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Uri Herrera announced today the release and general availability of Nitrux 2.2 as the latest stable live/installable ISO image of this Debian-based, systemd-free GNU/Linux distribution built around the modern KDE Plasma desktop environment.
Nitrux 2.2 is the first release of the distribution to ditch the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel and switch to the more recent Linux kernel 5.17 series by default, of course in a XanMod flavor just like with the previous releases. Unfortunately, the recently released Linux kernel 5.18 didn’t land in this release due to the broadcom-sta-dkms module failing to compile against DKMS.
One of the coolest changes in this release is the ability for users to perform full-disk encryption of their new Nitrux installations when using the automated partition options (Replace Partition and Erase Disk) in the Calamares graphical installer. The option can be found at the bottom of the partitioning screen and requires you to input a strong password, which will be asked every time you boot the system.
Last month’s Nitrux 2.1.1 release introduced a dedicated ISO image with the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver for those who wanted to install the systemd-free distribution on a computer with an NVIDIA GPU. Nitrux 2.2 ships with not one, but two NVIDIA ISOs, one featuring a newer NVIDIA graphics driver for modern NVIDIA GPUs and the other one featuring the legacy NVIDIA drivers for older graphics cards. The devs note the fact that you may need to add Nitrux’s X11 configuration for NVIDIA PRIME to work correctly on some laptops.
Other than that, Nitrux 2.2 improves hardware support by including more packages containing Broadcom firmware and updating the AMDVLK AMD Vulkan open-source driver, amd64-microcode, and linux-firmware packages. On top of that, this release improves gaming support by including the vkBasalt package, a Vulkan post-processing layer to enhance the visual graphics of games, as well as the Mesa 22.2-git graphics stack.
Nitrux’s default software selection has been updated in this release to the latest releases, including KDE Plasma 5.24.5, KDE Frameworks 5.94, KDE Gear 22.04.1, Mozilla Firefox 101, LibreOffice 7.3.1, MauiKit 2.1.2, and NX Software Center 2.1.2 with AppRepo as a new AppImage repository source. A new app has been introduced as well in Nitrux 2.2, namely Bonsai, a simple and fast Git control version manager.
Among other noteworthy changes, Nitrux 2.2 adds a package that includes utilities to automatically detect and configure printers, along with a PolicyKit helper to configure the CUPS printing server with fine-grained privileges, and updates Plasma desktop’s KWin configuration to organize the windows in a grid when the Overview effect is enabled.
If you want to give Nitrux a try on your personal computer, you can download Nitrux 2.2 right now from the official website. Existing Nitrux users will be able to update their installations by running the pkcon refresh && pkcon update commands in a terminal emulator.
Last updated 2 years ago
