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• bcachefs out for review — I'm submitting the bcachefs filesystem for review and inclusion.
• bcachefs TestServerSetup
• Bcachefs Submitted For Review - Aims For Mainline
• Fedora Program Manager Laid Off — On 24 April 2023, Red Hat announced a 4% reduction in global staff. As a member of that 4%, today is my last day at Red Hat.
• Fedora Program Manager Laid Off As Part Of Red Hat Cuts
• KDE Developers Planning For Plasma 6.0 — This week my fellow developers and I are in Germany for an in-person Plasma sprint–our first since 2019!
• KDE Developers In Germany Planning For Plasma 6.0
• KDE Plasma 6 to Ship with Floating Panel by Default, Double-Click for Opening Files
• Tesla sued over battery-busting OTA patch in Model S, X — The named plaintiffs claim that, despite Tesla saying their batteries are supposed to last the life of the vehicle, the Musk-owned automaker "deliberately and significantly interfere[d] with the car's performance through software updates that reduce operating capacity."

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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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• Announcing Fedora Linux 38 — The Fedora Linux 38 release is here! With this release, we’re starting a new on-time streak. In fact, we’re ready a week early!
• What’s new in Fedora Workstation 38
• Rust Foundation apologizes for trademark policy confusion — The Rust Foundation on Monday apologized for confusion caused by the organization's proposed trademark policy changes.
• A note on the Trademark Policy Draft
• Rust Foundation - Rust Trademark Policy Draft Revision
• Canonical Livepatch gets even better — Now supporting Hardware Enablement Kernels.
• Proton 8.0-1 Published With More Game Support — Proton 8.0-1 is the much awaited re-base of Proton against the Wine 8.0 state
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — “Proton 8.0 is now available with many changes. Our biggest rebase to date! Note: it requires a GPU with Vulkan 1.3 support. Experimental-8.0 will follow sometime this week.
• LFNW Call for Papers — We invite you to submit your proposal to speak at LFNW2023! We're seeking both experienced technical presenters, as well as first-timers to present to a hybrid audience.
• LinuxFest Northwest 2023
• In letter to EU, open source bodies say Cyber Resilience Act could have ‘chilling effect’ on software development — Penalties for non-compliance may include fines of up to €15 million, or 2.5% of global turnover.
• Cyber Resilience Act

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• New FOSS Fund to Support Free and Open Source Projects — To help maintain and sustain this ecosystem, companies and nonprofits alike have experimented with a framework called a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Contributor Fund.
• Bloomberg Launches Open-Source Funding Initiative
• Encrypted Fedora — Owen Taylor of Red Hat laid out a mailing list post and Discourse thread today around the future of encryption with Fedora.
• Google’s VM Turbo Charger — With this series, a workload running in a VM gets the same task placement and DVFS treatment as it would when running in the host.
• Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 CPUfreq/sched and VM guest workload problems
• Google Posts KVM-CPUFreq Driver To Dramatically Boost VM Performance, Power Efficiency
• KDE Discuss — KDE Discuss is a place for questions, requests, suggestions, banter, and in general interacting closely with the people actively involved in KDE, as well as with fellow users.
• KDE Discuss is a new discussion service from KDE for everybody who makes and uses KDE software
• New MSI Laptop Driver — Functions handled by the embedded controller on recent MSI laptops.
• new msi-ec driver patch
• Ubuntu 23.04 Beta Hands On
• Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup — Two meetups in the month of April, join us!

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• Kali 2023.1 — Today we are releasing Kali 2023.1 (and on our 10th anniversary)!
• Get Kali | Kali Linux Download
• Kali Linux Introduces “Kali Purple” for Defensive Security Hardening
• Qubes OS 4.1.2 — We’re pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes 4.1.2!
• Wayland Crash Survivor — A change merged to Qt this week can allow for Wayland clients to survive compositor restarts, such as when the compositor crashes.
• OpenMoon Ray Code Goes Live — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer.
• OpenMoonRay.org
• ipmitool Repository Archived — Those navigating to ipmitool/ipmitool on GitHub as the official repository for this project will find that it's now in a "public archive" state.
• Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know
• Justin Cormack on Twitter — when we remove accounts we do not free up the namespace so squatting is not possible.
• Some nuance for paid users
• GHCR was having some issues this morning it seems
• Red Hat’s Quay is maybe another option, they might offer free plans? public repos are free anyway
• José Valimon Twitter
• Deploy a registry server — This page contains information about hosting your own registry using the open source Docker Registry.

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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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• The Coder Robe — Celebrate Coder 500! The Robe, the Tumbler, and the Sticker are available for a limited time.
• Git Vulnerabilities — Today, the Git project released new versions to address a pair of security vulnerabilities, (CVE-2023-22490 and CVE-2023-23946) that affect versions 2.39.1 and older.
• 10 Years of Steam — Feb 14, 2013–Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. In celebration of the release, over 50 Linux titles are now 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st at 10 AM PST.
• Sabayon 9 Review | LAS | s22e08 - YouTube
• Opening the Valve | LAS | s22e09 - YouTube
• Ubuntu Gets Real — Canonical today announced the general availability of real-time Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
• Canonical Promotes Ubuntu’s Real-Time “RT” Kernel To General Availability
• Here Comes GTK5 — Discussions around the GTK5 tool-kit also happened with some developers eager to begin work on that next major release in order to begin facilitating API breaks and removing deprecated code.
• Plasma 5.27 — Plasma 5.27 is out and brings massive improvements to the desktop and all its tools. Another work of love from the KDE devs and contributors.
• KDE Plasma 5.27 Released — Better Wayland Support, KWin Tiling, Multi-Monitor Overhaul
• Final Version of KDE Plasma 5 Released – This is What’s New — Notably, this is expected to be the final release in the KDE Plasma 5.x series, with the following stable release set to be KDE Plasma 6.0, due for release towards the end of the year.

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• KDE Plasma 5.27 To Provide Better Multi-Monitor Support — KDE developer Marco Martin wrote a blog post today outlining some of the multi-monitor work that's been going into Plasma 5.27
• This week in KDE: big UI improvements!
• Schedules/Plasma 5 - KDE Community Wiki
• KDE Kicks Off 2023 With UI Refinements, More Fixes
• GNOME 44 Hopes and Dreams — GNOME devs are already working hard on the next major release, GNOME 44, due out in late March 2023 with more new features and enhancements.
• Dynamic Triple Buffering Hopefully Will Land For GNOME 44
• OpenZFS Performance Gains — With the combination of enabled prefetch and avoided memory copy this change improves sequential single-threaded read speed from a wide NVMe pool from 2049 to 3932 MiB/s. During write profiler shows 22% reduction of unhalted CPU cycles at the same throughput of 3653 MiB/s.
• End of the 4.9 Series — Greg KH: I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.337 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.
• Linux 6.1.4
• Linux 4.9.337 Released To End Out The 2016 LTS Series
• Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Starts to Play Games — Red Hat engineer and longtime open-source Nouveau developer Karol Herbst wrote on his chaos.social account about NVK running games and showing off a screenshot of The Talos Principle running with this open-source, "community" Vulkan driver.
• karolherbst on Social
• The Talos Principle — The Talos Principle is a philosophical first-person puzzle game from Croteam, the creators of the legendary Serious Sam series, written by Tom Jubert (FTL, The Swapper) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Claim Everything).

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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

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• Raspberry Pi 5 Not Launching Until After 2023 — Don't expect a Pi 5 next year [2023]" Upton then expands and explains that 2023 is a "recovery year".
• Eben Upton Interview: Raspberry Pi Availability & More! - YouTube
• Raspberry Pi Adds 100,000 Units to Supply Chain, Back to Pre-pandemic Levels in 2023 | Tom’s Hardware — In the blog post, Upton acknowledged the patience of the community and offers the 100,000 units, made up of Raspberry Pi Zero W, 3A+ and Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 4GB for single-unit sale. We don't know the breakdown of how many of each model there will be, but Upton does indicate that it is likely that Raspberry Pi Zero W will come back into stock first.
• KDE Frameworks 5.101 Released — Per the plans laid out earlier this year at the Akademy developer conference, KDE Frameworks 5 feature development stops following the v5.101 release. KDE Frameworks 5 will now just see maintenance updates moving forward.
• Xfce 4.18 Released — After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.18 !
• Xfce 4.18 by muscaln · Pull Request #206282 · NixOS/nixpkgs
• PipeWire Bluetooth Improvements — Most exciting with today's PipeWire 0.3.62 release is now supporting Bluetooth offloading.
• Releases · PipeWire / wireplumber · GitLab
• Feature Preview: Gitea Actions — Gitea Actions goes beyond just DevOps and lets you run workflows when other events happen in your repository.
• act_runner — A runner for Gitea based on act.
• act — Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀

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• Plasma 5.26 Released — Plasma 5.26 comes with new and tweaked widgets, improves the desktop experience leaps and bounds, and Plasma Big Screen's app family grows
• These weeks in KDE: Akademy and Plasma 5.26
• Google Reveals ‘First Laptops Built For Cloud Gaming’ — Google says the Acer Chromebook 516 GE, ASUS Chromebook Vibe CX55 Flip and Lenovo Ideapad Gaming Chromebook all have refresh rates of at least 120Hz, displays with up to 1600p resolution, immersive audio and, critically for cloud gaming, WiFi 6 or 6E connectivity.
• Intel Arc Graphics - A750 and A770 GPUs Release — The Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs officially launch today, October 12th in select markets. Everyone at Intel is beyond thrilled to get graphics cards with modern features and extremely competitive performance-per-dollar into your hands.
• Intel Arc Graphics Running On Fully Open-Source Linux Driver
• Canonical Launches Free Ubuntu Pro Subscriptions for Everyone — Ubuntu Pro is available for every supported Ubuntu LTS version, starting with Ubuntu 16.04 ESM and up to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
• Android leaks some traffic even when ‘Always-on VPN’ is enabled — The data being leaked outside VPN tunnels includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic.
• Incorrect VPN lockdown documentation [249990229] - Visible to Public - Issue Tracker
• Android leaks connectivity check traffic — As a closing note, we would like to recommend Google to adopt the ability to disable the connectivity checks, like on GrapheneOS, into stock Android.
• iOS VPN apps have another flaw: excluding many Apple apps — We confirm that iOS 16 does communicate with Apple services outside an active VPN tunnel. Worse, it leaks DNS requests. Apple services that escape the VPN connection include Health, Maps, and Wallet.

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• Massive GitHub Malware Attack? — It was revealed by Stephen Lacy in his tweet, he shared his findings of a large-scale campaign targeting random GitHub repositories with project clones containing credential stealing malware and remote shell execution on top of the original code.
• Stephen Lacy on Twitter — “I am uncovering what seems to be a massive widespread malware attack on @github. - Currently over 35k repositories are infected - So far found in projects including: crypto, golang, python, js, bash, docker, k8s - It is added to npm scripts, docker images and install docs”
• Checkmarx on Twitter — “A recent tweet uncovered a widespread malware attack on @github. This turned out to be a false alarm of sorts, as the infected repositories are simply forks and clones of the original ones - which were mostly deleted by Github by now. Stay safe!"
• No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin’s legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto
• Steam Deck Client Update and SteamOS 3.3 — We have just shipped SteamOS 3.3 and an updated Steam Client to the Stable channel. This update includes all the changes and improvements that have been undergoing testing in the Beta and Preview channels.
• SteamOS 3.3 Now Available With Many Improvements For The Steam Deck
• Steam For Linux In July Shows A 1.23% Marketshare — AMD CPUs Now More Common Than Intel On Linux
• DXVK 1.10.3 Released With Shared Fences
• Chris’ Steam Deck Review LINUX Unplugged 467
• Lenovo Expects 30+ Platforms With Linux Support This Year, Both AMD & Intel Systems — Lenovo's Mark Pearson provided an update on Linux for their laptops/PCs, including 30+ platforms for 2022 with Linux support.
• Lenovo Linux 2022 - DebConf 22
• Fedora Pi Support Gets Real — The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. With Fedora 37, Raspberry Pi 4 is now officially supported, including accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU.
• Fedora 37 To Offer Official Support On Raspberry Pi 4 Devices
• Linux 5.19 Released
• Some 5.19 development statistics
• Linux Kernel 5.19 Released with Major Networking Tweaks
• Rust Code For The Linux Kernel Updated With More Features
• Asahi Linux Confirms M2 MBA on Twitter — Linus is using an M2 MacBook Air, running ARM64 Fedora. He does his own kernel builds, of course, with our Asahi kernel branch merged in, and he's been building and testing kernels on it.
• Asahi Alternative Distros docs

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• Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
• Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
• Lars Knoll Announces His Successor For Qt Chief Maintainer — The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. This means Volker Hilsheimer will be our new Chief Maintainer. Congratulations!
• New Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project
• Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
• X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
• X Windows System Design Principles, a lecture by James Gettys
• A Political History of X - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
• Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 — Torvalds commented that real soon they expect to have the Rust infrastructure merged within the kernel, possibly even for the next release -- meaning Linux 5.20.
• Open Source Summit North America 2022: Keynote: Linus Torvalds
• How are we improving Firefox Snap performance? Part 2

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• K9 mail to become Thunderbird on Android — Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.
• K-9 Mail – Open Source Email App for Android
• K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family
• Frequently Asked Questions: Thunderbird Mobile and K-9 Mail
• Ubuntu Working To Provide Good Support For The VisionFive Low-Cost RISC-V Board — The Starfive VisionFive is a currently $179 USD RISC-V board that is intended to run full-blown RISC-V Linux distributions.
• Fedora 37 Looks To Boost Its Cloud Posture As An Official Edition — Approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee this week is returning Fedora Cloud base to be listed as an official Fedora edition.
• Plasma 5.25 - Released — Plasma 5.25 brings new features and concepts to the desktop environment.
• 5 Neat New Features in KDE Plasma 5.25, Released Today
• Ventoy 1.0.76 — Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
• Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk: Boot any OS or .efi file without disabling UEFI Secure Boot
• Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone — The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
• Photopea | Online Photo Editor

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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

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• NVIDIA Posts Open-Source DRM Kernel Driver For NVDLA — NVIDIA has posted 13k lines of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver code for review for supporting their NVDLA IP block.
• Sony Contributes ~73%+ Performance Improvement For exFAT Linux Driver — In turn this improved block request handling leads to 73% and higher performance improvements for tests carried out by Sony engineer Yuezhang Mo on an Arm test platform with SD card storage that is common for Microsoft exFAT file-system usage.
• KDE Has Many Plasma Wayland Fixes — It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work.
• Google Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With A Qt Back-End — It looks like Google is at least evaluating the prospects of Qt toolkit support for the Chromium/Chrome UI. A Phoronix reader tipped us off to newly-started Gerrit code reviews for Qt support with Chromium.
• Legacy BIOS Support Remains Important For Some On Fedora, May Shift Responsibility To SIG — Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support.
• LINUX Unplugged 454: Double Distro Details — Has Fedora pulled ahead of Ubuntu? We take a look at the new Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 releases.

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• $66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses — SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.
• Analysis: Relief and challenges for chipmakers as Nvidia-Arm megadeal collapses
• What Nvidia Can’t Buy, It Can Still Get Through An Arm Partnership — While a $1.25 billion hit to the Nvidia books after the company terminated its $40 billion deal to acquire chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group this week is a big deal
• The Collapse of the Nvidia Deal Leaves Arm Exposed
• Steam Deck Platform Driver Posted For The Linux Kernel — This platform driver is for supporting the Steam Deck Specific "VLV0100" device presented by the embedded controller (EC) firmware. This is ultimately used for functionality like CPU/device fan control, access to DDIC registers, battery temperature measurements, display-related settings, and USB Type-C event notifications.
• Engineer hired back in 2018 to work on kernel projects
• Open-Source Firmware Foundation Established For Advancing Open Firmware — The Open-Source Firmware Foundation (OSFF) is getting up and running with hopes of expanding open-source firmware usage throughout the industry.
• Open Source Firmware Foundation on Twitter
• FreeCAD Also Gets a Foundtation
• Intel Joins RISC-V International, Will Help With RISC-V Open-Source Software — Intel is joining the RISC-V International organization as a Premier member.
• Intel Promotes RISC-V, Pledges $1B to Help Chip Startups | Tom’s Hardware
• RAID-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS In the Home Stretch — While all capabilities of this feature have been implemented and all tests so far have been passed, there are still a few loose ends to tie up.
• RAIDZ Expansion Feature Pull Request by ahrens
• ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon
• Plasma 5.24 - Released — Plasma 5.24 improves in looks, ease of use and consistency.
• KDE Plasma 5.24 Released With Wayland Support In Increasingly Great Shape — KDE Plasma 5.24 is out as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment that will also be their new Long-Term Support (LTS) release.
• Try a New Podcast App

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• Nvidia is reportedly preparing to abandon its $40 billion takeover of Arm — The deal has faced close scrutiny from regulators around the world, who worry it would give Nvidia an unfair advantage in the semiconductor industry.
• SiFive Shifting Production Focus To Next-Gen HiFive Development Board — "With such great ecosystem adoption, demand has exceeded our already high expectations, and we’re close to selling out our production inventory. Given the challenge of supply chain issues that we overcame for the first run of these boards (issues that we continue to face), we’ve decided to focus on the next generation SiFive HiFive development systems rather than trying to put together another build of the HiFive Unmatched platform in 2022."
• Linux system service bug gives root on all major distros, exploit released — Qualys has uncovered a truly dangerous memory corruption vulnerability in polkit's pkexec, CVE-2021-4034. Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program.
• Major Linux PolicyKit Security Vulnerability Uncovered: Pwnkit
• KDE-Powering Qt’s New Framework Lets Developers Bring Ads Into Their Apps — Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications.
• Qt Digital Advertising Platform
• Steam Deck launches February 25, weekly purchase invites planned — Valve has today officially announced their Steam Deck handheld will launch officially on February 25.
• Steam Dynamic Cloud Sync — Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on Steam, and it's a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via the Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC.
• Valve sponsors more work to improve Linux graphics drivers

Plus, why we're worried Ubuntu is losing its charm for developers.

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• Plasma - 25th Anniversary Edition — Plasma - 25th Anniversary Edition brings new looks, features and enhancements to the classic free desktop.
• KDE Plasma 5.23 Released In Marking 25 Years Of KDE
• New Project: Kool Desktop Environment. Programmers wanted!
• Apple joins Blender Development Fund — The Blender Foundation, the organization behind the popular open source 3D creation tool “Blender”, today announced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support continued core development for Blender.
• Apple Pledges Support for 3D Graphics Tool Blender
• Why I have decided to step down from the AlmaLinux OS Foundation Board — When we created the concept of AlmaLinux back in December, shortly after Red Hat announced EOL for CentOS 8, the most important part for us was to make it community-owned, not just "community-controlled".
• AlmaLinuxFoundation chair Igor Seletskiy ste down
• Announcing AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Beta
• How to Use a Block Storage Volume with Plex Media Server — Plex is a media server that allows you to store your media on a remote server and stream it to your devices. This guide shows how to attach a Block Storage Volume to an existing Linode in order to meet the demands of a growing media library.
• Ubuntu 21.10 is Now Available to Download — This release — the 35th Ubuntu release for those keeping count — is backed by 9 months of security updates, critical fixes, and select software updates.
• Ubuntu 21.10 Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New
• SeaGL 2021 Schedule Published! — We’ll see you Friday November 5 & Saturday November 6 for SeaGL 2021, all virtual! As always, SeaGL is completely free to attend and no registration is required.

Plus our rundown of the feature-packed 5.11 release, a Fuchsia surprise, exciting hardware news, and more.

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• Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep — "The creepiest thing," he said, "[was] the direct contact on my private LinkedIn account" – which he noted did not share "the same corporate email.
• ＣｙｂｅｒＡｎｔａｎｉ on Twitter
• KDE Plasma 5.21 is Packed with New Features — KDE Plasma 5.21 is going to be released on February 16 and when it arrives it’ll bring a barrel load of changes and enhancements with it.
• This week in KDE — Plasma 5.21 approaches!
• Linux 5.11 Is Heavy On New Features, Improvements For 2021 — There are a ton of Intel and AMD changes, Syscall User Dispatch for helping some newer Windows games run under Wine, continued IO_uring advancements, many Btrfs file-system improvements, Lenovo contributed ThinkPad palm sensor detection support, and much more.
• Linux 5.11 - Linux Kernel Newbies
• Syscall User Dispatch Appears Destined For Linux 5.11 To Help Windows Games On Linux
• AMD Ryzen, EPYC 5~6% Faster Out-Of-The-Box With Linux 5.11
• Intel Xe Graphics Are Looking Great On Linux 5.11 With Nice Performance Uplift
• OpenLiteSpeed WordPress Server | Linode Marketplace
• System76 Begins Detailing Their Open-Source “Launch Configurable Keyboard” — Like the Thelio computers, System76 is going to be manufacturing their own keyboards at their facility in Denver, Colorado.
• Keyboards Go Open Source With System76’s ‘Launch Configurable Keyboard’
• system76/launch on GitHub — System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard
• System76 on Twitter — “The Launch keyboard PCB! #system76 #launch #keyboard #linux #comingsoon #sneakpeek"
• AMD Is Currently Hiring More Linux Engineers — Several of these new job descriptions do begin with, "step up into a new organization built to engage more strategically and deeply with the technical teams of our commercial customers."
• AMD “Green Sardine” Firmware Published For Linux Users
• Google Fuchsia OS could run Android & Linux apps ‘natively’ — This week, a proposal has been put forward for an alternative solution for Fuchsia to run programs meant for Linux and Android. Instead of running Linux itself, Fuchsia would gain a system called “Starnix,” which would act as a translator between instructions for the Linux kernel and instructions for Fuchsia’s Zircon kernel.
• [rfc] Running unmodified Linux programs on Fuchsia
• Fuchsia - Starnix Proposal
• Hacker News Comments — Running unmodified Linux programs on Fuchsia
• Homework: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
• Homework: Visual guide to SSH tunnels
• Homework: FOSDEM 2021 Videos

Plus Google's surprise for Chromium users, and we go hands-on with Podman's docker-compose support.

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• KDE Plasma 5.21 Brings Low-latency Compositing, New Kickoff Menu, and Wallpaper — A major addition is a complete redesign of the main KDE Plasma Application Launcher.
• This week in KDE: new KWin compositing, new Kickoff, new recording level visualization! — This week KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten! It should broadly reduce latency throughout all compositing operations, and also adds a user-facing control in the System Settings Compositing page so people can choose for themselves whether they prefer lower latency or smoother animations.
• Check out our interview with Nate Graham in LUP 385
• Plasma Gitlab MR: Add fingerprint manager
• Fedora Proposed Change: Wayland By Default For Plasma
• Xfce 4.16 Released — Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.
• XFCE Nation on Twitter — Reminder to @ChrisLAS and @wespayne that Xfce 4.16 has been out since December 22nd but hasn’t been mentioned on @LinuxActionNews or @LinuxUnplugged.
• Xfce 4.16 Changelog
• Intel Preparing New Driver Option To Disable GPU Security Mitigations
• Wine 6.0 released — This release is dedicated to the memory of Ken Thomases, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 51. Ken was an incredibly brilliant developer, and the mastermind behind the macOS support in Wine. We all miss his skills, his patience, and his dark sense of humor.
• Grab a Glass, Wine 6.0 Has Been Released
• The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 6.0 — The core DLLs, including NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, USER32, etc. are built in PE format. This should help a number of copy protection schemes that check that the DLL files on disk match the in-memory contents.
• CloudLinux readies CentOS Linux replacement: AlmaLinux — AlmaLinux will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything
• AlmaLinux is born!!
• AlmaLinux - Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System
• Using Podman and Docker Compose — Up to now, support for Docker Compose, the command-line utility that orchestrates multiple Docker containers for local development, was missing. With Podman 3.0 now in development upstream, we have begun to support Compose.
• Chromium Blog: Limiting Private API availability in Chromium — During a recent audit, we discovered that some third-party Chromium-based browsers were able to integrate Google features, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, that are only intended for Google’s use. We are limiting access to our private Chrome APIs starting on March 15, 2021.
• PSA: Vanilla Chromium ending some of Google’s API access such as syncing and spelling check starting on March 15, 2021
• MacOS update enables third party OSes on M1 — It's happening... macOS Big Sur 11.2 beta 2 is out with full custom kernel support.
• iBoot - Wikipedia — iBoot is the stage 2 bootloader for all Apple products. It replaces the old bootloader, BootX.

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.

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• Linux Action News 166
• The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% Of The Linux Kernel
• The New Microsoft exFAT File-System Driver Is Set To Land With Linux 5.7
• The Linux Kernel’s Scheduler Apparently Causing Issues For Google Stadia Game Developers
• Torvalds’ Comments On Linux Scheduler Woes: “Pure Garbage”
• Thanks Oracle! New Patches Pending Can Reduce Linux Boot Times Up To ~49%
• Systemd Had A Pretty Big 2020
• Systemd-Homed Merged As A Fundamental Change To Linux Home Directories
• Linux Action News 163
• New Linux Features, Timely Hardware Support & More
• Red Hat Recommends Disabling The Intel Linux Graphics Driver Over Hardware Flaw
• A KVM Virtualization bug on Intel Processors because of Unfinished Code
• Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics Have AV1 Accelerated Decode - Linux Support Lands
• AMD Wowed Linux Users In 2020 With Their Fantastic Zen 3 CPUs, and Timely New Open-Source GPU Support
• Linus Torvalds Switches To AMD Ryzen Threadripper After 15 Years Of Intel Systems
• Balancing the needs around the CentOS platform – Blog.CentOS.org
• 2020 Was Another Interesting Year For Microsoft Around Open-Source/Linux
• WSL2 Reaching General Availability In Windows 10 v2004
• Microsoft President Brad Smith Acknowledges They Were Previously Wrong On Open-Source
• Microsoft Is Writing Its Own Wayland Compositor As Part Of WSL2 GUI Efforts
• Microsoft Edge Is Coming Out For Linux Next Month
• KDE Saw Its Wayland Support Stabilize Nicely In 2020, Much Polishing Throughout
• KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released After A Lot Of Polishing, New Features
• LINUX Unplugged 385: The 2020 Tuxies
• GNOME In 2020 Saw Many Optimizations, GTK 4.0 Released, GNOME 40 In Development
• GNOME OS Is Taking Shape But Its To Serve For Testing The Desktop
• GNOME Circle Officially Announced For Letting More Apps/Libraries “Join GNOME”
• GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released
• ledger, a powerful command-line accounting system — Ledger is a powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line. Ledger, begun in 2003, is written by John Wiegley and released under the BSD license. It has also inspired several ports to other languages.

And why KDE joining the Matrix, along with others might be establishing a new open source standard.

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• KDE is adding Matrix to its instant messaging infrastructure — KDE is adopting non-proprietary and decentralized instant messaging services and is now running its own community-managed instance of Matrix.
• Matrix the basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger app
• Interview with Matthew Hodgson: Matrix in the French State
• New Release: OnionShare 2 — OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services.
• Redis Labs changes its open-source license — again — “Some cloud providers have repeatedly taken advantage of successful opensource projects, without significant contributions to their communities.”
• Arm unveils new Neoverse chips for data centers — Arm claims that the design provides as much as 2.5 times more processing power for certain server workloads than the previous Cortex-A72 architecture.
• GCC 9 Compiler Support For The Arm Neoverse N1 + E1
• Linus' doubts
• Intel Confirms Apple Macs Will Switch to Arm CPUs by 2020, Says Report
• Wine Developers Release Hangover Alpha — Hangover 0.4 is the first (alpha) release from this project for running x86/x86_64 Windows programs now on 64-bit ARM Linux distributions.
• Linux Academy - Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer (Remote)

Plus why we're not too worried about BlueBourne, the fight for public money to fund public code, and a new power tool for Firefox users.

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• GNOME 3.26 — The GNOME Project is excited to announce the release of version 3.26, the latest version of GNOME 3. The new version is the result of six months’ hard work by the GNOME community, and comes packed with improvements and new features.
• GNOME 3.26 Release Notes — GNOME 3.26 no longer shows status icons in the bottom-left of the screen. This prevents the status icon tray from getting in the way and is expected to provide a better overall experience.
• Purism and KDE to Work Together — Having full access to Purism's hardware platform is a dream for the KDE community.
• Relevant Email 1 — One of the open questions for the phone is still which UX we will use, and Plasma Mobile would obviously be a perfect fit for this kind of project, since KDE and Purism share the same values, the UI is already done in large parts, and nothing would have to be developed from scratch (especially the Kirigami controls are great!).
• Relevant Email 2 — To make clear our standpoint - both GNOME and KDE *will* be first class citizen on Librem5. So there is no favorite between two, but both are equal in this challenge.
• BlueBorne — The attack does not require the targeted device to be paired to the attacker’s device, or even to be set on discoverable mode.
• Public Money, Public Code — We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.
• Multi-Account Containers extension for Firefox — The Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension lets you carve out a separate box for each of your online lives