by 
Almost three years after disappearing from the distro scene, the Debian-based Siduction Linux distribution returns with a new official release featuring some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software.
As far as I remember, Siduction offered monthly releases with up-to-date components and latest security patches for those who wanted to deploy the Debian-based distro on new computers. The last official ISO release of Siduction Linux was version 2018.3.0, announced back in March 2018.
But the developers never quit working on the distro during this time, even with all the economic and social disruption caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, and they still generated updated ISO images for those who wanted to install the distribution on their computers without having to download hundreds of updates from the repositories.
“When the pandemic hit, we were in early preparations for a new release,” explained the devs. Shortly thereafter, around April 2020, Alf (agaida), our lead developer vanished from the face of the earth and has not been heard of ever since.”
Today, they announce the release of Siduction 2021.1, the first official release of the Linux distro in 2021 and the first after the 3-year hiatus. As you can imagine, the team had to update all the packages in all of the official flavors to the latest releases available at the moment of writing.
Therefore, the Siduction 2021.1 release is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, most precisely on Linux kernel 5.10.16 with some specific patches for better hardware support, uses the systemd 247.3 init system, and it’s fully synced with the Debian Sid (Unstable) software repositories as of February 7th, 2021.
While KDE Plasma remains the flagship edition of Siduction, which has been updated to KDE Plasma 5.20.5 injected with new KDE Apps like System Monitor and Kongress, the new release also ships with the latest Xfce 4.16, LXQt 0.16.0, Cinnamon 4.8.6, and LXDE 10+nmu1 desktop environments.
GNOME and MATE editions were not produced with this release, but the Xorg and noX flavors have been updated as well to include a new tool called iwd, which is a replacement for wpa_supplicant to help you connect to wireless devices. iwd can also be used in all the other flavors, either standalone or within NetworkManager, following the instructions from the release announcement.
Last but not least, Siduction 2021.1 comes with a graphical installer based on the Calamares universal installer framework, which, unfortunately, doesn’t let you opt-out of unwanted packages that do not comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, such as unfree firmware, but you can use the remove-nonfree script after installation to remove them automatically.
Update 20/02/21: Siduction 2021.1.1 was released a week after version 2021.1.0 to address a bug that made the Calamares installer to fail to create GPT partitions in EFI mode.
Last updated 3 years ago
