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.