May 9 Update: OS upgrades to 3.1.6 are temporarily disabled – see comments below – 3.1.7 will be out later today to fix a Realtek WiFi driver problem May 10 Update: OS upgrades to 3.1.7 are now available – see below if you got stuck without working WiFi or without the ability to update to 3.1.7
New Features and Bugfixes
Security fix: We changed the default permissions for home folders to not be readable by other non-admin users. If you upgrade to this version, your system will automatically apply this fix to existing home folders.
Upgraded browser: We upgraded the built-in browser to Chromium 58.
App Center speed improvements: We have sped up the App Center’s launch time by avoiding unnecessary metadata updates from some flatpak repos.
App Center localization: We fixed user interface translations and cut-off subtitles in Bengali and Hindi versions.
App names and thumbnail images: We fixed the names and thumbnail images for some core applications.
App updates: We fixed a problem where some apps could never be successfully updated and fixed an occasional problem where an app or runtime update would complete successfully but the “Update” button would remain (a similar bug had been fixed for 3.1.5 but only for “Install” and not for “Update”). We also improved the accuracy of progress bars for external app installations/updates so that you can now better predict the time it will take to complete.
Inkscape bugfix: We fixed support for some extensions for Inkscape.
Video app bugfixes: We fixed some visual glitches that you might have experienced when playing videos inside apps.
New Web Apps
These apps are available via desktop right-click.
Telegram
Twitter
New Flatpak Apps
These apps are available via the App Center.
Slack
Visual Studio Code
Sublime Text
Atom Text Editor
Transmission – This is now our recommended BitTorrent client and thus we have renamed FrostTorrent back to its upstream name, FrostWire.
Installer
Security fix: We fixed a security issue on dual-boot systems – Windows files are now protected from access by non-admin Endless users.
We just found a problem with a broken WiFi driver on the 3.1.6 version for some Endless hardware models. If you have an Endless or Mission computer, we recommend not upgrading yet. Most other hardware models are not impacted by this problem. We will work to fix it as soon as possible – hopefully within one day.
If you receive an OS upgrade and find that your WiFi stops working, you can revert to the previous version of the OS via the following command in the terminal window (search the desktop for “term”, then copy/paste or carefully type the command – the punctuation and number of spaces matters):
You will be asked for your admin user password. Then, shut down the computer (you may have to hold the power button for five seconds to complete the shutdown), and restart the computer. This should put you back in 3.1.5 (or whatever older version you had prior to the upgrade to 3.1.6) with working WiFi, and once we have a 3.1.7 release with the proper fix you can try to upgrade again.
I am disappointed that such a critical bug slipped through our testing, and I’m really sorry for any inconvenience. I also wish we had a simple way for a user to revert to the previous version without typing a long command in the terminal. (We always keep around one previous OS version in case of catastrophic upgrade issues such as this, but this is the first time that we’ve actually needed to use it.)
Apparently the WiFi bug could impact several models of Realtek WiFi chips, so it is not just the Endless hardware that was impacted.
We temporarily pointed the OSTree server back to 3.1.5, so no further users will be able to upgrade to 3.1.6. We are finalizing a fix that we plan to release later today as 3.1.7, at which point upgrades will be available again.
Good news! Endless OS version 3.1.7 is now released with the fix for the impacted Realtek WiFi chips, so upgrades are back on.
The bad news is that if you ran the sudo ostree admin deploy command in my previous comment, while you reverted to a version with working WiFi, your OSTree origin file would have been modified such that future upgrades would be possible. I’ll update the suggested command, but if you get into a state where you are not able to upgrade to version 3.1.7 or later, please type the following command to clean up your OSTree origin file:
sudo sed -i s?refspec=.*?refspec=eos:os/eos/amd64/eos3? /ostree/deploy/eos/deploy/*.origin
I’m going to modify my previous comment to provide a command that avoids this complication.
Sorry for the ugly command needed to clean up the breakage of version 3.1.6. In the future (starting with version 3.1.8), if there is ever a need to revert to an older OS version, we’ll have a simple command available.
If you did happen to upgrade to 3.1.6 and have broken WiFi, and if you haven’t tried the work-around yet, the easiest thing to do may be to connect an Ethernet cable to get on the internet, and try another upgrade to 3.1.7 (from user menu --> Settings --> Details --> Check for updates now). Once you successfully upgrade to 3.1.7, WiFi will be working again.
