Beta Release | Endless OS 4.0.0~beta3

[jprvita]

A new beta release of Endless 4.0 is out! Please follow these instructions if you want to join the beta testing program. Bear in mind that the chance of encountering bugs in a beta release is higher than in a regular release – please ensure your data is backed up before joining the beta.

This release brings a few bug fixes and stabilization work on top of the previous beta release, listed below:

• Security fixes for NTFS-3g and webkit-gtk
• Disable unnecessary services by default
• Only start vmware-user when running as a VMWare guest
• Hide unwanted icons by default (ex., htop)
• Translation fixes

Endless OS 4.0 will bring a lot of changes and improvements, detailed in the Endless OS 4.0 (UNRELEASED) Release Notes.

As a beta tester, you can help us by providing feedback on stability and hardware support, and reporting software regressions (things that used to work in previous releases that stopped working on this new release). And specifically at this time, we are looking for feedback on printing and VPN connectivity with L2TP and OpenConnect/AnyConnect VPNs.

[nedrichards]

I see that there’s a new release of the Appindicator extension https://github.com/ubuntu/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator which looks to have a number of useful bug fixes especially for X11 tray icon use cases. Do you plan to update to that within the beta timeline? (I’m aware that the shell itself won’t be getting a major rev)

[egrath]

You can install a extension locally (~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions) which then takes precedence over the system-wide installation. Just make sure that you install the extension which is built for the correct gnome version.

[nedrichards]

I’m aware that I can but this is built in as part of the product to provide the system tray in the bottom menu. I only mentioned it since I thought that a newer version would help everyone and it’s marked as still being compatible with 3.38 in the manifest.

[Daniel]

Hi Nick!
We moved to a build setup where we take binary packages directly from Debian Bullseye, and we try to only fork/modify/rebuild packages in limited circumstances. I believe Debian won’t introduce this class of update on a stable branch (since it is more than a bugfix upgrade) but is there a particular bugfix that you are looking for? Maybe we can work with Debian to backport a specific fix.

[nedrichards]

In particular it’s https://github.com/ubuntu/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator/issues/300 which just makes the feature feel overly finicky but bullseye has 34 so there’s a whole pile of refactoring (and other bug fixes!) between here and there. Likely to be a better use of your time to release 4.0 faster and then move on to more widespread upgrades.