risiOS 37 (The Beautiful) Release Notes
Today we are excited to release the 2nd version of risiOS, codenamed “The Beautiful”. We will be releasing an update tool in the coming days for risiOS 36 that you can use to upgrade from risiOS 36 to risiOS 37. In the mean time, you can use the dnf upgrade plugin method if you cannot wait.
NOTE: This was originally published on November 16th 2022
Leaving Beta.
For the entirety of risiOS 36’s lifecycle, we had it marked as a beta. Well, we decided that this release is the perfect time to leave beta now that we have gotten used to the workflow behind maintaining a Linux distribution.
risiOS New Features
This update was designed to improve how theming works on risiOS and allow for a bit more customization from within the OS.
rTheme
rTheme is a new theming tool created by us. rTheme is separated into a library and a daemon. The library uses a plugin based system with different plugins for different themes it needs to generate. At the moment rTheme supports gtk3, gtk4 (including LibAdwaita apps) and GNOME Shell. For the gtk3 and gtk4 plugins, rTheme edits the ~/.config/gtk-3(4).0/gtk.css to apply custom named colors that apply to LibAdwaita (or adw-gtk3 in the case of gtk3 apps). The rTheme plugin for GNOME Shell recompiles GNOME Shell’s SCSS with different color sets replaced. The rtheme daemon also runs in the background in order to automatically update the theme when any theming related setting gets updated (for example switching between Light and Dark mode).
A theme itself is just a yaml file with different set colors. You can have theme variants which can be useful for things as trivial as accent colors — all the way to recoloring everything. We will be releasing guides and documentation on how to create a theme very shortly. We can’t wait to see what our users create.
New Default Theme
Thanks to rTheme, risiOS now has a new default theme which is inspired by older 3.38-era Adwaita. This theme applies to both windows and the shell due to rTheme. We think that this new theme gives risiOS a bit more of a unique feel compared to other stock GNOME distributions. Judge it for yourself.
Accent based wallpapers
For those using the default “risi” rTheme along with the default wallpaper, we have matching wallpapers for all of the accent colors that the default risiOS theme supports.
Other minor changes
- GNOME Videos (Totem) replaced by Celluloid as the default video player in risiOS.
- PolyMC replaced by PrismLauncher in the gaming quick setup risi-script.
- Multimedia script now installs mesa-freeworld (used to mitigate Fedora’s removal of mesa codecs).
New Upstream Features.
Thanks to the teams upstream behind Fedora and GNOME, we have some nifty upstream features too.
GNOME 43
We are now shipping GNOME 43 which includes many desktop UI improvements including a brand new control center, GTK 4 support for the File Manager (Nautilus), and updates for many core apps including the software center.
Fedora 37
Another upgrade is that base distribution upgrade to a Fedora 37 base (hence the name risiOS 37). This includes many of the latest features such as Linux kernel 6.0, Python 3.11, and much more.
Download
risiOS 37 is already available on the download page with a torrent from FOSSTorrents coming out soon. Enjoy!
