Linux Action News 50

Trisquel has a new release, and Chris tries out the new ReactOS. Plus our thoughts on Microsoft announcing their own Linux, the German government switching to NextCloud, and the fix is in for Gnome Shell's infamous "Memory leak".

• Trisquel 8.0 LTS Flidas — The biggest internal change to the default edition is the switch from GNOME to MATE 1.12. The main reason for this change was that GNOME dropped support for their legacy desktop, which retained the GNOME 2.x user experience and didn't require 3D composition -- a feature that in many computers would still need non-free software to run at full speed. MATE provides a perfect drop-in replacement, it is very light and stable and it retains all the user experience design that we are used to from previous Trisquel releases.
• ReactOS 0.4.8 released — The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.8 as we continue to work on releasing every three months.
• German government goes open source with cloud firm Nextcloud — Seeks "construction of a private cloud for the federal government"
• Microsoft's Next OS is Based on Linux, Not Windows — Microsoft announced a new operating system for IoT called Azure Sphere OS. But here’s the shocker: It’s based on Linux, not on Windows.
• Google “pauses” Allo and creates yet another messenger — As we explain in our exclusive feature, the move is necessary because Google is going all in on Rich Communication Services, or RCS. The service will be branded “Chat” once carriers launch it, and Google wants to apply as many resources as possible to make sure that this time, finally, Android has a successful messaging app.
• GNOME Shell memory leak fixed — There has been a widely reported memory leak in the latest version of GNOME Shell which upstream GNOME have been working on fixing. While they finalise their plans and merge patches we have decided to press on with including one of the patches which should fix the biggest issues.