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• Ubuntu MATE 18.10 - dropping i386 images — Less than 10% of Ubuntu MATE users are running the i386 (32-bit Intel) images.
• 18.10 and beyond - 64bit images only | Ubuntu Budgie — from the various reports and statistics we have observed from 16.04 budgie-remix all the way to you enthusiastic 18.04 trail-blazers, almost all of you are now using the 64bit ISO.
• Lubuntu finally ready to move to LXQt — Lubuntu 18.10 will be the first release to ship with LXQt as default desktop environment instead of LXDE, according to Simon Quigley.
• Korora takes a “break” — Korora for the forseeable future is not going to be able to march in cadence with the Fedora releases. In addition to that, for the immediate future there will be no updates to the Korora distribution.
• Void Linux struggling as leader goes missing — There still are multiple members to the Void Core Team and others working on this independent Linux distribution, but their project leader has "disappeared". There's been no contact since January but no "meaningful contact" in over one year.
• Fedora 28 released — The headline feature for Fedora 28 Server is the inclusion of the new Modular repository. This lets you select between different versions of software like NodeJS or Django

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• Mint to add Flatpak support — The project says the upcoming release of Linux Mint 18.3 will come with “full support” for Flatpak out of the box. This will include integration with the Linux Mint Software Manager.
• Drop KDE edition — The Linux Mint crew has confirmed today they will be discontinuing future releases of their KDE spin following next month's Linux Mint 18.3 release.
• Oracle Could Still Make ZFS A First-Class Upstream Linux File-System — Mark wants to see ZFS become a core part of Linux. He wants it to become "the file-system of Linux" and "that could happen" for "core Linux." He later said, "it's a possibility... but I can't say how strong of a possibility," that includes talking with Oracle lawyers about the code license of both ZFS and Solaris.
• Open ZFS File-System Running On Windows
• Google Play Protect isn't very good at spotting malware — When exposed to recent Android malware samples, six of the 20 software suites sampled correctly flagged every single one as evil and prevented them from running. Eight more managed a 99 per cent or higher hit rate. Google's own system, Play Protect, only detected 65.8 per cent of threats.
• Mozilla helps out TOR and so can you — Today we’re launching our end-of-year crowdfunding campaign, “Powering Digital Resistance,” highlighting Tor’s work protecting essential human rights around the world. As part of this end-of-year campaign, Mozilla is matching donations up to a total of $500,000 -- so your donation to the Tor Project will go twice as far!
• Solus looking for help with aesthetics for Solus 4 — If you wanna help us improve the default experience for the next ISO, or you've some mad creative skills, let us know!
• Steam VR Marketshare Already Larger Than Steam Linux Marketshare — Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais‏ who is heavily involved in their Linux efforts as well as those around virtual reality has commented the VR market-share is already larger than the entire Steam Linux market-share.
• Putin Will Require Cryptocurrency Miners to Register With the Government — After months of conflicting statements, Russia has finally outlined its plan for cryptocurrencies.

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.

Plus some thoughts on tiny Linux computers, the Linage survey and more.

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• GNOME turns 20 — There have been 33 stable releases since the initial release of GNOME 1.0 in 1999.
• Debian turns 24
• Raspbian Stretch has arrived for Raspberry Pi — PulseAudio is therefore no longer installed by default, and the volume plugin on the taskbar will no longer start and stop PulseAudio.
• Work on Debian for mobile devices continues — Work on Debian for mobile devices, i.e. telephones, tablets, and handheld computers, continues. During the recent DebConf17 in Montréal, Canada, more than 50 people had a meeting to reconsider opportunities and challenges for Debian on mobile devices.
• Lineage summer survey — The survey is really simple and we won’t collect any sensitive information.
• Solus 3 Released — On behalf of the Solus team and community, we’re extremely proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 3. This is the third iteration of Solus since our move to become a rolling release operating system.
• ZFS On Linux Adds Encryption Support — This support allows creating and managing natively-encrypted datasets. There have been ZOL patches going back months for encryption
• Bitcoin Is Forking. Again. — Three months from now, there will likely be three different versions of bitcoin all attempting to prepare the currency for more traffic in different ways.
• Henry Brade Call for a Fight Against SegWit2x on Twitter — The SegWit2X hard fork scheduled for Nov is an attempted hostile corporate takeover of the #Bitcoin protocol.

Plus more good news for Firefox users, and why Google's "streaming OS updates" could be great for the Android ROM community.

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• Snaps in Solus — Occurs to me that I likely have to make some kind of statement or whathaveyou about the whole "Solus adopting snaps" thing.
• Ubuntu Community Hub Proposal — I propose we replace the Community Portal with a dynamic and collaboratively maintained site. The site would raise the profile of conversations and content, to improve our onboarding and communication issues.
• Ubuntu Artful Desktop Fit and Finish Sprint — First up is the Desktop Fit & Finish Sprint on August 24th and 25th.
• 50% CPU savings w/Hardware Accelerated Video Playback — We’re testing some patches to Chromium 60 in Artful to enable video acceleration and we’re seeing roughly a 50% saving in CPU overhead when using VA API.
• Nextcloud push into education — Today we are very proud to officially announce the Nextcloud Education Edition, developed in collaboration with Moodle, DeiC, regio iT, the TU Berlin and Univention.
• Firefox 55 — Performance changes include significantly faster startup times when restoring lots of tabs and settings that let users take greater control of our new multi-process architecture. We’ve also upgraded the address bar to make finding what you want easier, with search suggestions and the integration of our one-click search feature, and safer, by prioritizing the secure - https - version of sites when possible.
• Firefox 55 Advanced Performance Features — Firefox 55 introduces several new low-level capabilities that help improve the performance of demanding web applications
• Epiphany gets Firefox Sync — You can sync bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs with other Epiphany instances and as well as both desktop and mobile Firefox.
• Photon UI — Version 57 of Firefox is slated to be released sometime in November and the biggest user facing change is its new user interface.
• Android 8.0’s “streaming OS updates” will work even if your phone is full | Ars Technica — Starting with Android 8.0, the A/B system partition setup is being upgraded with a "streaming updates" feature. Update data will arrive from the Internet directly to the offline system partition, written block by block, in a ready-to-boot state.

Special Guest: Ryan Sipes.

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• Fedora 26 is here! - Fedora Magazine — What’s new in Fedora 26? First, of course, we have thousands of improvements from the various upstream software we integrate, including new development tools like GCC 7, Golang 1.8, and Python 3.6. We’ve added a new partitioning tool to Anaconda (the Fedora installer) — the existing workflow is great for non-experts, but this option will be appreciated by enthusiasts and sysadmins who like to build up their storage scheme from basic building blocks. F26 also has many under-the-hood improvements, like better caching of user and group info and better handling of debug information. And the DNF package manager is at a new major version (2.5), bringing many new features.
• Fedora 27 Might Do Away With 32-Bit Kernel Builds - Phoronix — A controversial change being considered for Fedora 27 is doing away with the i686 kernel build thereby effectively dropping support for older x86 32-bit systems.
• Yunit packages for ubuntu 16.04 LTS – yunit — We are pleased to announce that Yunit is now available as an overlay repository for ubuntu 16.04 LTS xenial (64bit). The following have been tested and should work with an existing ubuntu 16.04, ubuntu gnome 16.04, lubuntu 16.04 and xubuntu 16.04 installation. They will not work in either kubuntu 16.04 or ubuntu mate 16.04 due to the updated Qt libraries,
• Windows 10 loves Ubuntu | Ubuntu Insights — Ubuntu 16.04 is now available as an app from the Windows Store for users running Windows Insider builds. The newly improved app is created by Canonical in collaboration with the Microsoft WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) team as a result of the work announced at Microsoft Build 2017 Conference
• First day! | Solus on Patreon — Well, we're here! Today is officially my first day working full time on Solus. And it's thanks to YOU, supporters of Solus, for making this possible!
• System76 Blog — Pop!_OS Updates — CalDav and CardDav work continues. The deeper we’ve dug the more hard coding we’ve found. We’re considering writing a new installer for GNOME and any DE that features user setup separate from OS installation. The further we went down the Ubiquity path, the more it seemed over-complicated. Automated firmware updates are coming to System76 laptops. With this feature, the System76 Driver will prompt that there’s an update available. Running the update will reboot your computer, install the firmware, and take you back to login.
• A New Browser Is Making Peer-to-Peer Web Hosting More User-Friendly - Motherboard — Billed as a "peer-to-peer web browser," the idea behind Beaker is to provide a simple way to build and host websites directly from the browser, which can then be visited by other users of the browser without the need for any intermediary hosting providers.

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• Nextcloud announces Global Scale architecture as part of Nextcloud 12 — Achieve several orders of magnitude greater scaling. It is hard to scale the standard architecture to instances over hundred thousand users.
• Devuan finally reaches 1.0.0 — There have been no significant bug reports since Devuan Jessie RC2 was announced only three weeks ago and the list of release critical bugs is now empty. So finally Devuan Jessie Stable is ready for release!
• Debian Stretch is just weeks away. — We plan to release on 2017-06-17.
• SteamVR Home Now Works Under Linux — SteamVR Home is a beta feature from Valve for making a social, interactive launcher experience in virtual reality. Those unfamiliar with SteamVR Home can learn about it via this earlier announcement.
• SteamOS Brewmaster_beta gets huge update — SteamOS 2.115 also implements AMD Vulkan support. Please note that this will only work if you’re using Steam Beta Client.
• Solus adds experimental KDE Plasma support — For the sake of clarity, please note that the Plasma Desktop from KDE is not officially supported at this moment in time. It is however a project that Peter is working on, and slowly building up to be something useful. This in itself was enabled by the vast amount of KF5 (KDE Frameworks) software required in the repositories already for the “Big Items” (Kdenlive, etc).
• Firefox is Trying... — It’s because of our newfound internal confidence with Firefox that Mozilla has started to be more aggressive externally again. Firefox’s campaign launching today, called “browse against the machine”, is a perfect example.
• Chrome has won — From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere. That means that the esteemed Fox will be around for many many years, albeit with an ever diminishing market share. It also, unfortunately, means that a turnaround is all but impossible.
• More Coreboot progress for Purism — We are now pretty confident that we should be able to have coreboot firmware ready in time for factory preloading of the new inventory we’ll be shipping from in June.