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• Steam Deck one Year Later — The Steam Deck has been about a year on the market now (it started shipping at the end of February 2022). This first anniversary is a good chance to review what has happened since then.
• FFmpeg 6.0 Released — 6.0 was released on 2023-02-27. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 6.0 release branch, which was cut from master on 2023-02-19.
• FFmpeg 6.0 Released With NVIDIA NVENC AV1, VA-API Improvements
• FOSDEM 2023 - Dual presentation: FFmpeg 6 and VLC.js
• Plasma Switches to Qt6 — The master branch for Plasma repos will be made Qt6-only tomorrow.
• Hardware Noise “hwnoise” Tool for Linux 6.3 — hwnoise collects the periodic summary from the osnoise tracer running with *interrupts disabled*. By disabling interrupts, and the scheduling of threads as a consequence, only non-maskable interrupts and hardware-related noise is allowed.
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.3 — In the pull request Miguel Ojeda commented, "more core additions, getting closer to a point where the first Rust modules can be upstreamed."
• EXT4 Getting Direct I/O Performance Improvements With 6.3 — Improved performance for ext4
• Btrfs Enjoys More Performance With Linux 6.3 - Including Some 3~10x Speedups — Some of the performance work is quite juicy, as outlined in today's pull request.
• Btrfs updates for 6.3 - David Sterba
• Linux 6.3 Scheduler Updates Bring Fixes & Minor Optimizations
• RISC-V With Linux 6.3 Lands Optimized String Functions Via Zbb Extension — RISC-V with Linux 6.3 has improved its extension detection and alternative patching infrastructure for dealing with non spec compliant extensions.

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• Linux 5.18 Released With Intel SDSi, New CPU & GPU Features — Linux 5.18 brings the controversial Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) functionality.
• Thoughts on software-defined silicon — Its purpose is to disable access to specific processor capabilities in the absence of a certificate from Intel saying otherwise.
• Statistics from the 5.18 development cycle
• Btrfs Gets Some Buttery Good Improvements With Linux 5.19 — David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the ~4k lines of code worth of feature changes for the Btrfs file-system driver in the Linux 5.19 kernel.
• Our build and release infrastructure, and upcoming updates — This work will be incrementally deployed as each bit is finished. So be patient, and you will notice releases happening faster and faster!
• Google Summer of Code (GSOC 2022) Highlights of FOSS Projects — Google announced the GSoC 2022 projects, and the list includes some exciting improvements to the mainstream foss projects such as GNOME, Xfce, LibreOffice, etc.
• Ubuntu 22.10 Makes PipeWire Default for Audio — “That’s right, as of today the Kinetic ISO (pending, not yet current since the changes were just made) has been updated to run only PipeWire and not PulseAudio […] you can look forward to this for Kinetic”
• Broadcom-VMware Deal Said to Be Ready as Soon as This Week — Broadcom Inc. could announce an agreement to acquire cloud-computing company VMware Inc. as soon as this week
• Broadcom’s Potential VMware Acquisition: 5 Things About Dell, Stock Prices And Hock Tan To Know
• Broadcom in Talks to Pay About $60 Billion for VMware
• Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Has Mixed Feelings on a Broadcom-VMware Deal

We'll share the history, the context, and where things stand now around the controversial research that led to the ban.

Plus Ubuntu 21.04 is out, and we try WSL's new GUI Linux app support.

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• Intentionally buggy commits for fame—and papers [LWN.net] — A buggy patch posted to the linux-kernel mailing list in early April was apparently the last straw for Greg Kroah-Hartman as it led to the planned reversion of a whole slew of commits with one thing in common: their origin at the University of Minnesota (UMN).
• An open letter to the Linux community [LWN.net] — We sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did to the Linux kernel community. Our goal was to identify issues with the patching process and ways to address them, and we are very sorry that the method used in the “hypocrite commits” paper was inappropriate.
• Re: [PATCH] SUNRPC: Add a check for gss_release_msg - Greg KH
• University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired • The Register
• Greg Kroah-Hartman bans University of Minnesota from Linux development for deliberately buggy patches | ZDNet
• Revertion of all of the umn.edu commits - Kees Cook
• Linus Torvalds Responds to Linux Banning University of Minnesota | Tom’s Hardware
• Statement from CS&E on Linux Kernel research - April 21, 2021 | Department of Computer Science and Engineering | College of Science and Engineering
• Security Research Ethics Review. What’s the subject, Kenneth? | by Dave Dittrich | Apr, 2021 | Medium
• Paper: Stealthily introducing vulnerabilities in open source software via hypocrite commits
• Ubuntu 21.04 Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New - 9to5Linux — Ubuntu 21.04 has been released and is available to download from the Ubuntu website.
• Ubuntu 21.04 is here | Ubuntu — Ubuntu 21.04 comes with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK.
• LINUX Unplugged 402: Our Worst Idea Yet
• (Re)introducing the Community Team
• Fedora 34 To Release Next Week As A Very Exciting Update - Phoronix — After it was pushed back last week due to blocker bugs, on Friday it was determined that Fedora 34 is now in proper shape to officially ship next week.
• Red Hat Summit 2021 | About — Virtual again: April 27-28, 2021
• Microsoft enables Linux GUI apps on Windows 10 for developers - The Verge — Microsoft is starting to allow Windows 10 testers to access Linux GUI apps.
• Microsoft Posts WSLg Preview - GUI App Support With Windows Subsystem For Linux - Phoronix
• GitHub - microsoft/wslg: Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios
• GitHub - microsoft/CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances
• Introducing Linux GUI apps running on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
• Watch Mars Ingenuity's First Flight! (VIDEO AND IMAGES) — Mars​ Perseverance​ has been a historic mission, now its chopper, Ingenuity is flying on Mars. Watch a recap right here and see the very first video and images of it up in the air.
• Open source goes to Mars 🚀 - The GitHub Blog — Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity.
• Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter · The ReadME Project · GitHub — Today, nearly 12,000 developers will see a new badge on their GitHub profile celebrating their contributions to the specific versions of projects and libraries used by NASA to fly the Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars.
• Work Progresses Toward Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars - NASA Mars
• We’re Getting Ready for Ingenuity’s Second Flight - NASA Mars
• We Are Prepping for Ingenuity’s Third Flight Test - NASA Mars
• Mars helicopter shares first aerial color photo and preps for Sunday flight - CNN
• NASA’s Mars helicopter completes second, higher flight – Spaceflight Now
• Ingenuity: Nasa's Mars helicopter makes it three from three — On Sunday, the little chopper rose to a height of 5m before speeding off laterally for 50m - half the length of a football field.

Plus the ghost of Firefox OS lives on in the well-financed KaiOS, GitHub launches sponsors, and obvious uses for the new Google Glass 2.

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• Latest Firefox Release is Faster than Ever — We applied many of the same principles of time management just like you might prioritize your own urgent needs.
• Firefox 67 - Dark Mode CSS, WebRender, and more
• Smooth video playback with AV1 decoder
• It's not all beer and skittles for Firefox 67
• openSUSE Leap 15.1 released — The release of Leap 15.1 improves YaST functionality and the installer.
• openSUSE considers governance options — The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE community is currently under discussion as the community considers different options for how it wants to be organized and governed in the future.
• Antergos Linux Project Ends — We came to this decision because we believe that continuing to neglect the project would be a huge disservice to the community. Taking this action now, while the project’s code still works, provides an opportunity for interested developers to take what they find useful and start their own projects.
• Endeavour, Antergos community's next stage — We are proud to announce our project, code name Endeavour! This is going to be a distro with you, the community in mind.
• Manjaro claim >1M downloads so far this year
• Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 drops to $999 — Google is today ready to officially unveil Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, a followup with a faster processor, improved camera, and new Smith Optics frames.
• KaiOS raises $50M, hits 100M handsets — The funding takes the total raised by KaiOS — which has now shipped 100 million devices across 100 countries — to $72 million.
• Announcing GitHub Sponsors — We’re thrilled to announce the beta of GitHub Sponsors, a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software you use every day.