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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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• Kali 2023.1 — Today we are releasing Kali 2023.1 (and on our 10th anniversary)!
• Get Kali | Kali Linux Download
• Kali Linux Introduces “Kali Purple” for Defensive Security Hardening
• Qubes OS 4.1.2 — We’re pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes 4.1.2!
• Wayland Crash Survivor — A change merged to Qt this week can allow for Wayland clients to survive compositor restarts, such as when the compositor crashes.
• OpenMoon Ray Code Goes Live — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer.
• OpenMoonRay.org
• ipmitool Repository Archived — Those navigating to ipmitool/ipmitool on GitHub as the official repository for this project will find that it's now in a "public archive" state.
• Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know
• Justin Cormack on Twitter — when we remove accounts we do not free up the namespace so squatting is not possible.
• Some nuance for paid users
• GHCR was having some issues this morning it seems
• Red Hat’s Quay is maybe another option, they might offer free plans? public repos are free anyway
• José Valimon Twitter
• Deploy a registry server — This page contains information about hosting your own registry using the open source Docker Registry.

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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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• elementary OS 7 Available Now — Today we’re proud to announce that OS 7, codenamed Horus, is available to download now and shipping soon on several high-quality computers.
• Xfce Going Wayland — That’s right, work on Xfce 4.20 kicked off earlier this month with the release of libxfce4windowing, a new dependency for the Xfce desktop environment to provide support for the next-generation Wayland display protocol.
• Xfce / libxfce4windowing
• COSMIC DE has Speed — Alex here with the latest batch of updates from System76 engineers on the development of COSMIC DE, as well as some Settings mockups where you can explore some of the new changes.
• System76 Adding XWayland Support & Other Improvements
• Ubuntu Pro for All — First released in a beta version in October 2022.
• helloSystem 0.8 — helloSystem is now based on FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE. A desktop system for creators that focuses on simplicity, elegance, and usability.
• helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD — Since most applications I am using on a daily basis are cross-platform and many of them are written in Qt, it seemed logical to choose Qt as the native toolkit for helloSystem.

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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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• Wine on Wayland 2022 update: more games, more apps, more fun! — Significant improvement compared to last year is support for cross-process rendering, which is required by Chromium/CEF applications. Last year the driver was able to run Chrome with the "--in-process" command-line option. Chrome is now supported without any special flags, and is fully GPU accelerated on both OpenGL and Vulkan!
• A Wayland driver for Wine
• Wine on Wayland year-end update: improved functionality & stability
• Wine’s Wayland Driver Is Becoming Mature, May Aim For Upstreaming Early Next Year
• Linux 6.1 Released With MGLRU, Initial Rust Code — Linux 6.1 integrates the exciting Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) overhaul of the page reclamation code, the initial Rust programming language support
• The 6.1 kernel is out [LWN.net]
• Linux 6.2 Graphics Changes: Intel Arc Graphics Stable, Initial NVIDIA RTX 30 Acceleration
• Linux 6.2 Addresses Another “Tasty Target For Attackers”
• Linux 6.2 Expands Support For More Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs, Apple M1 Pro/Ultra/Max
• Intel On Demand Driver Ready To Activate Your Licensed CPU Features With Linux 6.2
• Btrfs With Linux 6.2 Bringing Performance Improvements, Better RAID 5/6 Reliability
• CERN recommendation for Linux distribution — CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities, reflecting recent experience and discussions with experiments and other stakeholders
• CERN, Fermilab select AlmaLinux as standard for big science
• AlmaLinux 9.1 - Now Available - AlmaLinux OS Blog
• Stephan Dörner (in English) on Twitter — CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities
• GCC Rust “gccrs” Code Merged Into Mainline GCC 13 — Following last week's approval with the GCC Rust v4 patches for them to be merged, all of the "gccrs" code was upstreamed this morning for GNU Compiler Collection 13.
• PeerTube v5: the result of 5 years’ handcrafting — Five years later, we are releasing PeerTube v5, a tool used by hundreds of thousands people on a thousand interconnected platforms to share over 850,000 videos.
• Support Framasoft
• Settings Link Missing after 5.0 Upgrade

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• Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux — We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games
• Asahi Linux Enables Early Apple GPU Driver Support - WIP OpenGL 2.1 + GLES 2.0
• Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Heading To Linux 6.2 — Sent in yesterday were the Arm CPUFreq updates to queue in the Linux power management tree ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window.
• [GIT PULL] cpufreq/arm updates for 6.2 - Viresh Kumar
• Floppy Driver Update Ready For Linux 6.2 — This memory leak with the floppy disk driver has been in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.11
• Android memory safety vulnerabilities declined as Rust usage grew — Specifically, the number of annual memory safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 to 85 between 2019 and 2022. They are now 35% of Android’s total vulnerabilities versus 76% four years ago. In fact, “2022 is the first year where memory safety vulnerabilities do not represent a majority of Android’s vulnerabilities.”
• Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust
• Fedora 38 Cleared To Produce “Mobility Phosh” Spins — The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor.
• Ping bug potentially allows remote hack of FreeBSD systemsSecurity Affairs — A remote attacker can trigger the vulnerability, causing the ping program to crash and potentially leading to remote code execution in ping.
• D-Installer needs your help — Today we published a new prototype of D-Installer, fixing several bugs reported by early testers and improving the usage experience in some areas like the configuration of passwords and users. But beyond those improvements, a couple of new features deserve some attention.
• Bug 1205938 – D-Installer - Slowness initialization on real hardware
• GitHub - yast/d-installer: A service-based Linux installer
• openSUSE’s D-Installer Adds LVM & Full Disk Encryption Configuration

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• New versions of Ubuntu Touch, Mir, and Unity arrive — Various parts of Ubuntu's canceled desktop/fondleslab convergence project are all still ticking away – some officially and some thanks to user communities.
• Ubuntu Touch OTA-24 Release
• Mir release 2.10.0
• Unity 7.6 is now available for Arch Linux
• Ubuntu Touch OTA-24 Released for Ubuntu Phone Users
• Google updates 2013 Chromecast for first time in over three years — In a new batch of Chromecast updates, Google has released new firmware for the first-generation Chromecast for the first time in years.
• Chromecast firmware versions and release notes
• Eufy cameras caught sending local footage to cloud — Paul Moore, a security researcher, posted on Twitter last week a frightening security situation with Eufy home security products including camera-equipped doorbells.
• Google says Google should do a better job of patching Android phones — Project Zero calls out Android and Pixel for not fixing a GPU vulnerability.
• ClamAV 1.0.0 Released — The first version of ClamAV, which is developed by the US-based tech company Cisco and the open-source community, was released back in 2002.
• 20 Years in the Making: ClamAV Finally Hits Version 1.0
• Compute Accelerator Subsystem Being Introduced For Linux 6.2 — It's happening: the new "accel" compute accelerator subsystem is now queued for introduction with the Linux 6.2 kernel once that merge window opens in December.
• Red Hat Developers Announce Work On New “Composefs” File-System — Red Hat is working on Composefs as a way to construct and use read-only images that are verifiable and have some immediate use-cases around sharing of Podman container layers and with the verification support for use by OSTree.
• GitHub - composefs

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• Announcing KataOS and Sparrow — Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications.
• Google launches KataOS
• Google Announces KataOS As Security-Focused OS, Leveraging Rust & seL4 Microkernel
• Some remotely exploitable kernel WiFi vulnerabilities — It would appear that there is a set of memory-related vulnerabilities in the kernel's WiFi stack that can be exploited over the air via malicious packets; five CVE numbers have been assigned to the set.
• Linux Gets Patched For WiFi Vulnerabilities That Can Be Exploited By Malicious Packets - Phoronix
• Firefox 106 Brings Improved WebRTC - Better Screen Sharing On Wayland — Firefox 106 upgrades its WebRTC capabilities to now make use of libwebrtc 103.
• impervious.ai — A Suite of Peer-to-Peer Tools for Communications, Data Transport, and Payments, Built Directly Into the Web Browser
• Impervious Ai GitHub
• You’re invited to the Fedora Linux 37 Release Party! — Please register on Hopin and join us on November 4th and 5th for a short program of informational sessions and social activities.
• Fedora Linux 37 Release Party Registration
• Linus Torvalds to Linux devs: Stop pulling all-nighters — "Let me just say that after I got my machine sorted out and caught up with the merge window, I was somewhat frustrated with various late pull requests. I've mentioned this before, but it's _really_ quite annoying to get quite a few pull requests in the last few days of the merge window"
• Linux 6.1 Features Include Initial Rust Code, MGLRU, New AMD CPU Features, More Security
• Linux 6.1 Will Likely Be This Year’s LTS Kernel Release
• Taming the Beast - LUP 480
• Send a Boost — Upgrade to a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and send a Boost and enjoy other improvements to your podcasts.

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• Plasma 5.26 Released — Plasma 5.26 comes with new and tweaked widgets, improves the desktop experience leaps and bounds, and Plasma Big Screen's app family grows
• These weeks in KDE: Akademy and Plasma 5.26
• Google Reveals ‘First Laptops Built For Cloud Gaming’ — Google says the Acer Chromebook 516 GE, ASUS Chromebook Vibe CX55 Flip and Lenovo Ideapad Gaming Chromebook all have refresh rates of at least 120Hz, displays with up to 1600p resolution, immersive audio and, critically for cloud gaming, WiFi 6 or 6E connectivity.
• Intel Arc Graphics - A750 and A770 GPUs Release — The Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs officially launch today, October 12th in select markets. Everyone at Intel is beyond thrilled to get graphics cards with modern features and extremely competitive performance-per-dollar into your hands.
• Intel Arc Graphics Running On Fully Open-Source Linux Driver
• Canonical Launches Free Ubuntu Pro Subscriptions for Everyone — Ubuntu Pro is available for every supported Ubuntu LTS version, starting with Ubuntu 16.04 ESM and up to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
• Android leaks some traffic even when ‘Always-on VPN’ is enabled — The data being leaked outside VPN tunnels includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic.
• Incorrect VPN lockdown documentation [249990229] - Visible to Public - Issue Tracker
• Android leaks connectivity check traffic — As a closing note, we would like to recommend Google to adopt the ability to disable the connectivity checks, like on GrapheneOS, into stock Android.
• iOS VPN apps have another flaw: excluding many Apple apps — We confirm that iOS 16 does communicate with Apple services outside an active VPN tunnel. Worse, it leaks DNS requests. Apple services that escape the VPN connection include Health, Maps, and Wallet.

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• Announcing the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project — Linux Foundation IT services plans for the GNU Toolchain include Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking, web sites, and CI/CD, implemented with strong authentication, attestation, and security posture. Utilizing the experience and infrastructure of the LF IT team that is already used by the Linux kernel community will provide the most effective solution and best experience for the GNU Toolchain developer community.
• Sourceware.org
• GNU Toolchain Plans Move To The Linux Foundation’s Infrastructure
• Two visions for the future of sourceware.org
• Plasma Mobile Gear Update — The Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce the developments integrated into Plasma Mobile between July-September 2022.
• The Work-In-Progress Rust-Written Apple DRM Driver Manages To Start Wayland’s Weston — After passing the initial spinning cube milestone this past weekend, Asahi Lina has been working on bringing up more of this reverse-engineered kernel DRM/KMS driver.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter — 🚀 Weston/Wayland works!!! 🚀 KDE doesn’t start all the way yet, but on X at least it showed the splash screen ^^
• Upgrade now to address E2EE vulnerabilities in matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 — Two critical severity vulnerabilities in end-to-end encryption were found in the SDKs which power Element, Beeper, Cinny, SchildiChat, Circuli, Synod.im and any other clients based on matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk or matrix-android-sdk2.
• Akamai Turns Linode Up Past 11
• Over the weekend, #MarsHelicopter successfully completed Flight 33 — The rotorcraft reached an altitude of 10 meters (33 ft) and traveled 111.24 meters (365 ft) in 55.2 seconds.
• There will be up to five flights in the 31-day test period. — The NASAPersevere rover will attempt to capture video of those flights.
• NASA’s Asteroid-Striking DART Mission Team Has JPL Members — JPL’s navigation section is experienced at getting spacecraft to faraway locations accurately.
• How JPL’s role in NASA’s DART asteroid impact could save the earth one day – Pasadena Star News
• DART’s Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos (Official NASA Broadcast)

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• GNOME 43 Release Notes — After 6 months of hard work, the GNOME project is proud to present version 43. This latest GNOME release comes with improvements across the board, ranging from a new quick settings menu, a redesigned Files app, and hardware security integration. GNOME 43 continues the trend of GNOME apps migrating from GTK 3 to GTK 4, and includes many other smaller enhancements.
• GNOME 43 Released With More Apps Ported To GTK4, Wayland Enhancements
• GNOME 43 Notes for Developers
• System76 Launches Redesigned Thelio Desktop — System76 today is announcing the Thelio, Thelio Mira, and Thelio Major with a full-chassis redesign.
• system76
• Next steps for Rust in the kernel — At the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, Miguel Ojeda updated the group on the status of the project with the goal of reaching a conclusion on when this merge might happen. The answer that came back was clear enough: Rust in the kernel will be happening soon indeed.
• Rust Porting Begins For Intel’s “e1000” Linux Network Driver — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
• Linux kernel’s eBPF feature put to unexpected new uses
• ASUS & Canonical Partner On The IoT — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
• OpenJDK Java 19 Released With RISC-V Linux Port, Foreign Function API — OpenJDK Java 19 in its general availability form while adding a number of new features.
• Introducing the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition — Today, we are excited to announce that we have partnered with Google to create the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition. We’ve taken the best parts of the Framework Laptop and merged those with the powerful simplicity of ChromeOS to create a high-performance, upgradeable, repairable, customizable Chromebook.

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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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• NVIDIA Posts Open-Source DRM Kernel Driver For NVDLA — NVIDIA has posted 13k lines of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver code for review for supporting their NVDLA IP block.
• Sony Contributes ~73%+ Performance Improvement For exFAT Linux Driver — In turn this improved block request handling leads to 73% and higher performance improvements for tests carried out by Sony engineer Yuezhang Mo on an Arm test platform with SD card storage that is common for Microsoft exFAT file-system usage.
• KDE Has Many Plasma Wayland Fixes — It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work.
• Google Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With A Qt Back-End — It looks like Google is at least evaluating the prospects of Qt toolkit support for the Chromium/Chrome UI. A Phoronix reader tipped us off to newly-started Gerrit code reviews for Qt support with Chromium.
• Legacy BIOS Support Remains Important For Some On Fedora, May Shift Responsibility To SIG — Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support.
• LINUX Unplugged 454: Double Distro Details — Has Fedora pulled ahead of Ubuntu? We take a look at the new Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 releases.

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• openSUSE Developing “Adaptable Linux Platform” For Next-Gen SUSE Linux Enterprise — Another important point is that we intend to split what was a more generic, everything is closely intertwined into two parts: One smaller hardware enabling piece, a kind of "host OS", and the and the layer providing and supporting applications, which will be container (and VM) based.
• Update on next generation of SLE - openSUSE Mailing Lists
• An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — With this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.
• PipeWire 0.3.50 — WINE applications using the JACK backend should no longer crash.
• OpenSSH 9.0 released — It is claimed to be primarily a bug-fix release, but it also switches to a new, quantum-computer-proof key-exchange protocol by default and includes a number of sftp changes, some of which may create some compatibility issues with scp.
• Reiser5 Issues New Development Release, Performance Numbers For Scaling Out — Shishkin published an new Reiser5 unstable snapshot today that targets Linux 5.16 kernel compatibility. Along with updating Reiser5 for newer kernel compatibility and other changes since its prior snapshot, Shishkin accompanied today's announcement with some benchmark numbers.
• New NVIDIA Open-Source Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Appears — Appearing with NVIDIA's latest Linux4Tegra code drop is a new open-source kernel graphics driver not previously published. This driver isn't based on the existing Nouveau driver but rather appears to be derived from their internal driver code-base with some copyright references going back to 90's.
• NVIDIA Publishes Signed Ampere Firmware To Finally Allow Accelerated Open-Source Support — Even with the signed firmware images, there are still complications around re-clocking the GPU to get off the rather low boot clock frequencies. Those complications around power management in the context of signed firmware images have meant the GTX 900 series and newer hasn't been able to operate with the open-source driver at its optimal clock frequencies...
• Debian still having trouble with merged /usr — The addition of the "/usr merge" feature has been something of longstanding mess in the Debian world. It seems like a relatively innocuous change, but ever since we first covered the feature introduction for Debian—more than six years ago—it has a been a recurring series of headaches within that community. Recent events have seemingly simply prolonged the pain, though perhaps the end is in sight.
• Usr move status in various distros
• The Case For The Usr Merge

Plus why the Simula One VR Linux computer could be worth a serious look.

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• TrueNAS Scale 22.02 Released and Resetting the NAS Paradigm — First off, let us start with what is TrueNAS Scale, and where are we in the process. TrueNAS Scale is based on Linux instead of FreeBSD like TrueNAS. We get all of the storage features we would expect in a modern solution like snapshotting, replication, iSCSI, SMB, NFS, and S3-compatible object storage.
• TrueCharts.org
• SCALE 22.02.0
• Intel Acquires Team behind PREMPT_RT patches — Linutronix is comprised of a team of highly qualified and motivated employees with a wealth of experience and involvement in the ongoing development of Linux. Led by CEO Heinz Egger and CTO Thomas Gleixner, Linutronix is the architect of PREEMPT_RT (Real Time) and the leading technology provider for industrial Linux. Gleixner has been the principal maintainer of x86 architecture in the Linux kernel since 2008.
• https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PREEMPT_RT-Lack-Of-Funds
• Podman 4.0 | Hacker News
• Release v4.0.0 · containers/podman
• Neil McGovern Stepping down in 6 Months — Now, nearly 5 years later, I’ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader.
• Linux Action News 182
• GNOME 42 Beta Released
• Steam for Chrome OS gets minimum hardware specs — If you follow Chrome Unboxed or Chrome OS development in general, the name ‘Borealis‘ may provoke some feelings of excitement and anticipation.
• Here’s which Chromebooks should support gaming w/ Steam
• HP and Lenovo Chromebooks expected to support Steam
• SimulaVR
• https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula
• Show HN: Simula One – Portable Linux VR Computer
• Hacking on Simula (in Simula): Implementing proper window resizing - YouTube

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• Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda Installer Shifting To A Web Based UI — Anaconda has long been GTK-based but as part of modernizing it they are now looking at rewriting the UI to be a web browser-based UI that makes use of Red Hat's Cockpit project.
• Anaconda is getting a new suit – Fedora Community Blog
• GNOME Shell & Mutter Prepare For GNOME 42 Alpha With Exciting Improvements
• Linux Mint 20.3 released promising security updates until 2025 — Linux Mint has released version 20.3, codenamed 'Una,' as a long-term support version that will receive security updates until 2025.
• Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” Cinnamon released!
• Linux Mint is reverting Firefox to Mozilla config after partnership signed
• Jack Dorsey spearheads new fund to defend Bitcoin developers against legal action — In an email addressed to developers, sent early on January 12, Dorsey described the open-source community as “especially susceptible to legal pressure.”
• [bitcoin-dev] Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund
• Jupiter Extras: Road Trip Memories

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• Newest Linux Optimizations Can Achieve 10M IOPS Per-Core With IO_uring — These optimizations today were primarily within the kernel's block / NVMe / IO_uring code but also some touching the memory management code. All of these optimizations he has been pursuing for achieving the best possible per-core I/O performance can be found via linux-block's perf-wip branch.
• Jens Axboe on Twitter — That’s it. 10M IOPS, one physical core. #io_uring #linux
• Linux 5.15 Delivers Many Features With New NTFS Driver, In-Kernel SMB3 Server, New Hardware — Here is a more detailed look at all of the Linux 5.15 changes coming for this next stable kernel.
• Linux 5.15 Lands Memcg Performance Regression Fix
• Apple Silicon PCIe Driver Queued For Linux 5.16
• Linux 5.16 To Support The 2021 Apple Magic Keyboard
• KDE Plasma Readies Its NVIDIA GBM Support, Fingerprint Authentication Added — Initial support for the NVIDIA driver with KDE Plasma 5.23.2's GBM back-end. In conjunction with the NVIDIA 495 Linux driver beta exposing Generic Buffer Manager support, Plasma 5.23.2+ will play nicely with that new driver support on Wayland.
• NVIDIA 495 Linux Beta Driver Released With GBM Support
• Fedora 35 has Wayland + GBM + NVIDIA
• Copyleft Compliance Projects - Software Freedom Conservancy — Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology, is filing the lawsuit as the purchaser of a product which has copylefted code. This approach makes it the first legal case that focuses on the rights of individual consumers as third-party beneficiaries of the GPL.

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.

Plus, the essential RISC-V code landing in the Linux kernel.

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• Asahi Linux On The Apple M1: “Usable As A Basic Linux Desktop” — With the progress made over the past month, "Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)!"
• Progress Report: September 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Asahi Linux emits usable basic desktop on Apple’s M1
• Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support — Given that it's taken a while to freeze, there isn't yet any performant RISC-V processors out there actually implementing the complete extension and so for now and during development, it's been a function of running it on simulators.
• Canonical launches Ubuntu Frame, the foundation for embedded displays — Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu Frame, a solution that allows developers to easily build and deploy graphical applications for interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other products that require a graphical output.
• Ubuntu Frame is a secure display server for embedded systems
• Building graphical applications in embedded devices
• Software Engineer - Toolbox (containers / desktop / golang) — The Red Hat Desktop team is looking for a Software Engineer to join us. In this role, you will develop and maintain containerization technologies for software development like toolbox.
• SUSE Working on a CentOS Clone? — I like looking in dnf countme data to see the various distros requesting EPEL repos. There are often many weird distro names showing up in the single digits. But this one jumped out at me with 38 hits last week
• DNF Better Counting
• Index of /csv-reports/countme
• Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) — High-quality packages that have been developed, tested, and improved in Fedora available for RHEL and compatible derivatives such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.
• SUSE Has been Rebuilding RHEL Packages for Years
• Will Furnass on Twitter — “Interesting that CERN are proposing to adopt @CentOS Steam 8 for new systems"
• PowerPoint Presentation

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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 critical kernel feature that lacks funding, and our take on helloSystem, a FreeBSD-based macOS alternative.

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• Plasma 5.22 — Plasma 5.22 improves its stability and usability across the board.
• KDE Plasma 5.22 Arrives with Miscellany of Usability Improvements
• Plasma 5.22 arrives but I bet you’ll want 5.23 once I show you this – Adventures in Linux and KDE
• GNOME 40.2 Released with Better Flatpak Support, Improved Screencasting, and More — The GNOME Project released today GNOME 40.2 as the second minor point release to the latest and greatest GNOME 40 desktop environment series.
• GNOME 40.2 Release News
• Privilege escalation with polkit — The vulnerability enables an unprivileged local user to get a root shell on the system. It’s easy to exploit with a few standard command line tools
• Real-Time Support "PREEMPT_RT" For Linux Held Up Due To Lack Of Funding — These "RT" patches have long been maintained out-of-tree but it turns out that while in the past it was seemingly close for merging, that effort has stalled for lack of funding.
• helloSystem Release r0.5.0 — This release is based on FreeBSD 12.2
• helloSystem 0.5 Released For macOS-Inspired FreeBSD Desktop
• FOSDEM 2021 - hello... again? — helloSystem is FreeBSD preconfigured as a desktop operating system. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from a world in which a global menu bar exists, the Command key is used rather than Control, and applications are contained in .app bundles.
• Bearded Tux Unisex Joggers - Jupiter Garage — Get ready for that 10K run or take it slow in your backyard—these joggers are sure to make you feel comfortable either way while making a low key statement that Linux is awesome.

We'll share the history, the context, and where things stand now around the controversial research that led to the ban.

Plus Ubuntu 21.04 is out, and we try WSL's new GUI Linux app support.

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• Intentionally buggy commits for fame—and papers [LWN.net] — A buggy patch posted to the linux-kernel mailing list in early April was apparently the last straw for Greg Kroah-Hartman as it led to the planned reversion of a whole slew of commits with one thing in common: their origin at the University of Minnesota (UMN).
• An open letter to the Linux community [LWN.net] — We sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did to the Linux kernel community. Our goal was to identify issues with the patching process and ways to address them, and we are very sorry that the method used in the “hypocrite commits” paper was inappropriate.
• Re: [PATCH] SUNRPC: Add a check for gss_release_msg - Greg KH
• University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired • The Register
• Greg Kroah-Hartman bans University of Minnesota from Linux development for deliberately buggy patches | ZDNet
• Revertion of all of the umn.edu commits - Kees Cook
• Linus Torvalds Responds to Linux Banning University of Minnesota | Tom’s Hardware
• Statement from CS&E on Linux Kernel research - April 21, 2021 | Department of Computer Science and Engineering | College of Science and Engineering
• Security Research Ethics Review. What’s the subject, Kenneth? | by Dave Dittrich | Apr, 2021 | Medium
• Paper: Stealthily introducing vulnerabilities in open source software via hypocrite commits
• Ubuntu 21.04 Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New - 9to5Linux — Ubuntu 21.04 has been released and is available to download from the Ubuntu website.
• Ubuntu 21.04 is here | Ubuntu — Ubuntu 21.04 comes with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK.
• LINUX Unplugged 402: Our Worst Idea Yet
• (Re)introducing the Community Team
• Fedora 34 To Release Next Week As A Very Exciting Update - Phoronix — After it was pushed back last week due to blocker bugs, on Friday it was determined that Fedora 34 is now in proper shape to officially ship next week.
• Red Hat Summit 2021 | About — Virtual again: April 27-28, 2021
• Microsoft enables Linux GUI apps on Windows 10 for developers - The Verge — Microsoft is starting to allow Windows 10 testers to access Linux GUI apps.
• Microsoft Posts WSLg Preview - GUI App Support With Windows Subsystem For Linux - Phoronix
• GitHub - microsoft/wslg: Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios
• GitHub - microsoft/CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances
• Introducing Linux GUI apps running on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
• Watch Mars Ingenuity's First Flight! (VIDEO AND IMAGES) — Mars​ Perseverance​ has been a historic mission, now its chopper, Ingenuity is flying on Mars. Watch a recap right here and see the very first video and images of it up in the air.
• Open source goes to Mars 🚀 - The GitHub Blog — Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity.
• Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter · The ReadME Project · GitHub — Today, nearly 12,000 developers will see a new badge on their GitHub profile celebrating their contributions to the specific versions of projects and libraries used by NASA to fly the Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars.
• Work Progresses Toward Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars - NASA Mars
• We’re Getting Ready for Ingenuity’s Second Flight - NASA Mars
• We Are Prepping for Ingenuity’s Third Flight Test - NASA Mars
• Mars helicopter shares first aerial color photo and preps for Sunday flight - CNN
• NASA’s Mars helicopter completes second, higher flight – Spaceflight Now
• Ingenuity: Nasa's Mars helicopter makes it three from three — On Sunday, the little chopper rose to a height of 5m before speeding off laterally for 50m - half the length of a football field.

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 a PSA for GNOME users, and a recently improved tool for the Raspberry Pi.

Special Guest: Dalton Durst.

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• Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 Release — Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-16, our sixteenth stable update to the system!
• Find your device: devices.ubuntu-touch.io — This list shows the devices which are currently under development in the Ubuntu Touch ecosystem. Mature devices have easy access to installation through the UBports Installer. Devices in an early state generally need to follow a manual installation procedure.
• Ubuntu Touch Q&A 96
• Extensions Rebooted: Porting your existing extensions to GNOME 40 — Since there have been significant changes in GNOME Shell – it will be important to understand where those changes are and how they might affect the various extensions that are out there.
• Guide: Port Extensions to GNOME Shell 40
• XWayland 21.1 Standalone Released To Offer Better X11 Client On Wayland Experience — With no one willing to step up and manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release Red Hat engineers are now moving ahead with standalone XWayland releases.
• Cloud CPU Benchmarking Report
• Google is preparing for Fuchsia’s first releases — For years now, we’ve been watching and waiting as Google has gradually developed their Fuchsia operating system from the ground up. Now evidence has appeared pointing to Google’s Fuchsia OS getting its first — and second — proper release.
• Raspberry Pi Imager Now Lets You Control Advanced OS Features When Flashing Images — The biggest new feature in this release is the implementation of a hidden advanced options panel which lets you control additional features for the operating system you’re about to flash on an SD card or SSD drive.
• GitHub: rpi-imager v1.6

Plus a major new feature coming to a Linux distro near you.

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• The Coder: Look and feel comfortable, while kicking ass. Life is better in a robe.

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• How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars — This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars. We’re actually running on a Linux operating system. The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.
• The Perseverance Mars rover just took Linux to another planet
• Ingenuity (Mars helicopter) on Wikipedia
• Mars Helicopter on YouTube
• Ingenuity helicopter phones home from Mars
• SparkFun Electronics
• Linaro Projects
• Linaro on Wikipedia
• Ivan Čukić on Twitter — Another @kdecommunity #KDE Mars landing a success!
• Linux 5.12 Git Seeing New Code Land Following Winter Storm — While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list.
• There Are Big Changes On The Horizon With Linux 5.12
• Btrfs With Linux 5.12 Gets More Performance Improvements, Working Zoned Mode
• XFS File-System With Linux 5.12 Has “A Lot Going On This Time”
• IDMAPPED Mounts Aim For Linux 5.12 - Many New Use-Cases From Containers To Systemd-Homed - Phoronix — This patch series introduces idmapped mounts which has been in the making for some time. Simply put, different mounts can expose the same file or directory with different ownership.
• NVIDIA continues tweaking their work for hardware accelerated Xwayland support — Performance should be fine in full-screen games, as long as the compositor supports the required zwp_linux_dmabuf_v1 interface.
• Experimental Wayland Support For Wine Now Sees More Functionality Working — With the new "request for comment" patches, there is now working support for copy/paste, drag-and-drop, and the ability to change the display mode.
• Apple M1 teaser — So OpenBSD boots multi-user on the new Apple M1 hardware. This still has some hacks in it that need to be fixed, so don't expect support for this in the tree right now. But a big thank you to those that contributed to the pool for getting us some hardware.

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.

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 Michael Larabel from Phoronix joins us to discuss the state of Linux hardware support in 2020.

Special Guest: Michael Larabel.

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• Budgie 10.5.2 Desktop Environment Released with Support for the GNOME 3.38 Stack
• Budgie 10.5.2 Released
• KDE Plasma 5.20.4 Is Out with More Than 40 Bug Fixes and Improvements
• Plasma 5.20.4 complete changelog
• GNOME 3.38.2 Desktop Environment Is Out with Even More Improvements and Bug Fixes
• 3.38.2/NEWS
• Cinnamon 4.8 Desktop Environment Released, This Is What’s New
• New Raspberry Pi OS release — The traditional end-of-year new release of Raspberry Pi OS, which we launch today.
• Raspberry Pi’s V3DV Vulkan Driver Now Supports Wayland — Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high-performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.
• Should Red Hat be afraid of SUSE’s Rancher acquisition? — SUSE, a major Linux and cloud company, finalized its acquisition of Rancher Labs earlier this year.. Rancher, formerly a privately held open-source company, had over 37,000 active users and 100-million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes management program, Rancher.
• Rancher Labs - Wikipedia
• Network World
• SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs - YouTube

Plus our reaction to Microsoft's Android subsystem that's in the works.

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• Prolonged AWS outage takes down a big chunk of the internet — Amazon noted that the issues are only affecting one of its 23 geographic AWS regions. But the problem was significant enough to take out a large number of internet services.
• Geoff Belknap on Twitter — “I… can’t vacuum… because us-east-1 is down.”
• Canonical publishes LTS Docker Image Portfolio on Docker Hub — The LTS Docker Image Portfolio comes with up to ten years Extended Security Maintenance by Canonical.
• Vivaldi Integrates Email Client, Feed Reader, and Calendar in a Browser — The Vivaldi team announced that they are bringing an Email client, a Feed Reader, and a Calendar – all of these together in the latest Vivaldi technical preview release.
• Introducing Vivaldi Mail in Technical Preview
• How to use the built-in GPG feature for Thunderbird
• Systemd 247 Released With Experimental Out-of-Memory Daemon, New Credentials Capability — systemd 247 is very heavy on new features, and one big change for udev.
• [systemd-devel] systemd 247 released
• NTFS read-write driver GPL implementation by Paragon Software — The Paragon NTFS kernel driver patch is now on its 13th iteration
• Microsoft is working on an Android subsystem for Windows 10 — This new initiative is called 'Project Latte,' and similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), will create a virtualized Android environment running directly within Windows 10.

Plus, our thoughts on Apple's seeming abandoning of CUPS, the latest and greatest open source podcast player, and an important show update.

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• Plasma 5.20: One absolutely massive release — A massive release, containing improvements to dozens of components, widgets, and the desktop behavior in general.
• KDE Plasma 5.20 is Here – And It's an Epic Update
• LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade — To mark the 20th anniversary of Apache OpenOffice, the project's main rival, LibreOffice, published a letter asking OpenOffice to tell its users to switch
• Google and Intel warn of high-severity Bluetooth security bug in Linux — The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later.
• Intel Blows the Coms Again
• Greg K-H on Twitter — "They are now claiming you need a 5.10 kernel or newer to solve this. 5.10 will be released at the end of December 2020. Intel knows better, and knows how to do this properly, this feels malicious at this point..."
• CUPS Printing System Open-Source Development Has Seemingly Dried Up — The open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020.
• Has Apple abandoned CUPS?
• LPC 2020 - Open Printing MC - YouTube
• OpenPrinting News - September 2020
• Antennapod 2.0 Released — AntennaPod version 2 released with a range of new features, bug fixes and improvements. Below you’ll find an extensive list of highlights, with each time the Pull Request ID.
• AntennaPod
• AntennaPod - Apps on Google Play
• AntennaPod | F-Droid

Plus, the major re-architecture work underway for Chrome OS with significant ramifications for Desktop Linux.

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• Introducing GNOME 3.38: “Orbis” — GNOME 3.38 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 27896 changes, made by approximately 901 contributors.
• LINUX Unplugged 370: PipeWire Progress
• New GNOME versioning scheme — The next version of GNOME, due to be released in March 2021, will be GNOME 40.
• GNOME Extensions Rebooted Initiative — Extensions Rebooted is a collaborative effort to address the issues around the GNOME Shell extension ecosystem.
• Wiki · extensions-rebooted · GitLab
• What is LaCrOS for Chromebooks and why does it matter? — Google is decoupling the Chrome browser from Chrome OS on Chromebooks. And it’s using Linux to do this.
• Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes — today we are announcing the end of life for two legacy services that grew out of the Firefox Test Pilot program: Firefox Send and Firefox Notes.
• Firefox for Android LAN-Based Intent Triggering — The SSDP engine in Firefox for Android (68.11.0 and below) can be tricked into triggering Android intent URIs with zero user interaction. This attack can be leveraged by attackers on the same WiFi network and manifests as applications on the target device suddenly launching, without the users' permission, and conducting activities allowed by the intent.
• Mozilla rolls out Firefox 81 on Android
• Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V — Linux on Azure might no longer need Windows
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows

Plus the best bit of Android 10 Go, Microsoft gives serious thought to bringing Edge to Linux, and Stallman's role at GNU comes into question.

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• CentOS 8 Released — Hello and welcome to the first CentOS-8 release. The CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, manageable and reproducible platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• Presenting CentOS Stream — CentOS Stream will be a rolling-release Linux distro that exists as a midstream between the upstream development in Fedora Linux and the downstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is a cleared-path to contributing into future minor releases of RHEL while interacting with Red Hat and other open source developers. This pairs nicely with the existing contribution path in Fedora for future major releases of RHEL.`
• Transforming the development experience within CentOS
• Fedora and CentOS Stream — There’s not really been a consistent flow between the projects and product at all.
• Docker is struggling financially — Docker CEO Rob Bearden sent an email to employees this week acknowledging challenges as the company tries to raise money.
• GNOME Foundation facing lawsuit — The GNOME Foundation has been made aware of a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC over patent 9,936,086. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes this patent.
• Donate to GNOME
• QR Code Patent Troll Sues Dickey’s Barbecue
• Google announces Android 10 (Go edition) — Android 10 (Go edition) includes a new form of encryption, built by Google for entry-level smartphones, called Adiantum.
• Gallery Go by Google Photos - Apps on Google Play
• Android: Try OTA updates without committing — That’s why they unveiled Dynamic System Updates (DSU) in Android 10 to let developers try a barebones version of a new OS update without unlocking the bootloader or wiping data.
• Sean Larkin on Twitter — "🚨🔥We on the @MSEdgeDev team are fleshing out requirements to bring Edge to Linux, and we need your help w/ some assumptions!🚨🔥 If you're a dev who depends on Linux for dev, testing, personal browsing, _please_take a second to fill out this survey! 📝 https://t.co/PCerGONmCG" / Twitter
• Stallman intends to keep leading GNU — I am still the head of the GNU Project (the Chief GNUisance), and I intend to continue as such.
• Stallman changes his mind and quits GNU leadership role? — I hereby step down as head of the GNU Project, effective immediately.
• Richard Stallman Reportedly Steps Down As Head Of The GNU Project

Plus Android Q gets an official Desktop Mode, the story behind the new Open Distro for Elasticsearch, and more!

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• GNOME 3.32 Released — Version 3.32 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
• Leaderless Debian — What would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
• Debian project leader candidates emerge
• Foundations galore — The merger is supported by 30 corporate and end user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent.
• New Red Team Project — The Linux Foundation has launched the Red Team Project, which incubates open source cybersecurity tools to support cyber range automation, containerized pentesting utilities, binary risk quantification, and standards validation and advancement.
• CommunityBridge — The Linux Foundation today announced CommunityBridge – a new platform created to empower open source developers – and the individuals and organizations who support them – to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology.
• Funded by Github
• Understanding LF's New “Community Bridge” - Conservancy Blog
• NGINX to be acquired — I’m incredibly excited that today we announced NGINX has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by F5.
• Open Distro for Elasticsearch — We have therefore decided to partner with others such as Expedia Group and Netflix to create a new open source distribution of Elasticsearch named “Open Distro for Elasticsearch.”
• Jeff Barr – Open Distro for Elasticsearch
• Android finally getting desktop mode — The AOSP Launcher has a new component that, when launched, brings up a new Android desktop interface.
• Here are the new Android Q features

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 how you can start testing Plasma Mobile, Pursim aims for convergence, and Mycroft is back!

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• Plasma Mobile test ISOs — 44% poll participants wanting to test Plasma Mobile on their device, and/or as a virtual machine, or on real machine.
• Purism aims for convergence — Upon successful completion of our funding campaign, we started to look for a Designer to take care of the user experience for the Librem 5, and a web developer to help us improve the look & feel (and more technical parts) of our website in general. Today, I’m glad to finally welcome them publicly!
• Mycroft Mark 2 — What sets Mark II apart? It’s open source. This means your personal data stays private, you can customize your experience, and Mycroft is a neutral player in the voice game, allowing you to be confident in your personal preference of apps and skills.
• Ubuntu 18.04 to revert to Xorg by default — We have decided that we will ship Xorg by default, and that Wayland will be an optional session available from the login screen.
• Torvalds unhappy with Intel's response to Spectre — Instead of treating Spectre as a bug, the chip maker is offering Spectre protection as a feature.
• Are the BSDs dying? — Too few eyeballs on code is a security issue as vulnerabilities go unreported and unpatched. Can FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD survive?

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

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Plus a new magazine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, several vulnerabilities in Intel's Management Engine, and more!

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• Google collected location data from Android users who didn't know — In a nutshell, the whereabouts of every active Android phone and tablet in the world were tracked even with location services disabled and no carrier SIM card inserted.
• Ubuntu want community input on Mir — However we’re also at the place where we need to reach out to the community and ask what are the aspects of your desktop that you value most, to help us figure out a direction for Mir.
• New magazine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation - Hackspace — The first issue of HackSpace magazine is here! Join us as we explore thinking machines, build a trebuchet, learn how Arduino changed the world, see how far we can overclock a Raspberry Pi using liquid nitrogen, and much more…
• Linus gets heated about kernel security — Linux Lord fires up over proposal to secure Linux by shutting down wonky processes
• Then calmly explains his position — His long post on the matter suggested to security practitioners that “'Do no harm' should be your mantra for any new hardening work.”
• Others act like children — So on the day of Kees' presentation, where he tried to drop a useless 0day on me and talk up how many upstream developers reviewed his code that did the same limitation *right*, I wrote an exploit of my own.
• Vulnerability in Intel Management Engine — Remote attackers could launch commands on a host of Intel-based computers, including laptops and desktops shipped with Intel Core processors since 2015.

Then we consider the recent smattering of opinion pieces on Microsoft's commitment to Open Source.

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• New Atari console runs Linux — The Ataribox is powered by a ‘customised’ AMD processor and uses Radeon graphics. On the software side the machine runs a ‘customised’ version of Linux that has an “easy-to-use user interface”.
• Ubuntu 17.10 final beta — Artful Final Beta includes updated versions of most of our core set of packages, including a current 4.13 kernel
• Ubuntu 17.10 Will Drop The 32-bit Desktop ISO — There will no longer be any "ubuntu-desktop-i386.iso" produced. There is no longer any effective QA or testing being done on the Ubuntu i386 desktop image on actual 32-bit-only hardware.
• Announcing the XFree KWin project — The idea is to be able to start KWin/Wayland without XWayland support.
• 6 year LTS kernel — Linux LTS releases will now be maintained for six years.
• Nextcloud Introducing Native Integrated End-to-end Encryption — Nextcloud End-to-end Encryption keeps the server from ever seeing the data while still facilitating syncing between devices and sharing with other users.
• SQL Server lands on Linux for the first time — Microsoft hit a major milestone today with the official general availability of SQL Server on Linux.
• Microsoft Rolls Out A Preview Of The New Skype For Linux — This long-awaited Skype for Linux update brings screen sharing, group chat, and other features not recently available under the current Skype for Linux client. This new Linux client is part of their effort to "rebuild Skype from the ground up with cloud technology."
• Microsoft becomes a sponsor of the Open Source Initiative — As a premium sponsor, Microsoft joins the likes of Google, IGM, HPE, AdblockPlus, GitHub and Heptio as top sponsors of the project. Other sponsors at lower levels include RedHat, The Linux Foundation, Mozilla and HP.
• When Microsoft met SUSE: This Windows-Linux partnership gets stronger every day — Microsoft SQL Server, which just became available on Linux, is also available on SLES and SLES on Azure on October 2.
• Will Microsoft love Linux to death? Shuttleworth and Stallman. — "It certainly looks that way. But it won't be so easy to extinguish us, because our reasons for using and advancing free software are not limited to practical convenience," he said.

Plus Debian warns of Hyper Threading issues; and of course a bit more.

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• OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise hit the Windows Store — Now OpenSUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and OpenSUSE Leap 42 are available for installation from the Windows Store.
• System76 Announce Their Own Linux Distribution called Pop!_OS — System76 say their ‘operating system’ — they don’t call it a distribution — will be built and tailored to meet the needs to “professionals and makers that use their computers to create.”
• Canonical Promises Smooth and Easy Unity 7 to GNOME Shell Migration for Users — Probably the most important thing that the Ubuntu developers have worked on lately is a smooth and easy migration process from Unity 7 to GNOME Shell
• Mir 1.0 Now Aiming To Support Wayland Clients Directly — Mir 0.27 also will feature a new set of APIs to develop a "Mir platform" outside of Mir itself, which can be used for developing Mir-Wayland platform support without having to fork Mir itself.
• MATE Developers Are Considering Mir-Over-Wayland — MATE developer Martin Wimpress has shared that they are talking to Mir developers about how Mir could be used as a Wayland compositor.
• Debian Warns Of Hyper Threading Issue With Intel Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs — Intel Skylake and Kabylake (6th and 7th gen CPUs) could "dangerously misbehave" when Hyper Threading is enabled.