14 DAY TRIAL // The Freespire development team has announced the release of the Freespire 4.8 operating system, a free and open-source version of the controversial Linspire Linux operating system.
Launched last year on August, the Freespire 4.x operating system series continues to be updated with new point releases, Freespire 4.8 being the latest in the series, packed with some of the latest software updates and security fixes. Freespire 4.8 is the latest version and it's recommended for new installations.
"Freespire is released bi-annually and showcases the best of the FOSS and KDE communities. Freespire is the best, most usable FOSS only based distribution in the world today," said Roberto J. Dohnert. "While Freespire 4.8 is an incremental release, it has a ton of new features and enhancements that we normally reserve for a major release."
Here's what's new in Freespire 4.8
Highlights of the Freespire 4.8 release include the long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.12.7 desktop environment, which is accompanied by the KDE Frameworks 5.44.0 software suite built against the Qt 5.9.5 LTS libraries. Freespire 4.8 is powered by the Linux kernel 4.18 from the Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system.
Freespire 4.8 also comes with the latest versions of pre-installed apps, among which we can mention the Chromium web browser, Calligra office suite, Geary email client, VLC media player, Amarok music player, Shotwell image viewer and organizer, Synaptic package manager, and DOSBox x86 emulator with DOS.
Ice SSB is included as well in Freespire 4.8 to let you install the web browser of choice in case you don't want to use Chromium, and many of the standard KDE apps are present as well, including Karbon vector drawing application, KolourPaint paint program, KPatience card sorting game, as well as DreamChess game of chess.
You can download Freespire 4.8 right now if you want to install it on your personal computer. If you're already using Freespire, just make sure you have all the latest updates installed and you'll be running Freespire 4.8. If you can't download Freespire 4.8, you can purchase a USB stick with Freespire pre-installed for $15.99 USD.
