0.9.0: Byte Haven

Notable changes:

• R/W support / persistency is enabled:
  • EXT4 partition is created out of redundant space of your R/W medium
• transition to openSUSE Tumbleweed;
  • repository list is overhauled to give priority to the «release» ones
• dropping 2GB limit and not considering anything less than 4GB:
  • keeping file persistency enabled;
  • keeping documentation and locales;
  • keeping basic devel packages since OpenCL wants half of them anyway;
  • not shunning away from 32bit packages anymore
• font selection is completely overhauled in favour of Google Noto collection;
  • Terminus font is used by default in KMS&GUI terminals;
  • DejaVu-based Hack font is used in text editors;
  • DejaVu font family is still generally used in GUI
• UI's look is overhauled for darkness without bleakness
• Mesa is outfitted with Gallium OpenMAX IL, VAAPI & VDPAU implementations
  • which are not used in apps by default due to driver instability
• support for OpenCL (AMD & Intel)
• support for high-quality midi playback via fluidsynth
• support for UPnP for PulseAudio
• support for motion-based (vapoursynth-mvtools) frame interpolation
  • and neural network (nnedi3) scaling in mpv
• addition of a bunch of YaST modules including Docker support
• addition of wine with native Gallium DirectX 9 support
• addition of more working gaming emulators:
  • DOSBox for IBM© PC/DOS
  • OpenMSX for MSX®
  • PPSSPP for Sony© PSP®
  • PCSX-R for Sony© PlayStation®
  • PCSX 2 for Sony© PlayStation® 2
  • Dolphin-Emu for Nintendo© Gamecube® & Wii®
  • Desmume for Nintendo© DS®
  • Mupen64Plus for Nintendo© N64®
  • Yabause for Sega© Saturn®
• addition of rEFInd (graphical probing EFI bootloader)
• addition of K3B disk burner just for the hell of it
• addition of Marble, the map viewer
• addition of Skype and skyperious (Skype data viewer)
• addition of Steam installer/launcher and its crutch-wrapper
• addition of ZFS support (disabled by default and may be removed at any time)
• addition of volatility (forensic tool for RAM analysis)
• return of PeaZip (until p7zip GUI decides to compile)
• removal of Bumblebee/Primus/VirtualGL/bbswitch in favour of PRIME/DRI3
• removal of conky due to its low practicality from out-of-the-box
• removal of toxic because we don't try to support console messaging
• removal of live-{fat-stick,usb-gui} because of low usefulness for our case
• replacement of bomi with xt7-player-mpv
• replacement of dropped kernel-desktop with our kernel-HSF
  • (tuned for low latency and packing almost all in-kernel drivers)
• replacement of LMT/pm-profiler/pm-utils with tuned/systemtap/powertop
• replacement of tc-play with veracrypt
• replacement of uTox with qTox
• commencing usage of multiple dnscrypt instances
• systemd's automatic userland coredumps are forbidden by default
• Firefox and TB are unbranded in hopes to disable mandatory signing;
  • mozilla-kde4-integration is removed, kde4 hacks are disabled
• general package updates and fixes

0.8.1: The White Devil

Notable changes only for 0.8.1:

• file persistency is disabled again due to extreme system slowness and
  space exhaustion on 2GB USB sticks
• removal of basic devel packages for purpose of space conservation

Notable changes for 0.8.1 and future releases:

• LXQt migration to Qt5 / 0.9 update
• fix for YaST2-firstboot no-GUI oversight
• support for F/OSS OpenMAX IL (AMD & Nvidia)
• addition of Tano IPTV player and return of non-beta VLC
• addition of mednafen, JACK-capable multi-system emulator
• addition of efitools and UEFITool for manipulating U/EFI crap
• removal of vaapi support in gstreamer (it brings more trouble than it's worth)
• removal of XScreenSaver (due to inhibition problem)
• removal of SIP Witch (too specific purpose)
• replacement of caching polipo with non-caching privoxy Tor-forwarding proxy
• replacement of unetbootin with imagewriter & live-{fat-stick,usb-gui}
• replacement of obsolete NPAPI flash with slightly less crappy PPAPI one
• replacement of gnote with keepnote due to newest GNOME idiocity
• replacement of n/oping (which segfaults) with fping
• replacement of guvcview (again, which segfaults) with qv4l2
• replacement of PeaZip (fatness) with xarchiver
• replacement of Calibre (extreme fatness) with CoolReader3-Qt5
• commencing actual usage of mDNS
• Firefox and TB are forced to use EGL;
  • Firefox also is forced to use OMTC and switch off its driver blacklist
  • (overwise interface is slow and HTML5 video is choppy)

0.8.0: Raiden

Notable changes:

• Transition to OpenSUSE 13.2
• LXQt 0.8 update (Qt4 version due to Qt5 build's instability)
  • be wary, nitrogen is used to control desktop wallpapers instead of pcmanfm-qt
• Enlightenment removed due to inability to login
• file persistency is enabled (may work extremely slow on slow R/W media like bad flash)
• /tmp is put on RAM and cleansing of /var/tmp is enabled
• printer and scaner support added due to occasional usefulness
• YaST firewall is disabled by default to ensure connectivity
• filesharing servers for NFS, T/FTP, SMB are provided
• OpenVAS and ClamAV security systems and plethora of network scanners are present
• forensic image taking & analysing tools such as guymager and plaso are installed
• virtualization support is added via libvirt: qemu/kvm & lxc
• kiwi is installed by default for completeness
• all audio I/O goes to JACK now, default user is allowed realtime
  • PA runs as JACK client, uses echo cancellation by default
  • pure ALSA also redirects to JACK
  • OSS apps (like tvtime) can use JACK via PA's 'padsp'
  • JAMin is used before output to enhance sound, defaults to low & high boost + DRC
  • QJackCtl, QasMixer and PASysTray are used for control and configuration
• colour is managed via colord with argyllCMS, dispcalGUI and xiccd
• LeechCraft-Azoth now supports audio calls
• Tox P2P IM audio/video protocol is fully supported
  • (X & ncurses Tox clients + libpurple-plugin for LC-Azoth)
• LinPhone + SIP Witch / switchview bundle is added for safe P2P conferencing in HD A/V
• SMplayer and VLC replaced with bomi/mpv
• gtk-recordmydesktop replaced with simplescreenrecorder
• SubtitleComposer and Aegisub are added for subtitle handling
• GoldenDict, the ultimate dictionary, is updated from its ancient version
• all logging completely directed into systemd-journal
• PCI & USB ids, smartdb and CAs always updated before creating image
• Custom build of Firefox with:
  • system libjpeg-turbo, libpng, cairo, pixman, libvpx, sqlite, libevent, hunspell, icu, ffi, bz2
  • direct JACK support (PA output should work too if JACK is not running)
  • disabled crash reporting, accessibility
  • enabled stripping, disabled '-g' flag
• sudo now handles GUI apps and can replace xdg-su/kdesu/gksu
• hundreds of other changes

Known issues

• systemd whines about failed services but it's full of shit, those actually work as expected
• jamin craps on screen's idle direct rendering surfaces like video player on pause
• gnome-keyring does not automatically unlocks on login as it supposed to
• autologin with delay doesn't work in lightdm
• programs like VLC and FF use DBus screensaver inhibition but XSS doesn't support it
• virtual keyboard used is actually onboard and not kvkbd
• openSUSE's build of Remmina has NX support disabled

0.7.5: The One

the first release that has no known major issues,
features pre-configured and tested Tor + Polipo + DNSCrypt + Unbound bundle.

AppArmor (restricting security system) and Hybrid Persistency (auto-creation of r/w partition when booted from flash) are disabled for now due to the former being buggy and pissy and the later - slow and unresponsive.