Mr Ruben Quidam of Trisquel development team has announced immediate availability of Trisquel 8.0 Flidas Alpha1 for testing. Trisquel is a Ubuntu LTS based GNU/Linux distribution that is 100% compliant with free software policy of Free Software Foundation.
Trisquel 8.0 is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and it comes with Linux-Libre 4.4 based kernel. Beginning from this release, Trisquel will be using MATE 1.12.1 as default desktop environment against GNOME 2.x/GNOME 3 fallback environments used in previous releases. The decision to replace GNOME with MATE was made after observing that, GNOME 3.x requires additional 3D acceleration even in fallback mode. So, after taking opinion community the team has decided to go with MATE Desktop.
Preliminary steps for the development of the next release are finished, including continuous-integration build jails, a Linux-Libre 4.4 based kernel, a bootstapable system and now functional Live images available at http://jenkins.trisquel.info/makeiso/iso/For more information, see the forum post and further discussions on this release.
The image has many of the basic components that will be the base for Flidas. The default desktop environment will be MATE 1.12.1, a fork of GNOME 2 that brings back all the functionality and quality level of previous Trisquel releases. The panel, file manager and control center are already looking polished. This decision comes from the current editions of GNOME requiring 3D acceleration even in fallback mode, a requirement that in many cases forces the user to choose between a degraded user experience and performance, or the usage of non-free graphics drivers. Instead, we aim to provide a fully functional, highly performing desktop for all users.