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• How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops — Today, the life of a gLinux team member looks very different. We have reduced the amount of engineering time and energy required for releases to one on-duty release engineer that rotates among team members. We no longer have a big push to upgrade our entire fleet. No more need for multi stage alpha, betas and GAs for new LTS releases while simultaneously chasing down older machines that still were running Ubuntu Precise or Lucid.
• Red Hat names new CEO — In a move many will find surprising, Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO.
• KDE Announces Powerful Slimbook 4 Linux Laptop — The laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor with eight cores. They use USB-C for charging and power, like many other modern laptops. There are two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, and a wired Ethernet jack.
• System76 Launch Lite Teaser — Launch, but Lite. Launch Lite is the everyperson's keeb — comfortable, portable, and configurable.
• System76 Teases the Launch Lite Open-Source Configurable Keyboard, Coming July 14th
• AMD Is Hiring To Improve Its Linux Graphics Driver Installation Experience — In addition to their recent hiring for a open-source Linux GPU driver developer with multimedia experience, this week they have posted a new role looking for Linux build engineer(s) to focus on their graphics driver.
• Linux Build Engineer — Our team works on open-source GPU drivers for Linux. We are leading contributors to the Radeon Mesa graphics and multimedia drivers included in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Debian. Our software is used in exciting products such as the Tesla Model S and the Steam Deck.
• Matthew Garrett: Responsible stewardship of the UEFI secure boot ecosystem — So, to have Microsoft, the self-appointed steward of the UEFI Secure Boot ecosystem, turn round and say that a bunch of binaries that have been reviewed through processes developed in negotiation with Microsoft, implementing technologies designed to make management of revocation easier for Microsoft, and incorporating fixes for vulnerabilities discovered by the developers of those binaries who notified Microsoft of these issues despite having no obligation to do so, and which have then been signed by Microsoft are now considered by Microsoft to be insecure is, uh, kind of impolite?
• X.Org Server Hit By New Local Privilege Escalation, Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities — CVE-2022-2319 and CVE-2022-2320 were made public this morning and both deal with the X.Org Server's Xkb keyboard extension not properly validating input that could lead to out-of-bounds memory writes. Hopefully though in 2022 you aren't relying on your xorg-server running as root.
• Many Old X.Org Components Saw New Releases This Weekend - Phoronix
• Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything! — tl;dr: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point.
• X.Org Security Advisory: July 12, 2022

Plus our thoughts on IBM's CEO stepping down, and Google's new open-source security key project.

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• Qt offering changes 2020 — Moving forward, Qt Long-Term Support (LTS) releases will be restricted to commercial customers.
• Use our stuff for free and sell your application? That's Qt.
• Qt LTS Releases To Be Restricted To Commercial Customers
• About “Qt offering changes 2020” – Fading Memories
• Nikolai Marchenko's message about TheQtCompany's presumed business model
• Linux 5.5 Released — So this last week was pretty quiet, and while we had a late network update with some (mainly iwl wireless) network driver and netfilter module loading fixes, David didn't think that warranted another -rc. And outside of that, it's really been very quiet indeed - there's a panfrost driver update too, but again it didn't really seem to make sense to delay the final release by another week.
• 10 Best Features in Linux 5.5
• Some 5.5 kernel development statistics
• WireGuard + Multi-Path TCP Were Merged Tonight Into Linux 5.6
• Indie VPN WireGuard gets the Torvalds seal of approval with inclusion in Linux kernel 5.6
• Linus Torvalds pulled WireGuard VPN into the 5.6 kernel source tree
• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Adds WireGuard Support
• The Time Namespace Support Has Been Added To The Linux 5.6 Kernel
• Linux 5.6 Is The First Kernel For 32-Bit Systems Ready To Run Past Year 2038
• USB4 Support Lands In The Linux 5.6 Kernel
• Staging Changes Lighten The Linux 5.6 Kernel By More Than Thirty Thousand Lines
• Thunderbird’s New Home — As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation.
• Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest
• Ginni Rometty is out as IBM CEO — Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat — which IBM acquired last year in a $34 billion megadeal — will become IBM's president on the same day.
• IBM CEO Ginni Rometty to step down — Under her tenure, IBM experienced 22 consecutive quarters of sales declines that ended in 2018. In the company’s latest quarter, sales dropped 3.9% year-over-year to $18 billion.
• IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO, Replacing Ginni Rometty
• OpenSK: a fully open-source security key implementation — OpenSK, an open-source implementation for security keys written in Rust that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards.