Nitrux 2.5 Is Here as One of the First Distros Powered by Linux 6.0 and KDE Plasma 5.26

Nitrux 2.5

Uri Herrera announced today the general availability of Nitrux 2.5 as the newest, freshest, and most advanced ISO release of this Debian-based distribution built around the KDE Plasma-based NX Desktop environment.

The monthly Nitrux ISO releases continue, and Nitrux 2.5 is here as the first release of the systemd-free distribution to ship with the latest and greatest Linux 6.0 kernel series by default. The very latest Linux kernel 6.0.6 kernel is included by default in the distribution in a XanMod flavor.

This is also the first ISO release of Nitrux to ship with the latest and greatest KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environment series. More specifically, the very latest KDE Plasma 5.26.2 point release is included by default, which is accompanied by the latest KDE Gear 22.08.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.99 software suites for the best possible KDE Plasma desktop experience you can get.

Another interesting change in Nitrux 2.5 is the fact that it ships with the proprietary NVIDIA 520.56.06 graphics driver for the Wayland session. NVIDIA GPU users should be aware that this driver won’t work on the X11 session and it’s not the Open Source version which only works with some high-end GPUs.

“We’ve decided to change our policy about including this particular piece of proprietary software to make this distribution more accessible to users and to avoid creating a separate ISO file,” said Uri Herrera in the release announcement. “We’re aware that Nvidia had released an open-source driver, too; however, it only supports a handful of Professional graphics cards and almost none of their Consumer graphics cards. If Nvidia decides to support more graphics cards with this driver, we will include it instead.

Among other changes, Nitrux 2.5 ships with an updated KDE Neon repository to coincide with their latest release, adds the Bismuth KWin plugin to transform KDE Plasma’s window manager into a tiling window manager, updates the AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan (AMDVLK) to the latest version, and adds Distrobox to the default installation for those who want to create containers using the Linux distribution of their choice.

Furthermore, the devs decided to remove the linux-firmware package from the Minimal default installation to provide a smaller Minimal ISO image, which means that some hardware may not be recognized by default so you’ll need to manually install this package when customizing your Nitrux distro with another desktop environment. Several issues were addressed as well in this release.

You can download Nitrux 2.5 right now from the official website. However, existing Nitrux users can update their installations to receive all these new features by running the pkcon refresh && pkcon get-updates command in a terminal emulator.

Last updated 1 year ago

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