Distro watch
What’s behind the free software sofa?
NOBARA 38
The Nobara Project has been in development since 2022. Its creators describe it as “a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added”. While they’re keen to assure users that Nobara isn’t an official spin of Fedora, it does come with a number of extra packages and fixes to make the OS work better out of the box, such as Wine dependencies, OBS Studio, third-party codec packages for GStreamer, and Nvidia drivers. You can learn more about Nobara at https://nobaraproject.org.
NUTYX 23.06.01
NuTyX is a French Linux distribution that has been around since 2011. It’s created using LFS (Linux from Scratch) and has its very own package manager called Cards. The good news is that you can install NuTyX from almost any other Linux distro using a Bash script. You can even load virtually any desktop environment, such as MATE, KDE or Gnome. Its ports system also enables you to compile your own binary packages. For advanced Linux users only. Discover more about NuTyX at www.nutyx.org/en.
PROXMOX BACKUP SERVER 3.0
Proxmox releases commercial versions of Linux based on Debian. Products include a backup server, mail gateway and virtual environment. The latest backup server release (3.0) is based on Debian 12 (Bookworm) and uses version 6.2 of the Linux Kernel. The software stack is written in Rust and ultra-fast Zstandard (ZSTD) compression, which is able to compress several gigabytes per second. Subscriptions start at €495 (£427) per year for the Community Edition. You can visit www.proxmox.com to learn more.
LINUX MINT 21.2 VICTORIA
This version of Linux Mint is a long-termsupport release, which will be supported until 2027. It uses the Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment and includes a number of new features. These include an updated Slick Greeter to support multiple keyboard layouts. The touchpad interface has also been improved, with support for gestures, and the Software Manager has had a UI refresh, as has Pix, whose UI is now based on gThumb 3.12.2. Head to www.linuxmint.com to find out more about Mint 21.2.