Available in noX, X.Org, LXDE, Xfce and KDE Plasma 5 flavors

Dec 27, 2016 22:40 GMT  ·  By

Ferdinand Thommes was proud to announce on Christmas Eve the release and general availability for download of the siduction 2016.1 "Patience" GNU/Linux operating system.

Based on the Debian Unstable repositories, which are also known as Debian Sid, and dubbed "Patience," siduction 2016.1 is here more than two years after the last stable release of the desktop-oriented distribution for personal computers, and one year after the siduction 15.1.0 development release.

It comes with the usual noX, X.Org, LXDE, Xfce, and KDE Plasma 5 flavors, and it's powered by the recently released Linux 4.9 kernel, which has been injected by the development team with various patches. siduction 2016.1 "Patience" also ships with an up-to-date graphics stack based on the latest X.Org Server 1.19.0 display server.

Another interesting change implemented in siduction 2016.1 is the use of the widely adopted libinput library for handling peripherals like mice, touchpads, and Wacom tablets. Some initial configuration has been added to support various touchpad actions, but not all there are out there.

This change is very important when the distribution will switch to the next-generation Wayland display server in upcoming releases. Moreover, it looks like the SDDM login manager is now used by default for the KDE Plasma 5 edition, which ships with KDE Plasma 5.8.4 LTS, KDE Frameworks 5.28.0, and KDE Applications 16.08.3.

"No other desktop environment was as keeping us from a release as much as Plasma 5. Transitions and lots of upgrades made it really hard to find a calm spot in time to release for us. Our friends from the debian-kde-qt team stayed very close to upstream releases (thanks for that!)," reads the announcement.

GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, and LXQt flavors are coming soon

While siduction 2016.1 comes with the LXDE 0.99.1 and Xfce 4.12.3 desktop environments, the development team plans to release GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, and LXQt flavors in the coming months, which, most probably, will feature the latest GNOME 3.22, Cinnamon 3.2, MATE 1.16, and LXQt 0.11.0 desktops.

To allow users to use their Wi-Fi and graphics cards, siduction 2016.1 enables the contrib and nonfree repositories by default and comes pre-installed with nonfree-firmware. A complete list is available in the release notes above, but users are warned that it's not in accordance with the Debian Free Software Guide (DFSG).

Last but not least, it appears that the release cycle of siduction has been modified starting with this new version, which means that upcoming flavors should launch as soon as they are ready instead of all of them at once when they're finished. You can download siduction 2016.1 "Patience" right now from our website.