The Feren OS November 2020 Snapshot is now available!
It has been a long time in the making, even getting delayed due to chaos happening personally, but now, today I can finally, with happiness, announce the immediate availability of the Feren OS November 2020 Snapshot!
There is A LOT of changes in this Snapshot, both in the backend and the frontend, all shaped by user feedback and advances made in Linux.
So then, let’s get right into the information.
Updating to November 2020 Snapshot
To update to the November 2020 Snapshot, use the Major Updater to update your Feren OS installation. (Feren OS Classic users need to go through the ‘Transition to Feren OS’ route in the Major Updater first)
For help and guidance, check the Major Update instructions post.
Now that is out of the way, lets go through the changes in this snapshot, because there is a lot of changes to cover.
Changes
Feren OS Classic has been discontinued
As many will already know, I warned people downloading Feren OS Classic via the official Feren OS website that it’ll be discontinued in the ‘next snapshot’ during the previous snapshot. Now that we’re on the ‘next snapshot’, it is with a heavy heart that I am announcing that Feren OS Classic is no longer available in the latest Feren OS base.
Feren OS Classic will still be updated until Ubuntu 18.04 reaches End-of-Life in a few years, and its ISOs may get periodic updates as well for those needing to reinstall it in the future, but after that point you won’t be able to download Feren OS Classic anymore via the website. It’ll be put in an archive, however, when that inevitably happens.
Overall, Feren OS Classic will still be available in its current form, until Canonical’s Ubuntu 18.04 reaches End-of-Life, but you won’t be able to have Feren OS Classic when updating your system to the newest Feren OS base.
32-Bit Support has been discontinued
Due to an upstream decision, and the discontinuation of Feren OS Classic, 32-Bit Support has also been discontinued in this Snapshot. Users of Feren OS Classic 32-Bit will still be able to use their systems as normal, but they won’t receive any future updates after Ubuntu 18.04 reaches End-of-Life.
Linux Mint’s Repository is GONE
Now I’ve got the discontinuations out of the way, it’s time for some happier changes. First of all, you will no longer find Linux Mint’s repository at all in Feren OS starting November 2020 Snapshot. It just is not there at all going forward. Therefore, you could say this ‘snapshot’ release is Feren OS… without the Minty aftertaste.
Software Sources updates
Of course, because of the removal of Linux Mint’s repositories, Software Sources got some updates in this snapshot:
- You can now toggle Feren OS specific ‘repository components’ from the main page of Software Sources
- The last pre-enabled PPA is no longer present as it is now pointless without Feren OS Classic
Theme Redesign
The complete redesign of Feren OS’s theme also makes its snapshot-debut in this snapshot of Feren OS, sporting a darker theme, a new dark theme, a new maximise icon, a custom Qt5 Application Style based on Adwaita-Qt, an Adwaita-based GTK2 and GTK3 theme, and way more improvements, mainly formed from user feedback on prior Feren OS themes.
For all the changes in the Theme Redesign, check out the official Theme Redesign theme announcement at https://medium.com/feren-os/meet-the-all-new-feren-os-theme-now-available-2f0db511cf7
Inter is now the default font
The default font used throughout Feren OS’s user interface has been changed to the Inter font, having used Open Sans and Lato beforehand. This should give Feren OS’s interface a fresher and more professional look while also adding to the freshness of the new Feren OS theme.
New Accent Colours
Based on user feedback, Feren OS November 2020 Snapshot adds two accent colours to the pre-defined accent colours available out of the box: Purple and Banana
Feren OS Tour makes its debut
Inspired by a recent addition to GNOME, the Feren OS Tour makes its debut in the Feren OS November 2020 Snapshot, replacing the prior first-login setup window and giving a more thorough and thought-out introduction to Feren OS. Unlike the prior one, it can also now be entirely skipped.
Improvements to OEM Config
OEM Config, the set of programs used to give you an interface for the System Installer to guide you through setting up Feren OS on the first boot of Feren OS in, has seen a bunch of improvements. The main improvements are that it no longer makes most of its temporary changes to settings system-wide for the environment it creates, instead applying them to the temporary user this all happens in, thus meaning there’s less chance of their being potential stray configurations post-Setup.
On the frontend, it has also gotten a new Desktop Layout that’s specific to it, that falls more inline with how Feren OS’s default Desktop Layouts look.
Calamares
Calamares also got some love interface-wise, with a new sidebar colour palette and more to make it fit better in the new Feren OS theme.
On top of that, a fix occurred upstream which means that the ‘Location’ step could, and has been, finally removed from Phase 1 of installation.
Web Browser Manager
Web Browser Manager has seen some changes in this snapshot as well:
- (specific to the new Feren OS base) Chromium’s install button will now install Debian’s version of Chromium
- Something might happen if you press spacebar
Welcome Screen
As Tour, and eventually the New Feren OS Store, is introduced, Welcome Screen is starting to become a pointless part of Feren OS. Therefore, this snapshot officially begins the process of phasing Feren OS’s original Welcome Screen out of Feren OS in favour of Tour, the User Guide, New Feren OS Store and potentially another addition to Feren OS in the future.
Welcome Screen will be missed, but as time goes on, things will move on for Feren OS as well for the better. I don’t plan on discontinuing what it’s replacing anytime soon, however, as its replacements are, so far, easier to get to grips with and maintain than Welcome Screen has been.
Feren OS’s Boot Screen
Feren OS’s Boot Screen Theme (Plymouth Theme) has been updated in this snapshot to benefit from a change made upstream, which now gives the theme the ability to show the manufacturer’s logo at the top of the screen when booting in a similar style to Microsoft Windows, if the hardware Feren OS is running on is modern enough to do so.
APT
To coincide with the change to Web Browser Manager, APT will no longer permit installing the ‘chromium-browser’ package by default, like in Linux Mint, as the ‘chromium’ that Web Browser Manager installs should suit that purpose. It’s just a temporary change however, until New Feren OS Store is eventually released, in order to keep certain users happy.
The current Feren OS Store has also been updated to hide the blocked packages from it in this snapshot, too.
GRUB Tweaks
Some extra tweaks were also made to the GRUB bootloader’s Feren OS configuration in this snapshot, in order to make the different Advanced Options’ names readable when the listings’ kernel names otherwise make them get cut off by ellipses.
From now on, nomodeset, Recovery Mode, and so on have their ‘(nomodeset)’, ‘(Recovery Mode)’, etc labels before the kernel string in their respective options.
All-new Backgrounds
In this snapshot, all of the background sets for Feren OS, from its first ever released version all the way to this snapshot, have been restructured and redone to provide proper crediting and also now have wallpaper names and credits in KDE Plasma, rather than them just being shown in Cinnamon (Feren OS Classic).
That aside, this snapshot also brings in new backgrounds, just like every snapshot before has.
ZSTD Compression
A change that’ll be noticeable right away when using the Live Session of this snapshot and onwards is the change of compression algorithms to ZSTD. This change, single-handedly, makes the live session way faster than before, at the cost of a slightly larger ISO size.
Now based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Finally, Feren OS November 2020 Snapshot is the first snapshot of Feren OS based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. All the prior snapshots since 2019 (and somewhat 2018) were based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Even more changes
That’s just the changes I remember happening in this snapshot. There’s potentially a lot more changes that I missed in this snapshot, for everyone else to potentially find for me. Aside from all of those, as always Feren OS now sports all of the latest updates made available to it since the release of the previous snapshot.
Conclusion
Overall, this was a rather crazy transition between Ubuntu bases for Feren OS. Future transitions should not take this long, hopefully, as a lot less stuff is likely to hopefully happen in future base transitions. Anyway, now that’s out of the way, I guess I can go back to working around the current chaos going on in life and prepare the update utility for existing Feren OS users, and backporting a lot of changes made in this snapshot to Ubuntu 18.04-based Feren OS.
The release notes of this snapshot of Feren OS and onwards can be found at https://ferenos.weebly.com/release-notes-for-feren-os-2004-based.
You can download Feren OS November 2020 Snapshot from the Get Feren OS page of the Feren OS website as always. https://ferenos.weebly.com/get-feren-os
I hope you enjoy the latest that Feren OS has to offer.
