Nitrux 2.6 Is Out Powered by Linux 6.1, Adds PipeWire and Wayland by Default

This release also removes dpkg, APT and PackageKit to force the use of containerized applications like AppImage or Flatpak.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Nitrux 2.6

Uri Herrera announced today the release of Nitrux 2.6 as the latest stable update for this Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution that does not use the systemd init system and it’s built around the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Powered by the latest Linux 6.1 kernel and the upcoming Mesa 23 graphics stacks, Nitrux 2.6 comes with the PipeWire multimedia server enabled by default for its NX Desktop graphical session built on top of the KDE Plasma 5.26.4 desktop environment, which is accompanied by the KDE Frameworks 5.101 and KDE Gear 22.12 software suites.

Wayland support was added as well in this release but it’s not enabled by default. Those who wish to use Nitrux’s KDE Plasma-based NX Desktop on Wayland will need to select the Plasma (Wayland) session from the login manager. However, the devs note the fact that Wayland may not work as expected with certain NVIDIA graphics cards.

Another major change in Nitrux 2.6 is the removal of the dpkg, APT and PackageKit package management systems for installing, updating, or removing packages from your Nitrux system. These are still present in the live system, but they are removed from the installed system, which also means that existing Nitrux users aren’t affected by this change.

To install new apps in your brand-new Nitrux 2.6 system, you will have to use one of the popular containerized app formats, such as AppImage or Flatpak. For this, Flathub support has been enabled by default in this release.

In addition, the devs recommend using Distrobox if they still want to use a conventional package manager for installing new apps in Nitrux. Distrobox lets you create a container of any GNU/Linux distribution available in DockerHub and use its package manager.

“This version of this distribution can be seen as the antithesis of the conventional Linux distribution, where a distribution is entirely devoted to its package manager, but this distribution is not,” said Uri Herrera. “Users can use a container of any Linux distribution (Arch, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE, NixOS, Gentoo, and many more), including multiple containers simultaneously; there’s no limitation whatsoever.”

Among other noteworthy changes, the Nitrux 2.6 release adds the Samba file server to enable file sharing across different operating systems over a network, sets the state of the root (/) directory to be immutable via overlayroot, and adds Pulseaudio Equalizer for PulseAudio.

Nitrux uses the latest Calamares graphical installer for installing the system, and in this release the settings have been updated to force Calamares to create a custom partition layout when selecting the “Erase disk” option, as well as to allow it to add custom kernel parameters to the GRUB file.

Nitrux 2.6 is available for download right now from the release announcement page or by clicking the direct download link below. Please note that the Minimal edition has been deprecated due to not meeting the expectations the devs set for it and because of high bandwidth costs.

Download Nitrux 2.6

Last updated 1 year ago

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