Another overdue progress report!

Hey everyone! It's been way too long, but I finally posted another progress report along with a slew of package and installer updates!

This time we're introducing USB3 support for both the Thunderbolt ports and the missing non-Thunderbolt ports (some iMac and Mac Studio models), as well as keyboard backlight and headphone jack support across the board. In addition, M2 support is now no longer considered experimental. We're also introducing a new optional bleeding-edge kernel package which adds the new display driver (DCP) with support for resolution switching, VSync, brightness control, and more, as well as experimental suspend (s2idle) support! These features will graduate to the regular kernel when they get more testing and stability fixes, but they are now safely available for everyone who wants to test them (and since it's a separate kernel, you can always go back if you have booting issues).

There are also a bunch of quality-of-life improvements across the installer and distro, and we're also switching to PipeWire in preparation for the upcoming speaker support and to avoid some PulseAudio bugs that were causing issues.

This update doesn't go into details about the GPU driver, but I wanted to give my supporters a bit of a sneak peek. I've asked Lina to finally write a blog post for next week detailing what she's been working on in the GPU kernel driver front, but the short story is that currently games such as Xonotic and Minecraft work well, and the GPU driver is stable enough to daily drive. It makes the desktop experience much smoother! If everything goes according to plan, we hope to be able to release alpha GPU support to users of our bleeding edge kernel sometime in December, if there are no showstoppers.

I hope you enjoy the update! :)