14 DAY TRIAL // Ken Moore, the creator of the TrueOS BSD-based distribution that was formerly known as PC-BSD, kicks off 2017 with a new stable release of his lightweight Lumina desktop environment.
Primarily an enhancement release, Lumina 1.2.0 desktop environment is here a little over two months after the release of version 1.1.0, and promises to bring a whole lot of goodies, including new plugins, a brand-new utility, as well as various under-the-hood improvements that users might find useful if they use Lumina on their OS.
While focusing on minimalism, Lumina 1.2.0 is here to do some general cleanup by removing a bunch of useless things, such as the LuminaUtils library, thus resulting in faster and more reliable binaries. It also begins the deprecation of some of the external utilities, and introduces pre-defined profiles for system interface configurations.
"I have often mentioned that Lumina could be reconfigured to reproduce the interface from most other desktop environments, but now users can literally turn Lumina into a reasonable facsimile of Windows, Mac OS X, GNOME 2/MATE, and the default Xfce interface with just a couple clicks of the mouse," said Ken Moore. Check out the screenshot gallery below to see it in action.
Coming soon to a distro near you
Lumina is not exclusive to TrueOS, as you can easily install it on various GNU/Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSuSE, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, or Arch Linux, as well as other BSD-based operating systems like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD, and even GNU/kFreeBSD.
The latest version, Lumina 1.2.0, should soon be available in the stable software repositories of some of these OSes, and it's a recommended update for those running any of the previous releases. You should also check out the project's homepage if you plan on compiling the desktop environment from sources on your distribution.
