# Khromian 21.XX (UNRELEASED) - Notable updates: Calamares 3.2.44.2 --> 3.2.44.3 LibreOffice 7.2.1 --> 7.2.2 - All branding has been updated for the 2021 redesign. - Following the recommendation of the PipeWire Debian maintainer, WirePlumber is once again the default session manager, after previously reverting the change due to regressions in default audio device selection. - The "packages" step in the installer was streamlined so it doesn't have to run a dozen separate operations. It also no longer refreshes the Apt package listings. This was oddly failing for one tester, even though their internet was stable. It was redundant anyways. - Some packages related to the proprietary NVIDIA driver that were erroneously included in the default images are now excluded. This saves on a meager amount of space. - Tilde is now included as an easy CLI text editor, suitable for use in tutorials that require editing system files but are targeting an audience that may still be intimidated by Nano. # Khromian 21-10 (2021-10-08) - Notable updates: Linux 5.10.46 --> 5.14.9 Chromium 90.0.4430.212 --> 93.0.4577.82 KDE Frameworks 5.83 --> 5.86 Calamares 3.2.41.1 --> 3.2.44.2 LibreOffice 7.1.5 --> 7.2.1 - Both Testing and Sid are included in Apt's sources by default, however the system is configured to only draw from Testing for all packages except the NVIDIA drivers. This should help ensure that the driver is patched for new kernels before the kernels migrate to Testing. - Use HTTPS by default with Apt. - KIO Fuse is preinstalled, for better handling of remote files. - Plasma Thunderbolt is preinstalled, to appropriately handle Thunderbolt devices. This also brings in the Bolt daemon. - Also bringing in: plasma-firewall, plasma-wayland-protocols, and plasma-runner-installer. - Better GPU video acceleration for Intel cards, including encode support, by preinstalling intel-media-va-driver-non-free and i965-va-driver-shaders as replacements for their free equivalents. - ZRAM by default - We're using Zstd compression and scale to 2x the full memory size. Physical swap creation (whether partition or file) is still available in the installer. This should merely make Khromian more functional on low-RAM systems by reducing effective RAM usage, as well as extend SSD lifetime by reducing the frequency of physical swapping. - vm.swappiness is raised from 1 to 200, to complement ZRAM. Additionally, vm.page-cluster is set to 0 as per the suggestion in reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/mzun99/ - NoHang is now ZRAM-aware, and a bit more aggressive when there's low memory pressure, since otherwise it would essentially never trigger until dire straits when ZRAM was in use. - Lower the storage minimum from 8.5GiB to 6.5GiB. This isn't a major change right now but it'll make things a little less tight. Eventually this will be lowered to 3.5GiB once Calamares can mount the chroot with all of our fstab options so they apply during the extraction process. - Lower the RAM minimum to 0.9GiB. ZRAM makes this possible comfortably. You can run a full desktop and even open a few YouTube videos on it. It's not a great experience, but I see no reason to arbitrarily restrict it now. - plasma-discover-backend-snap is included by default, but ***not*** snapd. Snaps will remain discouraged, but this should hopefully allow for better integration if a user ends up requiring and installing snapd. - VKBasalt and MangoHUD are preinstalled, since their installed size (even with new dependencies) is very low, and they're popular among gamers. libxnvctrl0 is also added to enable stats for NVIDIA GPUs, if the proprietary driver is present. - avahi-discover and ImageMagick are excluded by default, as they're too niche for most users to care about, and they add some ugly entries in the application launcher. - Images with the NVIDIA drivers preinstalled are built and distributed through the "Extras" section. This is probably more of a stop-gap. The big problem right now is, for cards new enough to lack firmware and/or Nouveau support, a safe graphics mode is available in the live environment, but this doesn't carry over into the installed system, requiring users to manually add nomodeset (and any other relevant parameters) to their boot options in order to get in and install the proprietary driver. In these cases, having prebaked ISOs avoids boot parameter fiddling. Eventually, users should instead have an option during installation to install the proprietary drivers (including legacy if needed). - On minimal images, the default media player is now MPV instead of Haruna. The default minimal browser is now Chromium instead of Falkon, owing to the relatively small size increase, the lack of security and extension support for QtWebEngine, and the lack of active upstream development on Falkon. ---------- # Khromian 2109-9 (2021-09-13) - Add NEWS file in the issue tracker for documenting changes. - Initial prototypes of small images. These have a minimal package set with every non-essential application excluded to drive down the file size. Some rare firmware is excluded. LZMA compression is used instead of Zstd. These are suitable for users who want a very baseline system they can configure further, or those with severe space constraints. Images should be <1.5GB and the installed system size should be <2.5GB. - Carlito and Caladea fonts installed by default, allowing LibreOffice to view documents written using the Calibri and Cambria fonts with proper metrics. - Newly preinstalled by personal request: Neofetch, Kolourpaint, KMines, KDialog. p7zip-full and p7zip-rar are explicitly brought in. - The Zstd compression level for the compressed filesystem is increased from 15 to 17. - GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 is a default environment variable in order to enable native KDE file pickers in Firefox and other select applications that support it. - Add a PolKit rule that allows users in the "sudo" group to mount external drives without entering a password (necessary for KDE automounting to work correctly). - If installing to a BTRFS partition, mount with discard=async on SSDs. - Rebase against Testing instead of Sid, fixing a notorious issue with Plasma being removed due to dependency issues whenever installing the Broadcom or NVIDIA driver. This does unfortunately mean reverting to Calamares 3.2.41.1 with a manual patch to fix BTRFS-on-root. libappindicator1 is temporarily cherrypicked from Sid to ease installation of Discord. None of this is kosher! - Don't include Wine by default, as currently, only Wine 5.0 is available, and this causes issues with applications that prefer your system Wine version, due to its age. Additionally, Winetricks 20210206 is considerably out-of-date and does not reflect the current state of the project. There are also some fair concerns that new users who are unfamiliar with Wine may accidentally use Windows versions of software even when Linux ports/alternatives are available, due to the integration. If we re-add Wine in the future, it should explicitly mention that it is a compatibility layer for Windows applications when launched.