Feren OS July 2019 Snapshot has been released

It’s been 3 months since the last Snapshot, so… if you don’t know what that means: It calls for a New Feren OS Snapshot, and it’s now released for the 64 Bit Architecture and the 32 Bit Architecture.
This release comes with a set of minor changes and improvements over the April 2019 Snapshot, with the most noteworthy changes that users will notice summarised below.

Updating to the July 2019 Snapshot

As always, it’s simple to update to the July 2019 Snapshot. Just go into the Update Manager, hit Refresh, and install any updates that might be there. Once you’ve done that, congrats, you’re now on the July 2019 Snapshot!

Changes since (Original) April 2019 Snapshot

New Wallpapers

Just like every single other Snapshot ever made for Feren OS, there are a new set of wallpapers to choose from.
With this snapshot comes the ordinary amount of Unsplash wallpapers that snapshots usually contain in their wallpaper sets, with a dynamic range of wallpapers to take advantage of both Feren OS’s default look and feel, and also the new additions to Feren OS Next this snapshot. As just mentioned, these wallpapers also appear in Feren OS Next too.

Inspire Icon Set updates

Also, in this snapshot, the default icon set, ‘Inspire’, got a huge update to add some small tweaks to its structuring, and change a few icons… in Cinnamon, that is.

On Feren OS Next, however, more changes have occurred as a result of this update. Changes in Feren OS Next include:

• The Inspire icon set now has a complete set of icons for all the pages of System Settings in Feren OS Next
• A fix for the colouring of symbol icons (or ‘symbolic’ icons) in Plasma when the icon set is used

Updates to the Feren OS Repository Keyring

Unfortunately, another smaller change had to be made to all the ISOs in this Snapshot, due to a mess up on my part with deleting the original package signing keys for the Feren OS Repositories by accident. The old signing keys had to be replaced with new ones, and so current users ended up getting ‘NO_PUBKEY’ errors on APT Package List Updates. While the ISOs for the previous snapshot were updated first to include the new signing keys out of the box, this snapshot is technically the first snapshot to do so too.

If you’re suffering from that issue, go here to get instructions on how to fix it: https://ferenos.weebly.com/troubleshooting/fix-no_pubkey-on-the-feren-os-repositories

New Boot Screen

Because of the fact that the old boot screen that Feren OS Snapshots up to April 2019 were using broke on the Feren OS HWE-included ISO (default download option), and because of the Feren OS Next project, I decided to completely re-do the boot screen, basing it now off of the ‘Breeze’ Plymouth Theme that KDE neon uses by default. This means that any issues with ‘Please remove installation medium and press ENTER:’ not appearing when shutting down the Live Session in previous snapshots should now be fixed due to the boot/shutdown screen working once more.

If you, at any time, want the old boot screen back, simply go into the Store and search for and install ‘plymouth-theme-feren-logo-old’.

Changes in this Snapshot that only affect Feren OS Next

From here to the end, any changes listed below are changes that only affect Feren OS Next in the July 2019 Snapshot.

Plasma 5.16 and changes to the login screen and lock screen

The most obvious change with Feren OS Next in this snapshot is that Feren OS Next now includes Plasma 5.16.3 out of the box. This release of Plasma contains a bunch of improvements over its predecessor, including a revamped notification system for users.

Due to an aesthetic change brought by Plasma 5.16 to some power-related dialogs (as well as its own login and lock screens) concerning the buttons and user switcher design, Feren OS Next has also received updates to its default login screen and lock screen to port most of these aesthetic changes over from the vanilla Plasma versions of said themes to retain consistency across the OS. Optimisations need to be made in the future to the login screen on less than capable hardware, however, as the login screen’s animations are really slow on such hardware compared to even the Breeze login screen theme.

Cupertino Layout updates

The Cupertino layout has been updated slightly in this snapshot to now include USwitcher in place of Simple Menu on the top panel as well as a shortcut on the dock to launch Application Dashboard, the full-screen applications launcher.

Light Themes

Another addition to Feren OS Next in this snapshot is the introduction of official Feren OS Light Themes in Plasma. These were heavily based off of other light themes and are designed to be as crisp and efficient in colour scheme as possible. This change was part of an update to all the Plasma themes to allow all of them to have their blue-coloured areas be coloured depending on the user’s current colour scheme’s ‘highlight’ colour.

OOBE comes to Feren OS Next

Another change in this snapshot, for Feren OS Next, is that the OOBE from the standard version of Feren OS has been put on Plasma for Feren OS Next. Built off of the Feren OS Cinnamon OOBE, the OOBE in Plasma contains options for getting Feren OS Next the way you want it as well as configuring a few settings unique to Feren OS Next.

Feren OS Next hits ‘Beta’

Last but not least, in this snapshot Feren OS Next has officially hit Beta status. This means that we’re getting very close to the day when Feren OS Next is ready to be released. You can check out what’s still pending for Feren OS Next before it can be considered stable over here: https://github.com/feren-OS/Bug-Reporting-Center/milestone/1

Make sure to report any bugs you find with it, if you find any, so that Feren OS Next can be as good as possible on release.

Updates galore

This is only scratching the surface of what has changed. In conclusion, all the packages that can be updated have now been updated to their latest versions at the time of the ISO’s building and there are few other changes in this snapshot that were not mentioned in this post. Go and check the July Snapshot out and enjoy! There was a lot of work put in, especially in Feren OS Next, in this release to make Feren OS better than ever… So, enjoy!