Butterbian Xfce 0.4.0 is out. The snapshot-first foundation hasn't changed - Btrfs subvolumes laid out for you, a Timeshift snapshot before every apt operation, rollback from the GRUB menu. What changed is everything you look at. 0.3.3 looked like stock Xfce with a wallpaper, 0.4.0 looks like a distro. The wallpaper is a twilight scene drawn for this release - a lone lighthouse lamp on a dark ridge. The boot menu uses the same art, so it's one scene from power-on to desktop. Cottage and lantern variants ship alongside it, and the SVG sources are in the repo if you want to remix them. LightDM now gets the dark Butterbian treatment instead of stock gray - spotlight artwork, the Butterbian glyph as your account picture, and a login box that matches the rest of the system. Locking your screen takes you to the same place. The desktop theme is Orchis in its black variant - near-black, flat, blue accents, with matching window borders, so titlebars and applications finally agree with each other.
NawaOS 2.0 is the biggest release so far. Setup, updates, saves and recovery are now things the system handles for you. What's new? Setup wizard on first boot, in Arabic or English - drivers, apps, done in minutes; NawaOS Store - 60+ games, launchers and tools, one click each; Companion 2.0 - your phone as an encrypted remote, straight from the browser, no app to install; a snapshot before every update, with Recovery Mode right in the boot menu; Game saves synced to your own Google Drive or Dropbox after each session; instant replay - Super + R saves the last 30 seconds of gameplay; handhelds - console mode, TDP control and a working guide button on ROG Ally, Legion Go and Steam Deck; driver manager - the right NVIDIA driver for your card in one click; firewall on by default and automatic security updates; a redesigned dark theme across the whole system, with a new wallpaper collection.
Armbian 26.8 is a major quarterly release featuring 787 merged pull requests and significant updates across the project. Highlights include Linux 7.1, a rewritten installer, Armbian Imager 2.0 with new Qualcomm flashing support, bootable UEFI ISOs, U-Boot 2026.07, improved wireless drivers, and broader ARM and RISC-V hardware support. The release also promotes 14 boards to standard support and introduces a modernized Debian Trixie-based CI and build infrastructure, while extensive cleanup and upstreaming work reduces long-term maintenance and improves reliability.
This release is built around two new in-house projects: aufs-ng and xfwm4-gl. aufs-ng is our new union filesystem, written from scratch to replace aufs, which PorteuX has relied on since day one. It keeps the same on-disk format and the same mount command grammar, so everything keeps working as before. It's around 5,000 lines instead of Aufs's 28,000, and it uses the kernel's modern I/O passthrough, which means much less filesystem-wide locking, considerably faster copy-up thanks to in-kernel splice instead of page-by-page buffering, and it tracks inodes only, so a warm system uses about a third of the memory. It's the default from now on. xfwm4-gl is our fork of xfwm4 that finally brings OpenGL compositing to Xfce in X11, with XRender kept as an automatic fallback. Compared to XRender it draws about a third less power and delivers roughly 10% more frames per second to applications.
CuerdOS 2.1.1 “Skycatcher” brings several small updates, including replacing OnlyOffice with LibreOffice, updating Cuerdtools to Qt6, and refreshing the ISO images. It also fixes an issue with the config-updates-skycatcher package in the GNOME ISO. The LabWC edition has been discontinued.