Just days after its previous October update, aerynOS has rolled out another substantial refresh to its Unstable Stream. The headline change is Budgie 10.10.3 arriving in the distribution’s regular package repositories, alongside COSMIC Desktop 1.10, KDE Gear 26.08.2, and Linux kernel 7.2.9.
As we reported earlier, Budgie 10.10.3 initially landed in aerynOS’s Volatile Stream for testing. Following that testing period, the desktop has been promoted to the Unstable Stream, making it available to a broader group of users.
This is noteworthy because Budgie 10.10.3 represents the desktop’s transition to a fully Wayland-based environment. Instead of relying on its previous X11 architecture, it now uses the lightweight labwc Wayland compositor with a configuration bridge that allows Budgie to manage the compositor’s settings.
Beyond Budgie, the update upgrades COSMIC Desktop from 1.9 to 1.10. The new version includes bug fixes, improvements to drawing tablet support, and enhancements to GPU acceleration.
KDE users also receive KDE Gear 26.08.2, the latest maintenance update for the 26.08 application series. Meanwhile, GNOME 51 gets several smaller application updates and packaging adjustments, including the addition of the Sushi file previewer to aerynOS’s recommended GNOME package set.
On the system side, the desktop and gaming kernel variants have been updated to Linux 7.2.9. The LTS kernel moves to 6.18.55. The NVIDIA graphics driver is now at version 615.78.08.
Other notable package updates include Firefox 157 bringing the new Nova UI, LibreOffice 26.8.1, LLVM 23.1.3, Zig 0.17, OpenSSH 10.6p1, GStreamer 1.28.8, Docker/Moby 29.9.0, and OpenVPN 2.7.8.
The release also addresses several desktop-related issues. These include a fix for an NVIDIA-related KWin crash, a Qt 6 Wayland text-input crash, and issues with KDE SVG icons. Additionally, Steam now explicitly includes XWayland as a runtime dependency, while GParted and KDE Partition Manager receive corrected Btrfs-related dependencies.
Finally, the developers have announced upcoming changes to the command-line interface of moss, aerynOS’s package manager. These changes are still under development and are not included in the current update.
For more details, see the announcement.
