While the popularity of Solaris may be waning, OpenIndiana continues ticking in 2021 as the open-source platform based on Illumos that was born out of the former OpenSolaris state.

The first release candidate of Rocky Linux 8.3 is out, the project's inaugural release as a new binary-compatible alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The T2 Linux distribution, or "System Development Environment" (SDE) as it refers to itself, is up to version 21.4 and with it is now supporting fifteen different CPU architectures for this barebones Linux-based operating system.

While Arch Linux now has its own convenient installer for quick and easy Arch installs, for those in search of an out-of-the-box, desktop-friendly Arch based Linux distribution Endeavour OS remains one of the leading options in 2021. This weekend marks the availability of Endeavour's April 2021 install media refresh.

Back in February Slackware 15.0 went into alpha, nine years since Slackware 14.0 made its debut or even five years since Slackware 14.2. Now Slackware 15.0 is up to its beta phase.

Approved at the start of the year was the CentOS Hyperscaler special interest group that is working to cater CentOS Stream so it's more suitable by the likes of Facebook and Twitter along with other modern enterprises. The SIG just issued their Q1'2021 report about what they accomplished in this first quarter of being an approved effort and what work remains on the table.

This month's Arch Linux install media update now provides "archinstall" as the guided installer for Arch Linux for those preferring a quick and easy route for deploying Arch Linux.

At the start of the year CloudLinux announced AlmaLinux as a 1:1 fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In ending out Q1, as promised this CentOS alternative is now available for download.

Nokia Bell Labs announced today that the copyright to the Plan 9 operating system software has been transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation for all future development of this novel distributed operating system that originated in the 80's.

Manjaro 21.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.

For those looking at Arch Linux powered distributions that provide a quick and easy desktop experience, Manjaro 21.0-rc1 is out today as the newest test release for this popular option.

While recently Arch Linux developers and stakeholders were discussing the possibility of raising the x86-64 base requirements for this Linux distribution to the "x86-64-v2" micro-architecture feature level that roughly correlates to Intel Nehalem and newer, now the discussion has shifted to keeping the same x86-64 base level while potentially offering a "x86-64-v3" port for those with newer Intel/AMD CPUs.

Arch Linux developers are considering some default enhancements to their Linux distribution that would increase the out-of-the-box performance.

Over the past month developers on Haiku as the open-source operating system inspired by BeOS have continued advancing the project.

Last week the Linux Mint project shared the troubling news how many of its users are behind on important security updates or in some cases even running end-of-life versions. In trying to help address the issue, Linux Mint is working on improvements to its Update Manager to encourage users to apply updates.

Void Linux, a rolling-release distribution we have covered before that is known for its XBPS package manager and interesting design decisions like using the Runit init system and supporting the Musl C library, has recently been working on enhancing its POWER CPU architecture support.

Mageia 8 is out today as a significant and long overdue update to this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva/Mandrake lineage.

Genode OS 21.02 is out as the latest feature release to this open-source operating system framework.

It's been nearly one year to the day since the release of Netrunner 20.01 as this desktop Linux distribution focused on providing a good KDE-based desktop environment and backed by Blue Systems. Today Netrunner 21.01 has been released as the latest step forward for this KDE desktop distribution built atop a Debian base.

The issue of having a beginner/easy-to-use focused desktop Linux distribution but not installing new security updates by default without user intervention is that for many users they fall behind in applying often important security fixes.

While Slackware carries the badge of being the oldest still maintained Linux distribution, it doesn't see new releases too often and doesn't carry the popularity it once did. In any case, Slackware 15.0 is being prepared as the next release.

One year after OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 released, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is now available. Continuing to make OpenMandriva Lx rather unique among Linux distributions is its use of the LLVM Clang compiler by default rather than GCC. Another unique "selling point" of OpenMandriva is its AMD Zen optimized version where the entire package set is rebuilt with Zen optimizations.

Linspire 10 is out this week as the newest version of this Linux distribution formerly known as Lindows nearly two decades ago. While Linspire went dark for several years, under its current ownership by PC/OpenSystems they have been trying to reinvigorate the desktop distribution the past few years. Linspire 10 represents the latest work for the Ubuntu-based platform.

Jolla's Sailfish OS 4.0.1 was released this past week to early access subscribers as a major milestone for Sailfish OS 4.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has continued pushing forward in 2021. The range of their work so far is quite diverse from finally landing SD/MMC driver support to at the same time being a bit more forward-looking and already working on 5-level paging support to handle terabytes of system RAM.

In addition to OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 nearing release, Mageia that shares a similar Mandrake/Mandriva lineage is nearing its next major release in the form of Mageia 8.

The seL4 micro-kernel that has been in development for over a decade saw the creation of the seL4 Foundation last year to further the project's goals. In 2020 the seL4 micro-kernel also added RISC-V as one of its primary CPU architectures.

For those that have been meaning to try out an Arch Linux based distribution that is easy-to-use and not time consuming with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS is out with its first new spin since 2021 -- and in fact their first fresh ISO release since September.

For fans of the Solus Linux distribution, Solus 4.2 is now available as the project's latest release for this optimized, desktop-minded platform.

The pandemic didn't adversely impact the Gentoo Linux project's operations with seeing the overall number of commits grow by nearly 42% last year within the Gentoo repository. Gentoo also saw commits from 333 unique authors in 2020, up from 333 the year prior. Plus they've made other improvements too for this technical-minded Linux distribution too during 2020.