Freespire 8.0 Public Beta 1 Released

Today the Freespire team has released Freespire 8.0 Public Beta 1. With Public Beta 1 we are introducing users to the next generation of Freespire. We are preparing for a January 2022 release. With Beta 1 there has been many refinements and visual changes. many users have said they wanted the appmenu's back and for Freespire not to look so "ChromeOS" We have updated many internals of the system which includes:

kernel 5.4.0-89
Google Chrome 95
Web app selections have not changed
Xorg has been updated
Intel based Mac support has been vastly improved
Microsoft Surface support has been improved
XFCE has had various updates applied

Plan to implement:

New kernel
ARM Release is still being worked on, but we are hoping for a release soon. The debate is whether to wait until we move to our new base in 2023.
ChromiumOS based experimental build will be released when we integrate the Neverware installer.

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WE DO NOT RECOMMEND THE BETA FOR PRODUCTION USE
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Freespire as always will be Free to download, use and redistribute you can download it here:

distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/beta/f8-beta1.iso
distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/beta/f8-beta1.iso.md5
distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/beta/f8-beta1.iso.sha256