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• Nextcloud’s Big new Customer — After a silent migration of millions of users, Telekom and Nextcloud are now unveiling the first feature of the new MagentaCloud: a free office.
• Last Minute GNOME Awesome — GNOME Shell and Mutter 44 have reached their release candidate milestone ahead of the official release in just two weeks, all is going to plan, and to our surprise, there have been several last-minute additions.
• GNOME 44 Mutter Adds fractional_scale_v1 Wayland Support
• GNOME Shell & Mutter Complete Their Migration Away From GTK3
• wp-fractional-scale-v1: New protocol for fractional scaling — This protocols allows for communicating preferred fractional scales to surfaces, which in combination with wp_viewport can be used to render surfaces at fractional scales when applicable.
• Asahi Linux Rust Drivers — This is my first take on the Rust abstractions for the DRM subsystem.
• Flathub in 2023 — It’s been quite a few months since the most recent updates about Flathub last year. We’ve been busy behind the scenes, so I’d like to share what we’ve been up to at Flathub and why—and what’s coming up from us this year
• Flathub in 2023 - Flathub Discourse

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• Akademy 2022: Full Steam ahead! — In this talk I will share how Plasma fits into the Steamdeck and what aspects of KDE made us the right choice for their new userbase. I will then share some of the projects that contractors Blue Systems have been doing for Valve and how the work there benefits not just the Steamdeck but improves the ecosystem for all Plasma users.
• GamingOnLinux category: Steam Deck
• Anaconda Web UI preview image — Download the Anaconda Web UI preview image and boot it on VM or hardware that contains no important data.
• Fedora 37 Hopes To Have A Preview Of The New Web-Based Install UI
• Libadwaita in the Wild — It’s hard to believe, but Libadwaita is not even one year old, having first been released on December 31, 2021.
• libadwaita — Building blocks for modern GNOME applications.
• Why the open source driver release from NVIDIA is so important for Linux? — Today NVIDIA announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how I think this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
• Linux Action News 240 — NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.
• Nvidia Scraps ARM Acquisition After Regulatory Pressure, Owner SoftBank Prepares Chipmaker For IPO
• Chips are down: Nvidia abandons $40 billion deal to purchase Arm Holdings

Plus, some good news for the Desktop and systemd-homed gets one step closer.

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• GNOME 42 To Finally Allow Input Events To Happen Full-Rate — Up to now GNOME Shell has been compressing pointer motion events so they are synchronized to the monitor refresh rate, which can be anywhere from around 30 to 144 events per second depending upon display.
• An Eventful Instant – GNOME Shell & Mutter
• Do not throttle input in wayland event delivery
• FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE Announcement — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/12 branch.
• systemd 250 Is Coming With A Boat Load Of New Features — systemd 250 is packing a rather large number of new features and changes across the board for this dominant Linux init system and service manager.
• Log4Shell — RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j2, a popular Java logging package
• Apache - The ASF on Twitter — “Did you know that Ingenuity, the Mars 2020 Helicopter mission, is powered by Apache Log4j? https://t.co/gV0uyE1ylk #Apache #OpenSource #innovation #community #logging #services
• Tom (^-^) on Twitter
• Kevin Beaumont on Twitter — “Starting a new thread for log4j security vulnerability and fallout. Spoiler: although this emerged as a Minecraft issue (lol) there is going to be impacts across a wide range of enterprise software for some time.”
• Log4jAttackSurface MEMES

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 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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• 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 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 Gnome and KDE come together at the Linux App Summit, Mozilla's update on DNS-over-HTTPS, and the case for the VR desktop.

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• Manjaro to ship FreeOffice by default — We will ship FreeOffice by default. This is possible since we partnered up with Softmaker. Enjoy the best compatibility to MS Office.
• Manjaro backtracks — Manjaro will not be installing FreeOffice by default.
• GNOME and KDE to co-host the Linux App Summit in November — The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are proud to announce Linux App Summit 2019. The Linux App Summit will be held in Barcelona from November 12th to 15th, 2019.
• An update on Android for search providers in Europe — Next year, we'll introduce a new way for Android users to select a search provider to power a search box on their home screen and as the default in Chrome (if installed).
• Google will use a first-price sealed-bid auction
• DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) Update — We want to understand how often users of Firefox are subject to these network configurations.
• Contract for the Web is becoming a reality — Berners-Lee has called it many things since he announced it at the 2018 Web Summit: a contract, a “magna carta” and a Bill of Rights.
• Browser vendors win war with W3C over HTML and DOM standards
• Solid
• Moving the Linux desktop to another reality — Today, we are very excited to announce a new open source project which enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR.

Also WebThings is launched and we think it might have a shot.

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• Ubuntu 19.04 'Disco Dingo' Released — Improved performance is what defines the ‘Disco Dingo’
• Open infrastructure, developers and IoT are 19.04's focus — Ubuntu 19.04 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects – like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph – with advanced life-cycle management for multi-cloud and on-prem operations – from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud.
• Ubuntu 19.04 Flavours Available to Download
• Introducing Mozilla WebThings — Project Things is graduating from its early experimental phase and from now on will be known as Mozilla WebThings.
• WebThings Documentation
• Pyodide — Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser.
• OpenSSH 8.0 released — This release contains mitigation for a weakness in the scp(1) tool and protocol (CVE-2019-6111).
• Presenting search app and browser options to Android users in Europe — Following the changes we made to comply with the European Commission's ruling last year, we’ll start presenting new screens to Android users in Europe with an option to download search apps and browsers.