2024: Well, that didn’t go to plan.
So, we’re at the end of 2024. Welcome back to the yearly article where we look back on what has happened in Feren OS over the last year.
Things REALLY didn’t go to plan this year — the upcoming Feren OS release is still delayed, and life and plenty of other factors have still impeded its release preparation.
As a result, there’s barely anything noteworthy this year, so this will be more of a reflection post about the impeding of release preparation.
Further Storium/Store development
In January, Feren Storium development continued — some additions to sources were made, such as the ability for Storium Item Management Modules to declare ‘main sources’ — sources that, in the planned Sources Manager in Store’s settings, appear in the module’s header, and early work on reimplementing tasks.
January — May: Finishing college
The first portion of this year was spent fully focusing on finishing college, with Feren OS development being temporarily paused during these months.
Silverfox
At this point, there was a brief stint of burnout — upon finding out about an upcoming Firefox theme designed to look like the Google Chrome I used to know from my first time using Linux in 2012-2013, I decided to jump in to see its development, was ultimately appointed to be a private tester, and ultimately used the private tester powers to contribute proper Linux support. That project was Silverfox. These improvements for Silverfox happened in tandem with other IRL tasks, whereas…
Geckium
Months after Silverfox released, with college now concluded, its successor, Geckium began development, and… after a long series of events, I became a private tester for it. This time around however, I came with extensive research into Chromium that I collected originally for Silverfox post-release, and decided to make a build of my own for Geckium, adding Chromium’s various Operating Systems’ titlebars, default themes, etc., thinking it would only take a week or so to do.
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What was planned to only take a week or so to do turned into several months of development, finishing with more than 200 commits, Geckium’s largest Pull Request to this date. Ultimately, while it led to Feren OS development finally resuming in November instead of June/July (per the original time estimate), Geckium now objectively stands as the new peak of Firefox modding at the time of writing, with the months of work poured in playing a major role in that outcome. While it was to Feren OS’s detriment, unintentionally, taking such an important role in Geckium’s development, in retrospect, was worth it — here’s to finishing what was started with Silverfox by ultimately releasing Geckium 1.0.
Rewritten Solstice
Hot off of Geckium, I started to rewrite parts of Solstice, initially planning on a half-rewrite, to be cleaner as a whole, more stable, and properly implement the previously added Solstice CSS support into the code. A few months later, during December the rewrite finally concluded.
Due to this rewrite, several more browsers are now supported, Flatpak support is improved, Flatpak permissions management during language changes and other related events is more reliable, the CSS for Firefox-based browsers was entirely rewritten to be cleaner and to fix breakages due to Firefox 128+, and all modules were rewritten to also be cleaner and more stable as a whole.
The rewrite hasn’t yet dropped in Feren OS as its changes break application shortcuts made for the previous version of Solstice, but it will drop once the next Feren Storium milestone is inevitably reached.
Back to Storium development
In the meantime, Storium development has resumed anew — tasks are being rewritten to be simpler and easier, in lieu of the knowledge gained due to those, and other, previous endeavours, and once that happens, the hardest part, excluding item management modules, will be complete (hopefully). 🤞🤞
Onward, with a Plan B also in tow.
It’s now or never - the first beta release is upon us. There is now a deadline — if Storium still isn’t ready by February, Plan B will be executed: Storium will be delayed until a future release, the Update Manager, System Maintainence and old Store will be redone for Ubuntu 22.04, and Feren OS Upcoming will be released after a short testing period.
Hopefully, it won’t have to come to that, but there sadly isn’t any time left to wait for reasons that will become apparent in March.
Remember that you can see progress on the upcoming release (Plan A) at https://github.com/orgs/feren-OS/projects/11.
Soon: Feren OS’s 10th Anniversary
While next year does present an ending that will be announced in March, it also will be a historic year for Feren OS: Feren OS’s 10th.
The plan, after Upcoming, is for a new Feren OS rebase, on Ubuntu 24.04, temporarily called “Feren OS 10th Anniversary Release”, to release in time for Feren OS’s 10th birthday. This release will feature KDE Plasma 6, and with it an entirely new design for Feren OS’s default “Inspire” theme and icon set out of necessity due to the switch to Qt 6, so keep your eyes peeled for that in the future… hopefully.
While 2024’s plans may not have been realised, 2025 is, no matter what, going to be a historic year for Feren OS as a whole, and I do absolutely plan on celebrating its 10th anniversary when the time arrives. 💪
