The live-disk distribution Parted Magic released its latest version. In this release Parted Magic officially migrates from the OpenBox to the XFCE desktop environment.
Overall .iso size and responsiveness should be lighter as it is a disk partition utility and needed during emergency situations. No need to use a heavy desktop environment like KDE Plasma or GNOME for example.
So it is a good choice for the Parted Magic team to use XFCE. XFCE is known for its lightweight nature and can work wonders for low-end hardware with less memory, processing power.
What’s new in Parted Magic – October 2020 release
XFCE is the default desktop environment. The XFCE version 4.14 is used. XFCE 4.16 still under development though.
The distribution also migrated to 64-bit for application support. This would help to include more applications bundled into the ISO required for a live-disk.
LibreOffice, VLC, and other applications are included now – thanks to the move to 64-bit .iso. Although the downside is the .iso size is increased to 1.5 GB.
With this release, the NVIDIA drivers are packaged by default and this would eliminate lots of troubles by users when rescuing broken systems.
The international language support and man pages are included as well in the .iso. This is super helpful if you are rescuing a broken system without the internet. This is quite a probable case for most of the situations.
Almost all packages and applications are updated to their latest versions in this release. The entire package list is available here.
In case you are wondering, Parted Magic includes almost all available and popular applications packaged in the .iso. Major applications which are included in this release are
- Firefox 68.x
- VLC 3.0
- LibreOffice 7.x
- gparted 1.1
Download
Parted Magic is not free to download. It was free earlier, but in 2013 it became a commercial product.
It comes with two price options with a 1-year subscription. For more details, visit the below page.
The Parted Magic is a commercial product due to its tools that are pre-packaged for you. It includes the partitioning tools, disk erasing tools for mechanical HD, SSD, etc. You can do secure erase and cleanup as well for sensitive tasks.
