14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the Debian-based Elive Linux distro announced today the availability of yet another Beta milestone towards the operating system's major 3.0 release, Elive 2.8.6 Beta.
The Elive 2.8.6 Beta development snapshot comes exactly one month after the release of the previous milestone, namely Elive 2.8.0 Beta, and promises to be the greatest update so far, implementing numerous stability and performance improvements, as well as various optimizations to the live mode, making it twice as fast.
"The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.8.6. This is such an amazing release with a great amount of improvements and fixes," reads the announcement. "This release includes a good amount of performance optimizations, raising the performance in live mode to be twice as fast!"
Here's what's new in Elive 2.8.6 Beta
Among the improvements implemented in the Elive 2.8.6 Beta release, we can mention an improved boot menu that should now offer an extra layer of user-friendliness, better support for configuring sound cards, as well as a brand-new gadget integrated into the Enlightenment desktop environment for easy management of external media.
It also looks like the artwork received some attention in this new Beta release of Elive Linux, offering users a revamped application menu, a more intuitive and less obtrusive pager, smoother effects and better readability for the dock, redesigned animated stars wallpaper, and bigger shadows for windows, with a 3D effect when they're in focus.
Elive uses Compiz to provide those gorgeous desktop effects that most of you adore, and the Elive 2.8.6 Beta release improves the Compiz stability and configurations, addressing an old bug that should make the GNU/Linux distro more suitable for daily work, but also optimize the speed of the effects on not so modern PCs.
You can download the Elive 2.8.6 Beta Live ISO image right now from our website if you want to take the distro for a test drive, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, which still includes various unresolved issues. Therefore, we don't recommend using it as your daily driver. Happy testing!