14 DAY TRIAL // The great folks from the Ubuntu Budgie (formerly budgie-remix) GNU/Linux distribution had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of budgie-remix 16.04.2.
What's budgie-remix 16.04.2, you may wonder? Well, as Ubuntu Budgie did not yet have a stable release, and because many people are still using the distro on their PCs with its previous name (budgie-remix), the developers updated it to be based on the recently released Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
Being based on Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, which inherits the newer Linux 4.8 kernel and an updated graphics stack based on Mesa 12.0 3D Graphics Library from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), budgie-remix 16.04.2 comes equipped with its HWE kernel and graphics stack, as well as the latest Budgie 10.2.9 desktop environment.
"This release builds on the shoulders of the fabulous Ubuntu 16.04.2. budgie-remix 16.04.2 comes equipped with the HWE Kernel and X Graphics," reads the announcement. "Budgie-desktop is the very latest v10.2.9 series and of course, much of the packages have been refreshed."
Appindicators now enabled by default
Another novelty introduced in the budgie-remix 16.04.2 release is the enablement by default of Appindicators, which enables various indicators supported by Ubuntu Linux to be displayed in the system tray area of the Budgie desktop. Newcomers to this OS will also find the latest budgie-welcome app to help them get started faster.
Apart from numerous updated packages and all the latest security patches imported from the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) repositories, budgie-remix 16.04.2 includes a tool that lets users choose their favorite web browser, if they are supported by Ubuntu, of course.
budgie-remix 16.04.2 is available for download right now on our website and it comes with Live ISO images for both 64- and 32-bit PCs. As expected, if you're using budgie-remix 16.04.1 or 16.04, there's no need to download these ISOs. All you have to do to keep your installations up to date is make sure all the released updates are installed.
If you're using budgie-remix 16.04 or 16.04.1 and, for some reason, you don't want to use the newer kernel from the Linux 4.8 series, you can keep the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, which Canonical will support until 2021 with security patches and other updates.