14 DAY TRIAL // illume OS 3.0 Beta 1, a full-featured operating system designed to be used on desktops, notebooks, Netbooks, and other systems, has been officially released and is now ready for testing.
illume OS 3.0 Beta 1 has been dubbed “Phobos” and it's one of the biggest updates released until now. The developers made some big changes since the previous 2.1 release, which was way back in August 2013.
The team spent almost a year making this new distro and it definitely shows that the devs put a lot of work and thought into it. They changed numerous aspects of it, including the base of the distro and the Linux kernel.
The new base for the operating system is now Debian 7.5 Wheezy, which is the latest stable available right now. The Linux kernel was also upgraded to version 3.2.0-4, which is actually a very old release. The 3.2.x branch of the kernel is still being maintained, but the latest one available is 3.4.90. Needless to say that much newer solutions are available.
One of the reasons for choosing such an old kernel is probably the stability, but the fact that it's not one of the latest sort of negates that advantage. Also, the kernel doesn't ensure the compatibility with newer hardware, but the distro is only released for the 32-bit architecture, which means that the developers are addressing to users with older hardware. It's possible that a 64-bit version might arrive at a later date.
A major change that has been implemented in the latest illume OS has to do with the launcher, which has been dropped completely. It seems that it was slowing down the operating system and they had to get rid of it.
Also, a new GTK+ theme with GTK+ 3.0 support has been added, font smoothing has been improved, new icon sets by sixsixfive and VisualPharm have been added, compositing has been enabled by default, multiple user account support has been implemented, the interface switcher has been improved, the Software Catalog has been revamped (it's not yet ready for user testing), and support has been added for Android device syncing.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and updates. You can download illume OS 3.0 Beta 1 images right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.