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• GNOME 44 Released — GNOME 44 is code-named “Kuala Lumpur”, in recognition of the work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia 2022.
• GNOME 44 Released With Many Desktop Enhancements
• GNOME 44 Getting New Background Apps UI
• Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal Release — This is the first OTA for Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) with major features, this is an Opt-In and not mandatory update.
• First Ubuntu Touch OTA Release Based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Is Out Now
• Ubuntu Cinnamon Flavor Status Announcement — Ubuntu Cinnamon started as a small idea in my head, in 2019. I was ELEVEN.
• ItzSwirlz (Joshua Peisach)
• Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix Becomes Official Ubuntu Flavor
• Microsoft’s CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution Continues Cultivating More Packages — With today's CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230321 they have continued cultivating more packages for the distribution.
• CBL-Mariner GitHub
• We’re no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan — After listening to feedback and consulting our community, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision in sunsetting our Free Team plan.
• Google discloses CentOS Linux kernel vulnerabilities following failure to issue timely fixes — Google Project Zero's security researcher Jann Horn learned that kernel fixes made to stable trees are not backported to many enterprise versions of Linux.
• Google Security Researchers Accuse CentOS of Failing to Backport Kernel Fixes
• Project Zero Mailing List Thread on CentOS Kernel Patches
• CVE-2023-0590
• kernel-5.14.0-277.el9
• CVE-2023-1249
• CVE-2023-1252
• Berlin Meet Up #2 - Nextcloud Hackfest & Dev Community Introduction, Fri, Mar 31, 2023 — NOTE: the time detailed on Meetup.com is strictly set to PST, so don't be confused by the interface!

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• Linux has a serious security problem that once again enables DNS cache poisoning — We can actually guess the ephemeral port in the embedded UDP packet and package it in an ICMP probe to a DNS resolver. If the guessed port is correct, it causes some global resource in the Linux kernel to change, which can be indirectly observed. This is how the attacker can infer which ephemeral port is used.
• Ubuntu Maker Canonical Planning To Vastly Improve Its Documentation — This is a permanent, on-going commitment. It’s work that will never end. It has already started, and will become part of the fundamental Canonical discipline of making software.
• The future of documentation at Canonical
• APT 2.3.12 package manager released, will no longer let you break everything — After the issues that happened with Linus from Linus Tech Tips breaking Pop!_OS during the switch to Linux challenge, the APT package manager has been upgraded to prevent future issues happening.
• KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system — Another change to make things look a bit friendlier in Discover is if you have issues upgrading, it will instantly shove a load of technical details in your face. To normal consumers, that's clearly not going to do much to help and probably scare them away. Now, instead, it will provide a very clear and friendly message, with the option to get more details to report the issue.
• Add support for list issue - Jens Axboe — With the support in 5.16-rc1 for allocating and completing batches of IO, the one missing piece is passing down a list of requests for issue.
• Linux 5.17 To Continue With I/O Optimizations, 5~6% Improvement Pending For NVMe — With the merge window for 5.16 closed, time to submit for review some of the performance optimizations that didn't make this release. Here's batched issue for blk-mq with an NVMe implementation included. 5-6% improvement.
• Linux 5.17 To Boast A Big TCP Performance Optimization
• Linux 5.17 To Bring DRM Privacy-Screen Support, Intel VESA PWM Backlight Handling — The Linux 5.16 merge window now past, an initial batch of changes from drm-misc-next has been sent in to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.17 cycle kicks off around the start of the new year.
• Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 Released for Linux Phones, Here’s What’s New — The UBports Foundation released today the Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices with various improvements and more bug fixes.
• FWUPD 1.7.2 Released With Fixes, Faster & Smaller Daemon — FWUPD 1.7.2 adds support for handling exported MTD block devices, tweaking the compiler flags to reduce the install size by around 300 Kb, speeding up the FWUPD daemon startup by ~40% by postponing some work, and a variety of fixes. The fixes range from a possible DFU crash to DLI download troubles and other device-specific corrections.
• Alma and Rocky Linux release 8.5 builds, Rocky catches up with secure boot — AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, both of which provide community builds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), have released builds matching RHEL 8.5, with Rocky's work catching up with Alma by being signed for secure boot.
• Proxmox VE 7.1 released! — Proxmox VE 7.1 is based on Debian 11 but uses a newer Linux kernel, 5.13, QEMU 6.1, and OpenZFS 2.1.
• Proxmox 7.1 release notes
• Proxmox Downloads

Plus, we try out Microsoft’s Linux distro, and some thoughts on our editorial style.

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• 5.15 Merge window — 3,440 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.15 development cycle.
• Amazon’s DAMON Merged Into Linux 5.15
• Linux 5.15 Hit By Some Early Performance Regressions
• AMD Posts New “AMD-PSTATE” CPUFreq Driver — Leveraging CPPC For Better Perf-Per-Watt
• Linux 5.15 Readies More Code For Compile & Run-Time Detection Of Buffer Overflows
• AMD Finally Releases Overdue Linux CPPC Driver
• OverlayFS On Linux 5.15 Improves Performance
• Linux 5.15’s New “-Werror” Behavior Is Causing A Lot Of Pain — That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build.
• Re: [GIT PULL] ntfs3: new NTFS driver for 5.15 - Linus Torvalds
• Red Hat will officially support EPEL in the future — The new team is being formed and is expected to start work in October.
• History and Philosophy of EPEL - Fedora Project Wiki
• Microsoft Releases Its August Update For The CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution — One of the big fundamental changes with CBL-Mariner August 2021 is Microsoft now provides a public ISO to download of this Linux distribution.
• CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances

Plus, our thoughts on WD Live users getting their data wiped and Rocky Linux's gold master.

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• Rocky Linux 8.4 Available Now — The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the General Availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 for x86_64 and ARM64.
• Ubuntu-maker Canonical will support open source Blender on Windows, Mac, and Linux — The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. Canonical’s engineers will engage directly with customers to provide comprehensive technical support to users by understanding, diagnosing and resolving issues as swiftly as possible.
• Canonical Partners With Blender Around Paid LTS Application Support
• Canonical Gives RISC-V a HiFive — Canonical have announced that its Ubuntu operating system now supports two RISC-V boards from SiFive, the HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched.
• “I’m totally screwed.” WD My Book Live users wake up to find their data deleted — On its website, Western Digital advised customers to disconnect their My Book Live devices to prevent further attacks while the company investigates the mass wiping.
• WD My Book NAS devices are being remotely wiped clean worldwide
• Declarative Cloud Infrastructure Management with Terraform
• Why Windows 11 is forcing everyone to use TPM chips — While Microsoft has required OEMs to ship devices with support for TPM chips since Windows 10, the company hasn’t forced users or its many device partners to turn these on for Windows to work. That’s what’s really changing with Windows 11, and combined with Microsoft’s Windows 11 upgrade checker, it has resulted in a lot of understandable confusion.
• Windows 11 System Requirements: Will TPM 2.0 be mandatory for Windows 11 Build 21996?
• TrueNAS SCALE 21.06-BETA Now Available! — With this first BETA, we kickoff the official pre-release testing cycles and prepare for a release version in the coming months. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on any issues found to our bug ticketing system so we can continue the work to make SCALE the best, most stable release possible.
• SCALE 21.06-BETA.1
• TrueNAS SCALE Announcement and Nightly Image Downloads
• TrueNAS SCALE Release Plan
• TrusNAS Developer Notes
• TrueNAS SCALE 21.06 BETA ISO

Plus our reaction to SCO reigniting their decades-long fight with IBM and Red Hat, and the big news in GTK-land you might have missed.

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• AlmaLinux Now Available For Download As RHEL/CentOS Alternative — As scheduled, AlmaLinux's initial release is available for download today from AlmaLinux.org. This initial AlmaLinux release is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 sources.
• AlmaLinux OS on GitHub
• AlmaLinux Repo
• AlmaLinux Wiki
• Shop Almalinux
• CloudLinux Launches AlmaLinux, CentOS Linux clone
• How to migrate CentOS to AlmaLinux and avoid downtime in your data center
• AlmaLinux OS Homepage
• IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos — Xinuos' lawsuit contends that IBM stole UnixWare and OpenServer code and incorporated it into the heart of its AIX, z/OS mainframe, and its midrange server operating systems.
• SCO vs. IBM looks like it’s over for good
• SCO slapped in latest round of eternal ‘Who owns UNIX?’ lawsuit
• Judge spanks SCO in ancient ownership of Unix lawsuit
• SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
• SCO keeps dying, and dying, and dying
• SCO trading suspended in US
• Xinuos sues IBM
• SCO Linux FUD returns from the dead
• Xinuos file suit against Red Hat and IBM
• Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave — The setup is more user-friendly thanks to the Subiquity installer, and a utility called ubuntuwsl.
• Announcing Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview
• Super Sneaky Ubuntu Link
• NVIDIA Proposes Mesa Patches To Support Alternative GBM Back-Ends — It looks like NVIDIA is finally taking the GBM route for supporting Wayland compositors with their proprietary driver...
• Mesa GitLab WIP Merge request — GBM alternate backend discovery and loading
• Introducing Libadwaita — This new libadwaita library intends to extend that concept by being the missing code part of Adwaita. and will be implemented as a direct GTK 4 continuation and replacement of libhandy.
• OBS Studio Now Ready With Wayland Capture Support — Well-known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has been working on allowing good and native Wayland support for OBS Studio with the last of that work being merged upstream today.
• OBS Studio on Wayland – Georges Stavracas
• Arch Linux Packages - archinstall 2.1.3-1
• Arch Linux installer GitHub

Plus why we've recently switched back to Firefox, and more.

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• Red Hat Announces Free “RHEL For Open-Source Infrastructure” — Eligible organizations will be able to enjoy no-cost RHEL for use within their infrastructure for continuous integration, web servers, and more.
• Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff
• Red Hat Announcement — Extending no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux to open source organizations
• Red Hat opens the door for both VMs tand containers in its latest OpenShift release
• Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Blurs The Line Between VMs And Containers — With OpenShift 4.7, Red Hat attempts to simplify the migration of virtual machines to containers.
• Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Is Now Available
• OpenShift Container Platform 4.7 release notes
• [Video] What’s new in Red Hat OpenShift 4.7
• Introducing the Framework Laptop — We’re here to prove that designing products to last doesn’t require sacrificing performance, quality, or style.
• Framework Laptop
• Google Funds Linux Kernel Developers to Focus Exclusively on Security — Silva and Chancellor’s exclusive focus is to maintain and improve kernel security and associated initiatives in order to ensure the world’s most pervasive open source software project is sustainable for decades to come.
• Latest Firefox release includes Multiple Picture-in-Picture and Total Cookie Protection — In today’s release, we added multiple picture-in-picture views, available on Mac, Linux and Windows, and includes keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. Total Cookie Protection stops cookies from tracking you around the web by creating a separate cookie jar for every website.
• Firefox 86.0 released
• Total Cookie Protection
• Firefox for Enterprise 86 Release Notes.

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• Element suspended on Google Play Store — At 2021-01-29 at 21:35 UTC Google suspended Element from the Play Store without warning or notification
• Element sees fivefold increase in signups after Whatsapp privacy debacle — After Whatsapp’s announcement, rival app Telegram reported a 500% increase in users and Signal saw an 18-fold increase in download numbers, putting it on track to cross 1m new users each day.
• Element team waiting hours — Update: we’re still waiting for a response from Google to our explanatory mail sent ~8 hours ago. Thanks all for your patience while we get this sorted...
• New Linux SUDO flaw lets local users gain root privileges — The issue is a heap-based buffer overflow exploitable by any local user (normal users and system users, listed in the sudoers file or not), with attackers not being required to know the user's password to successfully exploit the flaw. The vulnerability was introduced in the Sudo program almost 9 years ago, in July 2011.
• 10-year-old Sudo bug lets Linux users gain root-level access
• Buffer overflow in command line unescaping
• Sudo vulnerability allows attackers to gain root privileges on Linux systems (CVE-2021-3156) - Help Net Security — "This vulnerability is perhaps the most significant sudo vulnerability in recent memory (both in terms of scope and impact) and has been hiding in plain sight for nearly 10 years."
• New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in All Supported Ubuntu Releases
• Mitre - CVE-2020-28374
• Red Hat Customer Portal: CVE-2020-28374
• Debian: CVE-2020-28374
• Ubuntu: CVE-2020-28374
• The killing of CentOS Linux: ‘The CentOS board doesn’t get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do’ — Brian Exelbierd, responsible for Red Hat liaison with the CentOS project and a board member of that project, has told The Register that CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat simply refused to invest in it.
• Rocky Linux gets a new sponsor—Gregory Kurtzer’s startup, Ctrl IQ — Rocky Linux is to be a beneficiary of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."
• Linux maintainer says long-term support for 5.10 will stay at two years unless biz world steps up and actually uses it — Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has responded to complaints that the current promise of two years for 5.10 is not enough, explaining that support is not automatic but requires commercial help.
• Rust Game Server One-Click App Linode — A free-for-all battle in a harsh open-world environment.

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• New Year, new Red Hat Enterprise Linux programs: Easier ways to access RHEL — When we announced our intent to transition to CentOS Stream, we did so with a plan to create new programs to address use cases traditionally served by CentOS Linux.
• Staying on GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle - Desktop - Ubuntu Community Hub — The topic of what to do about the new GNOME started being discussed and after some consideration, we decided to stick to GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle.
• Welp, Ubuntu 21.04 Won’t Ship with GNOME 40 or GTK4 - OMG! Ubuntu!
• Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog — In order to ensure open source versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
• AWS, as predicted, is forking Elasticsearch | ZDNet
• The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let’s Encrypt - Let’s Encrypt - Free SSL/TLS Certificates — By going with AMD EPYC, we were able to get 64 physical CPU cores while keeping clock speeds high: 2.9GHz base with 3.4GHz boost. More importantly, EPYC provides 128 PCIe v4.0 lanes, which allows us to put 24 NVMe drives in a single machine.
• Ubuntu Can Run on Apple Silicon, Devs Say It’s ‘Completely Usable’ - OMG! Ubuntu! — Developers at ARM virtualisation company Corellium have managed to get Ubuntu 20.04 up and running on the new Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
• How We Ported Linux to the M1
• [RFC PATCH 0/7] Linux on Apple Silicon [LWN.net]
• Raspberry Pi Foundation launches $4 microcontroller with custom chip | TechCrunch — It has a dual-core Arm processor (running at 133MHz), 264KB of RAM, 26 GPIO pins including three analog inputs, a micro-USB port, and a temperature sensor.
• Raspberry Pi Foundation Release Their Own Silicon, the Raspberry Pi Pico - 9to5Linux
• Security Bulletin 1 - Home Assistant — It has come to our attention that certain custom integrations have security issues and could potentially leak sensitive information. Home Assistant is not responsible for custom integrations and you use custom integrations at your own risk.

Plus Google makes their Fuchsia intentions a bit more clear, and why Linux 5.10 is a BIG deal.

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• Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About… — But, before you get angry, please read this. I’ve been surfing Twitter, Reddit, and HackerNews threads just like many others. I’ve gathered some major buckets of complaints which seem to come up, and I’d like to address each of them.
• CentOS project lead disappears
• Usage Statistics and Market Share of Linux for Websites, December 2020
• Red Hat and the CentOS Project Join Forces to Speed Open Source Innovation
• Transforming the development experience within CentOS
• CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream
• FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates
• Google is opening Fuchsia OS development to the public — To both support developers and make the Fuchsia development process less skunkworks and more public, Google is opening Fuchsia’s bug tracker to the public.
• Expanding Fuchsia’s open source model | Google Open Source Blog
• Linux 5.10 LTS Released As One Of The Biggest Kernel Releases In A While
• Linux 5.10 Released — Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, this is a significant milestone in that it's also a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel to be maintained for at least the next five years and also is a huge kernel update in general with many new features.
• The 10 Most Interesting Features Of Linux 5.10