Arch-based ML4W OS 2.12.0 now available with Quickshell and other changes

German developer Stephan Raabe is back with a new refresh of ML4W OS, an effort he describes as "an advanced and full-featured Operating System and Dotfiles Configuration based on the dynamic tiling window manager Hyprland," which now has reached version 2.12.0. Based on Arch Linux, ML4W OS is only available for 64-bit machines and can be easily installed on another distro with the Dotfiles installer, but the Live ISO also allows those interested to take it for a spin first.

According to the official changelog (those interested in the changes delivered by the previous releases can find them on the article source page as well; see the link at the bottom of the last paragraph), these are the highlights of ML4W OS 2.12.0:

• Quickshell replaces the following apps: Welcome, Settings, Sidebar, and Calendar. 
• A Quickshell widget also replaces wlogout.
• The ML4W Hyprland Settings app is available as an option separately but can also be installed from the Welcome app.
• The new snapshot script for timeshift and grub-btrfs supports Arch, Fedora-based distros, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.
• New pacman update script for Arch to enable colors, parallel downloads, and ILoveCandy.
• New keybindings for toggling the calendar widget and the active window to floating and pinned.
• Quickshell Overview is now available and can be toggled with Ctrl+Tab.

ML4W OS can be launched from a bootable USB stick, but those who don't want to bother with that can also give it a try via a KVM/Qemu virtual machine. Installing ML4W OS with Arch Linux is still in a beta stage and can be done by running sudo install-ml4w-os in a terminal window. In addition to Arch, the list of distros that ML4W OS was tested with also includes EndeavourOS, Manjaro, Garuda, Arco, CachyOS, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Fedora Workstation 43.