Redcore Linux 1806 Provides Users with a Hardened Ecosystem by Default

Redcore Linux, which is based on the Gentoo rolling source release distribution, released version 1806 today. It’s elected to ship with the LXQt desktop environment installed by default, which is possibly one of the biggest pieces of news associated with the release. Some former LXDE-based distributions have been concerned about moving to LXQt because of various stability-related problems.

*buntu fans might have noticed, for instance, that Lubuntu 18.04 LTS came out with LXDE as the developers said they were going to wait until another ISO update to upgrade the desktop environment. Redcore’s developers, however, have found that LXQt is stable enough to include in a production environment.

Users who love Qt-based apps but want something that’s heavier than LXQt can install KDE Plasma instead. In fact, the developers announced that there might be a KDE-based spin in the future. Even those who stay with the lighter environment, however, will be able to take advantage of a variety of minor artwork tweaks and other graphical improvements.

Frugalware Linux provided Redcore with access to one of their speedy build servers so that they could put this release, nicknamed Kepler, together more quickly than they would have otherwise been able to. It comes completely hardened as a result of all this hard work, and this should make it particularly useful for those who need a dedicated secure environment to work from without having to sacrifice anything in the way of usability.

Anyone who downloads the current ISO and installs from it will also take advantage of some new portage improvements. Since server specifications are overkill for most systems, Redcore uses routines from Gentoo to check what sort of underlying hardware the user is attempting to install the operating system on.

Virtual machine deployments can take advantage of this technique as well, since these defaults would normally be overkill in these environments as well. That being said, the new Kepler ISO dropped VirtualBox guest additions, so those who are installing it in this fashion will want to treat it like any other distro install.

Some 1,000 other packages were updates as well, and these include the following browsers:
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Vivaldi
• Opera
• Falkon