Winter is coming - Next Release

[devil]

Hi,

for starters, let me say thank you for the great support you are giving us! It means a lot, and it backs us up with a solid base for your work.

Initially, we wanted to have a new release out by now, but work and other obligations prevented that from happening. So now we have decided to do another X-mas release like we did a few in the past. And we are wrapping up some nice new features for this X-mas present.

First of all, we will ship nala, a new front-end for libapt-pkg, that will make your updates, upgrades and dist-upgrades look prettier, be more informative and easier to grasp, while being faster overall. This does not mean, you have to use nala, you can still use apt, if that is what you prefer. Or you set an alias and use the apt commands from your muscle memory, while nala does the heavy lifting in the background.

Secondly, we'll try to ship for you the option to have snapshots created and be able to roll these back from the GRUB menu, should things go south in your installation. This option will be available automatically, if you choose btrfs as your file system in Calamares or our text-based installer. In the installation, you can handle your snapshots in CLI or with snapper-gui. The system will automatically create snapshots before and after you install packages or run upgrades of your system. I can also create them at boot time or anytime during runtime manually. The only drawback is, that, depending on your settings, it can use considerably more space on your disk to store the snapshots. We believe, the extra security you get through this is well worth the extra space, given the prize tags on today's HDDs and SSDs.

We are well aware, that the visual appearance of siduction has been a weak point in the last few years. So, in our last meeting the idea came up to go back to basing code names and wallpapers on well-known rock songs from the past, as we did when we started out with siduction. Let us know what you think.  And if you are good at design, you might want to lend a hand to transfer those rock songs into wallpapers. 

We are looking forward to our next release, and hopefully so are you. 

[ReinerS]

Sounds promising.
Will those be implemented piece by piece over time as usual, or just with the new release?

regards

Reiner

[kokurya]

huiuiui Guess this gonna be the first time i will try a new fresh install since I use siduction

[dibl]

Excellent -- sounds great! It makes me want to do a new installation! How sad, that my 3 siduction systems are all running flawlessly.

[edlin]

Sehr gute Nachrichten und ich hoffe, dass alle Beteiligten es bis Weihnachten schaffen.
Die Integration von nala ist für mich nicht so essentiell. Es kann leicht nachträglich installiert werden.
Aber die Integration von Schnappschüssen gefällt mir sehr, zumal ich ohnehin btrfs benutze. Da mein System erst im Juni neu aufgesetzt wurde, würde ich mich über eine nachträgliche Integration besonders freuen. Lasst es rocken ...
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Very good news and I hope everyone involved makes it to Christmas.
The integration of nala is not so essential for me. It can easily be installed afterwards.
But I really like the integration of snapshots, especially since I use btrfs anyway. Since my system was only rebuilt in June, I would be particularly happy about a retroactive integration. Let it rock ...

edlin

[dsat]

... let it roll ...
Song proposal: HEROES!

[dibl]

... let it roll ...
Song proposal: HEROES!

Yes, or "Heroes and Villains"!   

[michaa7]

Sehr gute Nachrichten und ich hoffe, dass alle Beteiligten es bis Weihnachten schaffen.

I am not much of a new install junky. So each new release is more of a milestone I notice going on ...

Die Integration von nala ist für mich nicht so essentiell. Es kann leicht nachträglich installiert werden.

That's what I did for my current system: Looks good and polished. But there is (currently) no equivalent to the "-d" (download only) option, an option I find very handy for on the one hand downloading all new packages but on the other hand then aborting d-u and evaluating whether or not a d-u is safe or tooo scary.
I filed a wishbug against nala for integration of this option ;-)

Aber die Integration von Schnappschüssen gefällt mir sehr, zumal ich ohnehin btrfs benutze. ..., würde ich mich über eine nachträgliche Integration besonders freuen. Lasst es rocken ...
...would be particularly happy about a retroactive integration. Let it rock ...

Same here. To have a means to revert srcewed installs/d-u_s would come *very* handy. As I migrated my system several times from one partition to an other partition I would give it some thought whether to migrate it from an existing ext4 partition to btrfs *if I then could benefit from snapshots".

Anyway: good luck

[der_bud]

.... But there is (currently) no equivalent to the "-d" (download only) option, ...

According 'nala upgrade --help' there is Option -d,--download-only. While shortcut '-d' did not work, the long option '--download-only' worked as expected, so respective alias is possible.

Looking foward to that release, perhaps worth a fresh install on my long-time-maintained "Distro: siduction 15.1.0 Paint It Black - kde"

[michaa7]

...
According 'nala upgrade --help' there is Option -d,--download-only. While shortcut '-d' did not work, the long option '--download-only' worked as expected, so respective alias is possible.

you are right, I didn't read the help pages carefully enough. Same here, '-d' didn't work, '--download-only' did.

EDIT: "-d" option will come back in the next nala version.

[DeepDayze]

Good to see a new siduction release in the works and it sure sounds promising.

Btrfs has gotten better over the years and hopefully is stable enough for daily driver use. Having snapper taking snapshots on each apt upgrade makes good sense and I've seen this when I tried out Garuda Linux (which is Arch based) as that distro makes btrfs the default filesystem for the root drive. Down the road will btrfs become the default?

Keep up the great work siduction team!

[thomv]

That are good news!
The integration of snapshots sounds great. I`m hoping, it can be integrated in an existing installation (with ext4) whithout an knew install - I like the look of wintersky, the appearance isn`t that bad.

[devil]

Unfortunately that will not be possible. The snapshot functionality relies on btrfs.

[DeepDayze]

Unfortunately that will not be possible. The snapshot functionality relies on btrfs.

Think for ext4 timeshift could be configured to work in a similar fashion to snapper.

[thomv]

OK, too bad. I read in GitHub, that Snapper-Gui should work with Ext4. But I take, what I get and am thankful for that.
(I had siduction running years ago (Riders-on-the-Sky), then I had no box to run Linux on it, and now I`m back to stay.
I`m just an interested user but I had never problems with siduction, reading the forum (and the debian-forum) always helped.)
And maybe I will try to figure out, how to make it with timeshift.