By Larry Cafiero
Marcus Nestor at 9 to 5 Linux reported on Friday about the release of Ultramarine 44 seven months after Ultramarine 43.
According to the article, “Jaiden Riordan released Ultramarine 44 today as the latest version of this GNU/Linux distribution built on top of Fedora Linux and featuring the KDE Plasma desktop environment by default.”
Based on Fedora 44, Ultramarine 44 comes with its default desktop, KDE Plasma 6.7.
“Apart from the KDE goodies, Ultramarine 44 also brings some love to the standalone Gnome, Xfce, and Budgie editions with upgrades to the latest Gnome 50, Xfce 4.20, and Budgie 10.10 desktop environments series,” the article continues.
While KDE Plasma edition is the recommended Ultramarine flavor for newcomers, “the team did some great improvements to the Gnome Edition, such as enabling the minimize and maximize buttons on all windows by default and adding calculator support to the overview search,” the article says.
New Arch Linux released
The latest Arch Linux ISO is out, according to Bobby Barisov in Linuxiac on Friday.
Included with the ISO is Linux kernel 7.0.14, Archinstall 4.4, systemd 261.1, fresh firmware and an updated core package.
“Arch Linux’s July 2026 ISO snapshot is now available for download, providing a fresh installation medium with Linux kernel 7.0.14 and updated packages from the distribution’s rolling repositories,” the article states.
While this is not a new “version” of Arch, “the monthly ISO images are intended mainly for new installations, delivering a more current starting point so users do not need to pull in as many updates right after the first boot,” the article continues.
This month’s image includes Linux kernel 7.0.14 and “[t]he Linux LTS kernel in the repositories has been updated to version 6.18.37. The firmware stack has also been refreshed with linux-firmware 20260622, covering AMDGPU, Intel, NVIDIA, Realtek, Broadcom, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Radeon, Atheros, and other supported hardware.” the article says.
KDE Linux offers ‘Developer Mode’
Michael Larabel at Phoronix reported on Wednesday that KDE Linux provides users a “Developer Mode” in its latest iteration.
“With the start of the new month comes a new progress report on the KDE Linux distribution for the prior month,” the article states. “Even with KDE developers being busy to ship Plasma 6.7 in June, they still accomplished a lot when it comes to KDE Linux.”
With that said, “KDE Linux has rolled out an initial ‘developer mode’ for showing various developer tools and options that are otherwise concealed by default to ease the end-user experience,” the article says. “Simply running toggle developer mode from the Konsole is all that’s needed to enable this initial developer mode.”
This makes for a clean experience for users that are not developers but where they may occasionally want to toggle additional features for helping to debug problems. “For now this toggle developer mode is quite basic but may be built upon in the future for further customizing the developer experience,” the article says.
And that’s all for today. Don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return on Monday.