Plus Google adds its weight behind Rust in the Linux Kernel, and the new security features landing in WSL2.

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• Dell to spin out remaining VMware stake, cements Friends With Benefits status for at least five years — The proposed transaction has been pitched as delivering value for shareholders, both in the short term and once the two corporations have less complicated structures that will let them compete more aggressively.
• Dell Technologies Announces Planned VMware Spin-Off — Under terms of the planned spin-off, VMware will distribute a special cash dividend of $11.5 - $12 billion to all VMware shareholders, including Dell Technologies.
• Dell Buys EMC For $67B In Largest Deal In Tech History
• COSMIC to Arrive in June Release of Pop!_OS 21.04 — We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!_OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization.
• There’s no place like GNOME: System 76 introduces COSMIC desktop GUI for its Pop!_OS Linux — System76 said that it studied user behaviour and sought to refine key elements of the desktop accordingly.
• pop-os/cosmic: — Computer Operating System Main Interface Components
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, indeed. Pop!_Shell will remain a separate extension.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, tiling will remain a separate extension and can be used on other distros. COMIC can as well.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — The is an extension that creates a unique GNOME UX while maintaining compatibility with GNOME and the GNOME app ecosystem and HIG.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Pop with the COSMIC desktop.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — We’re currently developing and testing on X and Pop 21.04 will default to X as well. However, we may be able to shift over to Wayland for future releases with the recent nvidia news about Wayland driver support.
• Google backs effort to bring Rust to the Linux kernel — "We feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel."
• Google Supports Getting Rust Into The Linux Kernel
• HN: Linus Torvalds on Rust support in kernel
• Linux 5.12 Diverted From Release To Allow An Extra Week Of Testing — Due to still a number of fixes landing this week, .Linus Torvalds decided to be safe and go for the extra round of testing.
• The 12 Most Interesting Changes Of Linux 5.12
• A bumpy 5.12 is due for release
• Element Matrix Services launches bridging for Microsoft Teams — A single Microsoft Teams Bridge supports unlimited users across unlimited channels. Pricing is based on the number of active users using the bridge from MS Teams, at a cost of $0.50 per user per month. Traffic from Element (or any other Matrix-based client) is free.
• HN: Will this bridge be be open source?
• Servicing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 Linux kernel — We’ve just shipped the 5.10.16.3 WSL 2 Linux kernel version to Windows Insiders which brings exciting new changes: Support for the LUKS disk encryption, and some long-awaited bug fixes.
• Microsoft Docs: Release Notes for WSL kernel
• microsoft/WSL: Issues found on WSL
• Hangover 0.6.5 Released For Running Windows Software On ARM64, POWER — Wednesday's release of Hangover 0.6.5 now allows for starting QEMU automatically if needed.

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 Android App mirroring, how the islands of the clouds are getting bridged, and Chris channels his inner Shuttleworth.

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• Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches Its 1.0 Stable Milestone — Stratis has been the Red Hat play two years in development for delivering next-gen Linux storage following their decision to abandon Btrfs support. Stratis offers ZFS and Btrfs like functionality and a lot of other new capabilities while this past week marked its first stable release.
• Stratis Whitepaper
• ​Red Hat Satellite integrated new, improved Ansible DevOps — Red Hat is adding Ansible DevOps capabilities to its Red Hat Satellite system management program.
• hibernation — does it work for you? — We have had a long discussion about hibernate (suspend to disk) being unreliable. But there seems to be no hard data. Let's gather some!
• Microsoft announces app mirroring to let you use any Android app on Windows 10 — The feature, which Microsoft is referring to as app mirroring and shows up in Windows as an app called Your Phone, seems to be work best with Android for now. Although Microsoft did announce the ability to transfer webpages from an iPhone to a Windows 10 desktop so you can pick up where you left off on mobile.
• Microsoft’s Linux powered dev boards, Azure Sphere for sale — An OS purpose built for security and agility to create a trustworthy platform for new IoT experiences. Our secured OS builds security innovations pioneered in Windows into an HLOS small enough for MCUs.
• Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Board — Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Kit_US Version
• Microsoft open-sources Infer.NET AI code — Infer.NET, which is on GitHub right now, takes a model-based approach to machine learning. The developer gives the framework a model, and the framework then develops a machine-learning algorithm directly from the model provided.
• Node.js and JS foundations looking to merge — “The Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation boards have met several times already to discuss a potential alignment of the communities. The Foundation leaders and key technical stakeholders believe that a tighter alignment of communities will expand the scope of the current Foundations and enable greater support for Node.js and a broader range of JavaScript projects,”

Plus new releases from nano and Nextcloud, huge news for Jupiter Broadcasting, and more.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• Give Fedora Silverblue a test drive — Fedora Silverblue is a new variant of Fedora Workstation with rpm-ostree at its core to provide fully atomic upgrades. Furthermore, Fedora Silverblue is immutable and upgrades as a whole, providing easy rollbacks from updates if something goes wrong. Fedora Silverblue is great for developers using Fedora with good support for container-focused workflows.
• nano 3.0 released — GNU nano 3.0 "Water Flowing Underground" speeds up the reading of a file by seventy percent, roughly doubles the speed of handling ASCII text, changes the way words at line boundaries are deleted, makes wipe the next word and the preceding word...
• Nextcloud 14 released — The upcoming Nextcloud 14 introduces a series of improvements to make Nextcloud even easier to use and also more accessible to people with visual disabilities.
• Firefox Focus to switch to Gecko — In the next weeks, we’ll release a new version of Focus for Android, and for the first time, Focus will come bundled with Gecko, the browser engine that powers Firefox Quantum.
• Chrome OS 70 brings native network file share support — Chrome OS will have its NativeSmb flag to set to enabled by default
• Microsoft planned to try and stop users installing alternative browsers in Win10 but then backtracked
• Jupiter Broadcasting Joins Linux Academy — As part of Linux Academy, we’re going to do more than create better content. We’re going to contribute back.
• User Error is back! — User Error is back with a new set of hosts! We answer some #AskError questions and talk about whether the Linux desktop will ever make money. Plus we wonder if dockless bike sharing is a good idea and whether travel really is as great as everyone seems to think.

Plus an update on the Conservancy's fight with the Software Freedom Law Center and more.

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• Introducing Amazon Linux 2 — Amazon Linux 2 provides a modern execution environment with LTS Kernel (4.9) tuned for optimal performance on Amazon Web Services (AWS), systemd support, and newer tooling (gcc 7.2.1, glibc 2.25, binutils 2.27).
• Amazon Linux 2 Benchmarks — With Amazon AWS this week having released Amazon Linux 2 LTS I was excited to put this updated cloud-focused operating system through some performance tests to see how it stacks up with the more well known Linux distributions.
• OpenSSH coming to Windows 10 — The software giant is now adding a native OpenSSH client to Windows 10. It’s available immediately as a beta option in the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10, and it’s easy to enable.
• Not just the client — we also shipped OpenSSH's sshd server, but it's a little tricky to configure right now. Expect a blog post this week. * This is not production-ready in the current version of Windows 10 (hence the "(Beta)" in the label), but we hope to be soon.
• Mozilla faces blowback after slipping Mr Robot plugin into Firefox — Firefox users noticed a strange new plug-in popping up in their browsers. A new plug-in called Looking Glass found its way into each instance of the new Firefox Quantum browser. It was disabled by default, but users were still alarmed to see a plugin they hadn’t installed.
• Steve Klabnik on Twitter — I am pretty upset with my employer, @mozilla, today
• Carol Nichols, Rus Dev on Twitter — "Mozilla wasn't paid for the Mr. Robot tie-in"
• Intel to slap hardware lock on Management Engine code to thwart downgrade attacks — From version 12 onward, ME-equipped chips will defend against patch rollbacks.
• Conservancy update on fight with Law Center — Today, Conservancy filed for summary judgment in SFLC's trademark cancellation action. As I understand from our lawyers, summary judgment is a mechanism to ask a Court to expediently handle a matter where the facts are straightforward and, as a matter of law, there is no plausible way that the party filing for summary judgment won't prevail.
• TechSNAP reboot — Systems, Network, and Administration Podcast. Every week TechSNAP covers the stories that impact those of us in the tech industry, and all of us that follow it. Every episode we dedicate a portion of the show to answer audience questions, discuss best practices, and solving your problems.

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.