement, said the service is "an authenticated, encrypted, signed stream of Linux livepatches that address the highest and most critical security vulnerabilities, without requiring a reboot in order to take effect." He posted a tutorial on enabling and using LivePatch complete with screenshots, so see his post if interested in that.

The Hectic Geek today shared a review of Ubuntu's latest release, 16.10 saying, "If you're happy with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, then stick with it!" He compared 16.10 to 16.04 in several key areas, especially benchmarks of sorts, and found 16.04 performed better in most of them. Feature-wise 16.10 didn't bring many changes, thus Geek advises staying with 16.04 since its a LTS.

Maui Linux is an offshoot (or renaming) of now defunct Netrunner featuring desktop newcomer Hawaii on Wayland. Germain said Maui is based on KDE neon and is offered in a "semi-rolling release model." He added the differences between the old Netrunner and Maui "are vast." But he found the installation easy and the desktop pleasing. He said Hawaii takes the complexity out of using Plasma, with which he's lost patience over the years. He said the desktop was a "welcomed alternative." Germain concluded, "Maui is an out-of-the-box solution to being productive with the KDE ecosystem. It's an inviting replacement to Kubuntu."

And speaking of Plasma, Sebastian Kügler today blogged about "Where do we want to take Plasma in the next two years?"