The siduction team is pleased to introduce a new release. It has been
some time since the last release. The reason for this delay is that we
were waiting for KDE Plasma 6 in Debian Unstable. Although Plasma 6 was
released at the end of February 2024, its release in Unstable was
delayed by about four months due to the t64 transition in
Debian, which you probably remember. But now it’s here, and Plasma
6.2 has been available in Unstable for about two weeks.
The username and password for the Live Session are siducer/live.
First, a few words about the new artwork of siduction 2024.1.0 titled
“Shine on…”. The famous album by Pink Floyd inspired this design. And if
you now have an earworm… you’re welcome :)
The wallpaper Nexus
by Krystian Zajdel serves as the basis. We have adapted it for
siduction, paying tribute to the KDE developers, who have again put
tremendous work into the project this year, making it the best desktop
environment for us. If you agree, please consider donating or supporting KDE.
The flavors we offer for siduction 2024.1.0 include KDE Plasma 6.2.4.1, LXQt 2.1.0-1, Xfce 4.20, Xorg, and noX. GNOME, MATE, and Cinnamon have not made it again, as there is no maintainer for them within siduction. If you’re interested, please contact us. They may return one day or not. Of course, they are still installable from the repository.
The released images of siduction 2024.1.0 are a snapshot of Debian Unstable, also known as Sid, from December 23, 2024. They are enriched with useful packages and scripts, a Calamares-based installer, and a customized version of the Linux kernel 6.12.6, while systemd is at version 257.1-3.
KDE Plasma 6
Plasma 6 has now nearly fully arrived in Unstable and Testing and
will be available for Debian 13 “Trixie.” Although Wayland is the
default session type in Plasma 6, we have opted for X11 as the default,
as Calamares currently does not take the desired keyboard layout under
Wayland. This could have severe consequences in encrypted installations.
However, you can always switch to Wayland in SDDM.
As existing users, you’ve likely already upgraded to Plasma 6, and now
the current Plasma generation is also available for fresh
installations.
Known bugs: Dolphin currently cannot connect via smb://. As a workaround, you can use sftp. The bug lies in the kio-extras package.
Xfce 4.20
The newly released Xfce 4.20 from December 15 barely made it into Unstable and therefore into our new release. The new Xfce release focuses, among other things, on the initial, still experimental support for Wayland. Also, the Thunar file manager received significant improvements.
Known bugs: Unfortunately, the Wayland implementation is currently so experimental that the session doesn’t start. We have blocked Wayland for now. If this bug is fixed, we will re-enable it in a point release.
LXQt 2.1
LXQt is the lightweight sibling of KDE Plasma. The desktop, developed over ten years, offers a usable but still experimental Wayland session in version 2.1.0.
When using the Btrfs filesystem with siduction, we allow you to manage your snapshots with the SUSE-developed tool Snapper, which has its own chapter in the siduction manual under System Administration → Btrfs and Snapper.
siduction-btrfs be used on systems with MBR and GPT partition tables,
with or without a separate /boot partition.
Since version 0.3.0, siduction-btrfs uses the Snapper plugin
directory.
With the GRUB boot manager
After a rollback, the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg is recreated in
the rollback target using chroot and then GRUB is reinstalled from the
rollback target. This allows the user to access the rollback target
directly with a simple reboot. All other subvolumes, including the
previously used one, can be accessed via the siduction
snapshots submenu.
If the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg is updated during software
installation or upgrade, thegrub-menu-title script will add the
flavor and subvolume to the menu line of the default boot entry.
With the systemd-boot boot manager
After a rollback, the rollback-sd-boot script creates the boot
entries. It takes into account all the kernels in the new snapshot. The
default boot entry is set to the default subvolume.
If a subvolume is deleted for which boot entries existed, those entries
will be removed.
Snapper Snapshot Description
After an APT action, the snapshot-description script changes
the description displayed by Snapper (apt) to a more meaningful
text.
ChangeLog of changes:
The following non-free and contrib packages are installed by default:
Nonfree:
Contrib:
Remove Non-Free Content
Currently, the installer does not offer an option to deselect
packages that do not comply with the DFSG, the Debian Free Software
Guidelines. This means that non-free packages, such as proprietary
firmware, are installed by default on the system. The command vrms will
list these packages for you. You can manually uninstall unwanted
packages or remove them all by entering
apt purge $(vrms -s) before or after installation.
Otherwise, our script remove-nonfree can do this for you
later.
If you want to reuse an existing home partition (or another data
partition), do so after the installation, not in the Calamares
installer.
On some Intel graphics processors on certain devices, the system may
freeze shortly after booting into Live. To fix this, you need to set the
kernel parameter intel_iommu=igfx_off before rebooting.