Neptune 7.0 “Faye” Released with Zswap, Based on Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye”

Neptune 7.0

Leszek Lesner announced today the general availability of Neptune 7.0, a major release of this Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution built around the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Coming more than two years after Neptune 6.0 and more than a year after Neptune 6.5, the Neptune 7.0 release is based on the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series.

Dubbed “Faye,” after the member of the Bebop crew from the Cowboy Bebop anime series, Neptune 7.0 ships with the KDE Plasma 5.20.5 desktop environment that has been beautified with a new Neptune specific theme that’s fully compatible with KDE Plasma’s Breeze widget style.

The new theme, which you can see in the screenshot above, brings a subtle, yet modern flat look and feel to Neptune Linux. On top of that, the new release comes with an in-house built variation of the Tela flat icon theme to accompany with the new desktop theme, and the default panel now lets users pin more apps and tasks to it.

The KDE Plasma desktop environment in Neptune 7.0 also received some small tweaks to make your Neptune Linux desktop experience better. For example, there are now right-click context menu options to open the Dolphin file manager as root (system administrator) and to set image files as wallpapers.

Another interesting features is under the hood, as Neptune Linux now ships with Zswap instead of ZRAM, which is a kernel feature that provides a compressed RAM cache for swap pages, allowing Neptune to support the Suspend to Disk feature once again if the swap partition/space is big enough. This is good news for those installing Neptune Linux on low-spec machines.

Of course, many of the pre-installed apps have been updated, but others were removed. This release also uses newer versions of the Qt 5 libraries.

“For some applications we decided to remove support like snapshot manager and persistent creator. Those applications were less and less used by our users and the effort to port them to the newer base made no sense anymore,” explained Neptune developer Leszek Lesner.

Thank you Daniel for the tip!

Last updated 2 years ago

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