IT Voice News : Exactly one year since the release of the second version of Elementary OS, the team behind the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has made the first beta of elementary OS Freya publicly available for developers and testers. However, before you go about installing Freya, the team wants you to know ‘be extra cautious’, or rather don’t try it at all! Freya project lead Daniel Foré has been more than kind in advising developers/testers to let this one pass, “strongly recommending against using this beta in a production environment.”
However, we are sure there are any of you out there practically itching to take Freya out on a spin, therefore we decided why not make you familiar with some of the key changes the latest iteration brings along. Therefore, if you’re going to try it anyway, don’t blame us if all hell breaks loose, remember, we warned you! Freya, as expected is based on the recently released Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. With that said, the new release tends to overlook the stability aspect with the addition of GTK+ 3.12 and an updated version of Vala.
Pantheon Online Accounts (entirely different from Ubuntu Online Accounts) makes its debut with Freya and aims to offer a more flexible remodelling of GNOME Online Accounts and stuff. Again, only time will tell if it’s well worth the use anyway. For now, it supports only Twitter and Facebook with a few other popular social services thrown in here and there. Of course, it needs some more applciations to prove its worth, and that hopefully would arrive in subsequent releases or quite possibly as and when a stable release rolls out. Additionally, the Slingshot app launcher now uses Synapse plugins for powering app searches. The launcher now supports basic calculations with unit conversion in the pipeline. Meanwhile, Client Side Decorations, theme and icon improvements as also the Pantheon Greeter are now controlled via LightDM.
The first beta of elementary OS Freya is now publicly available
