4 Myths About Trisquel 12 | Installation and Configuration

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Also available on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@javierorozco.observer:6/Trisquel12:c

“It’s only for fanatics.”

“It doesn’t work on real hardware.”

“It’s a dead distro.”

I have heard that about Trisquel for years. And Trisquel 12.0, codenamed “Ecne”, deserves better press than it gets: none of those claims survive contact with reality. But I am not going to ignore the real limitations that do exist either, because that would be doing exactly what I criticize.

I am not here to sell an ideology. I come from systems administration and cybersecurity, and from that perspective Trisquel has a solid technical argument that is rarely explained well.

What Trisquel Is: a 100% Free Ubuntu

Trisquel is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which is itself based on Debian), but what makes it stand out is that it is certified by the Free Software Foundation as a 100% free distro.

It uses linux-libre: an alternative version of the kernel from which all proprietary firmware blobs have been manually removed. Not only does it not include the blobs, it patches the kernel so it does not even try to load them if it found them on the system. That is closed binary code that manufacturers ship inside the regular Linux kernel and that runs on your hardware without you being able to read it, audit it, or know exactly what it does — just like proprietary drivers on other operating systems.

Free software in general grew out of an anecdote related to this. Richard Stallman worked as a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s and 80s, when it was common for researchers to share source code freely: if someone improved a program, they made it available to the community.

The lab received as a donation from Xerox a high-speed laser printer with a serious problem: it jammed frequently. With the previous printer, Stallman had solved that kind of problem by modifying the software, because they had access to the driver source code. With the new Xerox it was impossible: the software was only a binary and Xerox did not hand over the source code. And the most revealing twist: someone did have that source code, but refused Stallman a copy because he had signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with Xerox.

That moment showed him the dangers of proprietary software: it turns you into a prisoner of your software, it stops you from fixing real problems, it breaks cooperation between users, and it gives the manufacturer disproportionate power over the user. In September 1983 he announced the GNU Project, in 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation, and he defined the Four Freedoms of Free Software: to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify it, to distribute copies, and to distribute modified versions. And a point he always clarifies: “free” refers to freedom, not price. As the famous saying goes: think free speech, not free beer.

That is not paranoia, fanaticism, or extremism. In systems administration and security, software you cannot audit is a risk by definition, not an optional convenience. And the FSF does not certify distributions lightly: it is one of the strictest filters out there.

Myth 1: “It’s Only for Fanatics”

This argument assumes that using fully free software is an emotional decision, a rejection of companies, and it is a comfortable way of not having to evaluate the real argument.

The technical argument is this: when your kernel includes binary firmware, you are running code with extremely high privileges, at the hardware level, that you cannot inspect. In a security context that is an attack surface. Not theoretical: real. There have been documented vulnerabilities in the firmware of network cards, storage controllers, and audio chips.

Does that mean everyone should use linux-libre? Not necessarily. There are contexts where that trade-off does not pay off. But saying that whoever chooses it does so out of fanaticism is ignoring the argument. And in security, ignoring arguments is exactly what you should not do.

Myth busted. Moving on.

Installation: the Ubiquity Installer and APT 3.0

The ISO is downloaded from trisquel.info, in its main edition with the MATE desktop. There are also editions with KDE Plasma, LXDE, and an educational version based on Sugar, but here I focus on the main one.

The installer is Ubiquity, the same one Ubuntu uses. If you ever installed Ubuntu, everything will feel familiar: language, time zone, partitioning, user. No surprises. My recommendation, valid for any operating system, is to always enable the full-disk encryption option.

One detail worth mentioning: in Trisquel 12 the installer already uses the deb822 repository format natively. That is APT 3.0. It is not a visible change for the end user, but it is modern infrastructure and engineering work the Trisquel team did from scratch, inherited not from Ubuntu 24.04 but directly from Debian 13.

During installation it will not ask you for any proprietary firmware. There is no “install additional drivers” option like in Ubuntu. That is intentional: if your hardware needs blobs to work, Trisquel will not install them. And that takes us straight to the next myth.

Myth 2: “Without Blobs There Is No Wi-Fi or GPU”

This myth has a true part and an exaggerated part, and it is worth separating them.

The true part: there is hardware that requires binary firmware and linux-libre does not include it. The most common cases are Broadcom Wi-Fi cards, some Realtek models, and certain NVIDIA GPUs. If you have one of those, it will not work on Trisquel. Period.

But the exaggerated part, where the argument collapses, is assuming that applies to all modern hardware. It does not: Intel and AMD graphics, Intel wired network cards, and recent integrated Realtek audio work without proprietary firmware.

For physical machines, my practical recommendation is to check your hardware beforehand on h-node.org, the catalog of free-software-compatible hardware maintained by the FSF. It is not a complicated step and it saves you surprises.

Is it a real limitation? Yes. Does it rule out Trisquel for any hardware? No. Those are different things.

The MATE Desktop and Preinstalled Software

MATE has been Trisquel’s default desktop environment for years: simple, stable, and accessible. It does not need 3D acceleration, which makes it viable on old hardware and in virtualized environments.

It comes with the basics preinstalled: Abrowser, which is Firefox reconfigured without Mozilla telemetry or services, LibreOffice, a media player, a file manager, and the standard system tools.

The system ships with a bit of everything: disk usage analyzer, calculator, dictionary, archiver, file search, character map, on-screen keyboard, PDF editor, text editor, blue-light filter, magnifier, screen reader, terminal, screenshots, and font and PDF viewers. For multimedia and graphics there is a disc burner, webcam viewer, media players, sound mixer, scanner software, photo editor, color picker, and photo organizer. For the internet: email client, decentralized, private, and encrypted chat software with calls and video calls, news reader, browser, multiprotocol messaging, BitTorrent client, and remote desktop client. And for the system: full office suite, backups, file explorer, system monitor, ISO image mounter, log viewer, updater, software installer, bootable USB creator, .deb package manager, printer wizard, and management of users, networks, disks, power, and repositories. Most settings are centralized in the Control Center.

Myth 3: “It’s No Good for Real Work”

The Trisquel repositories hold thousands of available packages. We are not talking about ten tools in a plain-text directory, but a package base derived from Ubuntu 24.04 and cleaned of non-free dependencies. WireGuard, KeePassXC, networking tools, editors, version control: nothing critical is missing for a systems administration and programming workflow.

Trisquel 12 also has an active backports repository: LibreOffice in its latest version, yt-dlp, Inkscape, Nextcloud Desktop, Kdenlive. Updated software without waiting for the Ubuntu LTS cycle.

And on browsers: in this release the team added GNU IceCat and ungoogled-chromium as additional options alongside Abrowser. Three fully free browsers available from the official repositories.

The “it has no useful software” argument confuses “free” with “scarce”. They are not the same thing: free means you can read the code, modify it, and redistribute it, not that there is less software.

Post-Installation: Updates, Backports, and Browser

Updating the System

The first thing after a clean install is to install the pending updates. APT 3.0 feels noticeably faster at resolving dependencies than previous versions:

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sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Something the Trisquel team worked on specifically in this version 12: they reviewed and expanded the AppArmor rules for graphical environments. More applications running with active confinement profiles by default. It is silent work, nothing visible, but exactly the kind of security work that matters.

Enabling Backports: LibreOffice 24 → 26

Without enabling backports, LibreOffice ships in version 24, the same one Ubuntu 24.04 carried by default. Enabling the repository is easy from the graphical interface: Menu, System, Administration, Software & Updates; in the “Other Software” tab you enable the Backports repository, authenticate with your password, click “Close” and then “Reload”. You can also do it faster from the terminal, but through the interface the process stays visible. Then go back to Menu, System, Administration, Software Updater, click “Check for Updates” and the backport packages appear: just click “Install Now”. When you reopen LibreOffice you can verify it is now on version 26.

Resource Usage

With htop you can see the distro’s real resource usage: used RAM sits between 800 and 900 MB:

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htop

I also installed fastfetch, which is in the now-enabled backports, to show the system information:

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sudo apt install fastfetch

Keep in mind that fastfetch usually shows an extra RAM figure above 200 MB, because it includes its own memory overhead.

Abrowser, the Default Browser

Abrowser even lets you sign in with a Firefox account to sync across devices. But it has one quirk: when you try to install extensions, the browser sends you to the Mozarella page on Ñugzilla, which only contains 100% free extensions… with the problem that they are outdated, as I verified with the two I use in every browser: uBlock Origin for blocking intrusive ads and Bitwarden as my self-hosted password manager.

It is not a serious problem: just go manually to the Firefox extensions page, search for the ones you need, and install them.

The browser also ships with strict anti-tracking mode. I recommend leaving it that way and, if some site has problems, selectively enabling the option to fix major site issues.

MATE Customization

This is already personal taste: I removed the three taskbar icons for the menu, the file manager, and the browser. Then, with right-click and “Add to Panel”, I added the advanced MATE menu, which supports search; I moved it to the edge and locked it to the panel so I would not move it by mistake. Then I added back Caja, the file manager, and the browser, although you can add as many as you want.

To test the centralized configuration I switched to the dark theme from the Control Center. When you do this, I recommend logging out and back in: that way the change applies to all applications, including the menu.

GNU Guix: More 100% Free Software

And to finish breaking myth 3, there are two ways to get more fully free software compatible with the distro’s philosophy and the FSF’s.

The first is GNU Guix. On the official Trisquel website, searching for “Guix” takes you to the “All Manuals” page and from there to the “GNU Guix Package Manager” manual, with a short description of what it is. If you know the Nix package manager or the NixOS distribution, this is the same thing, but in a 100% free version: it is both a package manager and a NixOS-style distribution.

One of its advantages is that you can even install different versions of the same package, with all dependencies included and bundled, and generally everything stays at its latest version.

Installing it means following some fairly simple steps, although parts of the process take around half an hour. That is completely normal, but it only happens the first time. When finished I recommend logging out and back in so the added environment variables take effect, for example so installed applications show up in the menu.

Installing and Searching Packages with Guix

Guix can be used at the user level, without administrator privileges, which is the most recommended way. As a demonstration I installed the LibreWolf browser, also Firefox-based but with a strong focus on privacy:

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guix install librewolf

From the console you can also search for packages. I searched for GIMP, the photo editor, and with the keyboard arrows I moved through the results: at recording time GIMP 3.2.0 was available, the latest version, but also 2.10.38. There you can see what I said before: there are several versions of the same software in case you need them:

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guix search gimp

If you prefer searching from the browser you can also do it on the Guix packages page, where the command appears ready to paste into the terminal and install.

I staged this demonstration on purpose: GIMP already comes preinstalled from the official Trisquel packages in an older version, but I installed 3.2.0 via Guix. To avoid conflicts just log out and back in: the menu ends up with the Guix-installed edition. It is a huge, practical, and very simple repository to use, with the guarantee that the software is 100% free because it is an official GNU and FSF project.

Flatpak Limited to Free Licenses

The other way to install additional software is Flatpak by adding the Flathub repository. But that repository normally contains hundreds of proprietary closed-source programs, so there is a way to force it to only show software with free and verified licenses.

The simplest path is to install the Flatpak plugin for the GNOME software store: with a single command you install the store, the plugin, and Flatpak together. Afterwards I recommend logging out and back in, for the same reason as with Guix:

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sudo apt install gnome-software gnome-software-plugin-flatpak flatpak

Then, from the terminal you add Flathub in user mode, without root privileges and limited to free licenses. From there you just open the GNOME software store: you already have access to all those applications without breaking, relatively speaking, the distro’s philosophy.

Why do I say “relatively”? Because inside a lot of open-source software there is an easy path to installing non-free software: closed plugins, proprietary and unethical third-party services, and so on. The FSF is not in favor of using software like that. Even so, the final choice belongs to the user, who could even add the full Flathub with all the proprietary software… but that would defeat the purpose of using a 100% free distribution only to then install closed programs on it. It would not be coherent.

Myth 4: “The Project Is Dead”

This myth comes from the release pace. Time passed between Trisquel 10 and 11, and between 11 and 12 as well, and people read that as abandonment. It is not abandonment: it is the cost of doing something difficult with limited resources.

Trisquel 12 ships with APT 3.0, with extensive kernel work to make its modifications more modular, with expanded AppArmor, with three free browsers available, and with active backports. And the team has already announced it is starting preliminary work to support the RISC-V architecture, which is the next frontier of free hardware.

An abandoned project does not do that. A project with limited resources but clear direction does.

Trisquel is non-profit and sustained by donations and memberships. If after trying the project you find it valuable, that is the concrete way to support it.

Who It Is For (and Who It Is Not For): Conclusions

Trisquel is for those who value having a fully auditable system, for those who work in environments where non-free software is a real rather than theoretical risk, for those who want an Ubuntu-based system but without the compromises Ubuntu makes with proprietary firmware and Canonical packages, and for those who want a stable platform with support until 2029 and active backports.

Who is it not ideal for yet? Those who depend on Wi-Fi or GPU hardware that requires binary firmware, although that universe shrinks every year as more manufacturers free their drivers. And those who need proprietary software with no free equivalent. That exists; I am not going to deny it.

But those real limitations are very different from the myths I started with. And the difference matters, because the myths keep people who would benefit from Trisquel from ever considering it.

If you use Linux and never gave Trisquel a chance because you heard it is useless or for fanatics, I hope this changes that. At least so you evaluate it with real information.

Sources and Resources

Official Trisquel site: https://trisquel.info/
Trisquel downloads (12.0 LTS “Ecne” edition): https://trisquel.info/en/download
h-node, free-software-compatible hardware catalog: https://h-node.org/
GNU Guix, transactional package manager: https://guix.gnu.org/
Guix package search: https://packages.guix.gnu.org/
FSF-recommended free GNU/Linux distributions: https://www.gnu.org/distros/distros.en.html
GNU/Linux-compatible hardware (FSF): https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw

Trisquel on Javier Orozco | Observer