2.0.3

AnduinOS 2.0.3 Release Notes

AnduinOS 2.0.3 improves installation flexibility and everyday system management. Highlights include a redesigned advanced-storage workflow for installing alongside Windows, centralized system settings, private voice typing, and the transition to Dracut, together with regional consistency and UEFI reliability improvements.

Live-image and installation-flow changes apply primarily to new installation media. Existing AnduinOS 2 systems receive compatible application, desktop, privacy, security, and boot-stack updates through APT, including a guarded migration to Dracut where applicable.

New Features

• AnduinOS Control Panel: Added anduinos-control-panel, a category-based home for system, hardware, application, account, appearance, AI, compatibility, and recovery settings. It brings AnduinOS tools and selected GNOME settings into one searchable interface, can offer supported optional applications when they are not installed, and exposes individual settings through GNOME Shell search.
• Software Source in Control Panel: Moved APT mirror selection and system-package update controls from Welcome Center to Programs → Software Source. The in-process settings window shows the current mirror, tests candidates, asks before switching, and restores the original source if refreshing the new one fails. Checking for updates and installing them are separate actions. See Select best APT source.
• Btrfs Factory Reset: Supported new Btrfs installations create a protected New OS system baseline and a visible New OS Home baseline. Control Panel → Backup and Recovery → Factory Reset opens a checked recovery flow that creates a current-system safety snapshot before restarting. Home is preserved by default; Roll back user data explicitly restores the initial Home state and preserves Home snapshot history. Existing installations without factory baselines do not gain them by merely updating the application. See Factory reset.
• Independent Home Rollback: Disk Snapshots Manager supports browsing and rolling back both System and Personal Files snapshots. Home-only rollback restores the shared Home subvolume without rolling back system packages, creates a Home safety snapshot, and preserves existing Home snapshot history. Both System and Home rollback take effect through a restart. Rolling back user data is not secure erasure.
• Startup and Boot Settings: The Control Panel can change the GRUB boot-menu wait time and choose an appropriate boot display mode through a narrowly scoped privileged helper. The interface distinguishes UEFI from unsupported Legacy BIOS Secure Boot configurations and refreshes the boot menu after validated changes.
• Private Voice Typing: Added an optional offline voice-typing stack built around whisper.cpp. It provides a GTK4 settings and microphone-calibration interface, a GNOME Shell integration for starting and stopping dictation, configurable keyboard shortcuts, local speech recognition, and clear installation and session-activation guidance before use.
• Adaptive Live Transcription: Voice Typing offers Automatic, On, and Off modes for displaying words while speaking. Automatic mode enables live transcription only when local performance measurements show sufficient headroom and pauses it for the session if actual previews become too slow. Final recognition continues, explicit user choices are preserved, and final-result preview and noise reduction remain independent settings. Recognized Chinese text follows the selected script preference.
• Local Voice Performance Setup: Voice Typing uses a short, cancellable performance test with a 10-second measurement budget and compact countdown to select a suitable CPU or GPU configuration. Measurements use bundled audio with the microphone off and are cached for reuse. Model preparation follows the test; the countdown is not a guarantee of total startup time. A longer performance test and manual backend settings remain available.
• Taskbar Behavior in Appearance: Added taskbar auto-hide and pointer-at-screen-edge reveal controls to the Appearance home page, alongside taskbar positioning. These controls use the existing Dash to Panel settings, so users no longer need to open the extension's preferences for these options. Addresses AnduinOS discussion #441.
• Recommended Display Scaling in Welcome Center: Added a primary-display scaling dropdown to the OOBE visual setup page. Recommendations combine the current pixel resolution, reported physical dimensions, and laptop-panel detection, targeting approximately 146 effective PPI for likely laptop panels and 96 effective PPI for other physical displays. The closest supported scale is labeled Recommended; selecting a scale applies it through GNOME while preserving the display resolution. Opening the page leaves the current scale unchanged, and displays without usable physical dimensions receive no density-based recommendation. Addresses AnduinOS discussion #442.
• Intel Graphics Settings: Driver Center now shows Intel GPU identity, the active i915 or xe driver, kernel information, and available display and firmware diagnostics. Supported display power-saving features can be left at their defaults or disabled explicitly, with conflict checks, restoration of managed settings, and clear restart requirements. Changes are opt-in; AnduinOS does not disable PSR globally. Driver switching remains unavailable without a validated hardware/kernel combination.
• About This Computer: Driver Center gains a hardware overview covering the processor, memory, graphics, storage, displays, and system software, with expanded diagnostic details and an estimated installation date where filesystem information is available.
• GNOME Settings Backup and Restore: AnduinOS Appearance can export GNOME settings, layouts, and extension preferences to a readable INI file. Imports can merge selected settings with the current profile or perform a strict restore, with automatic rollback when an import fails.
• Proxy Status Indicator: The redesigned Proxy Switcher shows a panel status icon whenever the system proxy is active, making the current proxy state immediately visible. It also provides quick access to Off, Manual, and Automatic modes and remembers the last active mode when the proxy is toggled off and back on.
• Redesigned Advanced Installation: The native installer's advanced-storage workflow gives users more control over installing AnduinOS alongside Windows on the same disk. It improves manual partition planning and feedback, allows explicit choices about which partitions to preserve, delete, create, or format, and provides inline filesystem selection. This addresses the advanced-installation problem reported in AnduinOS #425.
• Guarded NTFS Shrinking: Manual partitioning can shrink an eligible, healthy, unencrypted NTFS partition to make room for AnduinOS without moving the partition's start. This is an explicit operation with strict safety checks, not automatic Windows resizing or general-purpose partition resizing. See the limitations below.
• Flexible Storage Settings: Added configurable Swap sizing and a dedicated automatic disk-layout settings flow. Manual layouts support Btrfs, Ext4, XFS, and F2FS where the partition role permits them; automatic and guided layouts continue to offer Btrfs or Ext4.
• Optional External Installation Targets: The disk-selection page retains its default filtering and adds a Show External Drives action. After acknowledging a warning, users can expose eligible external disks and use the standard installation workflow; Live-media protections still apply. Installation and booting on another computer are not guaranteed, and AnduinOS ToGo remains the recommended portable USB option. Addresses the hidden external-disk scenario reported in AnduinOS discussion #439.
• Complete Keyboard Layout Catalog: The installer now reads the complete XKB keyboard catalog instead of presenting only a maintained subset. Layouts and variants remain searchable and can be previewed without changing the active Live-session keyboard unexpectedly. This broader catalog is intended to cover regional variants such as German (Switzerland); final validation remains tracked in AnduinOS-2 #12.
• Guided Optional Application Setup: The Control Panel provides guided installation paths for optional local AI, offline Voice Typing, Flatseal permission management, and Bottles-based Windows compatibility. Package and Flatpak operations display their progress and retain diagnostic output for failures.

Advanced Storage: Scope and Safety

Guided coexistence uses existing unallocated space on supported UEFI/GPT disks and reuses a validated EFI System Partition without formatting it. It does not automatically shrink Windows. The manual GPT editor provides explicit partition operations, including the guarded NTFS shrink path described above.

NTFS shrinking is rejected for BitLocker-encrypted, mounted, hibernated, Fast-Startup-affected, dirty, or inconsistent volumes. Before writing, the installer repeats its target-specific checks and resize dry run. It shrinks the filesystem before reducing the partition boundary and verifies the resulting layout before creating new partitions. It does not move partitions or resize Ext4, Btrfs, XFS, or F2FS filesystems.

If Windows requires a disk check, the installer offers Close and View Repair Steps rather than forcing a resize. Follow the repair steps in Windows, run chkdsk X: /f as administrator for the affected drive, and complete any requested restart and disk check before retrying.

!!! warning "Back up before changing partitions"

Back up important data before changing partitions. Do not interrupt a resize or power off the computer while partition changes are in progress. Safety checks do not replace a backup or guarantee recovery after an interrupted operation.

Behavior Changes

• Shorter Welcome Center Setup: Removed the system-update and account/backup pages, together with the mDNS and Bash command-prediction controls. These settings remain available through Control Panel and GNOME Settings. The separate mainland-China Flathub mirror page remains available for Simplified Chinese users. See Welcome Center.

• Automatic Snapshot Space Protection: Scheduled System and Home snapshots share a configurable minimum free-space setting, defaulting to 40 GiB. Below the limit, scheduled creation pauses while enabled retention cleanup continues; creation can resume when space is available. Setting the limit to 0 disables this additional guard. Manual, package-transaction, factory-baseline, and recovery-safety snapshots retain their own checks and are not governed by this scheduled-snapshot limit. See Disk Snapshots Manager.

• Pure Dracut Boot Stack: AnduinOS installation media and installed systems now use Dracut instead of the former Casper and initramfs-tools stack. New Live images are composed directly for Dracut, while existing installations use a one-shot migration package that stages the new initramfs, retains a recovery path until a successful boot is confirmed, and removes obsolete boot-stack packages only after the transition is safe.

• Atomic Dracut Migration: The Dracut switch waits until all required packages are available from the configured repository, survives interruption or power loss, verifies the generated initramfs at the appropriate kernel-package stage, and retries safely when publication or configuration is incomplete. Package scripts avoid refreshing GRUB inside image-building chroots.

• Independent Live and Installed Regions: Language, timezone, and keyboard selections made in the GRUB region menu configure the Live session. The installer can independently select the language, timezone, keyboard, and input methods for the installed system, allowing users to test in one region without forcing that choice onto the final installation. Follow-up validation of installed input-source persistence remains tracked in AnduinOS-2 #13.

• Earlier Live Keyboard Configuration: The selected Live keyboard layout is applied before GDM starts and does not require PolicyKit authorization. The login screen, desktop session, terminal, and installer therefore begin with the same validated keyboard choice.

• Centralized System Tools: AnduinOS-specific applets and selected system destinations now open through the Control Panel. ArcMenu and desktop shortcuts use these centralized routes, while the Control Panel keeps direct access to the underlying Appearance, Driver Center, Firewall, Swap, YubiKey, snapshots, networking, account, printer, scanner, and software tools.

• Explicit Weather Location Consent: The desktop no longer performs an implicit SimpleWeather location lookup. AnduinOS Appearance explains the request and asks for consent before using the network to determine a location for weather configuration.

• Explicit Voice Model Consent: Enabling offline Voice Typing shows the approximate model download size and requires an explicit installation action. Speech recognition remains local after the model is installed.

• Scoped Automatic Updates: The updated APT configuration enables unattended upgrades from Ubuntu's base and security archives and the current release's AnduinOS addon and webapps channels. Production configurations allow packages.anduinos.com; testing configurations allow apkg-dev.aiursoft.com instead. AnduinOS rules match the repository host, Origin, and release channel together, rather than allowing every Apkg server. Ubuntu's regular -updates channel and unrelated third-party repositories are not added by these defaults. Existing administrator-defined rules remain in effect. Existing installations must first receive the updated configuration package; see Update your system for the current policy and manual update instructions.

• Responsive Settings Windows: AnduinOS GTK applications use more consistent scrolling, default window sizes, and narrow-window layouts, making settings pages easier to use on small displays.

• Taskbar Layout Naming: The numeric 11 taskbar-layout label is now presented as Centered across the interface and translations.

• Installer Naming: The native installer is now presented as AnduinOS Installer without the former Beta qualifier.

• Consistent Storage Requirements: The installer, documentation, and website use a minimum storage requirement of 25GiB and a recommendation of 50GiB. Whole-disk installation rejects disks below the minimum and warns below the recommendation. Advanced partitioning adds capacity warnings for the selected root partition.

• Clearer Driver Updates: Driver Center distinguishes updating an installed graphics driver from installing a different driver. Updates show the installed and available versions and ask for confirmation of the package transaction, including removals. A dedicated progress window streams download and installation output, reports the result, and identifies when a restart is needed.

Packaging and Release Engineering

The following changes are mostly invisible during everyday use, but make upgrades, installation media, and release qualification safer:

• The Live-image builder now owns one Dracut-specific composition path instead of maintaining parallel Casper patching and initramfs update paths.
• Dracut migration packages use staged publication and dependency checks so a partially synchronized repository cannot begin an incomplete boot-stack transition.
• Release acceptance tests perform a real UEFI boot regression check, validate the transition from firmware to the graphical session, and retain serial diagnostics when a guest fails to reach the expected state.
• Regional acceptance tests verify that Live-session choices and installed-system choices remain independent, including language, timezone, keyboard layout, and input methods.
• QEMU test cleanup reclaims orphaned virtual disks after interrupted runs, and long-running serial and GDM checks tolerate delayed or incomplete guest output without hiding genuine failures.
• Package-level tests cover recovery-engine behavior, Secure Boot state, Driver Center behavior, localization, and GNOME Shell integration. ISO acceptance tests exercise end-to-end installation and recovery workflows, including factory reset with and without Home rollback, repeated factory reset, ordinary system rollback, and Home-only rollback.

Bug Fixes

• UEFI Boot Registration: Fixed whole-disk UEFI installations that could repeatedly show Reset System because firmware returned to shim's fallback registrar instead of starting the installed AnduinOS entry. In UEFI mode, the installer now keeps the normal installed-system loader in EFI/AnduinOS, avoids deploying the fallback registrar as the primary boot path, creates an explicit firmware entry bound to the selected EFI System Partition and loader, places that entry first in BootOrder, and verifies the resulting firmware state. It stops before destructive whole-disk work when EFI variables are unavailable instead of completing an installation that depends on first-boot registration. Fixes AnduinOS #422. Multi-disk EFI System Partition selection remains separately tracked in AnduinOS-2 #6.
• Secure Boot Verification: Fixed installation checks that rejected a valid signed AnduinOS boot layout when an unnecessary fallback EFI loader was absent. UEFI installations verify the signed loaders in EFI/AnduinOS and the dedicated firmware boot entry; they no longer require the shared EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI (or ARM64 BOOTAA64.EFI) fallback file. This corrects a boot-path check, not the set of trusted certificate authorities. In Legacy BIOS mode, Secure Boot is reported as not applicable rather than offering key enrollment; this describes the current boot mode, not necessarily the computer's hardware capabilities.
• Installed NVIDIA Driver Updates: Fixed Driver Center repeatedly offering an available NVIDIA update without upgrading the installed package. The update path now performs a validated APT transaction rather than relying on automatic driver installation, permits narrowly checked replacement of older NVIDIA module packages, and verifies the resulting package versions.
• Installer Connectivity Recovery: Fixed an initial connectivity failure remaining in effect after the network had recovered. Before mirror selection and software downloads, the installer makes a bounded connectivity recheck and records endpoint failures. If the system remains offline, base installation can still complete, and the completion page names selected features that could not be installed, such as input methods or multimedia codecs.
• Btrfs Scrub Reporting: Fixed Disk Snapshots Manager scrub progress, privileged recovery status, completion results, and stale runtime-state handling.
• Btrfs Snapshot Tool Retention: Fixed Disk Snapshots Manager becoming eligible for automatic removal after installation. Btrfs installations now explicitly retain it, including fully offline installations, while it remains optional on non-Btrfs systems.
• Live Keyboard Startup: Fixed the Live keyboard layout being applied too late for GDM or requiring an unavailable desktop authorization path.
• Seamless Taskbar Startup: Dash to Panel is now prioritized ahead of other panel extensions such as ArcMenu during GNOME Shell startup. The stock GNOME top panel remains hidden while the taskbar initializes, preventing the top panel and misplaced extension elements from briefly flashing after login.
• Virtual Machine Shutdown: Limited the SPICE guest agent shutdown wait to 15 seconds, preventing rare 90-second delays during shutdown or restart in virtual machines.
• Theme Shutdown Race: Fixed a race during user-theme teardown that could leave GNOME Shell theme state inconsistent during logout or package changes.
• Login Message Permissions: Restored executable permissions for the AnduinOS MOTD script so branded login information appears consistently.
• Separated Layout Spelling: Corrected the user-facing spelling of the Separated taskbar layout. Fixes AnduinOS #427.
• Welcome Center German Text: Corrected German spelling and wording in the Welcome Center and changed fragmented messages into complete translatable sentences. Addresses AnduinOS-Packages #9.
• Localization: Improved translation coverage and corrected Italian and other localized strings across existing AnduinOS applications. New settings and messages include translations for the 28 supported locales.