Plus Google adds its weight behind Rust in the Linux Kernel, and the new security features landing in WSL2.

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• Dell to spin out remaining VMware stake, cements Friends With Benefits status for at least five years — The proposed transaction has been pitched as delivering value for shareholders, both in the short term and once the two corporations have less complicated structures that will let them compete more aggressively.
• Dell Technologies Announces Planned VMware Spin-Off — Under terms of the planned spin-off, VMware will distribute a special cash dividend of $11.5 - $12 billion to all VMware shareholders, including Dell Technologies.
• Dell Buys EMC For $67B In Largest Deal In Tech History
• COSMIC to Arrive in June Release of Pop!_OS 21.04 — We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!_OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization.
• There’s no place like GNOME: System 76 introduces COSMIC desktop GUI for its Pop!_OS Linux — System76 said that it studied user behaviour and sought to refine key elements of the desktop accordingly.
• pop-os/cosmic: — Computer Operating System Main Interface Components
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, indeed. Pop!_Shell will remain a separate extension.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, tiling will remain a separate extension and can be used on other distros. COMIC can as well.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — The is an extension that creates a unique GNOME UX while maintaining compatibility with GNOME and the GNOME app ecosystem and HIG.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Pop with the COSMIC desktop.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — We’re currently developing and testing on X and Pop 21.04 will default to X as well. However, we may be able to shift over to Wayland for future releases with the recent nvidia news about Wayland driver support.
• Google backs effort to bring Rust to the Linux kernel — "We feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel."
• Google Supports Getting Rust Into The Linux Kernel
• HN: Linus Torvalds on Rust support in kernel
• Linux 5.12 Diverted From Release To Allow An Extra Week Of Testing — Due to still a number of fixes landing this week, .Linus Torvalds decided to be safe and go for the extra round of testing.
• The 12 Most Interesting Changes Of Linux 5.12
• A bumpy 5.12 is due for release
• Element Matrix Services launches bridging for Microsoft Teams — A single Microsoft Teams Bridge supports unlimited users across unlimited channels. Pricing is based on the number of active users using the bridge from MS Teams, at a cost of $0.50 per user per month. Traffic from Element (or any other Matrix-based client) is free.
• HN: Will this bridge be be open source?
• Servicing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 Linux kernel — We’ve just shipped the 5.10.16.3 WSL 2 Linux kernel version to Windows Insiders which brings exciting new changes: Support for the LUKS disk encryption, and some long-awaited bug fixes.
• Microsoft Docs: Release Notes for WSL kernel
• microsoft/WSL: Issues found on WSL
• Hangover 0.6.5 Released For Running Windows Software On ARM64, POWER — Wednesday's release of Hangover 0.6.5 now allows for starting QEMU automatically if needed.

Plus the facts around RMS’s return to the FSF board, and our analysis of the situation.

Special Guest: Neil McGovern.

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• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
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• GNOME 40 Release Notes — GNOME 40 is the latest version of GNOME, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 24571 changes, made by approximately 822 contributors.
• Feeling brave? GNOME 40 is here and you can have a poke around in the Fedora 34 beta
• GNOME 40
• GNOME 3.38.5 Released with Support for Handling Monitor Changes During Screencasts — Coming a month after the GNOME 3.38.4 point release the GNOME 3.38.5 update is here with more bug fixes and various improvements to make the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series more stable, secure, and reliable.
• Forthcoming OpenSSL release — This release will be made available on Thursday 25th March 2021 between 1300-1700 UTC.
• CVE-2021-3450: CA certificate check bypass with X509_V_FLAG_X509_STRICT — Starting from OpenSSL version 1.1.1h a check to disallow certificates in the chain that have explicitly encoded elliptic curve parameters was added as an additional strict check.
• Cloud CPU Benchmarking Report | Linode
• Run Windows on Linode
• RMS is Back — Free software advocate Richard Stallman is rejoining the board of the Free Software Foundation.
• An open letter to remove Richard M. Stallman from all leadership positions
• An open letter in support of Richard M. Stallman
• Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board | Ars Technica
• Statement on the Re-election of Richard Stallman to the FSF Board | Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Free Software Community Condemns Richard Stallman’s Reinstatement to FSF Board of Directors
• Richard Stallman returns to the Free Software Foundation
• SUSE joins open source bodies calling for Stallman to go
• From PS5 to Ford F-150: How a global chip shortage is 'impacting everything' — The biggest news in the automotive industry right now isn't new electric vehicles or Tesla CEO Elon Musk's latest comments. It's a major semiconductor shortage that's hurting automakers across the globe.
• [Video] How The Global Computer Chip Shortage Happened

Plus Mozilla and KaiOS team up to bring the modern web to feature phones, and the surprising way Microsoft is shipping a Linux kernel.

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• Firefox 74 arrives with stricter add-on rules, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 disabled — Starting with Firefox 74, users will need to take explicit action to install the extensions they want, and will be able to remove previously sideloaded extensions when they want to.
• Introducing GNOME 3.36: “Gresik” — GNOME 3.36 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, such as new login and unlock experience, and a dedicated app for managing extensions.
• GNOME 3.36 Released with New Lock Screen, Better Performance — Six months of development later and the official GNOME 3.36 release is finally here, with source code available to download from the usual places.
• Announcing Bottlerocket — Bottlerocket comes with a single-step update mechanism and includes only the essential software to run containers. These properties enable customers to use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, enabling better uptime for containerized applications and lower operational cost.
• Docker: Helping You and Your Development Team Build and Ship Faster — How are we going to do this? By focusing on developer experience through Docker Desktop, partnering with the ecosystem, and making Docker Hub the nexus for all the integrations, configuration, and management of the application components which constitute your apps and microservices.
• VMware Announces Expanded Portfolio of Products and Services to Help Customers Modernize Applications and Infrastructure — Tanzu, first introduced at the VMworld event in August 2019, is a portfolio of products centered on K8s. Also announced was vSphere 7, newly rearchitected using Kubernetes, and optimized to run both modern container-based and traditional virtual machine-based workloads.
• KaiOS Technologies and Mozilla partner to enable a healthy mobile internet for everyone — This partnership bolsters the security and performance of KaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, as well as the platform’s developer tools, security, and available functions, including better Progressive Web App and WebAssembly support.
• Magisk may no longer be able to hide bootloader unlocking from apps — Users have noticed that their bootloader-unlocked devices are failing SafetyNet’s Basic Integrity check even though they used Magisk to patch the boot image. According to Magisk creator John Wu, this is because Google may have implemented hardware-level key attestation to verify that the boot image has not been tampered with.
• Kernels for WSL2 will come from Windows Update — WSL2 will soon be officially available as part of Windows 10, version 2004! As we get ready for general availability, we want to share one additional change: updating how the Linux kernel inside of WSL2 is installed and serviced on your machine.

Plus the Tizen surprise, elementary OS' pay-what-you-want AppCenter, and what's new Android O.

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• Ubuntu Desktop Team Discuss Their Plans for GNOME in Ubuntu 17.10 — “may consider a few tweaks here and there to ease our users into the new experience
• The Ubuntu Desktop Team Wants YOUR Feedback — The results of this survey will help inform and shape the Ubuntu desktop team’s approach to GNOME in Ubuntu 17.10.
• OMG! UBUNTU! on Twitter: 16,000+ Ubuntu users have taken the survey — 16,000+ #Ubuntu users have taken the 17.10 GNOME desktop survey
• Windows Server will add the Linux subsystem, join the Insider program — Microsoft announced that WSL will be included in Server later this year.
• Will Linux distros run on Windows 10 S? — Just because an “app” comes from the Windows Store does NOT automatically mean that it’s safe & suitable for running in Windows 10 S. There are some apps that are not allowed to run on Windows 10 S, including all command-line apps, shells and Consoles.
• New Release: elementary OS Loki 0.4.1 — This release comes with a brand new version of AppCenter with support for apps submitted to the AppCenter Dashboard. Welcome to elementary OS, third-party developers!
• Loki's New AppCenter with Daniel Foré | Chris Interviews Daniel — Daniel Foré, elementary OS founder, joins Chris to chat about their new update to Loki, their pay what you want AppCenter, what the end of Unity means for them, and the future of the project.
• Shipping Advance Prototype - Mycroft — This first version of Mark 1 is an advance prototype, perfectly suitable for developers or enthusiasts, yet it is not ready for the consumer market.
• What’s New in Android: O Developer Preview 2 & More — New tools for developers to help create more performant apps, and an early preview of a project we call Android Go -- a new experience that we’re building for entry-level devices.
• Samsung to extend Tizen OS to nearly all home appliances by 2020 — A new report says, though, that Samsung is looking to further increase Tizen adoption by bringing Tizen (or, in this case, Tizen RT) to nearly all of its home appliances by 2020.
• Samsung to announce Tizen RT for smart home appliances — Samsung intends to announce a slimmed-down Tizen OS, called Tizen RT, for its washing machines and other smart home appliances at its Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) today, according to a new report.