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• HDR hackfest wrap-up — People from various organizations were on-site: Red Hat, KDE, System76, AMD, Igalia, Collabora, Canonical, etc. Some more people from NVIDIA, Intel and Google joined us remotely (some of them waking up at 2 AM due to their timezone!).
• Fakespot is acquired by Mozilla — I have exciting news to share, Fakespot has been acquired by Mozilla! We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet.
• Apple removes Fakespot from App Store after Amazon complains
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.4 — New Rust code for Linux 6.4 includes the introduction of the pin-init API, which is for dealing with safe pinned initialization and allows reducing the amount of "unsafe" Rust code within the kernel.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter: My Rust contributions for Linux 6.4 are finally merged upstream! 🦀🐧 — The next big challenge is going to be the DRM subsystem abstractions!
• India blocks 14 mobile apps used by terrorists in Pakistan to send information in J-K — As inputs received that these applications are being used to further terror propaganda and incite youths in Jammu and Kashmir, the Central government blocked them under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
• India removes ban on VLC media player after cybersecurity concerns addressed
• Text of the RESTRICT Act — To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes...
• Tell Congress: Don’t Outlaw Encrypted Applications

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• Linux Tech Sustainability — The mainline Linux 6.4 kernel is set to see a new touchscreen driver for supporting the Novatek NVT-ts.
• Acer Iconia One 7 B1-730
• Unlocking the bootloader and disabling dm-verity on Android-X86 devices
• Here Comes WebGPU — After years of development, the Chrome team ships WebGPU.
• Chrome 113 To Ship WebGPU By Default
• Muse on Twitter — Breaking news🚨 Chrome's Web GPU has launched after 6 years of development! 🚀
• A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
• Plasma 6 Early Builds — I’ve now got a working Plasma 6 dev session on my machine. It’s still rough, but it’s usable.
• Early KDE Plasma 6 Development State
• Rust Support Is Being Worked On For V4L2 — Daniel Almeida of Collabora sent out initial Rust V4L2 support patches on Thursday. This provides just enough for working with a prototype VirtIO camera driver written in Rust along with a Rust sample driver.
• Linux 6.4 Bringing Apple M2 Additions — Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month.
• Btrfs Improvments — This week a number of patches from SUSE engineer Qu Wenruo were queued into kdave's linux.git for-next branch of the Btrfs file-system driver development code.

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• Android Gets RISC-Y — Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit promises official, polished support.
• Keynote: The Android Open Source Project and RISC-V - Lars Bergstrom, Google Director of Engineering
• New Google Tool Goes Open — The OSV database is a distributed, open-source database that stores vulnerability information in the OSV format. The OSV-Scanner assesses a project's dependencies against the OSV database showing all vulnerabilities relating to the project.
• Ubuntu’s New Installer Milestone — With Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" in April that new desktop installer is poised to finally be used by default.
• HDR Beginning To Work For Linux Gaming — "New Linux gaming milestone: with the latest work from Josh Ashton, HDR can now be enabled for real games! Tested it tonight on my AMD desktop with Halo Infinite, Deep Rock Galactic, DEATH STRANDING DC. Very early and will still need some time to bake to be useful to most."
• Red Hat Planning HDR Hackfest
• GNOME Shell + Mutter 43 Alpha Released
• VKD3D-Proton 2.7 Released With Eight Months Worth Of Changes
• Google Home speakers allowed hackers to snoop on conversations — A bug in Google Home smart speaker allowed installing a backdoor account that could be used to control it remotely and to turn it into a snooping device by accessing the microphone feed.

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• IBM Takes Over Red Hat Storage to IBM Offerings — IBM announced today it will add Red Hat storage product roadmaps and Red Hat associate teams to the IBM Storage business unit, bringing consistent application and data storage across on-premises infrastructure and cloud.
• Why Whitehurst is stepping away from IBM
• IBM Does A “Quasi-Acquisition” Of Red Hat Storage — Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is also being absorbed into IBM Spectrum Fusion. IBM is assuming the Premier Sponsorship role of the Ceph Foundation from Red Hat.
• Announcing Nextcloud Hub 3 — Our design always followed three principles. Focus on content, ease of use, and great accessibility. For this refresh, we added a fourth: make it your own.
• Introducing NVK — NVK is a new open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa.
• Debian’s firmware vote results — The winning option allows the installer image to include firmware necessary to use the system.
• Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 — After looking at some logs we do end up with potentially bogus panel power sequencing delays, which may harm the LCD panel.
• Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 To Avoid Potentially Damaging The Display - Phoronix
• Linux 6.0 Released With Many Intel & AMD Driver Additions — Linus Torvalds just promoted Linux 6.0 to stable on-schedule and thereby now ushering in the Linux 6.1 merge window to officially get underway tomorrow.
• Some 6.0 development statistics — A total of 2,034 developers contributed to the 6.0 release; of those, 236 made their first contribution during this cycle. The total number of developers is just short of the record (2,086) set for 5.19, but the number of first-time contributors is the lowest seen since the 5.6 release (216) in 2020.
• Linux 6.0 Supporting New Intel/AMD Hardware
• Btrfs Brings Some Great Performance Improvements With Linux 6.1
• The Initial Rust Infrastructure Has Been Merged Into Linux 6.1 — As a follow-up to the Rust infrastructure pull request for Linux 6.1, Linus Torvalds pulled the initial Rust code into the mainline Linux kernel this evening.

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• Valve expect to make ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Steam Decks next month — The good news is though, production is quickly ramping up. Yang mentioned how "in production terms it'll ramp very quickly, in the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands and beyond that it'll grow even quicker".
• Steam Deck gets an OS update to help solve stick drift
• Bungie rejects Steam Deck’s Linux, threatens to ban Destiny 2 players there
• Collabora talk briefly about their work with Valve on SteamOS, Steam Deck — With its new “A/B” design, there are now two operating system partitions, with two different versions of SteamOS. When upgrading, a new operating system image is written to whichever partition is not currently in use, before rebooting the system. A specialized bootloader module then automatically selects the newer operating system and boots into it.
• Portable Linux gaming with the Steam Deck
• Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS — The problem was that ReiserFS code in the kernel used some API calls that nothing else did, preventing them from being changed or enhanced. For now, one of the other ReiserFS developers has contributed a patch that removes the issue.
• CentOS New “AutoSD” Distribution Announced For In-Vehicle Linux Distro — CentOS Automotive Stream Distribution is their binary distribution that will serve as a public, in-development preview of Red Hat's upcoming in-vehicle operating system. CentOS formed their Automotive SIG last year with Red Hat working on a RHEL-based in-vehicle Linux platform that is yet to be publicly released.
• Future Intel Systems To Reportedly Be Even Less Friendly For Open-Source Firmware
• Zaolin on Twitter — For everyone wondering what’s @IntelSoftware planning for the Firmware Support Package 3.0 #fsp and USF is basically going fully closed-source on the firmware side. This means Intel’s #fsp decides to drop #OSF open-source firmware. It’s really a shame…
• Why RISC-V Is Succeeding
• Intel’s software-defined silicon set to debut in Linux 5.18 — The existence of software-defined silicon (SDSI) emerged in October 2021 when Intel staffers posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list with hints about new functionality that would allow users to purchase licenses that turned on capabilities physically present in processors, but which are not available to use out of the box.

Plus a major new feature coming to a Linux distro near you.

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• The Coder: Look and feel comfortable, while kicking ass. Life is better in a robe.

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• How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars — This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars. We’re actually running on a Linux operating system. The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.
• The Perseverance Mars rover just took Linux to another planet
• Ingenuity (Mars helicopter) on Wikipedia
• Mars Helicopter on YouTube
• Ingenuity helicopter phones home from Mars
• SparkFun Electronics
• Linaro Projects
• Linaro on Wikipedia
• Ivan Čukić on Twitter — Another @kdecommunity #KDE Mars landing a success!
• Linux 5.12 Git Seeing New Code Land Following Winter Storm — While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list.
• There Are Big Changes On The Horizon With Linux 5.12
• Btrfs With Linux 5.12 Gets More Performance Improvements, Working Zoned Mode
• XFS File-System With Linux 5.12 Has “A Lot Going On This Time”
• IDMAPPED Mounts Aim For Linux 5.12 - Many New Use-Cases From Containers To Systemd-Homed - Phoronix — This patch series introduces idmapped mounts which has been in the making for some time. Simply put, different mounts can expose the same file or directory with different ownership.
• NVIDIA continues tweaking their work for hardware accelerated Xwayland support — Performance should be fine in full-screen games, as long as the compositor supports the required zwp_linux_dmabuf_v1 interface.
• Experimental Wayland Support For Wine Now Sees More Functionality Working — With the new "request for comment" patches, there is now working support for copy/paste, drag-and-drop, and the ability to change the display mode.
• Apple M1 teaser — So OpenBSD boots multi-user on the new Apple M1 hardware. This still has some hacks in it that need to be fixed, so don't expect support for this in the tree right now. But a big thank you to those that contributed to the pool for getting us some hardware.

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 a birthday gift to Raspberry Pi users, Collabora comes to mobile, and more.

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• Collabora brings smooth editing to Android and iOS — This release fully integrates the iOS and Android apps into our Collabora Office product family.
• The Story of Collabora Office for Phones
• Firefox continues push to bring DNS over HTTPS by default for US users — The rollout will continue over the next few weeks to confirm no major issues are discovered as this new protocol is enabled for Firefox’s US-based users.
• Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this
• The Facts: Mozilla’s DNS over HTTPs
• Securing Firefox with WebAssembly — RLBox, a new sandboxing technology.
• Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me — I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee's distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream.
• Building a World-Class Team at Inrupt
• Microsoft's Azure Sphere, its Linux-based microcontroller plus cloud service, hits general availability — Microsoft is making its Azure Sphere secure IoT service generally available after several years of testing and previews.
• A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35 — The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35.
• The Raspberry Pi 4 gets a RAM upgrade