TUXEDO OS 2 Being Prepared With Linux 6.0, Updated KDE Desktop & More

Bavarian Linux computer vendor TUXEDO Computers last year introduced TUXEDO OS as their tailored Linux distribution built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. TUXEDO OS was delivering some performance improvements over stock (K)Ubuntu 22.04, ships with TUXEDO's configuration utilities by default, and other refinements to this desktop OS using the KDE Plasma desktop by default. The team in Augsburg is now preparing to ship TUXEDO OS 2 in the near future while this week they made available a public test snapshot.

TUXEDO OS 2 continues to ship with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as its package base but with numerous upgrades and other changes compared to that current Long-Term Support (LTS) release. On the desktop side, they are pulling in newer KDE Plasma / KDE Frameworks / Qt components by leveraging the KDE Neon repositories. They are shipping a Linux 5.15 LTS based kernel still but following this week's test release as a software upgrade they have now deployed the Linux 6.0 kernel.

Seeing the Linux 6.0 kernel available on TUXEDO OS 2 is nice compared to Ubuntu Linux sticking to the same major kernel version for the duration of its release cycle or until hitting the hardware enablement upgrades in later LTS point releases.

TUXEDO OS 2 is shipping Mesa 22.3.4 for more recent open-source graphics driver support while hopefully they will be quick to adopt Mesa 23.0 upon that imminent stable release.

There are also other desktop-minded software upgrades coming with TUXEDO OS 2 like PipeWire 0.3.65, the NVIDIA 525 graphics driver option, and more.

Overall TUXEDO OS 2 is shaping up to be an incremental upgrade over last year's TUXEDO OS debut and at least having some fresher desktop packages atop the stable Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base and excitingly the jump from Linux 5.15 to at least Linux 6.0.

Given the kernel upgrade, I did take TUXEDO OS 2 for a spin to see how the performance compares over TUXEDO OS 1 and Kubuntu 22.04 LTS.