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• Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux — We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games
• Asahi Linux Enables Early Apple GPU Driver Support - WIP OpenGL 2.1 + GLES 2.0
• Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Heading To Linux 6.2 — Sent in yesterday were the Arm CPUFreq updates to queue in the Linux power management tree ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window.
• [GIT PULL] cpufreq/arm updates for 6.2 - Viresh Kumar
• Floppy Driver Update Ready For Linux 6.2 — This memory leak with the floppy disk driver has been in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.11
• Android memory safety vulnerabilities declined as Rust usage grew — Specifically, the number of annual memory safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 to 85 between 2019 and 2022. They are now 35% of Android’s total vulnerabilities versus 76% four years ago. In fact, “2022 is the first year where memory safety vulnerabilities do not represent a majority of Android’s vulnerabilities.”
• Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust
• Fedora 38 Cleared To Produce “Mobility Phosh” Spins — The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor.
• Ping bug potentially allows remote hack of FreeBSD systemsSecurity Affairs — A remote attacker can trigger the vulnerability, causing the ping program to crash and potentially leading to remote code execution in ping.
• D-Installer needs your help — Today we published a new prototype of D-Installer, fixing several bugs reported by early testers and improving the usage experience in some areas like the configuration of passwords and users. But beyond those improvements, a couple of new features deserve some attention.
• Bug 1205938 – D-Installer - Slowness initialization on real hardware
• GitHub - yast/d-installer: A service-based Linux installer
• openSUSE’s D-Installer Adds LVM & Full Disk Encryption Configuration

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• OpenSSL 3.0.7 Released Fixing Critical Flaw — Today we published an advisory about CVE-2022-3786 (“X.509 Email Address Variable Length Buffer Overflow”) and CVE-2022-3602 (“X.509 Email Address 4-byte Buffer Overflow”).
• OpenSSL version 3.0.7 published
• /news/openssl-3.0-notes.html
• Fedora 37 Release Delayed To Mid-November Over Critical OpenSSL Vulnerability
• Linux 6.2 Power-Savings While Idle Or Lightly Loaded — The short story for Linux end-users is the Lazy RCU work can provide 5~10% power-savings for idle or lightly-loaded systems by this lazy/batching functionality.
• Linux 6.2 Picking Up Mainline Support For Apple M1 Pro/Max/Ultra Hardware — This gets the high-end Mac Studio systems with those premium SoCs now compatible with the mainline kernel.
• Hector's Deleted Tweet — I'm getting tired of arguing with kernel maintainers. The other day I spent 6 hours arguing on IRC about what should've been a 30 minute fix patch.
• Hector Martin on Twitter Follow Up Tweet — Like dude, if you aren't going to step into my world and actually understand what I'm trying to do here, just suck it up and ack my patch. It is not my job to drag you kicking and screaming until you either give up or have a lightbulb moment.
• Seems some Kernel Maintainers Noticed the Twitter Rant — Well they saw my tweets and apparently didn't like them 🤷‍♂️
• Bcachefs Rolling Out New Allocator, Performance Continues Improving — Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet on Friday published a new status update on this original file-system born out of Linux's block cache (BCache) code.
• FreeBSD Re-Introduces WireGuard Support Into Its Kernel — As of Friday, a new WireGuard driver implementation has been re-introduced with many fixes/improvements over the code state from 2020.
• Open Letter to Gitea - Restoring Trust in the Gitea Project — This unfortunately concludes the Gitea Open Letter has failed and there is no alternative but forking the project under a new name, with a healthy democratic governance.

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• Ubuntu 22.10 Released — Codenamed “Kinetic Kudu”, this interim release improves the experience of enterprise developers and IT administrators. It also includes the latest toolchains and applications with a particular focus on the IoT ecosystem.
• LINUX Unplugged 481: Just a Prompt Away — We take a look at Ubuntu 22.10 on a ODRID H3+
• Ubuntu 22.10 Pi Focused Features
• Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) Is Now Available for Download
• Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea — We’d like to announce that we have formed a company, Gitea Limited, to ensure the goals are met.
• Apple CPUFreq Driver Updated For Linux - Initial M2 Support Added — The new v3 patches have addressed feedback raised during prior review. One notable addition with the new patches is adding initial support for the Apple M2 SoC (T8112).
• Asahi Lina on Twitter — My Linux M1 GPU driver passes >99% of the dEQP-GLES2 compliance tests!
• Hector Martin on Twitter
• Linus Torvalds may pull '486 support from Linux kernel — As Torvalds surveyed contributors' code, he appears to have been frustrated by the need to include workarounds that cater to older CPUs. He therefore suggested ending support for old kit could be an easier way to solve memory matters.
• Red Hat releases a virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop on AWS — Red Hat is positioning the service as suitable for processing-intensive workloads like animation rendering or data visualization but without the associated hardware costs.
• Stratis Storage 3.3 Released — Stratis 3.3.0 includes one significant enhancement and several smaller enhancements as well as number of stability and efficiency improvements.
• Stratis Storage
• Matthew Miller on Twitter — Heads up: we are very likely to slip the official Fedora Linux 37 release in order to integrate fixes for the upcoming critical openssl vulnerability. Official decision on this tomorrow.
• Forthcoming OpenSSL Releases — OpenSSL 3.0.7 is a security-fix release. The highest severity issue fixed in this release is CRITICAL

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• Proton 7.0 out with Easy Anti-Cheat improvements — Proton 7.0 pulls in Wine 7.0 which it's based upon along with: upgrades to DXVK 1.9.4 for DirectX 9 / 10 / 11, newer VKD3D-Proton for DirectX 12 to Vulkan
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter
• Proton 7.0-1: A Major Milestone for Linux Gaming
• Canonical Will Begin Certifying Gigabyte Servers For Ubuntu Linux — Moving forward Gigabyte's server platforms are expected to obtain Ubuntu Server certification.
• GIGABYTE Partners with Canonical to Certify Servers for Ubuntu
• Canonical at MWC 2022
• Bcachefs Might Be Ready For Upstreaming In Linux This Year — The Bcachefs file-system that was born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has over the past few years matured greatly. Now in 2022 the core fundamentals of the file-system are "pretty close to done" and will hopefully be mainlined this calendar year into the Linux kernel.
• Linux On The Apple M1 Preparing Better Performance With In-Development CPUFreq Driver — Fortunately, a proper CPUFreq driver for the Apple M1 is in development for Linux and is allowing for a combination of enticing performance and good battery life for this community-driven, open-source support around the Apple Silicon.
• Get Chrome OS Flex for PC or Mac — Chrome OS Flex is a free and sustainable way to modernize devices you already own. It’s easy to deploy across your fleet or simply try it to see what a cloud-first OS has to offer.
• Google announces Chrome OS Flex for ordinary PCs, Macs • The Register
• Chrome OS Flex is an ideal off-ramp for millions of PCs that can’t run Windows 11
• Google’s free Chrome OS Flex could breathe new life into old PCs and Macs

Plus, the new tech in SteamOS 3 that might make it a great desktop OS.

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• Raspberry Pi OS hits the bullseye — Raspberry Pi announced the release of a new version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), which advances to the Debian 11 “bullseye” release.
• What’s new in RHEL 8.5 — Customers running Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL will see a number of enhancements to help configure, manage and operate RHEL more efficiently.
• Major Changes in 8.5
• Red Hat 8.5 released with SQL Server and .NET 6
• AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Stable Now Available — AlmaLinux OS 8.5 includes features and improvements to container tools to reduce friction and make the build and deploy processes more flexible, support for OpenJDK 17, additional OpenSCAP profiles for hardening and security compliance, new system roles, and Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP, amongst other additions and enhancement.
• Canonical Makes It Easier to Run Ubuntu VMs on Apple M1 Macs with Multipass — Multipass promises to offer Apple M1 MacBook developers interesting in developing apps for the Linux/Ubuntu desktop the fastest way to run Linux cross-platform, running a Ubuntu VM in as little as 20 seconds.
• Hector Martin on Twitter — Say hi to an M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM! Notch compatible! I made NVMe work today and decided it's time to properly install a distro ;)
• Hector Martin on Twitter: “It’s been running the glxgears demo (60% all-core CPU usage) all night, lid closed, no display sleep. It’s barely warm to the touch, and I can only hear the fan if I put my ear 15cm away from the vents. This is why I’m putting Linux on these machines :-) https://t.co/HPBDskirSf” / Twitter
• Big Btrfs Changes in the Works — I’m working on a large set of on-disk format changes to address some of the more painful parts of Btrfs’s design. There’s a lot of discrete changes here, but they’ll all go under the single umbrella of “extent-tree-v2.”
• On-Disk Format Changes Ahead To Improve “Painful” Parts Of Btrfs Design
• Steam Deck Release Pushed Back To February 2022 — For those that pre-ordered the Steam Deck your position in the queue remains, but is now all shifted back by approximately two months.
• Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing — Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
• Valve Says SteamOS 3.0 Will Be Available for Everyone to Download and Install
• Steam Deck Development Live Stream - YouTube
• Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now

Plus, the essential RISC-V code landing in the Linux kernel.

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• Asahi Linux On The Apple M1: “Usable As A Basic Linux Desktop” — With the progress made over the past month, "Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)!"
• Progress Report: September 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Asahi Linux emits usable basic desktop on Apple’s M1
• Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support — Given that it's taken a while to freeze, there isn't yet any performant RISC-V processors out there actually implementing the complete extension and so for now and during development, it's been a function of running it on simulators.
• Canonical launches Ubuntu Frame, the foundation for embedded displays — Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu Frame, a solution that allows developers to easily build and deploy graphical applications for interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other products that require a graphical output.
• Ubuntu Frame is a secure display server for embedded systems
• Building graphical applications in embedded devices
• Software Engineer - Toolbox (containers / desktop / golang) — The Red Hat Desktop team is looking for a Software Engineer to join us. In this role, you will develop and maintain containerization technologies for software development like toolbox.
• SUSE Working on a CentOS Clone? — I like looking in dnf countme data to see the various distros requesting EPEL repos. There are often many weird distro names showing up in the single digits. But this one jumped out at me with 38 hits last week
• DNF Better Counting
• Index of /csv-reports/countme
• Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) — High-quality packages that have been developed, tested, and improved in Fedora available for RHEL and compatible derivatives such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.
• SUSE Has been Rebuilding RHEL Packages for Years
• Will Furnass on Twitter — “Interesting that CERN are proposing to adopt @CentOS Steam 8 for new systems"
• PowerPoint Presentation

Plus, why Western Digital might be to thank for your next ultimate Linux workstation.

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• Debian 11 “bullseye” Released — After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.
• Phoronix: Debian 11 “Bullseye” Released
• Debian Live install images
• Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation - Phoronix — For driving eBPF usage moving forward for these sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel, the eBPF Foundation has been formed with backing from The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Google, and others.
• Linux Foundation Press Release
• eBPF - Introduction, Tutorials & Community Resources
• RISC-V Developers Continue Working On KVM Support — This KVM RISC-V support has been led by Western Digital who remains very active with various elements of RISC-V Linux support.
• Progress Report: August 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Restore/upgrade firmware of iOS devices
• Apple M1 PCIe Driver Under Review For The Linux Kernel
• Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a ‘pay what you want’ basis • The Register
• Pantheon-tweaks: A system settings panel for the Pantheon desktop environment.

Plus the good, the bad, and the impressive in the new Linux 5.13 release.

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• System76 Blog — Pop!_OS 21.04: A Release of COSMIC Proportions — Pop!_OS COSMIC (Computer Operating System Main Interface Components) gives you the freedom to navigate your workflow via your mouse, keyboard, and/or trackpad.
• Pop OS 21.04 Cosmic Desktop Brings Much Needed Productivity Boost
• Pop!_OS 21.04 Released with New ‘Cosmic’ Desktop
• Audacity Is Now A Possible Spyware, Remove It ASAP — The updated privacy policy page for Audacity includes a wide range of data collection mechanisms. It states for example that it can hand any user data to state regulators where it is located, which is basically Russia, USA and the EEA zone.
• Audacity GitHub: Clarification of Privacy Policy
• Audacity GitHub: New privacy policy is completely unacceptable!
• Audacity Desktop Privacy Notice
• GitHub - cookiengineer/audacity: Audacity Fork without any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting.
• HN Audacity Discussion
• Fedora Audacity discussion
• Google is moving away from APKs on the Play Store — Starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps will have to be published using the Android App Bundle format. Your phone will still download apps as APKs, but the app bundles will create APKs that are optimized for your device.
• Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.13 after seven release candidates — “In fact," he said, "it’s one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers.
• Some 5.13 development statistics [LWN.net]
• Linux Git: Merge tag ‘landlock_v34’
• (2016) Sandboxing with the Landlock security module [LWN.net]
• NFS is broken in Linux 5.13 — This made it into 5.13 final, and completely breaks NFSD for me. Existing mounts on clients hang, as do new mounts from new clients.
• Ubuntu 20.10 End of Life Warning — Official support for Ubuntu 20.10 ends on July 22, 2021.

Plus a major step in Apple M1 GPU support.

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• FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates — CentOS Stream 9 will launch in Q2 2021 as part of the RHEL 9 development process.
• Fedora Linux 34 is officially here! — Following the introduction of BTRFS as the default filesystem on desktop variants in Fedora Linux 33, we’ve introduced transparent compression on BTRFS filesystems.
• Fedora 34 Changes
• Gnome40
• DefaultPipeWire
• XwaylandStandalone
• WaylandByDefaultForPlasma
• BtrfsTransparentCompression
• EnableSystemdOomd
• Remove Support For SELinux Runtime Disable
• UnifyGrubConfig
• An update on the UMN affair — None of the three patches that contained real bugs were accepted by maintainers, though the reasons for rejection were not always the bugs in question. The paper itself has been withdrawn and will not be presented in May as was planned.
• Owncast Streaming Application | Linode Marketplace | Linode
• “Full disclosure” from the University of Minnesota — The researchers at the University of Minnesota have posted a description of the work they did as part of their "hypocrite commits" project. It includes a list of the buggy commits they posted and how they were handled.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 arrives — The latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux operating system is designed to be deployed on the computing edge.
• Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 Released For This New RHEL Alternative — The first release candidate of Rocky Linux 8.3 is out, the project's inaugural release as a new binary-compatible alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
• Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 — The intent of a release candidate is for the community to test and validate expected functionality of Rocky Linux and report any bugs if present.
• CentOS replacement distro AlmaLinux gets commercial support options — CloudLinux Inc has announced that it will offer commercial support for the AlmaLinux community distribution. The new support plans will include regular patches and updates for AlmaLinux's kernel and core packages, patch delivery SLAs, and 24/7 incident support.
• Commercial Support for AlmaLinux OS from CloudLinux — CloudLinux Inc will start providing multiple support options for AlmaLinux OS in May 2021.
• 8.4 Beta of AlmaLinux Released — This is a BETA release and should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines, unless you don't mind if something breaks. 😉
• Ubuntu Bug Breaks EFI on 21.04 Update With Older Machines — The exact nature of the hardware likely to fail is still unclear. Canonical software engineer Dave Jones suggested modern machines would be unaffected but older machines such as a ThinkPad 420 from 2011 and a MacBook Air from 2012 were affected by the bug.
• elementary OS 6 Beta Available Today — Developers and testers, it’s the day you’ve been waiting for: elementary OS 6 Beta is available now! We first started talking publicly about elementary OS 6 in August of last year.
• New Spectre Exploits Beat All Mitigations: Fixes to Severely Degrade Performance — Researchers from two universities have discovered several new variants of Spectre exploits that affect all modern processors from AMD and Intel with micro-op caches. Existing Spectre mitigations do not protect the CPUs against potential attacks that use these vulnerabilities.
• PDF: I See Dead ﾂｵops: Leaking Secrets
• M1 Mesa Driver Upstreamed — I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run OpenGL workloads like glxgears and scenes from glmark2 on the M1 with an open-source stack. To top it off, the compiler and driver are now upstreamed in Mesa!
• mesa - Add asahi Gallium driver

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• Linux Foundation serves up free code-signing service — The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.
• Linux Foundation announces new open-source software signing service
• Introducing sigstore — Installing most open source software today is equivalent to picking up a random thumb-drive off the sidewalk and plugging it into your machine.
• rekor: Signature Transparency Log — Rekor's goals are to provide an immutable tamper resistant ledger of metadata generated within a software projects supply chain.
• Fulcio: SigStore WebPKI — fulcio is a free Root-CA for code signing certs - issuing certificates based on an OIDC email address.
• cosign: Container Signing — Container Signing, Verification and Storage in an OCI registry.
• Diversity, Flexibility, and Linux: Prioritizing Generous Transfer
• German software company SUSE targets pre-summer IPO — SUSE is targeting a pre-summer initial public offering in a deal that may value the private equity-backed company with German roots at 7-8 billion euros ($8.3-9.5 billion), people close to the matter said.
• SUSE prepares for multi-billion Euro IPO
• VirtIO Sound Driver Coming — The virtual sound driver for VirtIO has been queued up into the sound-next code ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window this spring.
• GNOME 40 Introducing Virtual Monitors — This headless native back-end that was merged today into GNOME 40's Mutter allows for running the native back-end atop a render node in a headless configuration without a physical display attached.
• GRUB 2.06 Release Candidate Available For Testing — Among the changes coming with GRUB 2.06 are expanded Btrfs RAID support, LUKS2 encrypted disk support, the BootHole patches and other security work,
• Progress Report Asahi Linux — To adapt the Apple world into a devicetree world, we are developing m1n1.
• Current status of the Corellium team's effort — Wifi now works on Linux on the M1.

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• New Year, new Red Hat Enterprise Linux programs: Easier ways to access RHEL — When we announced our intent to transition to CentOS Stream, we did so with a plan to create new programs to address use cases traditionally served by CentOS Linux.
• Staying on GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle - Desktop - Ubuntu Community Hub — The topic of what to do about the new GNOME started being discussed and after some consideration, we decided to stick to GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle.
• Welp, Ubuntu 21.04 Won’t Ship with GNOME 40 or GTK4 - OMG! Ubuntu!
• Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog — In order to ensure open source versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
• AWS, as predicted, is forking Elasticsearch | ZDNet
• The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let’s Encrypt - Let’s Encrypt - Free SSL/TLS Certificates — By going with AMD EPYC, we were able to get 64 physical CPU cores while keeping clock speeds high: 2.9GHz base with 3.4GHz boost. More importantly, EPYC provides 128 PCIe v4.0 lanes, which allows us to put 24 NVMe drives in a single machine.
• Ubuntu Can Run on Apple Silicon, Devs Say It’s ‘Completely Usable’ - OMG! Ubuntu! — Developers at ARM virtualisation company Corellium have managed to get Ubuntu 20.04 up and running on the new Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
• How We Ported Linux to the M1
• [RFC PATCH 0/7] Linux on Apple Silicon [LWN.net]
• Raspberry Pi Foundation launches $4 microcontroller with custom chip | TechCrunch — It has a dual-core Arm processor (running at 133MHz), 264KB of RAM, 26 GPIO pins including three analog inputs, a micro-USB port, and a temperature sensor.
• Raspberry Pi Foundation Release Their Own Silicon, the Raspberry Pi Pico - 9to5Linux
• Security Bulletin 1 - Home Assistant — It has come to our attention that certain custom integrations have security issues and could potentially leak sensitive information. Home Assistant is not responsible for custom integrations and you use custom integrations at your own risk.

Plus Google's surprise for Chromium users, and we go hands-on with Podman's docker-compose support.

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• KDE Plasma 5.21 Brings Low-latency Compositing, New Kickoff Menu, and Wallpaper — A major addition is a complete redesign of the main KDE Plasma Application Launcher.
• This week in KDE: new KWin compositing, new Kickoff, new recording level visualization! — This week KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten! It should broadly reduce latency throughout all compositing operations, and also adds a user-facing control in the System Settings Compositing page so people can choose for themselves whether they prefer lower latency or smoother animations.
• Check out our interview with Nate Graham in LUP 385
• Plasma Gitlab MR: Add fingerprint manager
• Fedora Proposed Change: Wayland By Default For Plasma
• Xfce 4.16 Released — Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.
• XFCE Nation on Twitter — Reminder to @ChrisLAS and @wespayne that Xfce 4.16 has been out since December 22nd but hasn’t been mentioned on @LinuxActionNews or @LinuxUnplugged.
• Xfce 4.16 Changelog
• Intel Preparing New Driver Option To Disable GPU Security Mitigations
• Wine 6.0 released — This release is dedicated to the memory of Ken Thomases, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 51. Ken was an incredibly brilliant developer, and the mastermind behind the macOS support in Wine. We all miss his skills, his patience, and his dark sense of humor.
• Grab a Glass, Wine 6.0 Has Been Released
• The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 6.0 — The core DLLs, including NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, USER32, etc. are built in PE format. This should help a number of copy protection schemes that check that the DLL files on disk match the in-memory contents.
• CloudLinux readies CentOS Linux replacement: AlmaLinux — AlmaLinux will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything
• AlmaLinux is born!!
• AlmaLinux - Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System
• Using Podman and Docker Compose — Up to now, support for Docker Compose, the command-line utility that orchestrates multiple Docker containers for local development, was missing. With Podman 3.0 now in development upstream, we have begun to support Compose.
• Chromium Blog: Limiting Private API availability in Chromium — During a recent audit, we discovered that some third-party Chromium-based browsers were able to integrate Google features, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, that are only intended for Google’s use. We are limiting access to our private Chrome APIs starting on March 15, 2021.
• PSA: Vanilla Chromium ending some of Google’s API access such as syncing and spelling check starting on March 15, 2021
• MacOS update enables third party OSes on M1 — It's happening... macOS Big Sur 11.2 beta 2 is out with full custom kernel support.
• iBoot - Wikipedia — iBoot is the stage 2 bootloader for all Apple products. It replaces the old bootloader, BootX.

Plus Wendell from Level1Techs joins us to discuss his thoughts on porting Linux to the Apple M1.

Special Guest: Wendell Wilson.

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• LTS versions of Qt going closed-source — The Qt Company is making LTS releases commercial only and thus closed-source. "The problem is that these releases are in effect no longer maintained. If there is a security issue, or a fix needed to support some change in one of the target operating systems, open-source users will not get that fix other than in the not-ready version 6.0."
• QT 5.15 Commercial-only LTS phase starts: Closing the 5.15 branch(es) on 5th January : linux
• LTS versions of Qt going closed-source : linux
• A shell UX update – GNOME Shell & Mutter — The new design has prompted a lot of interest and comment, which we’re all really thrilled about. In this post I wanted to provide an update of where the initiative is at. I also want to take the opportunity to answer some of the common questions that have come up.
• Progress On The GNOME 40 Shell Continues At Full Speed - Phoronix
• Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I — A few weeks ago, I purchased a Mac Mini with an M1 GPU as a development target to study the instruction set and command stream, to understand the GPU’s architecture at a level not previously publicly understood, and ultimately to accelerate the development of a Mesa driver for the hardware. Today I’ve reached my first milestone: I now understand enough of the instruction set to disassemble simple shaders with a free and open-source tool chain, released on GitHub.
• Early Work Is Underway On Reverse-Engineering The Apple M1 GPU
• NVIDIA getting geared up to support hardware accelerated XWayland — NVIDIA’s Erik Kurzinger has submitted a Merge Request to the xserver GitLab titled “Xwayland: Support hardware accelerated rendering with the proprietary NVIDIA driver”, with the two patches included “intended to accompany upcoming support in the proprietary NVIDIA driver for hardware accelerated GL and Vulkan rendering with Xwayland”. Kurzinger continues to mention that once a driver is out with the needed hooks, this code should “just start working”.
• NVIDIA Prepares XWayland OpenGL/Vulkan Acceleration Support
• Xwayland: Support hardware accelerated rendering with the proprietary NVIDIA driver (!587) · Merge Requests · xorg / xserver · GitLab
• PeerTube v3: it’s a live, a liiiiive ! – Framablog — Today we are releasing a major new version of PeerTube, our alternative to centralized video platforms like YouTube.

Plus Michael Larabel from Phoronix joins us to discuss the state of Linux hardware support in 2020.

Special Guest: Michael Larabel.

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Links:

• Budgie 10.5.2 Desktop Environment Released with Support for the GNOME 3.38 Stack
• Budgie 10.5.2 Released
• KDE Plasma 5.20.4 Is Out with More Than 40 Bug Fixes and Improvements
• Plasma 5.20.4 complete changelog
• GNOME 3.38.2 Desktop Environment Is Out with Even More Improvements and Bug Fixes
• 3.38.2/NEWS
• Cinnamon 4.8 Desktop Environment Released, This Is What’s New
• New Raspberry Pi OS release — The traditional end-of-year new release of Raspberry Pi OS, which we launch today.
• Raspberry Pi’s V3DV Vulkan Driver Now Supports Wayland — Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high-performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.
• Should Red Hat be afraid of SUSE’s Rancher acquisition? — SUSE, a major Linux and cloud company, finalized its acquisition of Rancher Labs earlier this year.. Rancher, formerly a privately held open-source company, had over 37,000 active users and 100-million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes management program, Rancher.
• Rancher Labs - Wikipedia
• Network World
• SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs - YouTube

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back — Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
• Remove cipher algorithm and mentions of copyrighted material
• GitHub reinstates youtube-dl library after EFF intervention
• $6 billion Linux deal? SUSE IPO rumored — SUSE, the major European Linux company, may soon be spun out in a $6 billion IPO.
• EQT Said to Plan IPO of $6 Billion Software Developer SUSE
• Canonical Saw ~$119M Revenue In 2019 But Still Operating At A Loss — Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years.
• Librem 5 Mass Production Phone Has Begun Shipping — Purism has begun shipping its mass-produced Librem 5 phone to customers.
• Servo’s new home — Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed.
• Mozilla Punts Servo Web Engine Development To The Linux Foundation
• Starting January 4, 2021, Google will block all sign-ins to Google accounts from embedded browser frameworks — The browser must identify itself clearly in the User-Agent. The browser must not try to impersonate another browser like Chrome or Firefox.
• Guidance to developers affected by our effort to block less secure browsers and applications