After 6 months and almost 600 bugfixes from the first beta, elementary OS Freya Beta 2 released. This beta is a huge step towards the final release, it includes several bug fixes and new features as well. Here’s a (non-complete) list of changes taken from the official announcement at elementary’s blog.
- Better support for Samba in Files
- New Calculator & Videos apps
- UI improvements in Calendar, Photos, System Settings, Slingshot & more
- Notifications & Firewall settings
- Better and more discoverable multitasking.
- Updated 3rd party apps (including Geary, Simple Scan, Document Viewer & more)
- Updated development libraries (including Gtk 3.14)
- Security and Stability improvements
- UEFI/SecureBoot support
- Tons of stylesheet and icon changes and fixes
There are many other tiny new features (including the Terminal warning popup I wrote about yesterday). To see the complete changelog navigate to this page on Launchpad.
What’s next?
The next step is RC1. You can track the progress of it at the top left corner, I set up a counter for the remaining bugs until the release of RC1 which is going to be mostly a cleanup and details release.
Download
You can get the latest beta release at elementary’s new site: elementary OS Beta 2 Download.
Updating
If you’re using Luna, unfortunately you can’t update to Freya at this point. You have to do a fresh install. Please bear in mind that Freya is still in beta stage, while Luna is a stable distro so you might want to wait until Freya final release is out.
If you’re already running Freya you just have to run the Software Updater app and it will update you to beta 2.
