14 DAY TRIAL // While not a GNU/Linux distribution, PC-BSD is an important piece of software for the open-source ecosystem, a BSD operating system tweaked and optimized for desktop computers, based on FreeBSD.
The latest release, PC-BSD 10.2 has been announced earlier today, August 21, by the PC-BSD team, based on the recently released FreeBSD 10.2 operating system and including a great number of new features, updated apps, and many goodies.
"The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the availability of 10.2-RELEASE! A very special thanks to all the developers, QA, and documentation teams for helping to make this release possible," reads today's announcement.
Prominent features of PC-BSD 10.2 include a new option that lets users enable or disable the IPv6 or SSHD services during installation, a new network installation media, and a new “Plugins” system for AppCafe that lets users download pre-built jail environments.
Additionally, there's now better dual-boot support, "iocage" is now begin used for jail management backend, the login manager's localization options, Life-Preserver replications, and AppCafe's interface have been greatly improved.
Moreover, there's now better support for 4K monitors, the fonts have been improved, there's a new Disk Manager GUI available via the graphical installer, and a software repositories with enterprise packages has been implemented.
Lumina Desktop 0.8.6 is the default user interface
Among the updated software, we can mention the Lumina Desktop 0.8.6 and GNOME 3.16.2 desktop environments, the Mozilla Firefox 40.0 and Chromium 44.0.2403.130 web browsers, as well as the Mozilla Thunderbird 38.1.0 email, calendar, and news client.
While existing PC-BSD users will be able to upgrade their 10.1 installations to the new 10.2 release right now via the built-in updater software or using the pc-updatemanager command-line utility, new users can download PC-BSD 10.2 right now from Softpedia.