OpenIndiana Hipster 2018.04, Drops GNOME 2 For MATE + Adds KPTI For Meltdown

The OpenSolaris-derived Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system is out with their first Hipster update of the year.

OpenIndiana Hipster 2018.04 is the new release. On the desktop front they have finally dropped GNOME 2.x in favor of using the GNOME2-forked MATE Desktop Environment. Meanwhile, upstream Oracle Solaris with their pending 11.4 release has upgraded to the GNOME Shell.

Also significant with the new OpenIndiana release is KPTI support for Meltdown mitigation. OpenIndiana is using Kernel-based Page Table Isolation in a similar manner to other platforms for mitigating this widely-discussed CPU vulnerability.

On the tooling side, OpenIndiana 2018.04 has the GCC 6 compiler in use among many other updated packages. Packages have been rebuilt using GCC 6. OpenIndiana has also now pulled in UPower.

More details on OpenIndiana Hipster 2018.04 via the OpenIndiana.org release announcement.