SEVERAL years ago we wrote a long post about Pardus, which had been gaining a lot of momentum in Turkey until Microsoft stepped in. According to DistroWatch, Pardus Linux is alive and well, but in prior years there were not many releases of it (compared to years prior to Microsoft's intervention).
Based on [1,2], Pisi 1.0, which is based on Pardus, is quickly approaching final release. The updates are in Spanish, but this blogger, who mostly covers Mandriva and Mageia [3,4] (Mageia 4 is coming [5]), has the translation. It is a blog which is mostly dedicated to Mandriva and derivatives like PCLinuxOS or Mageia [6]. Pardus too is related to Mandriva, which is now managed in Russia and has some branches like ROSA.
Pardus Linux represents a great force with true potential outside the 'Western' conglomerate of distros. It is important to shelter Pardus Linux because it aids a certain balance of power. The Turkish military is seeking to escape Windows and now that we know more about the NSA, it is very clear why. ⬆
Related/contextual items from the news:
This entry (in Spanish) confirms that the RC of Pisi Linux 1.0 (Izmir) is here. Pisi RC comes as a 64 bit distro only.
The Pulse Cluster is busy working on the next major version of Pulse2, the 1.6. Scheduled to be released this Fall, we are all excited about it. Why? Quite simply, this upcoming version is meant to bring Pulse2 to the next level. What this means -without disclosing too much- is that this release will focus among other features on two major components: a renewed interface and the ability to prepare and plan the migration of your desktops to Windows 7.
Although I'm not a gamer, I decided to check Steam on Mageia 3. I installed the Steam client and open an account when the distro was released, but the software would crash whenever I attempted to see the description of a game. As it was a beta client, I never thought about using it until today.
This alpha brings KDE 4.11.1, Gnome 3.10.0 and now Mate is found inside the repositories.
I updated my PCLinuxOS and my Mageia laptop installs today. The process finished without any problem and everything is working as expected.