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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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• 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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• 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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• Red Hat’s next steps, according to its new CEO — "We expect to see an 800% increase in edge applications built by 2024. We want those applications to be part of the open hybrid cloud. We think we have a unique position to connect end devices back to the assets that you have in your data centers and cloud that you use to run your company today."
• PREEMPT_RT Might Be Ready To Finally Land In Linux 5.20 — The Linux real-time patch series has been getting smaller with time and quite close to crossing the finish line with just around 50 patches to be merged.
• Google Engineers Go Big on Carbon - A Hopeful Successor To C++ — The Carbon programming language hopes to be the gradual successor to C++ and makes for an easy transition path moving forward.
• ByteDance Working To Make Kernel Booting Faster — This patch series touching around 100 lines of Linux kernel code is what they are now hoping to upstreamed.
• Happy Birthday This Week in GNOME — I am pleased to announce that TWIG is having its first anniversary!
• This Week in GNOME
• This Week in KDE
• #53 GUADEC 2022 · This Week in GNOME
• Btrfs Native Encryption Being Worked On — My goal in sending out this RFC is to get feedback on whether these are going in a reasonable direction; while there are a couple of additional parts, they're fundamentally minor compared to this.

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• How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops — Today, the life of a gLinux team member looks very different. We have reduced the amount of engineering time and energy required for releases to one on-duty release engineer that rotates among team members. We no longer have a big push to upgrade our entire fleet. No more need for multi stage alpha, betas and GAs for new LTS releases while simultaneously chasing down older machines that still were running Ubuntu Precise or Lucid.
• Red Hat names new CEO — In a move many will find surprising, Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO.
• KDE Announces Powerful Slimbook 4 Linux Laptop — The laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor with eight cores. They use USB-C for charging and power, like many other modern laptops. There are two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, and a wired Ethernet jack.
• System76 Launch Lite Teaser — Launch, but Lite. Launch Lite is the everyperson's keeb — comfortable, portable, and configurable.
• System76 Teases the Launch Lite Open-Source Configurable Keyboard, Coming July 14th
• AMD Is Hiring To Improve Its Linux Graphics Driver Installation Experience — In addition to their recent hiring for a open-source Linux GPU driver developer with multimedia experience, this week they have posted a new role looking for Linux build engineer(s) to focus on their graphics driver.
• Linux Build Engineer — Our team works on open-source GPU drivers for Linux. We are leading contributors to the Radeon Mesa graphics and multimedia drivers included in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Debian. Our software is used in exciting products such as the Tesla Model S and the Steam Deck.
• Matthew Garrett: Responsible stewardship of the UEFI secure boot ecosystem — So, to have Microsoft, the self-appointed steward of the UEFI Secure Boot ecosystem, turn round and say that a bunch of binaries that have been reviewed through processes developed in negotiation with Microsoft, implementing technologies designed to make management of revocation easier for Microsoft, and incorporating fixes for vulnerabilities discovered by the developers of those binaries who notified Microsoft of these issues despite having no obligation to do so, and which have then been signed by Microsoft are now considered by Microsoft to be insecure is, uh, kind of impolite?
• X.Org Server Hit By New Local Privilege Escalation, Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities — CVE-2022-2319 and CVE-2022-2320 were made public this morning and both deal with the X.Org Server's Xkb keyboard extension not properly validating input that could lead to out-of-bounds memory writes. Hopefully though in 2022 you aren't relying on your xorg-server running as root.
• Many Old X.Org Components Saw New Releases This Weekend - Phoronix
• Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything! — tl;dr: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point.
• X.Org Security Advisory: July 12, 2022

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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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• 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 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

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• Previous Predictions: Linux Action News 169
• Year in Review: How we’re curating the web with you and our top Pocket features
• Mozilla expects to generate more than $500M in revenue this year
• Pocket and Slate Podcast Partnership Announcement
• Asahi Linux

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.

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• Red Hat - Senior Software Engineer - HDR Enablement — The Red Hat Workstation Engineering team is looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to work on desktop, compositor, and GPU support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats and displays for Linux.
• Jared Domínguez on Twitter — "It's that time again. I'm looking for someone to join my team to work on enabling HDR support in upstream Linux, Fedora and RHEL. Global applicants welcome. Underrepresented minorities highly encouraged."
• Ubuntu to Make Firefox Snap Default in 21.10 — “Per Canonical’s distribution agreement with Mozilla, we’re making the snap the default installation of firefox on desktop ISOs starting with Ubuntu 21.10.”
• Bug #1943840 “[FFe] Update the ubuntu-desktop-minimal seed to us…”
• Feature Freeze Exception: Seeding the official Firefox snap in Ubuntu Desktop — This is the result of cooperation and collaboration between the Desktop and Snap teams at Canonical and Mozilla developers, and is the first step towards a deb-to-snap transition that will take place during the 22.04 development cycle.
• Reverse Engineering, Open-Source Driver Writing Continues For Apple’s M1 GPU — Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor.
• XDC 2021 - Day 1 - September 15, 2021 - YouTube
• Apple M1 USB Type-C Linux Support Code Sent Out For Testing — Sven Peter has sent out the initial USB Type-C enablement work for the Apple ACE1/2 chips used by Apple M1 systems.
• Apple Silicon / M1 Port Planned For GCC 12 — While the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) supports AArch64 and macOS/Darwin, it hasn't supported the two of them together but there is a port in progress to change it.
• Alyssa Rosenzweig on Twitter — Hello from Linux on my M1's internal storage! Thank you to @svenpeter42 for the NVMe driver. My daily driver now supports internal storage plus hotpluggable HDMI (native resolution), USB, and Ethernet.
• X.Org Could Use More Help Improving & Addressing Its Security
• LVFS Serves Up 2+ Million Firmware Downloads In The Past Month — Over the past thirty days, LVFS has served up more than two million firmware files to users.
• LVFS joins Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project.
• Richard wrote on twitter — We hit 2 million firmware downloads in the last 30 days for the first time. There are now over 3000 firmware files available on the LVFS, with over 100 vendors using 50 different protocols. It's been a huge amount of work but it feels pretty awesome.
• LVFS Supported Device List
• Researchers Find Malware Hiding in Windows Subsystem for Linux | Tom’s Hardware
• There’s now malware for Windows Subsystem for Linux — "These files acted as loaders running a payload that was either embedded within the sample or retrieved from a remote server and was then injected into a running process using Windows API calls,
• KSMBD In-Kernel File Server Already Needs Important Security Fix - Phoronix — This "important security fix" was sent in today for the Linux 5.15 kernel, potentially landing in time for 5.15-rc2 later today.

Plus, we try out Element’s new voice messages and share our thoughts.

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• This week in KDE — The KDE Project released today KDE Gear 21.08 as the newest series of their open-source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other projects.
• KDE Gear 21.08 Brings Improvements to Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, and Many Other KDE Apps
• KDE Plasma Introduces A New Overview Effect, Many Wayland Fixes - Phoronix
• #6 Sharing, Caring · This Week in GNOME
• Ubuntu 21.10 Likely Sticking To The GNOME 40 Desktop — Ideally we would have updated to 41 but feature freeze is today and we didn’t really have the resources available for the update.
• MATE 1.26 Desktop Released With Some Wayland Support — After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more.
• Element introduces Voice Messages — This has been one of our oldest and most upvoted feature requests ever, so we are incredibly happy to unleash our first version of it at last.
• Join the Jupiter Broadcasting Matrix Server
• Tenacity Update
• LINUX Unplugged 419: What’s Cookin’ at System76
• Launch Configurable Keyboard | System76 — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.

Plus the imminent problem KDE solved this week, and more.

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• Initial Apple M1 SoC Support Aims For Linux 5.13 Kernel — This initial Apple M1 Linux port gets the UART, interrupts, SMP, and DeviceTree bits in place for offering basic functionality.
• “Challenge accepted”
• Ars: Apple M1 hardware support merged into Linux 5.13
• Official support for Linux on the M1 Macs could come as soon as June
• [GIT PULL] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up for 5.13
• Asahi Linux on Twitter — Initial M1 support has been merged into the Linux SoC tree and will be coming to Linux 5.13!
• SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 — The HiFive Unmatched has a FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core, 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet.
• How to Secure phpMyAdmin
• Firefox Is Making WebRender The Default Rendering Engine On Linux This Month And There Is A Facelift Coming In May — The Firefox web browser is finally making the long-anticipated WebRender rendering engine the default on GNU/Linux when Firefox 88 is released later this month.
• uBlock Origin works best on Firefox — The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
• Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That — Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. Rather than exposing all of the parsed information from the kernel, there is now a call to have a more unified Linux EDID parsing library.
• vgpu_unlock — Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer-grade GPUs.
• Hacker figures how to unlock vGPU functionality intentionally hidden from certain NVIDIA cards for marketing purposes
• Announcing KDE’s Qt 5 Patch Collection — As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.
• Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed to No Earlier than April 14 — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
• LUP 400 Beer Stein

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.

Plus Edge is out for Linux, and PayPal gets bitcoin fever.

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• Ubuntu 20.10 Released, Now Available to Download — Ubuntu 20.10 rides atop the Linux 5.8 kernel, includes the GNOME 3.38 release, has new wallpapers, Active Directory integration (for enterprise users) in the installer, and carries a clutch of updated software, tools, and libraries.
• Ubuntu 20.10 Flavours Released
• Ubuntu 20.10 on Raspberry Pi delivers the full Linux desktop and micro clouds
• How to build a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster using MicroK8s
• Build a Raspberry Pi Desktop with an Ubuntu heart
• Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise — It is the world’s first software that runs Windows directly on enterprise Chromebooks―enabling full-featured Windows apps including Microsoft Office and proprietary apps―even when there is not an Internet connection.
• youtube-dl removed from GitHub by RIAA takedown notice — Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, audiovisual works and images, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.
• How the youTube-dl devs found out about DMCA takedown
• Microsoft Edge arrives in preview form for Linux — The release officially supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE. Sadly, there is no love for Pi fans at present; the team are apparently "looking at Arm", but no release has been forthcoming.
• We Go Hands on With Microsoft Edge for Linux
• PayPal Launches New Service Enabling Users to Buy, Hold and Sell Cryptocurrency — Today announced the launch of a new service enabling its customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal account, and signaled its plans to significantly increase cryptocurrency's utility by making it available as a funding source for purchases at its 26 million merchants worldwide.
• PayPal and Venmo will offer and accept cryptocurrency for all online payments

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.

Plus Ubuntu's plans to collect user metrics, the Linux on Galaxy survey, and Plasma desktop on a Nintendo Switch.

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• dtrace relicensed as GPLv2 — This changeset integrates DTrace module sources into the main kernel source tree under the GPLv2 license. Sources have been moved to appropriate locations in the kernel tree.
• Firefox adding sponsored stories to the new tab page — What’s next? We recently started testing personalized recommendations, and we will soon experiment with showing an occasional sponsored story within the Pocket Recommendations section in New Tab Page in Firefox Beta. This will be shown to a small portion of U.S. users as we start to test.
• AMP Stories and AMP for email — Starting with the Gmail Developer Preview of AMP for Email today, the new feature will allow users to perform simple tasks such as booking calendar appointments and checking into flights directly within the layout of the email.
• Related
• Ubuntu plans metrics collection — "We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," explained Will Cooke, the director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.
• Ubuntu adds 'Minimal Install' option 18.04 — The new “minimal install” option appears in section of the installer that asks whether you want to install restricted codecs to enable multimedia playback alongside the main desktop.
• Linux on Galaxy Survey — “In order to determine how to best design the product to meet your needs, we ask for a moment of your time to complete this Linux on Galaxy Survey.”
• Plasma running on a Switch — Code execution is all the rage these days, but can your Switch do *this*?

Plus we put hard numbers on the highs and lows of Bitcoin during 2018.

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