We are proud to announce the release of Neptune 5.0 "Refresh". 

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https://youtu.be/VwJoCdiQ5_g

This version marks a new iteration within the Neptune universe. It switches its base to the current Debian Stable "Stretch" version and also changes slightly the way we will provide Updates for Neptune. We will no longer strive to bring in more recent versions of Plasma, Kernel or other software on our own. With Snaps, Flatpaks and AppImages being more and more popular and mature these days we strongly believe these are the ways to go if you want to try out bleeding edge software. We on the other hand strive to provide the most stable and best Desktop user experience out there. 

This is why we decided you to provide the latest LTS release of Plasma version 5.12 together with KDE Applications 17.12 aswell as KDE Frameworks 5.43 

For good hardware support we provide Linux Kernel 4.14 from the Debian Stretch Backports Repository. This ensures also up to date kernel updates in the future for improved security. 

Notice: With Neptune 5.0 we stopped officially supporting proprietary graphics card drivers. We removed the support for easy installing them from our zevenoshardwaremanager. You can however install them on your own if you need or like.

Neptune 5.0 ships not only with the latest and greatest Plasma LTS release but also features our known Neptune Artwork with beautiful designs for all applications no matter if GTK+2, GTK+3 or Qt4 or Qt5 applications. Combined with our Icon Theme this provides a truly marvelous user experience. 

If you don't like our Theming you can easily switch the Look and Feel and experience a totally different desktop. Neptune already provides several Themes. Tip: Check "Use Desktop Layout from theme" for the best experience. 

We offer our usual collection of default applications like LibreOffice 6, Chromium 64, Thunderbird 52.6, Amarok 2.9, VLC 2.2 and many more. 

With the strong focus on Multimedia we still offer our Encode transcoding utility aswell as YAVTD a quick and easy way to download videos from multimedia sites like Youtube. Of course you can also find our screencasting tool recffmpeg based on vokoscreen. 

When it comes to editing media we now offer you besides Gimp 2.8.18 also the vector editing application Inkscape in version 0.9.2. 
As usual you can edit audio files with Audacity 2.1.2 or Ardour 5.5. Editing video files is done by Kdenlive 17.12

We also offer you the best in terms of system tools. KDE Partitionmanager 3.3.1 replaced Gparted as default paritioner and zuluCrypt 5 replaced Veracrypt. You can also use the plasma-vault to create secure encrypted volumes to safe important data. Backing up data is done via BackInTime which allows you to create profiles and control automatic increment backups of your device. For the first time ever in Neptune we also offer full disk encryption support during installation thanks to our new installer Calamares 3.2.0-rc3 

For Live System users we still provide our tools Persistent-Creator aswell as Snapshot Manager. If you want to remaster our ISO or any other Debian Live or Ubuntu Casper based ISO you can do so with our tool remaster-kit. 
Newly included is grub-customizer a tool which allows you to set the design and options of your grub bootloader.

Neptune 5.0 is now available as 64Bit ISO on our download page.(Be aware to download from our primary US-Servers first as the FilePup Mirror might be still syncing)

Known Issues:

• Translations for Plasma-Vault are not loading correctly (Bug: #391472)
• NV4x Nvidia Graphicscards could fail to bring up the plasma desktop (Bug: #102349)

FAQ: 

How long will be Neptune 5 supported? 

We will offer at least as long support as Debian is offering for Debian 9

How about the support of Neptune 4.5.x?

Support for Neptune 4.5.x is running out in may 2018. Please be aware that the repositories might vanish soon after that.
We recommend upgrading to Neptune 5.0.

Can I upgrade from Neptune 4.5.x?

We do not support a direct update from Neptune 4.5.x and recommend a new installation. If you installed Neptune 4.5.x with a seperate /home partition you should be able to reuse that /home partition for Neptune 5

Can I use the newer Plasma, KF5, KDE App Packages even on Debian Stretch?

Yes this should be possible. Though be aware this is mostly untested by us. Be aware to create backups before using our kde-repo listed on the bottom of our about page. Make sure to download our GPG-Key first and add it to the system (sudo apt-key add neptune.gpg.key). Also make sure to remove all kde-l10n-* language packages before trying to upgrade to avoid file conflicts.