The second beta of elementary OS 6 is now available for testing.

elementary OS 6 Beta 2 Now Available

Developers and testers, elementary OS 6 Beta 2 is available now! For a refresher on what a beta is, the release schedule, and how to provide feedback, see the  Beta 1 announcement.

What’s New Since Beta 1

So, what have we been up to for the past several weeks? The biggest changes in Beta 2 are related to the OS installer, Flatpak, and Online Accounts.

Installer

We’ve been putting lot of polish and cleanup into the installer UI. We’ve ensured the various views no longer resize the window, we reworked the layout in a few of the views to be more consistent with one another, and we added a pleasant animation to the installation progress view instead of just a static icon. We’ve also improved disk detection and error handling when failing to install on certain setups.

Flatpak

We’ve continued our efforts to ship first-party apps packaged as Flatpaks in Beta 2. elementary OS 6 now comes with Calculator, Camera, Document Viewer, Screenshot, Tasks, and Web from the AppCenter Flatpak repository. As a user, it’s entirely transparent: apps launch and behave just as before—they just happen to be packaged in a different way under the hood. As the beta process progresses and we solve sandboxing issues in our apps, we plan to transition even more apps over from Debian packages to Flatpaks provided by the AppCenter Flatpak repository.

Online Accounts

A major feature to land in Beta 2 is support for adding Online Accounts from System Settings. We now support adding both mail and calendar accounts that support the IMAP and CalDav standards. Once added, data from these accounts will show up across the system in apps like Mail, Calendar, and Tasks as well as in the Date & Time panel indicator.

Notifications

elementary OS 6 comes with an improved Notifications system, and we’ve expanded on its capabilities for app developers in Beta 2.

…and More!

Beta 2 comes with greatly improved focus styles in the system stylesheet, and we’ve fixed several small issues including border radii of linked buttons, nested header bars, and missing styles for the monospace style class. Developers, make sure to test against Beta 2 to ensure your apps look right—and as always, please  file issues if you have any problems.

elementary OS 6 Beta 2 Now Available
Download elementary OS 6 Beta 2