Plus more hardware for Plasma Mobile, Matrix gets a big boost, and the FSF receives a large Bitcoin donation.

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• Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS, Expanding its Kubernetes and Containers Leadership — Red Hat today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc., an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million
• TechSNAP Episode 353: Too Many Containers — We introduce you to Kubernetes, what problems it solves, why everyone is talking about it, and where it came from. Also who shouldn’t be using Kubernetes, and the problems you can run into when scaling it.
• LibreOffice 6.0 Released — The release of LibreOffice 6.0 marks the first major update to the productivity suite since the LibreOffice 5.4 release back in July 2017. It also coincides with the anniversary of the very first release of LibreOffice in January 2011.
• How do I test Plasma Mobile? (part 2) — Currently there are two possible ways of testing Plasma Mobile on an actual mobile device, Using postmarketOS Installing Halium and a KDE neon-based rootfs
• GNOME and KDE in PureOS: diversity across devices — If we were doing short-term planning it would be easy to “just use Plasma” for the Librem 5, but that would undermine our long-term vision of having a consistent look/feel across all our devices, where GNOME/GTK+ is already the default and what we’ve invested in.
• Purism considering UBports for the Librem 5
• Purism Might Develop An X11-Free Wayland Compositor — We also reviewed and evaluated compositing managers and desktop shells that we could use for a phone UI. We aim to use only Wayland, trying to get rid of as much X11 legacy as we possibly can, for performance issues and for better security. From our discussions with GNOME maintainers of existing compositors and shells, we may be better off igniting a new compositor (upstreamed and backed by GNOME) in order to avoid the X11 baggage.
• Matrix receives large investment — We’re delighted to announce that our friends at Status have made a major strategic investment ($5M) in New Vector: the company which currently employs most of the Matrix.org core team.
• FSF receives large Bitcoin donation — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced it has received a record-breaking charitable contribution of 91.45 Bitcoin from the Pineapple Fund, valued at $1 million at the time of the donation.

Plus we follow up on the lawsuit that could split the community, and then we eat some Bitcoin humble pie.

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• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

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• UBports release OTA 3 — This update brings some new features and bug fixes atop the Ubuntu Touch 15.04 base. New features include some new packages requested by the community, the default start page and search provider was changed over to DuckDuckGo, and not displaying the keyboard when working with multiple windows. This over-the-air update has also removed the Ubuntu Store from the App Scope.
• Ubuntu Touch working on Android app support — “Project Anbox”. Anbox - a shorted form of ‘Android-in-a-Box” - is a community effort which allows Android apps to execute in a container in a more native way rather than the more common approach of using an Android emulator,
• LEDE and OpenWrt merge — The merged project will use the code base of the former LEDE project.
• Fuchsia available for the Pixelbook — Fuchsia—which only started development in 2016—is Google's third operating system after Chrome OS and Android.
• Meltdown and Spectre — Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs. This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents.
• Law Center and Conservancy updates — Because the SFLC has amended its trademark cancellation petition with a fraud claim, the SFC's motion to toss the complaint must be refiled after the fraud issue been considered.

Plus some key project updates & more!

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• Solus pushing forward Steam with Snaps — That snap, as some people have already guessed as much, will be the linux-steam-integration project, using a strict-mode LSI intercept module. We can also make various tweaks on top of that runtime to enforce ABI compatibility where it might be missing.
• AAC will be supported in Fedora Workstation 27 — What we will be shipping in Fedora is a modified version of the AAC implementation released by Google, which was originally written by Frauenhoffer. On top of that we will of course be providing GStreamer plugins to enable full support for playing and creating AAC files for GStreamer applications.
• Plasma 5.11 released — Plasma 5.11 brings a redesigned settings app, improved notifications, a more powerful task manager. Plasma 5.11 is the first release to contain the new “Vault”, a system to allow the user to encrypt and open sets of documents in a secure and user-friendly way, making Plasma an excellent choice for people dealing with private and confidential information.
• 5.12 aims for Wayland improvements — If we all just use Wayland and report and fix the bugs we run into I'm sure that 5.12 will be an awesome release on Wayland. So please help to make it happen!
• KDE turns 21 — t was on 14 October 1996 that the "Kool Desktop Environment" was founded by Matthias Ettrich. At the time he wanted KDE to be a "consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment."
• Fwupd 1.0 Released — fwupd now supports 72 different kinds of hardware, support for another ~12 devices is currently being worked on, many vendors continue using or exploring fwupd, and around 165,000 devices each month get updated firmware using fwupd with LVFS.
• Oneplus collecting data in Oxygen OS — Moore discovered that some of the data being sent to OnePlus' servers included the phone's IMEI number, the phone number, MAC addresses, mobile network names and IMSI prefixes, Wi-Fi connection info, and the phone's serial number.
• Say they'll stop — By the end of October, “all OnePlus phones running OxygenOS will have a prompt in the setup wizard that asks users if they want to join our user experience program.” Not only that, but he also stated that OnePlus “will no longer be collecting telephone numbers, MAC Addresses and WiFi information.
• Librem 5 funded — 14 days early, we have crossed a historic milestone.
• Purism Collaborates with Cryptocurrency Monero — The Monero Project is a grassroots, community-driven initiative that advocates for privacy on a global scale by producing several free libre open source software projects, with the flagship offering being Monero, a fungible and decentralized cryptocurrency.