Moving towards a more stable experience

24.01 have just been released. There are bunch of new stuff to go over this time, so let’s get started!

A more stable experience

One of the goals of this distro was to offer a stable experience, however lately I have been using the official repos as a testing ground. There were bunch of broken packages being shipped, so to prevent this, I have came up with a new repo structure.

All the “stable” packages will now be shipped in the release specific repo. For MatterLinux 24, this repo is https://24.matterlinux.xyz. All the unstable development packages will be shipped in https://next.matterlinux.xyz.

Unstable development packages will be moved to the stable repo when they are ready.

For now the old URL (pkgs.matterlinux.xyz) points to the 24.matterlinux.xyz to prevent breaking old systems. If you are still using pkgs.matterlinux.xyz in the mp configuration (/etc/mp/cfg), then move over to 24.matterlinux.xyz as soon as possible.

Better standards for development

I have updated the contribution wiki page, adding better standards that every developer should follow for a better development experience. I have also added a new wiki page for reporting bugs and I have added issue templates to the git repositories.

THE HOLY BAR

With the new 24.17 and 24.18 release of MatterLinux Pacakge Manager (mp), I have added a bar for operations such as downloading files, extracting files, deleting files etc. I have also added initial support for internalization and fixed some little bugs.

LOTS of new packages!

desktop repo has now more than 300 packages, these new packages include Emacs, Lightdm, XFCE4, Network Manager and more! And there are even more packages on the way, see the TODO.md for the desktop repository to check whats on the way.

New tool: xcfg

I wrote a little script that is similar to the xwmconfig from Slackware. xcfg lets you install different available desktop environments and window managers. It also adds needed .xinitrc configuration for the desktop of your choice. You can install xcfg from the desktop repo.

What’s next?

There will be bunch of new packages, that’s for sure, but a part from that, I think I may start working on a GUI or TUI based installer. Or I may configure an installer such as Calamares. Not really sure on that.

Anyway, I think that will be all for now, see you in the next post!