14 DAY TRIAL // Do you remember Maui? It's the new name gave by the Netrunner team to their Netrunner Desktop flavor earlier this summer, rebased on KDE Neon and shipping with the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) goodies.
The first Maui release, versioned 1, landed in mid-August, and we've just been informed about the general availability of Maui 2, dubbed "Blue Tang," featuring the recently released KDE Plasma 5.8.2 LTS desktop environment on top of an updated Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base, and, of course, running the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel.
Maui 2 also ships with the latest KDE Applications 16.08.2, KDE Frameworks 5.27.0, and Qt 5.7.0 technologies, as well as the Mozilla Firefox 49.0.2 web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird 45.4.0 email and news client, which just landed in the stable Ubuntu repos on October 27, 2016. Talking of repos, Maui 2 comes with new software repositories.
"We decided to move our repositories to a new infrastructure and cloned the Neon based repo so we have control over when to push new updates to the user and let the users themselves decide when they want to move to a new Plasma version or KDE Frameworks 5 version," reads the release announcement.
Calamares universal installer now used by default
That way, Maui users will always receive the latest stable KDE Plasma desktop environment, and guess what? Maui 2 switches to use the Calamares universal installer framework for GNU/Linux distributions as the default graphical installer for new Maui 2 installations. We remind you that Calamares 2.4 offers full-disk encryption support.
Apart from bringing us the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop experience and the Calamares installer, Maui 2 "Blue Tang" also reimplements the Driver Manager, an in-house built tool that promises to let you install the latest proprietary drivers for your hardware, including Nvidia, AMD or Intel graphics cards and Wireless chips.
Ultimately, Maui 2 includes a new tool for configuring systemd services, replaces the Gparted partition editor with KDE Partition Manager for a better disk partitioning experience, improves language translation support in the mintUpdate tool, enhances the KDE Telepathy Instant Messaging feature, and adds InkScape and KDE Remote Desktop Client.
You can download the Maui 2 64-bit live ISO image right now via our website, and if you're currently running the Maui 1 release on your personal computer, you can update to Maui 2 using the upgrade instructions provided by the development team on the project's official forums, where you'll also find all the help you need to get started with the Maui OS.