blendOS 2 Is Already Here and Supports Android Apps Out-of-the-Box

This major release is available as two flavors featuring the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environments.
blendOS 2

Rudra Saraswat announced the release and general availability of blendOS 2 “Avial,” the second major release of this unique, immutable GNU/Linux distribution that we introduced you to earlier this year.

When I first looked at blendOS, the distro promised a blend of Arch Linux, Fedora Linux, and Ubuntu, but now blendOS 2 is already here and it promises more than that, such as out-of-the-box support for Android apps.

The Android app support implementation inside blendOS 2 is possible thanks to the WayDroid project, an open-source container-based solution for running the full Android operating system inside your Linux box.

Android apps can be easily installed from graphical app stores like the Aurora Store or F-Droid. blendOS 2 lets you use these Android apps alongside native Linux apps.

“This is also useful for Android developers, as they can test their apps through WayDroid in Android Studio, just like regular Linux apps without the need for a heavy Android emulator,” said Rudra Saraswat.

In addition to supporting Android apps, blendOS 2 lets you install and use Web Apps/PWAs, as well as apps from Arch Linux‘s software repository and the Chaotic-AUR repository, an automated building repo for AUR (Arch User Repository) packages.

With this major release, the devs also went a step ahead of the competition and developed their own “distrobox” implementation using the Podman tool for managing OCI containers and pods, which allows them to implement new and unique features that you’ll find in blendOS 2.

The blending of distributions offered by blendOS has been improved as well by automatically adding containerized software in the base system. Moreover, there’s now a new priority-based system that puts users in control of which containerized software should be prioritized over the others and avoid any conflicts.

Among other noteworthy changes, blendOS 2 comes with two official flavors featuring the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environments, the official NVIDIA graphics drivers installed by default, support for both BIOS and UEFI (32-bit and 64-bit) systems, a new installer framework, and support for creating blendOS remixes.

If you want to give blendOS 2 a try on your personal computer, you can download the live ISO images with either GNOME or KDE Plasma desktops right now from the official website or by clicking on the direct download links below.

Image credits: Rudra Saraswat

Last updated 11 months ago

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