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 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 "The problem is that these releases are in effect no longer maintained.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.

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?