If you're using Ultramarine 41, you can upgrade to Ultramarine 42 right now! Just don't forget your towel.
For such a monumentally huge release number (for nerds at least) this upgrade is mostly harmless to your install. While the improvements here are junky, wunky, lunky, and possibly stunky, they're a small taste of the things we're working on for our updated images coming not so long from now. You may now be asking "when" and to that my answer is yesterday, as time is an illusion (and lunchtime doubly so).
With all that out of the way, let's take a look at what's new!
Edition Updates
Plasma Edition
Plasma Edition now ships with Plasma 6.3.4, continuing to clean up papercuts around the system.
Like improvements to fractional scaling.
And better drawing tablet configuration.
GNOME Edition
GNOME 48 comes with a couple of big changes.
Like notification stacking:
And screen time tracking in settings:
You may also notice that the grays in GNOME are a bit bluer, that's because they are!
GNOME Edition now has triple buffering enabled by default, which should improve performance on most systems.
Xfce Edition
Xfce Edition now comes with Xfce 4.20, enabling experimental Wayland support.
sbin Merge
In Fedora, and therefore Ultramarine, /usr/sbin has become a symbolic link to /usr/bin. If you've been around long enough, you may remember when /bin and /sbin moved to their current homes in /usr/*. This change is the final step in that simplification effort as the ecosystem continues to stray from its UNIX heritage.
You shouldn't notice any changes to your day-to-day usage of Ultramarine. Packages are already changed to support this and the symbolic link will cover any edge cases you happen across.
New Wallpaper
Our new wallpaper for this release is inspired by the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy. A small unregarded yellow sun and ringed gas planet are visible in the skies over this sea, a babel fish is frozen mid-leap, floating much the same way bricks don't. All is tinged yellow, not entirely unlike a Vogon Constructor ship.
Our artist in residence, Aikoyori, calls it "Sea of Imagination."
Upgrading
As with any upgrade, please take a backup before starting.
Using the App Store
All editions can be upgraded from their respective app stores! Check Software on Flagship, Xfce and GNOME, or Discover on Plasma and follow the prompts there!
Using DNF System Upgrades
Run these commands to update the current install, and upgrade to Ultramarine 42:
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=42
sudo dnf system-upgrade rebootThis can take a while, you may want a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster while you wait. If you can't get all of the ingredients on your planet, here's a version with ingredients you can find on Earth.
Converting from Fedora
Converting from Fedora is just as easy as always!
From Fedora 41 to Ultramarine Linux 42
bash <(curl -s https://ultramarine-linux.org/migrate.sh)
sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=42
sudo dnf system-upgrade rebootFrom Fedora 42 to Ultramarine Linux 42
bash <(curl -s https://ultramarine-linux.org/migrate.sh)Please make sure to back up your system before converting!
Installing a Fresh Copy
Images are coming soon! Keep an eye on this blog and our socials!
Getting Support
Join one of our Chats, the subreddit, or Open an Issue on GitHub. We'll get you going again in no time.
For documentation, don't check the Encyclopaedia Galactica! Check our wiki instead!
Almost every blog post I've written on this blog has ended with "so long, and thanks for all the fish" (or some variation on it.) While that does make sense for a cat to say, it was actually said by the dolphins when they left Earth ahead of its destruction. To close this plot hole I present what I look like irl:
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