Earlier this month, the Linux kernel 6.19 was released, and that was a good excuse to refresh our ISO. And as you can read from the title, the changes for this one were big enough to turn it into a major release with a name that really covers this ISO. Named after the second-largest moon in our solar system, Titan. So, we borrowed Saturn’s largest moon to orbit around our purple Linux space for now. This theme is also reflected in the new wallpaper that was created by our very creative and trusty community member, Unclespellbinder.
But before I go into the Titan release, I just want to address the recent development concerning age verification for all operating systems in California for 2027.
Age verification law
Like many of you, we were surprised by the news last week, and questions quickly followed about our position on this matter. We just have to wait to see how this will develop for FOSS and Linux in general. It isn’t easy for us to make a clear statement on it at this moment, because this decision involves not only the distros but also DE/WM environments, software packages and mirror networks. Like Arch, we don’t have any infrastructure to track how many users download or install our system, let alone who is running Endeavour on their machines. Besides the fact that it goes against FOSS fundamentals, we simply don’t have the manpower or resources to take on this near-impossible task.
Also, in creating this law, not a single person or entity from the FOSS world was represented or heard, and there is still a window of opportunity open to address the concerns for open source software and Linux/Freebsd systems before the law takes effect. After the news dropped, the OSI, FSF, and Linux Foundation must have realised their mistake in not reacting in time and hopefully will come into action for the many distributions and other FOSS projects, like us, that don’t have Californian or US legal representation. So, all eyes are on them, because Colorado and the rest of the world are next… We are not blaming any of the organisations mentioned by the way. We are just pointing out that the law isn’t set in stone, yet.
Okay, now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the joyous news of the Titan release.
The Titan release
Wallpaper created by Unclespellbinder
Of course, it is unnecessary to mention, but I will remind you, though.
The changes described over here are affecting new installs, our Calamares installer, and the Live environment on the ISO only. Running systems don’t have to “upgrade” to Titan; if you update regularly, your system is fine.
Titan’s live environment and offline installer are shipping with:
- Calamares 26.03.1.3-1
- Firefox 148.0-1
- Linux 6.19.6.arch1-1
- Mesa 1:26.0.1-1
- Xorg-server 21.1.21-1 (xorg)
- Nvidia-utils 590.48.01-4
For this release, we cleaned up and streamlined the installation process and added some new big features alongside.
- Improved mirror ranking support, including providing an optimised mirror list when the installer is offline
- Added hardware detection for all GPUs and VMs
- We are now installing additional drivers for all GPUs, including Vulkan drivers and the needed packages for hardware-accelerated video decoding when applicable
- GPU drivers are now being loaded early by default
- This release also introduces a new tool,
eos-hwtool. This is the tool being used by the installer, and it is also available now to all EOS users to install and remove GPU drivers whenever needed.
A very noticeable change also, is the slight increase in size of the ISO in comparison to Titan’s predecessors. It increased from around 3 GB to 3.4 GB. This increase has all to do with the new features we have shipped to create a smoother installation process and has nothing to do with us adding a more “bloated” OS or DE experience. We have stayed true to our very principles in providing an almost clean Linux experience, ready to customise to your needs.
I hope you have fun with Titan, as we’ve had fun creating it for you, and we would like to thank all of our wonderful community members who were involved in giving feedback on our forum/Telegram group, creating and testing this release. We think the world of you!
Titan is available for download on our homepage.
The world has gone mad. The US of A even more so and California is probably twice as mad. From now on, it should no longer be possible to download any Linux version in California: problem solved!
While I agree that age verification for an OS is insane, blocking distro downloads in the state does nothing but harm the community at large and signal to bad actors that it “worked”. Besides that, CA is the largest economy in this country where a majority of tech is located…which runs primarily on Linux based servers. It’s a fight worth fighting for.
So glad to see someone else say this.
I’ve seen so many of these “no linux in california” comments, and it’s like none of them realize that doing this would basically destroy the entire internet overnight.
Forget not downloading your favorite distro in cali, you won’t be downloading ANY distro ANYWHERE.
Not to mention steam runs on cloudflare, which run on linux in california. You won’t be gaming either.
The only possible upside is that this probably the most likely scenario in which the cali government rolls back the law, but more likely they will just make an exception for large corpos, leaving small businesses and individual users screwed, and of course shrinking the userbase of any distro that doesn’t go through with it, forcing all those users to migrate to a distro that does, like S76.
It kind of goes along with the digital ID scheme that will be rolled out in the UK (I still hope it doesn’t). We already have enough ID and tracking.
I still can’t see why a whole OS requires verification, how about headless servers, do they need verification?
Children will always get around restrictions if they really want to, often their parents even help them, they’ll be a lot of kids using their “parents” accounts no doubt.
I’m for protecting children but wouldn’t trust the security or true motivation of any government or big tech verification system.
Thanks for a superb update. Really looking forward to loading EOS onto my new rig!
yeah lets cut California and see ther world burn with out linux
Many thanks for your hard work!! I really appreciate it! 😉
Very grateful for your work
This is a MUST download and install for me, Titan is the hostname of my main PC 🙂
Thank you EndeavourOS Team for all the hard work you do, very much appreciated!!
Vielen Dank an das gesamte Team. Ihr seid spitze…
i appreciate that yall are basically saying you won’t comply with these disgusting laws even though you actually said you literally couldn’t even if you wanted to
its honestly insane that to even use our own operating systems we need to send in our ids to some random database, we’ve genuinely lost the plot
I love it. Thanks a very lot.
This version fixed a bunch of gaming performance issues on Wayland for me! Nice!
Great to hear!
How to upgrade please ?
If I only do eos-update –aur or else using pacman -Rs or yay -Rs I cannot get the new tools right ?
I mean sudo pacman -S eos-hwtool will work for this particular tool but what about the others ?
Thanks
Hi,
How to upgrade please ?
If I only do eos-update –aur or else using pacman -Rs or yay -Rs I cannot get the new tools right ?
I mean sudo pacman -S eos-hwtool will work for this particular tool but what about the others ?
Thanks
The features described over here are installation improvements.
Is there a higher quality wallpaper image of Titan? I can’t find it anywhere
You can find the full res over here https://github.com/UncleSpellbinder/EndeavourOS-HD-Wallpaper/blob/main/EndeavourOS_TITAN__3840x2160.png
ty :3
Does the new installer account for the fact the 590xx Nvidia drivers aren’t compatible with older but still surprisingly popular Nvidia cards (e.g. 1060, 1070, 1080 ti)?
If they aren’t already, I think it would be good to include the 580xx drivers with the installer as well, so that Linux newbies with older hardware who are installing the OS for the first time don’t have to troubleshoot Nvidia issues right out the gate.
Those cards are included. That was the main reason why we created the tool.
I think a cool name for the next update is “Orbit” or “Galaxy” just my opinion though, great operating system!
I think a cool name for the next release is Galaxy