Introducing Loss32: A New Lightweight Linux Distro With a Focus on Legacy Hardware

2 weeks ago
by George Whittaker Introduction

A fresh entry has just appeared in the world of Linux distributions: Loss32, a lightweight operating system built from scratch with one goal in mind — giving old and low-resource computers a new lease on life. Announced by its small but passionate development team, Loss32 aims to be fast, respectful of older hardware, and friendly to users who want simplicity without sacrificing modern usability.

Whether you’re rediscovering an old laptop in a drawer or building a tiny home server, Loss32 promises to deliver a capable computing experience with minimal overhead.

A Distribution Born from a Simple Idea

Loss32 began as a personal project by a group of open-source enthusiasts frustrated with how quickly modern software has moved past older machines. They noticed that even relatively recent hardware can struggle with mainstream operating systems, leaving many devices underutilized.

Their solution: build a distro that boots fast, uses minimal RAM and disk space, and still provides a complete desktop environment for everyday tasks.

The name Loss32 stems from its focus on “losing” unnecessary bloat — keeping only what’s essential — and the fact that it targets 32-bit and low-resource systems that many other distros are abandoning.

Key Features of Loss32 1. Runs on Older CPUs and Low Memory

Loss32 supports:

  • 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs

  • Machines with as little as 512 MB of RAM

  • Hard drives and SSDs down to 4 GB usable space

These minimums open the distro up to machines that newer Linux distros won’t even install on.

2. Lightweight Desktop — Fast and Simple

Instead of heavy desktop environments, Loss32 ships with a customized Xfce/XF-Lite hybrid:

  • Classic panel layout for easy navigation

  • Small memory footprint for snappy response

  • Simple app launchers and taskbars

This ensures a familiar feel while staying lean.

3. Essential App Suite Included

Out of the box, Loss32 includes a careful selection of applications:

  • Web browsing — light browser with Web standards support

  • Email and calendar — basic, responsive client

  • Media playback — audio and video codecs included

  • Simple document editing and PDF viewing

  • File manager optimized for speed

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George Whittaker

Linux Kernel 6.19-rc4 Released as Development Marches On

2 weeks 2 days ago
by George Whittaker

The Linux kernel development cycle continues with the release of Linux 6.19-rc4, the fourth release candidate in the lead-up to the final 6.19 stable kernel. As with previous RC builds, this release is aimed squarely at developers, testers, and early adopters who help identify bugs and regressions before the kernel is finalized.

Release candidates are not feature drops — they are checkpoints. And rc4 reflects exactly that role.

What Does rc4 Mean in the Kernel Cycle?

By the time the fourth release candidate arrives, the merge window is long closed. That means all major features for Linux 6.19 are already in place, and the focus has shifted entirely to:

  • Fixing bugs introduced earlier in the cycle

  • Addressing regressions reported by testers

  • Refining drivers, subsystems, and architecture-specific code

In other words, rc4 is about stability and correctness, not surprises.

What’s Changed in Linux 6.19-rc4

While rc releases don’t usually headline major features, they do include a steady stream of important fixes across the kernel tree.

Driver and Hardware Fixes

Many of the changes in rc4 focus on hardware support, including:

  • GPU driver fixes for stability and edge-case behavior

  • Networking device driver cleanups

  • Updates for input devices and platform-specific drivers

These changes help ensure Linux continues to run reliably across a wide range of systems, from desktops and laptops to servers and embedded hardware.

Filesystems and Storage

Several filesystems see incremental fixes in this release, addressing corner cases, error handling, and consistency issues. Storage-related updates also touch block-layer code and device-mapper components, helping improve reliability under load.

Architecture-Specific Updates

As usual, rc4 includes fixes tailored to specific CPU architectures, such as:

  • x86 refinements

  • ARM and ARM64 cleanups

  • RISC-V and other platform-specific adjustments

These changes may not affect all users directly, but they’re crucial for maintaining Linux’s broad hardware compatibility.

Regression Fixes and Testing Feedback

A large portion of rc4 is dedicated to resolving regressions reported by testers running earlier release candidates. This includes:

  • Fixes for boot issues on certain configurations

  • Corrections for performance regressions

  • Cleanup of warnings and build errors

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George Whittaker

Manjaro 26.0 Anh-Linh released

2 weeks 4 days ago

Manjaro 26.0

Since we released Zetar in April 2025 we worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Anh-Linh.

The GNOME edition has received several updates to Gnome 49 series. This includes a lot of fixes and polish when Gnome 49 originally was released in September 2025. You can find find release dates of each upcoming point-release here: Release Calendar. Weekly updates around GNOME can be found here.

Highlights of 49 release series are:

Calendar sees a number of improvements in GNOME 49. The most visible change is the reorganized interface, which is now more flexible, and allows the window to adapt to different window sizes. It also makes it possible to manually hide the sidebar, which is ideal for smaller screens or tiled windows.

Version 49 of the Software app focuses heavily on performance improvements. One major bottleneck has been how the app store parses large amounts of data from Flatpak repositories like Flathub. This release introduces optimizations that greatly reduce memory usage and speed up the parsing process. The result is a snappier, more responsive experience when browsing and searching for apps, especially on systems with limited resources.

GNOME 49 introduces a vibrant new wallpaper catalog that’s specifically engineered for high‑dynamic‑range (HDR) displays and the Display P3 color space. These HDR beautiful wallpapers are possible due to enhanced color-management in GNOME’s window manager (Mutter), which allows it to render wallpapers with their full 16‑bit‑per‑channel RGB depth, giving an unprecedented range of colors and contrast. Image loading backend (Glycin) has also been improved with regard to performance of the color-managed pipelines.

GNOME’s built-in remote desktop capabilities have been extended for version 49, providing more capabilities for those connecting to their GNOME desktops from elsewhere.

The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 6.5 series, Frameworks 6.21 and KDE Gear 25.12. It brings exciting new improvements to your desktop.

Plasma 6.5 includes a number of highly-requested features:

First up: rounded bottom window corners! Breeze-themed windows will now have the same level of roundness in all four corners. If you don’t like this, you can un-round them, too. Another one is automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on the time of day. You can configure which global themes it switches between, and also which themes are shown on the manual toggles on System Settings’ Quick Settings page. As a part of this feature, you can also configure whether you want the wallpaper to switch between its light and dark versions based on the color scheme, the time of day, or be always light or dark.

The Flatpak Permissions page got transformed into a general Application Permissions page, where you can configure apps’ ability to do things like take screenshots and accept remote control requests.

Plasma’s built in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server now lets you share the clipboard. You’re also no longer required to manually create separate remote desktop accounts; now the system’s existing user accounts work as expected, and you can just supply their credentials to the RDP client app.

The utility that reads the level of ink or toner from your printer now informs you when it’s running low or empty.

And finally, you can now hibernate your system from the login screen.

With our XFCE edition, we have now Xfce 4.20. Here some highlights: A new file highlighting feature (accessed from the file properties dialog) in Thunar file manager lets you set a custom colour background and a custom foreground text colour – an effective way to call attention to specific file(s) in a directory laden with similar-looking mime types. On the subject of finding files, Thunar includes recursive search.

The panel picks up a pair of new preferences. First, panel length is now configured in pixels rather than percentages, as before. Second, there’s a new “keep panel above windows” option. This allows maximised app windows to fill the area behind the panel rather than maximise its bottom or top edge to sit flush against it.

Control Centre groups all of the desktop’s various modules for managing the system into one easy-to-use window. New options are present in many of these. For example you can disable header bars in dialogs from the Appearance module; show or hide a ‘delete’ option in file context menus from Desktop; and pick a default multi-monitor behaviour before you attach an additional screen – dead handy, that.

Kernel 6.18 is used for this release, such as the latest drivers available to date. With 6.12 LTS and 6.6 LTS we offer additional support for older hardware as needed.

We hope you enjoy this release and let us know what you think of Anh-Linh.

Anh-Linh 26.0.1 (2026-01-14)

Download XFCE (click for more details) Download GNOME (click for more details) Download KDE (click for more details)

Anh-Linh 26.0 (2026-01-04)

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philm

[Stable Update] 2026-01-04 - Manjaro 26.0, Mesa, Firefox, LibreOffice, COSMIC

2 weeks 5 days ago

Hello community, first of all: “Happy 2026!” We hope you all had a good start into the new year. We wish you all the best. Here we have another set of package updates. This also marks the release of Manjaro 26.0, code-named ‘Anh-Linh’. This time our focus is on Plasma 6.5 and GNOME 49. Both will use Wayland by default, which may change things for older systems out there. Some who still need X11 support may consider our XFCE build. Expect the new ISOs for installation of Manjaro soon to be published.

Important Note: Users of Plasma and GNOME may lose their X11 session support. Therefore read our Known issues and solutions section before restarting your systems!

Important Note: Users of Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the NVIDIA driver when 580xx series got used since 590xx doesn’t support the older hardware anymore. Only Turing series and newer. Therefore read our Known issues and solutions section before restarting your systems!

Current Promotions Recent News NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal support (click for more details)
  • As of Linux 5.4.302, the 5.4 series is now EOL (End Of Life). Please install 5.10 LTS (Long Term Support) or 5.15 LTS.
  • As of Linux 6.17.13, the 6.17 series is now EOL (End Of Life). Please install 6.18 stable and/or 6.12 LTS (Long Term Support).
Valkey to replace Redis in the [extra] Repository (click for more details) Previous News Finding information easier about Manjaro (click for more details) Notable Package Updates
  • Some Kernels got updated
  • NVIDIA 590.48.01
    • 590xx doesn’t support the older hardware anymore. Only Turing series and newer. Therefore read our Known issues and solutions section before restarting your systems!
    • Updates to nvidia-driver-assistant to detect drivers for older cards better
  • Mesa 25.3.2
  • Firefox 146.0.1
  • LibreOffice 25.8.4
  • GStreamer 1.26.10
  • COSMIC 1.0.1
  • ALSA 1.2.15.1
  • Wireplumber 0.5.13
  • Updates to Budgie and Cinnamon packages
Additional Info Python 3.13 info (click for more details) Info about AUR packages (click for more details)

Get our latest daily developer images now from Github: Plasma, GNOME, XFCE. You can get the latest stable releases of Manjaro from CDN77.

Our current supported kernels

  • linux54 5.4.302 [EOL]
  • linux510 5.10.247
  • linux515 5.15.197
  • linux61 6.1.159
  • linux66 6.6.119
  • linux612 6.12.63
  • linux617 6.17.13 [EOL]
  • linux618 6.18.3
  • linux619 6.19.0-rc3
  • linux61-rt 6.1.158_rt58
  • linux66-rt 6.6.116_rt66
  • linux612-rt 6.12.57_rt14
  • linux617-rt 6.17.5_rt7

Package Changes (1/3/26 02:29 CET)

  • stable core x86_64: 10 new and 10 removed package(s)
  • stable extra x86_64: 1258 new and 1380 removed package(s)
  • stable multilib x86_64: 29 new and 29 removed package(s)

A list of all changes can be found here.

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