14 DAY TRIAL // After six months of hard work, the development team behind one of the most beautifully designed GNU/Linux operating system in the world, elementary OS, happily announced on February 8 the immediate availability for download of the second Beta for the forthcoming Freya (version 0.3) release with over 600 fixes, but still based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).
Yes, 600 fixes, which can be viewed at a glance on the project’s Launchpad page. It will be impossible for us to write here all those changes, not to mention that many of them aren’t that important for end users who only want to see the big picture. So for them and everyone else interested in the elementary OS Freya development, please consider viewing the elementary OS Freya Beta 2 screenshot tour first, which will demonstrate that the visual changes are minimal in this second Beta.
While the official announcement states that the changes are huge, we can only mention here the addition of two new applications (Videos (Totem) and Calculator), support for the GTK+ 3.14 GUI toolkit, updates to several core components and applications, such as the Geary email client, the Evince document viewer, and the Simple Scan image scanner software, enhanced multitasking functionality, and better Samba support in the Nautilus file manager (Files).
Moreover, we can mention that elementary OS Freya Beta 2 comes with built-in support for the Secure Boot and UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) computer technologies. Applications like Calendar, Slingshot, Photos, and System Settings received various UI (User Interface) improvements, the brand-new notifications system can be configured from the System Settings panel, as well as the built-in firewall.
The next step in the elementary OS Freya development cycle is RC1
The next step in the elementary OS Freya development cycle, which will still be based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), is the RC1 (Release Candidate) version, which will be mostly a cleanup release that only fixes nasty bugs discovered by testers from the Beta 2 version, as well as updated translations. Unfortunately, there’s no news when the elementary OS Freya RC1 will be available for testing, but hopefully not after another six months.
Last but not least, we remind everyone reading this article to check out our in-depth screenshot tour of elementary OS Freya Beta 2, as well as to give it a spin as soon as you download the Live ISO image that corresponds to your computer’s CPU architecture (64/32-bit) from Softpedia, while keeping in mind that it is an unstable release and it should not be deployed on production machines.