We are proud to announce the release of Neptune 7 ("Faye") named after the member of the Bebop crew in the anime Cowboy Bebop.

This version comes with a new Debian base (11 "Bullseye") that offers newer and better hardware support as well as newer software and apps.
KDE Plasma 5.20.5 ships with a new Neptune specific theme that embraces the Breeze widget style for maximum compatibility and introduces a new subtle but modern flat look and feel to Neptune. We also updated the Icon theme to our own variation of the Tela Icon theme to fit with the new look of the system. The default panel has been modernized to allow pinning more apps and tasks to it aswell as offering a new bigger easier look to the eyes.
Besides that Linux Kernel 5.10 offers modern hardware support aswell as bugfixes.

We put effort in optimizing the memory usage on Neptune by fine tuning swap behavior. Instead of ZRAM we now ship ZSwap which allows compressing pages of memory before swap out instead of relying on virtual compressed swap space in memory. That allows us to activate Suspend to Disk again as long as you have a swap partition/space that is big enough. Overall it improves low memory handling also on low speced machines.
We also worked on little details and feature improvements requested by our users. So we offer now an easy way to open up the default file manager Dolphin as root user via right click. Image files can be easily set as wallpaper via right click on the file aswell.  

With the underlying change of our Debian base many of our own apps had to be updated to use newer versions of the Qt 5 libraries. We updated the video encoding application Encode, Recffmpeg & KNetworkMounter. For some applications we decided to remove support like snapshot manager and persistent creator. Those applications were less and less used by our users and the effort to port them to the newer base made no sense anymore.

The new Debian base allows you to enjoy newer software versions of LibreOffice 7.0.4, Chromium 90, Thunderbird 78.14 and more.

As always you can find the new version on our download page. We also offer an upgrade script for users of Neptune 6.x. Please do a full backup of your system before you start the upgrade process and refer to the upgrade manual linked here.

The Neptune team wishes everyone Merry Christmas and a happy new year.