Lubuntu 24.10 is the first release of Lubuntu to ship with a primarily Qt 6-based environment. Previous LXQt releases used Qt 5. Due to this upgrade, modern Qt 6-based apps such as the latest versions of VirtualBox, qBitTorrent, and more will now be themed similar to the rest of the desktop. Qt 5 app theming also still works, allowing you to continue to use apps that haven't caught up with Qt 6 yet. Lubuntu-specific applications (namely Lubuntu Update and the Lubuntu Installer Prompt) have also been updated to use Qt 6. The Calamares installer continues to use Qt 5 however. We expect to switch Calamares to using Qt 6 for Lubuntu 25.04. For a while now, Lubuntu has been using the Breeze theme from KDE Plasma. While this has worked well enough for a while, it has had some incompatibilities with LXQt crop up before, and this cycle it happened again. Rather than continuing to make a KDE component work where it wasn't really designed to, Lubuntu 24.10 now ships with Kvantum theming.
Ubuntu 24.10 features the latest Linux 6.11 kernel for improved performance and hardware support, marking a shift to a more aggressive kernel version selection policy going forward. Building on our previous LTS efforts around performance engineering, Ubuntu 24.10 now includes kdump-tools on relevant platforms for automatic kernel crashdumps. The default desktop installation also includes sysprof for application and workload profiling. Ubuntu Desktop delivers GNOME 47 with improvements to performance, user experience and enhanced touchscreen support. The power-profiles-daemon improves power management for AMD CPUs and GPUs while libfprint adds support for many new fingerprint reader devices. Ubuntu Desktop now defaults to Wayland on devices with NVIDIA graphics cards and defaults to the NVIDIA 560 open driver version.
Here are the highlights of what's changed since the release of Ubuntu MATE 24.04: ships stable MATE Desktop 1.26.2 with a handful of bug fixes; switched back to Slick Greeter (replacing Arctica Greeter) due to a race condition in the boot process which results the display manager failing to initialise; returning to Slick Greeter reintroduces the ability to easily configure the login screen via a graphical application, something users have been requesting be re-instated; Ubuntu MATE 24.10 ISO image is now 3.3GB, down from 4.1GB in the 24.04 LTS release - this is thanks to some fixes in the installer that no longer require as many packages in the live-seed; accompanying MATE Desktop 1.26.2 and Linux 6.11 are Firefox 131, Celluloid 0.27, Evolution 3.54, LibreOffice 24.8.2.
When the file system of the Persistent Storage has errors, Tails now offers you to repair the file system when unlocking from the Welcome Screen. Because not all file system errors can be safely recovered this way, we wrote comprehensive documentation on how to recover data from the Persistent Storage using complementary techniques. Update Tor Browser to 13.5.6. Improve the notification when a network interface is disabled because MAC address anonymization failed. Increase the maximum waiting time to 8 minutes when unlocking the Persistent Storage before returning an error. Hide shown password while unlocking Persistent Storage.
Added scandirat(3) from FreeBSD. Added elf_aux_info(3), designed to let userland peek at AT_HWCAP and AT_HWCAP2, using an interface from FreeBSD. Added missing function wcsnlen(3) to find length of a wide string (i.e. wcslen(3) with a max len argument). Imported libva 2.22.0, an implementation for VA-API (video acceleration API). VA-API provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing. Added the option '-u name' to env(1) to remove a variable from th environment. Various bugfixes and tweaks in userland: Throughout the source tree, add missing error checks to calls of gmtime(3) and localtime(3). Added missing error checks to all calls under libexec and sbin in case of ctime(3) and ctime_r(3) failures when timestamps are far off.
Many in-house scripts and applications have been tweaked and further improved. Some new apps include: antiX TV - antiX streaming tv receiver; antiX Radio - antiX streaming radio receiver GUI for MPV; Finder - Simple yad script to search for everything (Files, Installed apps, web); antiX SAMBA manager - Script for managing SAMBA shares in antiX control centre; antiX equaliser toggle - tool for activating or deactivating pipewire-equaliser Easyeffects; antiX acoustic colours - script allowing to change the acoustic colour of audio output; meld - graphical tool to diff and merge files.
The new release 24.04.1.3 of Starbuntu presents the new update of the libreoffice suite 4:24.2.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.1. In addition, Starbuntu now allows to set the GTK themes of GTK2, GTK3 and GTK4 programs separately or uniform. Moreover, the editor of the app launchers has thoroughly been revised and expanded, and beyond, a problem of the automatic mount of storage devices has been solved.
bslx-6.11.1-1-2024.10.01-x86_64 has been released and is available for download. We were told that the new kernel would provide some performance improvements for Intel and AMD products as well as networking. So far I have noticed that overall performance has been noticeably better. Networking is definitely faster.
Since we released 'Wynsdey' in May 2024, we worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Xahea. The GNOME edition has received several updates to GNOME 46 series. This includes a lot of fixes and polish when GNOME 46 originally was released in March 2024. The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 6.1 series 1 and KDE Gear 24.08 1. It brings exciting new improvements to your desktop. Plasma 6 hits its stride with version 6.1. While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct, 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take your desktop to a new level.
The 24.10 release is built on the Debian testing repository as of October 1, 2024, and includes the Linux kernel 6.10.11-1. This version introduces an option to install Rescuezilla and features the Openbox window manager. Pre-installed applications include GParted, PCManFM, Xfce Terminal, and Netsurf, among others. Additionally, a wide array of CLI tools such as `testdisk`, `clonezilla`, `ddrescue`, and `cryptsetup` are provided. Users can also take advantage of 1-click installs for popular software like Boot-Repair, Firefox, Synaptic, and Dropbox.