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The SparkyLinux developers announced the release of SparkyLinux’s December 2020 ISO snapshot based on the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series.
SparkyLinux 2020.12 comes with up-to-date packages from the Debian Testing software repositories, where the Debian Project develops the next major release of their operating system, Debian GNU/Linux 11, dubbed Bullseye. SparkyLinux’s packages have been synced with the Debian Testing repos as of December 3rd, 2020.
This is the first release to ship with the latest Linux 5.9 kernel series for top-notch hardware support. The Linux kernel 5.9.11 is included by default in the December 2020 ISOs, but users will also be able to install the latest Linux kernel 5.9.12, as well as the 6th Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux kernel 5.10 LTS from SparkyLinux’s unstable repositories.
SparkyLinux 2020.12 is also the first release to ship with the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 10.2 as the default compiler, and new RSS feed reader clients, namely QuiteRSS on the LXQt edition and Liferea on the Xfce and MATE flavors.
Among other noteworthy changes, SparkyLinux’s December 2020 ISO snapshot includes the Calamares 3.2.34 graphical installer, APTus AppCenter 20201203-RC1 as a drop-in replacement for APTus, and sparky-www, a small package that provides a custom SparkyLinux start page on your favorite web browser, powered by DuckDuckGo.
According to the developer, the SparkyLinux start page is located under /opt/sparky/index.html. This means that users will have to load it manually to their default web browser after installing the sparky-www package from the software repositories.
Software-wise, the SparkyLinux 2020.12 ISO brings some of the latest software releases, including the Mozilla Firefox 83.0 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 78.5.0 email client, LibreOffice 7.0.3 office suite, VLC 3.0.11 media player, Exaile 4.1.0 Beta 1 music player, and libpython3.9 (Python 3.8 remains the default).
If you want to install SparkyLinux’s December 2020 ISO snapshot on your personal computer, you can download the 64-bit images right now from the official website. Since this is a semi-rolling release, existing SparkyLinux 2020.09 users only have to do a full system upgrade via Sparky Upgrade or by running the following commands.
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
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