4MLinux 40.0 achieves stable status, but does anyone actually care?
You know what annoys me most about the Linux comuniuty? There are too many gosh darn operating systems based on the Linux kernel. And yes, too much choice can be a bad thing. You see, new Linux users often find themselves overwhelmed with the number of distributions from which to choose. Even worse, having many distros causes resources to be spread too thin. Desktop Linux would be better off if developers worked together on just a handful of operating systems (such as Debian and Fedora).
But no. The Linux community can't operate as a cohesive unit. Instead, it must be fragmented and confusing. Such is life, I suppose. With all of that said, version 40.0 of 4MLinux -- an operating system that probably doesn't need to exist -- is now available for download. The lightweight distribution has officially achieved stable status, and the developers are hopeful you will choose their offering over the plethora of alternatives.
"The status of the 4MLinux 40.0 series has been changed to STABLE. Edit your documents with LibreOffice 7.3.5 and GNOME Office (AbiWord 3.0.5, GIMP 2.10.32, Gnumeric 1.12.52), share your files using DropBox 143.4.4161, surf the Internet with Firefox 103.0 and Chromium 103.0.5060.53, send emails via Thunderbird 91.12.0, enjoy your music collection with Audacious 4.1, watch your favorite videos with VLC 3.0.17.3 and mpv 0.34.0, play games powered by Mesa 21.3.8 and Wine 7.12. You can also setup the 4MLinux LAMP Server (Linux 5.18.7, Apache 2.4.54, MariaDB 10.8.3, PHP 5.6.40 and PHP 7.4.30). Perl 5.34.1, Python 2.7.18, and Python 3.9.12 are also available," explains the development team.
The devs further add, "As always, the new major release has some new features. Legacy MPlayer with MEncoder are now available out of the box (HyperVC can be used as MEncoder’s GUI for transcoding). Many system-wide changes has been done to improve 3D support (both on real and virtual machines). QEMU (with its GUI called AQEMU) as well as TrueCrypt (encryption utility) are now also included. New games: GNOME Mahjongg (available out of the box) and Entombed! (available as a downloadable extension). And finally, a preliminary support for NVM Express interface has been added (currently it seems to work well in VirtualBox)."
Who should download 4MLinux 40.0? Probably no one. Look, I mean no disrespect to the developers, but there truly is no reason for this operating system to exist with so many better options out there. If you want to give the distribution a spin anyway, however, you can download an ISO here now.