The latest version of Tanglu can be downloaded from Softpedia

Aug 25, 2014 14:40 GMT  ·  By

Tanglu, GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian designed for the current desktop, has been updated to version 2.0 Alpha 1.

Not too many people heard about the new Tanglu operating systems, although the developers are not at their first release. In fact, Tanglu 1.0 (Aequorea Victoria) was made available back in February, 2014. Now, the Tanglu devs have started to work on a second release and everything seems to be going as planned.

The system features a modern desktop and it's based on GNOME (not the default). It seems to be faster than the other distros with the same desktop, but this is still an Alpha release and many things can change in a few months’ time.

"The release mainly brings updated software and loads of fixes regarding systemd-services. There also has been a lot of work on the Debian installer, to make it work for Tanglu, and initial work exploring a port of Ubiquity (the Ubuntu installer) to Tanglu has started - although this project is only an experiment so far."

"There have also been improvements to KDM (systemd integration), but we expect the final release of Tanglu to ship with SDDM instead of KDM. The whole Tanglu distribution is now built on debile and there have been several other infrastructure improvements alongside that large change," reads the official announcement.

This is actually an interesting approach. Developers don't usually adopt a system installer different from the base (in this case Debian), but in the case of Tanglu, the devs made use of Ubiquity, which is the one used by Ubuntu.

Ubiquity is actually one of the most used pieces of Ubuntu software, besides the operating system, which says something about its quality.

So far, ISO images with the GNOME and KDE desktop environments have been provided, but the devs have explained that a number of other DEs will be supported in the future.

Also, Tanglu uses most of the files from Debian Testing, but there are a number of packages that had to be brought in from Debian Stable. This method will ensure that the end-users will get the latest and the most stable applications and packages form the base distro.

More details about Tanglu can be found in the official announcement. You can download Tanglu 2.0 Alpha 1 GNOME and KDE right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.