Linux Action News 179

Canonical reveals long-term Ubuntu plans that you might have missed, and the "double ungood" warning from Linus this week.

• Canonical: Flutter Is The Default Choice For Future Ubuntu Apps — Along with the new installer, Ken Vandine, Engineering Manager, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical revealed that the out-of-the-box experience for devices preloaded with Ubuntu will also be powered by Flutter.
• Ubuntu on Twitter — Flutter is the default choice for future Ubuntu apps. @kenvandine, Engineering Manager, is here to tell you about some of Canonical’s contributions to Flutter at #FlutterEngage.
• Getting started with Flutter on Ubuntu
• Version 2 of Google’s Flutter toolkit adds support for desktop and web apps
• The Linode network model — As we worked on expanding our global network, three things were non-negotiable: maintaining vendor diversity, balancing flexibility and control, and incorporating Linux starting at the network level as much as possible.
• Chrome (Chromium) release cycle shortened to 4 weeks, Chrome(ium) gets “Extended Stable” release every 8 weeks — We are excited to announce that Chrome is planning to move to releasing a new milestone every 4 weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021.
• Chrome Moving To A 4-Week Release Cycle
• (2019) Mozilla Shifting Firefox To A Four-Week Release Cycle
• Linux Mint may start pushing high-priority patches to users — Besides looking for available updates, the Manager will also track cases where updates are overlooked. This will include metrics on when updates were last applied; when were packages last upgraded; and how many days have passed since a particular update was made available.
• Linux Mint Finds Many Of Its Users Are Running Behind On Security Updates
• Linux Mint emits fix for memory-gobbling Cinnamon
• Update your computer! – The Linux Mint Blog
• A warning about 5.12-rc1 — This merge window, we had a very innocuous code cleanup and simplification that raised no red flags at all, but had a subtle and very nasty bug in it: swap files stopped working right. And they stopped working in a particularly bad way: the offset of the start of the swap file was lost. Swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results.
• That Linux 5.12 Severe Data Corruption Bug Hits Intel CI Systems - Issue Caused By Swap File
• Watch Out For Possible Data Loss On Early Linux 5.12 Kernels
• Save the Date! | Container Plumbing Days — The Container Plumbing Days will be a 2-day event to investigate, discuss, hack, learn, and celebrate the “lower-level” open source container technologies, everything from the container runtime on down to the Linux kernel.