Linux Action News 12

A good week for desktop Linux with news from Ubuntu, Fedora & openSUSE.

Plus our take on the pending death of Flash, some great work by the Debian project & Mozilla updates us on Project Common Voice.

• Ubuntu MATE 17.10 Alpha 2 — We’re not happy, proud, pleased or ambivalent to announce this alpha. No, not us. The is our most “Super” alpha ever and we’re ecstatic to present this fine release for your distro delectation. Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is brimming with new toys to play with.
• Uptake of Fedora 26 is really strong — It's already surpassed F24 and those of you still on F23.
• Boltron preview — Fedora’s Modularity Working Group (and others) have been working for a while on a Fedora Objective.
• openSUSE Leap 42.3 — “By avoiding major version updates in the base system as well as the desktops, the upgrade to Leap 42.3 is a rather unadventurous matter,” said Ludwig Nussel, openSUSE Leap release manager.
• The death of Flash — Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
• Some people don’t want it to die — Open sourcing Flash spec would be a good solution to keep Flash projects alive safely for archive reasons.
• Update on Debian Reproducible Builds Project — At the start of 2015 it was safe to say that Debian was fairly alone in the quest for reproducible builds, and a relevant number of developers were unconvinced by the effort's goals. Thankfully, this is not true anymore.
• More on Mozilla’s Project Common Voice — Today’s speech recognition technologies are largely tied up in a few companies that have invested heavily in them.