March 30, 2018

Netrunner OS Release 18.03 Idolon Is Out Based On Debian Testing

A bit late on this one. The Netrunner OS team announced a few weeks ago the release of Netrunner OS 18.03 - Codenamed Idolon. Based on Debian Testing to stay fairly bleeding-edge in it's package selection, at least by Debian standards, the team has also included an updated list of default packages for various user tasks. One of the things that makes this distribution stand out is their willingness to break from KDE Applications when the team feels it's warranted.

For example, you'll find some GTK+ applications around - namely, Thunderbird for email,  GMusicBrowser as a secondary audio player, and Synaptic package manager instead of Muon. The rest is pretty straight forward for a KDE distribution.

From the release announcement:
"Compared to the previous 17.10 release, 18.03 comes with the following updates:
  • KDE Plasma 5.12.2
  • KDE Frameworks 5.42
  • KDE Applications 17.08.3
  • Qt 5.9.2
  • Linux Kernel 4.14
  • Firefox Quantum 58.0.1
  • Thunderbird 52.6.0
  • LibreOffice 6.0.2"
The theming is uniquely Netrunner, which is casual yet refined looking. My recollection of past releases brings to mind some pretty bold visuals - none of those remain here. There are also several noob-friendly touches sprinkled around, such as the "My Computer" and "Network" icons on the desktop to give users coming a certain paid-for operating system a more familiar look and experience. Additionally, I really like the ReadMe file on the desktop as well. Clicking it will take you to a troubleshooting webpage outlining tips to get you un-stuck should you find yourself in that position. Probably something all releases should do but most do not, and represents some thought given to a user's initial experience with Netrunner.

Netrunner OS comes in two flavors, just because it can. Netrunner Rolling, and Netrunner OS. As mentioned, Netrunner OS is based on Debian Testing, whilst Netrunner Rolling is a rolling distribution based on Manjaro Linux. This announcement is for the former, though other than the base framework the rest is very similar on both releases.  It's just a personal preference as to which version one should install.

Netrunner OS releases installation media on a six month interval basis, with the 18.03 .iso release being freshly-minted this month. The download comes in at a beefy 2.2Gb in size.

A popular distribution


It's worth a final note to say that Netrunner OS currently holds the number 5 position on our monthly "Top 5 KDE Distribution List", so it appears to be quite popular. 

If you run Netrunner, let us know what you think about it!

Links:


- Netrunner 18.03 – Idolon released
- Netrunner on DistroWatch 


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