blendOS v3 Released with Support for 7 Desktop Environments

Rohan Timalsina

July 17, 2023 - TuxCare expert team

blendOS v3, codenamed “Bhatura,” was released with tons of new features and improvements on July 6, 2023. Bhatura is a name of popular bread in India. This version ships with 7 different desktop environments: GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, Deepin, MATE, and LXQt.

blendOS is an Arch-based immutable Linux distribution, and this release now marks another major upgrade of this amazing distribution. Now, let’s have a look at some notable additions in blendOS v3.

blendOS v3: New Updates and Changes

Support for More Desktop Environments

As we already mentioned, blendOS v3 is now available with a total of 7 desktop environments. In addition, it allows users to switch between all supported desktop environments simply using the system track command.

System Updates

blendOS utilizes ISOs for performing system updates, unlike other traditional distributions. Also, the download size usually ranges from 10-100 MiBs. Updates get downloaded in the background, and the current root filesystem is replaced on the next boot while untouching any custom packages that have been installed.

Application Installation Becomes Simple

This version introduces a new feature to install applications to a container by double-clicking a DEB, RPM, pkg.tar.zst, or an APK. Remember that you will need to enable Android app support from the blendOS Settings app for APKs.

New Command Line Tools

Furthermore, you will find two new command line tools in blendOS v3: system and user. The system command enables users to install packages from the Arch Linux repositories. In contrast, the user command has arrived as a replacement for the old command blend. It is used for creating and managing containers and associations.

Supports 9 Distributions

You can now use Nix with a single/multi-user installation on the following distributions, exactly like you would on any standard Linux distribution, and these distributions are currently supported for containers:

Arch Linux
AlmaLinux 9
Crystal Linux
Debian Fedora 38
Kali Linux (rolling)
Neurodebian Bookworm
Rocky Linux
Ubuntu 22.04
Ubuntu 23.04

Conclusion

The blendOS project is new in the distro market and is managed by the Linux developer, Rudra Saraswat. The first version of blendOS was publicly made available on February 12, 2023. If you want to try blendOS v3, head to the official guide to follow the installation steps.

The sources for this article include a story from blendOS.

Summary