Plasma 6 with Wayland or X11 option and qt 6 ported Calamares, meet Gemini

Image by Smokey

With the arrival of Plasma 6 and qt6, it was high time to celebrate them with a new major release ISO. The road to Gemini, named after the NASA program that was a bridge between the Mercury and the Apollo missions, was a real journey for our developing team but they got the release in top shape with an endless perseverence in a relatively short time.

As I wrote earlier in this post, Gemini will be the first release without the option for ARM installations. We are still open for anyone who wants to join us to breath new life in our ARM project.

This release doesn’t affect running systems, if you regularly have updated your system, the core updates are already there. The fixes described in this announcement are improvements for the ISO and the installation process.

The Gemini release

Gemini ships with:

• Calamares-3.3.5 24.04.1.3-1
• Firefox 125.0.1-1
• Linux 6.8.7.arch1-1
• Mesa 1:24.0.5-1
• Nvidia 550.76-1
• Xorg-server 21.1.13-1 (xorg)

New features and fixes:

• Plasma 6 on both the Live environment and the offline installation option – The Live environment runs X11 to ensure support for all hardware and when Plasma is chosen as the installed DE, both offline and online options, Wayland will be the default, but X11 can be chosen as an option in SDDM.

• We switched from Nvidia-dkms to Nvidia packages – The Nvidia-dkms was causing issues, like freezing the Live environment when Nvidia boot was chosen on the ISO.

• ARM installation option is removed

• EFI partiton is created correctly when “replace partition” option is chosen – A bugfix reported by some users.

• Gparted is back on the ISO in addition to KDE partitionmanager – Gparted returned as an option to use on the Live environment, since several users pointed out that they were missing some options KDE partition manager lacks.

• Welcome updater and eos-bash-shared uses Gnome terminal by default when Gnome is chosen – Our native Welcome updater and eos-bash-shared uses xterm by default on any DE, but with Gnome the console was unable to close the window. To fix this issue, the apps now uses the Gnome trminel app.

• EOS update notifier is removed from the default installation list – Our native update notifier is removed by default. It still can be installed as an option after installation through our Welcome app.

Improvements to EndeavourOS apps and libs:

eos-update

• has new options, more info with command eos-update --help
• fixed for running in chroot

nvidia-inst

• added support for installing a non-dkms Nvidia driver

eos-sendlog

• added URL expiration support (current works with the 0x0 service)
• added warning about sending sensitive data
• fixed for running through ssh

added experimental support for the doas command

Gemini can be downloaded over here.