Luke Short Cloud, the VP of Linux engineering at Playtron, somehow found the time to work on a nice update to winesapOS – a portable, Arch-based Linux distro in which the user doesn’t have to install the OS on their hard drive. Released a few days ago, here are some of the 4.5.0 update highlights:

  • Ventoy resize support
  • the ability to install additional desktop environments – such as Pop!_OS’ new COSMIC DE, or GNOME – in addition to the distro’s default KDE Plasma
  • TLP for automatic power management – the release notes describes this change as a “huge performance increase” over AutoTDP
  • improved gyro support for gamepads
  • non-Steam games can now be streamed with Steam Remote Play via RemotePlayWhatever
  • support for “various emulators” via RetroDECK

It’s been great seeing this distro steadily become better over time. Luke and the rest of his team have been hard at work addressing the issues posted on the project’s GitHub – fixing over 1,000! Now only five are left.

See the full patch notes on GitHub. Downloads can be found on Luke’s server. And be sure to check out the interview I had with Luke for more details on winesapOS!