Finally, the Trisquel team has announced the release of Trisquel 8.0 Flidas, latest stable release of Ubuntu based GNU/Linux distribution that strictly follows free software foundation guidelines. This release brings an end to the long standing uncertainties in Trisquel community regarding Trisquel 8.0. It will be the first release of project featuring MATE as default desktop environment.
Trisuel 8.0 is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and will provide critical bug fixes and security updates till 2021. It has been almost two years since the availability of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Considering the history of trisquel releases, there will be a gap of 6 months between an Ubuntu release and it's corresponding Trisquel release. But Trisquel 8 release has broken this schedule and has reached till the next Ubuntu LTS release. In order to avoid this kind of delay future, Trisquel team will immediately start working Trisquel 9.0 and it will be released after 6 months of it's base release.
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| A preview of Trisquel 8.0 |
Delayed release means more stability
Trisquel 8.0 testing images were ready for more than one year now. It has undergone through testing by the team and the volunteers. Also, the Free Software Foundation is using it for LibrePlanet conferences since last year. Their new server infrastructure is also powered by Trisquel 8.
What is new in Trisquel 8.0?
Trisquel 8.0 brings all crucial package updates from Ubuntu 16.04 which ranges from minor applications to Kernel modules. It includes an updated Kernel and related components to provide a better support for modern hardware resources.
A biggest change in Trisquel 8.0 is use of MATE as default desktop environment. Earlier versions of Trisquel used to ship a tweaked version of GNOME 2.x. When GNOME foundation discontinued GNOME 2.x project in favor of GNOME shell, Trisquel also adopted GNOME 3 fallback in Trisquel 7. Since it requires some proprietary drivers to work properly, Trisquel team opted to use MATE Desktop. It is an ideal choice because it retains all good characteristics of GNOME 2.x. The team has nicely tweaked it to retain the user experience in previous releases.
The next most important component is Abrowser 59 (based on Mozilla Firefox), which is not only fully-featured and quite faster than before, it has also been audited and tweaked to maximize the user's privacy without compromising on usability. Abrowser will not start any network connections on its own (most popular web browsers connect for extension updates, telemetry, geolocation and other data-collection as soon as you open them, even if you haven't even typed an address yet!) and it has a list of easy to set, privacy-enhancing settings that the user can opt-in depending on their needs. As a companion to it, and based on Mozilla Thunderbird, the IceDove mail client is also fully updated and set up for privacy.For more information, read Trisquel 8.0 release announcement published in project's website.