Abora V2

[AnimatedGTVR]

Abora OS v2.0.0

The biggest update to Abora yet. v2 rebuilds the installer from the ground up, expands the desktop and
app lineup significantly, and makes the whole experience feel noticeably more polished from boot to
first login.

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Installer

The installer is now a proper multi-step flow with a clear path from welcome to first boot.

• Locale step — timezone and keyboard layout are auto-detected, but you can now correct either one
  before anything touches the disk. No more being stuck with UTC.
• Confirm screen — a bordered summary box shows every choice (disk, desktop, apps, hostname, user,
  timezone, keyboard) before the wipe happens.
• Number key shortcuts — press 1–9 to jump to any menu item instantly, on both the boot menu and the
  installer.
• Finish screen — tells you exactly who to log in as and which desktop to expect.
• Live boot menu — also gets number shortcuts, consistent with the installer.

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Desktop Environments

v2 ships with 23 desktop environments, up from 10 in v1.

New in v2:
Sway, Niri, River, Pantheon, LXDE, Enlightenment, AwesomeWM, i3, Openbox, Qtile, BSPWM, Fluxbox, IceWM,
Herbstluftwm, DWM

Full list:
GNOME · KDE Plasma · Hyprland · Sway · Niri · River · XFCE · Cinnamon · MATE · Budgie · LXQt · Pantheon
· LXDE · Enlightenment · i3 · AwesomeWM · Openbox · Qtile · BSPWM · Fluxbox · IceWM · Herbstluftwm ·
DWM

All 23 DEs get dark theming and wallpaper seeding applied automatically on first login.

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App Catalog

Expanded from 16 to 28 apps across all bundles.

New additions: MPV, Audacity, Blender, KeePassXC, HandBrake, Darktable, Calibre, qBittorrent, Element,
Lapce, FileZilla, Remmina

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Virtual Machine Support

Abora v2 now runs well in five hypervisors out of the box:

• QEMU/KVM
• VMware
• VirtualBox (new)
• Hyper-V
• SPICE (new)

All VM guest tools use lib.mkDefault so users on real hardware can disable them without fighting the
module.

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Visuals

• Boot splash — unified "Abora OS" title with tagline, cleaner layout and color palette
• Fastfetch — section separators, display resolution, user@hostname title, color palette blocks at the
  bottom
• Fonts — Noto Sans/Serif/Mono/Emoji set as system-wide defaults
• Icons — Papirus icon theme included out of the box
• Cursor — Adwaita at 24px set consistently across all sessions

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Fixes

• SSH server is now off by default on installed systems (it was silently running in v1)
• Abora wallpaper correctly overrides the Limine bootloader default
• Keyboard layout validation prevents invalid values from reaching xkb.layout

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Built on NixOS unstable · Limine bootloader · Nix flakes

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This discussion was created from the release Abora V2.