It’s the end of June and all that’s circling my mind is, that if we push off the release by just one more week, it will be 2032, and everyone’s wearing brain interfaces instead of typing away on keyboards or shouting words at their phone… Not yet.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the thousands that signed-up for our mailing list over the past couple of months and years, wondering about when this thing is going to come out, how it’s going to look like and what’s new … if you can even remember us. Well, if it was up to me, we would probably never release PantherX because it will never be quite perfect nor finished. It’s software after all. It’s constantly evolving, hopefully improving - In 5 years it wants to laugh about what it was in 2021. Don’t you?
Of course that’s not realistic and while we’re quite happy working on this for ourselves, the goals we are aiming for, require much broader adoption to actually materialize. We are only at the beginning of our journey, yet over the past 3 years, our ideas have grown more robust, and the overall direction is more clear.
Public Release
Our first big milestone is the beta release of PantherX OS. We’ve long hesitated to make this move as we do not have the resources (time!) to properly support a community right now but the system is extremely stable and users that don’t scare away from the occasional command line use, should find everything that’s needed to be productive.
Truly, once you pass the initial installation, you might never see a command line again. We’ve already developed a number of applications that make it easier to manage your system, find and install new software and add your online accounts to get notifications about what’s happening on GitLab, GitHub, Mastodon and many others. Of course you’ll also find many familiar applications like Firefox, Network Manager, VLC, … as well as tools that come with LXQt.
We’ve also put together some resources, and will provide a space for discussion:
- A useful, growing Wiki for self-help
- A community forum to discuss PantherX and Guix
- A chat powered by Matrix
- A Mastodon instance for PantherX users
Some are already online, others will follow soon.
Overall the system is ready for daily use and you will rarely if ever face any issues. We are certainly productive! I myself use it for virtually everything - development, design, presentations, music, movies - you name it.
Release Date
I’d like to say end of June, but that won’t happen. There’s still a number of details to take care of. Most importantly we’ll need to setup a new build server, so all the software you need, comes in flying.
Let’s look at end of July. Maybe.
What’s next
Over the next 6-12 months our primary focus is on polishing the system and finalizing the interface to look exactly like we planned for. We are also working to complete our Central Management platform for organizations, to keep PantherX viable in the long run - In fact, we are already collaborating on multiple projects that greatly benefit from the platform and have significantly cut their development cost.
Also in the pipeline is PantherNet and some other things that won’t make it into the beta.
Stay Tuned!
