Two years after the release of Trisquel 9.0, we get the news of the release of a new version of this Linux distribution ‘made in Spain’ and ‘100% free’: Trisquel 10.0 ‘Nabia’which will offer official support until April 2025.
Trisquel is, in fact, one of the oldest distributions on the Spanish scene, having been born in 2004 with the sponsorship of the University of Vigo, and being presented a year later, sponsored by Richard Stallman himself.
At first it was based on Debian Unstable, but since 2008 it is based on Ubuntuand almost always (as in this case) in LTS versions of said distribution, to guarantee its own stability and robustness.
5 flavors, 2 architectures
Traditionally, Trisquel was released with 32-bit and 64-bit support, however, that definitely changes in this edition:
“Nabia will be the first release without support for x86 32-bit hardwarewhile Trisquel 9.0.2 Etiona will continue to provide support for x86 32-bit machines until April 2023.”
However, the gap left by the 32-bit edition will be filled by the newly released support for ARM devicesincorporating armhf as a new architecture with support for Nabia:
“The changes made to the development system to achieve this goal will allow us to expand to other architectures soon, targeting 64-bit ARM and PowerPC as the next candidates. Although there is no support for specific ARM devices yet, the release of the image pre-installed development kit will allow the community to start experimenting and bringing support to new devices.”
Apart from that, Trisquel comes in 5 ‘flavors’, differentiated by its default desktop environment
Triskele: The main flavor of the distribution, based on MATE (v1.24), an environment that they bet on “because of its great accessibility support, simple user interface and no dependence on 3D acceleration”.
Triskele: KDE based edition (v5.68).
Trisquel Mini: Edition based on LXDE (v0.99.2), a lightweight desktop environment “for netbooks and old computers”.
Trisquel Sugar / Trisquel On A Sugar Toast (TOAST): Edition that implements the Sugar teaching platform (v0.118), “with dozens of educational activities for children”.
Network installation image: For installation via command line interface, “ideal for servers and power users who want to explore custom designed desktop environments.”
What does 100% free mean?
With ‘100% free’ we mean that it is one of those distributions that have the approval of the Free Software Foundation due to the lack of non-free componentsa concept that includes everything from proprietary firmware and drivers to software subject to registered trademarks, passing through DRM systems.
Many people are surprised, but even the official Linux kernel breaks these guidelines by including ‘binary blobs’ with proprietary firmware and drivers, to ensure compatibility with a wider range of hardware. Trisquel, like several other distributions, prefers to give up such support and replace the package linux of the kernel for its modified alternative ‘linux-libre’.
In fact, Trisquel also includes two little-known packages such as Abrowser and Icedove, which replace the much more popular Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Actually, they are nothing more than altered versions of the same to solve the problem that the name and the ‘artwork’ of both are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation.
Icedove, like the Iceweasel browser, was created by the Debian project. Abrowser, however, is a creation of the Trisquel project itselffor understanding that Iceweasel did not completely solve the problem that, like Firefox, it recommended using non-free extensions.
upcoming changes
“Our main site will soon undergo a major upgrade, which combined with the move to the trisquel.org domain will be the perfect opportunity to migrate our issue tracking platform to our GitLab instance where all development will continue.
Speaking of development, work on Trisquel 11 is ready to begin immediately, so we invite the community to start development with codename suggestions, as is tradition. Please join the forum or mailing list to participate.”
Via | triskele