– This post is from my hashnode blog. –

The true end to distro hopping gets an upgrade.

So blendOS v3 came out (I still have to update the docs oh god).

v3

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What I like

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So far, I’m excited about the full immutability (snapshots and easy backups), and this newfangled ISO update system (to confuse ‘ol Baldy here). The akshara utility is cool too.

So what’s new?

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Rudra made a trailer to push all this, I recommend you watch it for the iMovie stock music (although Apple only recently unveiled actual Apple stores in India):

[youtube embed removed]

Rudra also outlined everything in a blog post (iframe’d badly below):

[iframe removed]

TL;DR

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It all boils down to the following:

• Installation ISOs are used for updates (never seen before, a new breakthrough!).

• akshara, some new management utility that Rudra forgot to write the README for. It’s a mystery what it is to me anyway.

• zsync is being set up for the ISO repo to only download changed files, like what git does.

• Updates are in the background and instantaneous.

• Rudra made assemble, a tool based on the LineageOS repo build tool, which makes remixing and ISO building easy via XML manifests

• Akshara can be used to install extra drivers, though the ISO comes with many.

• It supports these distro containers:

  • Arch

  • AlmaLinux 9

  • Crystal Linux

  • Debian

  • Fedora 38

  • Kali Linux (rolling)

  • Neurodebian Bookworm

  • Rocky Linux

  • Ubuntu 22.04

  • Ubuntu 23.04

• Misc. bug fixes

• Same old binary naming scheme (BINARY_NAME.CONTAINER_NAME)

• I’m put under more pressure to finish the docs 🙂

Releases are named after Indian foods now, in alphabetical order (so what happens after v23…)

I also want v4 to be called blendOS Cheeseburger, although Leviathan and Avalon are valid options.

blendOS is like a cheeseburger, in every single way except for all of them.

- Asterisk

What’s next?

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• We’re planning on moving most of the repositories to our new GitLab instance.

• We’re also hoping to have a proper KB by v3 stable.

• zsync needs to be implemented for updates.

• We have to get v3 onto peoples’ mirrors and we have to set up mirrorbits on the build server.

Conclusion

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This one was a bit shorter, but in general I’m happy with the project and hope it only gets better. These changes will help it be a better replacement for (or get it closer to, depending on your opinion) Bedrock Linux or VanillaOS, and give it a better user experience and more customizability overall.

Thanks for reading!