What’s coming for Nitrux in 2019
2018 is over, and it has been an excellent year for Nitrux. We hit a significant milestone back in November when we released Nitrux with znx and included our applications using MauiKit both making their debut one year and a half after we re-launched Nitrux OS on the 15th of March 2017 after a three-year hiatus. We are very thankful to all the people that have accompanied us for all these months and here’s a glimpse of what you can expect from Nitrux next year.
Nitrux 2.0
First, let’s talk about our next major version, Nitrux 2.0. Our most recent release series Nitrux 1.1.x can be considered a transitional period where we make use of the new technologies that we have developed throughout 2018 like znx and MauiKit.
znx is already showing its incredible potential allowing us distribution vendors to deliver updates in a significantly more accessible manner than ever before and giving users the peace of mind of a stable operating system — all of this coupled with our tight integration of AppImages.
MauiKit is gaining new features that will expand on its functionality as a framework. Some of these new features you will notice throughout our next releases. Currently, we’re not making these new features public yet but rest assured that we will let you know once they’re good to go for general use.
But that is not all, for Nitrux 2.0 there are other ideas that we want to explore and make them a reality. For instance, to further simplify our Linux distribution we want to implement a renewed Files System Hierarchy for Nitrux where we create a more straightforward, less cluttered directory tree.
One can already have a glimpse of this; we include a folder in the root directory called /Applications where we store system-bound AppImage files like znx, this folder is also present in the user’s folder and serves the same purpose which is to save the user’s AppImage data.
Given that our focus is not to use a package manager but to use AppImages exclusively, this is the next evolutionary step with Nitrux, and a cleaner directory tree would be indicative of this. With Nitrux we want to make use of AppImages for desktop applications and CLI tools, but for the rest of the operating system like libraries or other binaries, we are considering other similar means to achieve our goals of making Nitrux a modern operating system.
znx and MauiKit
All of that means that znx will be receiving significant overhauls to its code, and we will also be working on new tools to make use of these changes.
As of now, we have included the following fixes or updates in znx:
- Embed update information in AppImage.
- Create a 64MB ESP partition and format it as FAT32 instead of FAT16.
We included a new application in Nitrux 1.1.2 called Nota; Nota is a convergent simple text editor and its part of the latest additions to the Maui applications set. There’s also Station, a terminal emulator, and Library a document viewer, we didn’t include these, but we will be adding them to our following ISO files.
MauiKit has also received a lot of online services integration; this will allow applications to access an API to connect to a store and browse its contents to download them. For example, with Pix, you could download new wallpapers or with Library PDF documents.
As always all applications using MauiKit are convergent and cross-platform, running on Linux, Android and Plasma Mobile with other platforms in the future.
But wait, there’s more
Once we finalize our move towards a new file system tree, we have more plans in the pipe, one idea that we have is related to gaming in Nitrux and general purpose computing enhancement.
We want to make it available for other Linux systems too as we consider that it will be a breakthrough once it’s fully launched. For the time being, we can’t make it public either as we are just putting it together, but we will be publishing news about it as we always do.
