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• KDE Plasma 5.27 To Provide Better Multi-Monitor Support — KDE developer Marco Martin wrote a blog post today outlining some of the multi-monitor work that's been going into Plasma 5.27
• This week in KDE: big UI improvements!
• Schedules/Plasma 5 - KDE Community Wiki
• KDE Kicks Off 2023 With UI Refinements, More Fixes
• GNOME 44 Hopes and Dreams — GNOME devs are already working hard on the next major release, GNOME 44, due out in late March 2023 with more new features and enhancements.
• Dynamic Triple Buffering Hopefully Will Land For GNOME 44
• OpenZFS Performance Gains — With the combination of enabled prefetch and avoided memory copy this change improves sequential single-threaded read speed from a wide NVMe pool from 2049 to 3932 MiB/s. During write profiler shows 22% reduction of unhalted CPU cycles at the same throughput of 3653 MiB/s.
• End of the 4.9 Series — Greg KH: I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.337 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.
• Linux 6.1.4
• Linux 4.9.337 Released To End Out The 2016 LTS Series
• Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Starts to Play Games — Red Hat engineer and longtime open-source Nouveau developer Karol Herbst wrote on his chaos.social account about NVK running games and showing off a screenshot of The Talos Principle running with this open-source, "community" Vulkan driver.
• karolherbst on Social
• The Talos Principle — The Talos Principle is a philosophical first-person puzzle game from Croteam, the creators of the legendary Serious Sam series, written by Tom Jubert (FTL, The Swapper) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Claim Everything).

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

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• Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
• Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
• Lars Knoll Announces His Successor For Qt Chief Maintainer — The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. This means Volker Hilsheimer will be our new Chief Maintainer. Congratulations!
• New Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project
• Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
• X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
• X Windows System Design Principles, a lecture by James Gettys
• A Political History of X - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
• Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 — Torvalds commented that real soon they expect to have the Rust infrastructure merged within the kernel, possibly even for the next release -- meaning Linux 5.20.
• Open Source Summit North America 2022: Keynote: Linus Torvalds
• How are we improving Firefox Snap performance? Part 2

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• 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

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.

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 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.