The release of the meta-distribution t2 sDE 25.4 has been announced by the T2 project, enabling users to create their own distributions, cross-compile, and maintain package versions. Notably, Puppy Linux is one of the popular distributions built on the T2 system. The project offers 25 bootable ISO images with minimal graphical environments using MUSL, UCLIBC, and GLIBC libraries, as well as assemblies with graphical environments based on Gnome and Wayland for current architectures.
The platform is primarily designed for building assemblies based on the Linux kernel, but there are separate prototypes for collecting packages for various operating systems, including MacOS, Haiku, and BSD systems. Future plans include support for creating environments based on other kernels like L4, Fuchsia, and Redoxos, as well as assemblies based on Android (AOSP). More than 5,000 packages are available for assembly purposes.
T2 provides support for 25 hardware architectures, catering to both modern built-in systems and older hardware such as Nintendo Wii U, Sony PS3, SGI, Sun, and HP workstations. Some architectures can function with just 512 MB of RAM. Ready assemblies are available for various architectures such as Alpha, ARC, AVR32, HPPA64, IA64, Loongarch64, M68K, Microblaze, MIPS64, NIOS2, Openris, PowerPC 64, RISC-V 64, S390X, SPARC 64, SUPERH, I486, X86-64, and X32.
Noteworthy changes in the new version of t2 sDE 25.4 include the implementation of a simple installer called “Web Installer” for replacing or creating new Linux systems, the addition of AMD ROCM stack port for RISC-V and ARM64 systems to accelerate machine learning operations, default support for OpenCl, packages with Rust and Qemu for SPARC64/32 architecture, restored support for Reiserfs and Orinoco wireless drivers, and a new system for using alternative implementations of standard programs and libraries like Libjpeg-Turbo and SDL-Compat. Additionally, efforts have been made to make dependencies optional and work is ongoing on a dynamic dependencies resolution system. The update includes 527 new packages or capabilities, updates to 4558 packages, and removal of 138 packages, with updates to Linux 6.14, GCC 14.2, LLVM/Clang 20.1, Glibc 2.41, Musl 1.2.