The Genode operating system framework is out with a new release along with its general purpose Sculpt OS operating system.

While test builds have been available for months, out today is Android-x86 9.0-r1 as the first stable release of the Android 9.0 "Pie" series brought to Intel/AMD x86/x86_64 hardware.

Manjaro 19.0 is out today as this popular desktop-focused Arch Linux based distribution that is focused on its Xfce desktop spin but also offers other desktop options.

The Linux Mint crew continues maintaining Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) as a fall-back should anything ever happen to Ubuntu or their ability to deliver an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. Available now in beta is Linux Mint Debian Edition 4.

Aaron Griffin is stepping down as the Arch Linux Project Leader, who has led the distribution since 2007 where under his tenure Arch Linux boomed in popularity. With him stepping away due to minimal time to invest in the project, a process for selecting a new leader has formed.

Netrunner 20.01 is out today as the 20th release for this Debian + KDE focused project over its ten year history.

For those tantilized by the prospects of gaming on RISC OS, SDL2 has been seeing early mainline work on supporting this long-standing operating system.

Quibble is a new open-source bootloader that supports booting Windows XP through Windows 10 and opens up new possibilities like booting a Windows installation off Btrfs.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced their first feature update to their Debian-based Raspbian operating system of 2020.

The seL4 micro-kernel that is focused on delivering robust security and performance is being ported to the RISC-V architecture.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system that has been in development since 2001 saw its long-awaited beta release in late 2018 while it looks like a second beta release could be on approach for this open-source operating system.

Following the recent beta release with a Clang-built kernel option and experimental Zypper as an alternative to DNF, OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 has been released as part of FOSDEM 2020 celebrations over in Brussels.

In addition to Linux Mint 20 coming this year that will be based off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Linux Mint crew is preparing LMDE 4 as their re-base of the Debian based variant.

AppStream was started in 2011 as a means of drawing up cross-distribution (XML-based) standards for describing software components/packages metadata and for repositories to describe software collections. Now nearly a decade later, AppStream 1.0 should be coming in the next few months.

Dracut that is used for generating the initramfs image on Linux distributions like Fedora / RHEL, Debian, openSUSE, and many other distributions could be much faster.

It's already been over nine months since the release of Solus 4 while now this popular Linux desktop distribution has been succeeded by Solus 4.1

Android 9.0 "Pie" is approaching two years of age and already succeeded by Android 10, but on the Android-x86 front the 9.0 release is finally getting closer.

The Genode operating system framework that's been going strong for over a decade and continuing to employ a micro-kernel architecture continues to plan for an interesting future.

Making rounds in Q4 of last year was the little known Project Trident open-source operating system switching from its TrueOS/FreeBSD base to in turn moving to Void Linux as a base for their platform. Towards the end of the year they offered some initial images of their reborn OS while now Project Trident based on Void Linux has reached beta.

In time for some weekend testing is the beta release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.1.

The long awaited release of OpenWrt 19.07 took place this week for this Linux distribution popular for embedded, primarily networking devices.

For fans of the easy-to-use Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, 19.0 preview images as the first test builds have begun to surface.

Similar to Fedora's move last year to compress RPMs with Zstd rather than XZ for much faster decompression speeds and a better compression ratio at the highest level, OpenMandriva has now enacted a similar change.

Arch Linux has been working the past several months on transitioning to Zstd-compressed packages in place of XZ compression for faster package installation. At the end of December that package compression scheme changed and the results are impressive.

Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has been working on improving the security of OpenWrt, the Linux distribution popular for running on routers / networking equipment and other embedded Linux networking use-cases.

Jolla has been working on Sailfish OS for nearly a decade now and for 2020 they are planning more improvements to their Linux-based smartphone OS as well as working to push Sailfish into new markets.

One of the few still maintained Linux distributions derived from Gentoo is Calculate Linux, which saw a new release today in preparing for the new year.

As we enter 2020, Debian remains one of the oldest Linux distributions out there and over the 2010s continued advancing quite well for being volunteer-led and competing with the corporate heavyweights like Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE. Debian in the 2010s found itself being used as the basis for Valve's SteamOS, continuing to be integral to the success of Ubuntu, it ultimately decided to make use of systemd, there were various desktop changes, and multiple successful releases of Debian GNU/Linux to celebrate.

Jolla has announced Sailfish OS 3.2.1 "Nuuksio" as their mobile operating system update to end out 2019.

While much of the lure to Gentoo Linux is on being a source-based distribution and assembling your system packages from source, some Gentoo developers are toying with the idea of providing some new kernel binary options similar to that of the more conventional binary Linux distributions.