14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the Slackware-based Zenwalk Linux operating system have announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the upcoming Zenwalk 8.0 computer operating system.
Yes, believe it or not, Zenwalk 8.0 is now in development, and it promises to bring the latest versions of all preinstalled software packages, while remaining 100 percent backward compatible with the default software repositories of the Slackware Linux operating system.
One of the most important changes users will notice when upgrading or installing Zenwalk 8.0 is that the default web browser is now Chromium, which replaces Mozilla Firefox because it didn't provide decent video/flash support. Also, according to the developers, Chromium offers a faster PDF viewer and better image gallery viewer.
"The main recent change at user level is Chromium becoming the web browser," said Jean-Philippe Guillemin, one of the Zenwalk maintainers, in the release announcement. "In 2016, I believe that the web browser is becoming the most important application, and that desktops have to be able to be synced with smartphones."
Zenwalk 8.0 coming soon
Among other new features implemented in Zenwalk 8.0 Beta, we can mention that Netpkg is now capable of simultaneously querying as many software repositories as required, offering users direct access to thousands of Slackware packages, including a real-time kernel and a complete set of audio recording tools for transforming Zenwalk into a powerful recording studio.
Other than that, the latest Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, Linux 4.4 LTS kernel, LibreOffice 5 office suite, and Bluetooth support are present in this release, as such you can download first Beta build of Zenwalk 8.0 right now from our website. Please note though that a Beta is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use. The Zenwalk devs are teasing us with the final release of Zenwalk 8.0 as being "very close."
