elementary OS 6 Beta 2 Polishes the Installer UI, Adds More Flatpak Apps

elemetary OS 6 beta

The elementary OS team announced today the availability for public testing of elementary OS 6 beta 2 to further improve the upcoming release, which will be based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

elementary OS 6 Beta 2 comes about five weeks after the first beta release and it’s here to polish and cleanup up the installer UI and improve the detection of disk drives, as well as error handling when elementary OS fails to install on certain systems.

The team recommends those who develop apps for elementary OS 6 to reinstall the system using the beta 2 image to ensure the installation works well with as many hardware configurations as possible.

“We reworked the layout in a few of the views to be more consistent with one another, and we added a pleasant animation to the installation progress view instead of just a static icon,” said developer Cassidy James Blaede.

In addition to the installer improvements, this beta release introduces more apps as Flatpaks, including Calculator, Camera, Document Viewer, Screenshot, Tasks, and Web. The team plans to turn more of their default apps into Flatpaks before the final release of elementary OS 6.

Also included in the beta 2 release is the FreeDesktop Flatpak extensions, which ensures that Web browser’s rendering functionality works correctly with more web pages.

Another major change is the ability to add online accounts from System Settings, including email and calendar accounts supporting the IMAP and CalDav standards. In addintion, the Mail app has been further improved to perform better and much faster than ever before.

Last but not least, the second elementary OS 6 beta improves the Notifications system with support for icon badges and action buttons. Also improved are the focus styles in the system stylesheet. For more details, check out the release notes.

If you want to give elementary OS 6 beta 2 a try, you can download the live ISO image right now from the official website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don’t use as your daily driver or install it on a production machine.

Last updated 3 years ago

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