I have decided going forward I'm going to go ahead and give monthly progress reports on our progress on product development. This helps communicate whats going on and doesnt leave our customers and users in the dark.
Our work with Ubuntu 22.04
This has progressed quite a bit and Im pleased to announce that the new build of Freespire using the 22.04 codebase may drop earlier than expected. We are aiming for the first of the year 2023. We will still be Kubuntu based. Freespire when it comes to the new LTS code base will ALWAYS drop first. The reason for this is because Linspire is still used by a lot of our enterprise and education customers and they need time to test and make changes to any in-house apps they may have and really putting it through the paces. So yes, our 22.04 builds will be dropping earlier than whats on the roadmap.
Older builds
The Xandros 11 series starting in September 2022 will be moving to critical support only. Being as it is based on 16.04 LTS we have updated as much as we can and to save the company time, money and resources we have decided to move it to critical support meaning there will be no monthly ISO refreshes and we will patch only critical issues and paid for patches going forward. EOL is still October of 2024 so yes we will be ending support at that time.
Linspire
Linspire 11.5 will still be released March 14, 2022. There have been MANY changes to this system. This includes not only KDE, but several kernel improvements and security fixes. We just built the final ISO today and it has been uploaded. We have included the minimal install feature that mainstream Ubuntu offers for people who want to deploy specialized desktop systems. Linspire does remain our number 1 best seller even for Enterprise customers and Education customers. Sales have been down since the start of the pandemic but we are starting to see a creep upwards and a pick up although nowhere near our sales numbers that we had in 2019 and early 2020.
PC/OS
PC/OS Desktop 20.04.4 and Server 20.04.4 have just been updated and to say sales have picked up recently and I think the introduction of free downloads has helped quite a bit. All the PC/OS builds have moved over to KDE and Server contains KDE and DWM.
Server is one that we are continuing to improve on and customer adoption has seriously grown. Some of the changes coming in the new release are DWM is now the default desktop. We do still include KDE for a more friendlier desktop but customers have relayed to us that for server work they like DWM more, so after you install the system on first boot DWM is the default desktop environment. Some customers have also asked us to put back in Live testing. The more recent releases we had removed live testing and put in install only. But they told us they run this on older systems and desktops and the #1 complaint was that they were going through the install and on first boot it would fail. By allowing you to test through the live environment for those use cases many of these issues will be worked out. Ubiquity matches the desktop installer and is not the custom Ubiquity that we used for Server although that will be changing. Other changes include updated server kernel, clonezilla, timeshift and better headless support.
PC/OS EOL will be December 2027
Freespire
Freespire 8.2 was released a couple of weeks ago and downloads have been extraordinary. We are approaching 7 digit downloads for Freespire and feedback from the community has been AWESOME. Freespire 8.5 will drop in June and 9 will drop on Halloween day. Freesire 10 as I said will be earlier than we anticipated but wont drop in 2022. Today we have updated Freespire 8.2 with all the security updates up to March 11, 2022 and thats available today at https://www.freespire.net
So there you go guys, and as I stated I will have the progress report for April about the same time.
Thanks all
