Hi,

for starters, let me say thank you for the great support you are giving us! It means a lot, and it backs us up with a solid base for our work.

Initially, we wanted to have a new release out by now, but work and other obligations prevented that from happening. So now we have decided to do another Christmas release, like we did a few in the past. And we are wrapping up some nice new features for this Christmas present.

First of all, we will ship nala, a new front-end for libapt-pkg, that will make your updates, upgrades and dist-upgrades look prettier, be more informative and easier to grasp, while being faster overall. This does not mean, you have to use nala, you can still use apt, if that is what you prefer. Or you set an alias and use the apt commands from your muscle memory, while nala does the heavy lifting in the background.

Secondly, we'll try to ship for you the option to have snapshots created and be able to roll these back from the GRUB menu, should things go south in your installation. This option will be available automatically, if you choose btrfs as your file system in Calamares or our text-based installer. In the installation, you can handle your snapshots in CLI or with snapper-gui. The system will automatically create snapshots before and after you install packages or run upgrades of your system. You can also create them at boot time or manually anytime during runtime. The only drawback is, that, depending on your settings, it can use considerably more space on your disk to store the snapshots. So please take that into consideration, before setting up btrfs as file system. We believe, the extra security you get through this is well worth the extra space, given the prize tags on today's HDDs and SSDs.

We are well aware, that the visual appearance of siduction has been a weak point in the last few years. So, in our last meeting the idea came up to go back to basing code names and wallpapers on well-known rock songs from the past, as we did when we started out with siduction. Let us know what you think.  And if you are good at design, you might want to lend a hand to transfer those rock songs into wallpapers. 

We are eagerly awaiting our next release, and hopefully so are you.