Recent advances in embedded Linux, Canonical takes full control of LXD, ZFS gets a handy Btrfs feature, and updates on the show's production.

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• Status of Embedded Linux — In this talk, Tim will give an overview of issues in the Linux in the embedded space that have come about in the past year
• The 2023 State of The Embedded Linux Ecosystem
• LXD Moves to Canonical — While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision and is now in the process of moving the project over.
• Ubuntu Maker Canonical Pulls In Control Of LXD
• Nearly 40% of Linux gamers on Steam are on Steam Deck — Overall the Steam Deck has kind of taken over Linux gaming and June 2023's statistic are pretty striking.
• Steam Deck on Twitter — “Hi all, just a quick note to celebrate a big milestone - we’ve just passed 10,000 Verified and Playable titles on Steam Deck! 🎉🥳🎉 A bunch of these titles are on sale (along with Steam Deck itself) at the Steam Summer Sale!
• ZFS Block Cloning — Block Cloning allows to clone a file (or a subset of its blocks) into another (or the same) file by just creating additional references to the data blocks without copying the data itself. Block Cloning can be described as a fast, manual deduplication

Why everyone is excited about the next Linux kernel, Valve's big hire, and Red Hat's clone war.

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• Linux 6.4 Released — Released With Early Apple M2 Code, More WiFi 7, AMD Guided Autonomous Mode
• Linux 6.4 Released, focus on 6.5 — Linus Torvalds on Sunday announced the release without making any comment at all on the state of the kernel, or the efforts that led to the release of this version. Indeed, he had little to say about the progress of version 6.4
• Btrfs In Linux 6.5 May Bring A Cumulative Performance Improvement
• Linux Kernel 6.4 Released with Interesting Mix of Changes
• Bcachefs File-System Pull Request Submitted For Linux 6.5
• Early access to the LXD graphical user interface — While we don’t yet advise you to use the LXD UI in a production setting, we made it available as an experimental feature and would like to invite you to take it out for a spin and share your feedback.
• Early look at the LXD web UI - YouTube
• Google Pixel 8 could debut Desktop Mode — The Pixel 8 series is expected to leverage DisplayPort alternate mode, although specific details are not yet available. Through code analysis, it is possible to speculate on Google’s intentions for this feature. One obvious use would be to transform a Pixel 8 phone into a desktop replacement.

• Ubuntu Edge
• Valve Contracts Another Prominent Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Developer — Great to hear and given her vast experience will be exciting to see what open-source improvements she manages to further advance Linux gaming.
• Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes — Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make. That brings me to CentOS Stream, of which there is immense confusion. I acknowledge that this is a change in a longstanding tradition where we went above and beyond, and change like this can cause some confusion.
• Furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream
• git.centos.org
• A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model — We fear that be it through incompetence or malice, many RHEL salespeople and business development professionals may regularly violate GPL and no one knows about it. That said, the business model as described by IBM's Red Hat may well comply with the GPL — it's just so murky that any tweak to the model in any direction seems to definitely violate, in our experience.

Note: Linux Action News will be off next week.

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• Debian 12 “bookworm” released — This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as "obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for "bookworm" is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.
• Debian 12 is nearly ready, and reassuringly boring
• Debian 12 discussion on Hacker News
• Linux Foundation & RISC-V International Launch RISC-V Fundamentals Course — This course prepares IT professionals to write assembly language code for RISC-V processors and use high-level languages like C to develop applications for RISC-V-based systems.
• RISC-V Fundamentals Training Course — Learn everything you need to know about RISC-V, the open-source instruction set architecture that is predicted to become ubiquitous as it paves the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation.
• Help Us Test Evolution — If you’re a bit more advanced user who would like to help with testing and you use Evolution from Flathub, consider switching to the beta channel. You wouldn’t switch to something broken. Milan doesn’t let low quality releases out. It’s for rather rare bugs that would be great to identify and fix before they hit everyone, or for early feedback when UX changes are being done.
• Evolution Email App Wants Flatpak Beta Testers
• Nextcloud Hub 5 — Hub 5 builds on all the improvements we introduced earlier this year, including the Smart Picker and it’s AI integrations, the cool new Nextcloud Tables app and more.
• Nextcloud on Twitter — Announcing Hub 5: Self-hosted AI-powered digital workspace for everyone!

Ubuntu gets serious about the immutable desktop, red flags from Red Hat, and the little tricks Apple used to patch Wine.

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• Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux Desktop base — In this blog post we discuss the architecture of immutable operating systems, their benefits and drawbacks, and the role of Ubuntu Core in the immutable Linux landscape.
• Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement — However, the "tradeoff" to focusing on that is they will be pivoting away from less desktop application work and "cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHE version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora."
• LibreOffice to be cut out of RHEL installs
• Asahi: Big Updates — Get your updater ready!
• OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux
• Wine comes to macOS: Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit powered by CrossOver source code — We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit.
• Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is Wine
• Apple Home Brew Repo — Using the game-porting-toolkit formula requires downloading the Game Porting Toolkit from developer.apple.com.
• Game Porting Toolkit — Game Porting Toolkit is Apple's new translation layer which combines Wine with Apple's own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 9-12. Games that use anti-cheat or aggressive DRM generally don't work. Games that require AVX CPUs also do not work e.g. Last of Us.

How the recent XFS bug was squashed, insights into why Microsoft built their own Linux from scratch, and recent attacks on Archive.org.

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• Those Using The XFS File-System Will Want To Avoid Linux 6.3 For Now
• XFS Metadata Corruption On Linux 6.3 Tracked Down To One Missing One-Line Patch — This is a bug fix that we thought just fixed a livelock on stripe aligned filesystems. I'm guessing that in certain circumstances instead of livelocking on repeated failed allocations, it results in a broken mapping being returned to the writeback code and hence misdirecting the writeback IO.
• Linux 6.3.5 Released With XFS Metadata Corruption Fix — Making Linux 6.3.5 a notable point release is that it has back-ported the fix for the XFS metadata corruption bug that was plaguing the Linux 6.3 point releases.
• Azure Linux - Microsoft revealed why it did not fork Fedora — Why did Microsoft create Azure Linux? “We needed a Linux distribution internally,” Perrin said. “We wanted a consistent platform for ourselves.” Now there is “one vendor to support the full AKS stack”.
• Plasma 6 is Wayland only - No X11 for Plasma 6 — With Fedora KDE and Kinoite being fully Wayland by default from login (since F38) to desktop (since F34), it's now time to work toward eliminating our dependency on the Xorg server for Plasma 6.0.
• Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 — The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release. The default desktop session is now the Wayland session in most cases.
• Fedora 36 Changes: Replace the fbdev drivers with simpledrm and the DRM fbdev emulation layer — This change replaces the legacy Linux frame buffer device (fbdev) drivers that are still used in Fedora, with the latest simpledrm driver and the DRM fbdev emulation layer.

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS end of standard support — Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, codenamed ‘Bionic Beaver,’ is approaching the end of its standard five-year maintenance period on 31 May 2023.
• Let us serve you, but don’t bring us down — Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services. This activity brought archive.org down for all users for about an hour.
• Internet Archive — Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

Microsoft's new Linux server distro, Red Hat Summit 2023 highlights, big changes at CodeWeavers, and Podman catches up to Docker Desktop.

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• Podman Desktop 1.0 Annouced — Podman Desktop offers a user-friendly interface for handling containers and integrating with Kubernetes from a local workstation.
• Podman.io
• Podman
• Podman Desktop 1.0: Local container development made easy
• Podman Desktop 1.0 Released As An Alternative To Docker Desktop
• Podman Desktop 1.0: Local container development made easy
• Introducing Azure Linux — This General Availability announcement follows our October preview announcement under the CBL-Mariner project codename. We’d like to thank the customers who provided valuable feedback and insight during our preview.
• Introduction to the Azure Linux Container Host for AKS | Microsoft Learn
• CodeWeavers An Employee Ownership Trust — As of April 12th, the the company has a new shareholder - the CodeWeavers Purpose Trust. This Trust will become the primary owner of CodeWeavers.
• CodeWeavers Now Controlled By An Employee Ownership Trust
• Red Hat Summit 2023 — Highlights — The Red Hat Summit 2023 witnessed the launch of OpenShift AI and Red Hat Ansible software, security cloud services, and Linux management features.
• The moment for AI
• Automation and the AI revolution — Generative AI is everywhere. But I cannot overstate how different our approach to all this has been.
• Red Hat Summit 2023: Adolfo Rodriguez, Advance Auto Parts - YouTube — Adolfo Rodriguez, SVP of Technology Transformation at Advance Auto Parts joins theCUBE hosts John Furrier & Rob Strechay for our continuing coverage of Red Hat Summit 2023

Bcachefs hits a major milestone, how the Red Hat cuts impact Fedora, Plasma 6 plans, and the software update bricking EV batteries.

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• bcachefs out for review — I'm submitting the bcachefs filesystem for review and inclusion.
• bcachefs TestServerSetup
• Bcachefs Submitted For Review - Aims For Mainline
• Fedora Program Manager Laid Off — On 24 April 2023, Red Hat announced a 4% reduction in global staff. As a member of that 4%, today is my last day at Red Hat.
• Fedora Program Manager Laid Off As Part Of Red Hat Cuts
• KDE Developers Planning For Plasma 6.0 — This week my fellow developers and I are in Germany for an in-person Plasma sprint–our first since 2019!
• KDE Developers In Germany Planning For Plasma 6.0
• KDE Plasma 6 to Ship with Floating Panel by Default, Double-Click for Opening Files
• Tesla sued over battery-busting OTA patch in Model S, X — The named plaintiffs claim that, despite Tesla saying their batteries are supposed to last the life of the vehicle, the Musk-owned automaker "deliberately and significantly interfere[d] with the car's performance through software updates that reduce operating capacity."

We get you up to speed on two serious flaws, Linux's recent gaming loss, Ubuntu doubling down on RISC-V, and news from the Open Source Summit North America.

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• CVE - CVE-2023-28410 — Improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer in some Intel(R) i915 Graphics drivers for linux before kernel version 6.2.10 may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access.
• INTEL-SA-00886
• Intel Security Center
• New NetFilter flaw gives attackers root privileges — A new Linux NetFilter kernel flaw has been discovered, allowing unprivileged local users to escalate their privileges to root level, allowing complete control over a system.
• NVD - CVE-2023-32233
• Goodbye to Roblox on Linux — I’m sorry to be such a downer about this, but it’s the reality. We have to spend our time porting to and supporting the platforms that will grow our community.
• Proper support for the Linux platform - Feature Requests
• Ubuntu 23.04 Now Works on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC — ”This partnership will provide users with a seamless development experience, allowing them to leverage the best of open source software and RISC-V through Ubuntu and VisionFive 2.”
• Canonical enables Ubuntu on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer
• Open Source Summit North America — Open Source Summit is a conference umbrella, composed of a collection of events covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today.
• AWS open-sources snapshot fuzzing and policy authorization tools
• Schedule - Linux Foundation Events
• The Linux Foundation on Twitter

The results from the recent HDR Hackfest, Mozilla's new acquisition, and the concerning crack down on free software encryption.

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• HDR hackfest wrap-up — People from various organizations were on-site: Red Hat, KDE, System76, AMD, Igalia, Collabora, Canonical, etc. Some more people from NVIDIA, Intel and Google joined us remotely (some of them waking up at 2 AM due to their timezone!).
• Fakespot is acquired by Mozilla — I have exciting news to share, Fakespot has been acquired by Mozilla! We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet.
• Apple removes Fakespot from App Store after Amazon complains
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.4 — New Rust code for Linux 6.4 includes the introduction of the pin-init API, which is for dealing with safe pinned initialization and allows reducing the amount of "unsafe" Rust code within the kernel.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter: My Rust contributions for Linux 6.4 are finally merged upstream! 🦀🐧 — The next big challenge is going to be the DRM subsystem abstractions!
• India blocks 14 mobile apps used by terrorists in Pakistan to send information in J-K — As inputs received that these applications are being used to further terror propaganda and incite youths in Jammu and Kashmir, the Central government blocked them under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
• India removes ban on VLC media player after cybersecurity concerns addressed
• Text of the RESTRICT Act — To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes...
• Tell Congress: Don’t Outlaw Encrypted Applications

What we know about the Red Hat layoffs, highlights of Linux 6.3, and Canonical's bold claim in Ubuntu 23.04.

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• Red Hat Cutting “Hundreds Of Jobs” — The tech layoffs have now reached Red Hat with "hundreds of jobs" being cut and the initial round of layoffs being announced today.
• Message to Red Hat associates today
• IBM announces layoffs at Red Hat — "Our reductions will focus on general and administrative (G&A) and similar roles across all functions and represent a reduction of just under four percent in total," he said. "We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products."
• Linux Kernel 6.3 Officially Released — Introduces a new Intel VPU DRM accelerated driver, BIG TCP support for IPv4, and native Steam Deck controller support.
• Btrfs Receives A Very Important Last Minute Fix For Linux 6.3 — Ahead of the Linux 6.3 kernel being potentially released as stable on Sunday, two last-minute patches for the Btrfs file-system driver were submitted
• Linux 6.3 Released With More Meteor Lake Enablement — Zen 4 Auto IBRS & Much More
• Linux 6.3 Features Have A Lot For AMD & Intel — Also Steam Deck, ASUS Motherboards & More
• Intel i219-LM Had Only Been Running At ~60% Of Max
• The new Flathub Website — Welcome to Flathub, the home of hundreds of apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution.
• Flathub Website Gets a Brand New Look
• Docker Security Essentials eBook — This guide focuses on securing the Docker platform on Linux. Follow along with the techniques demonstrated in this guide. All you need is a Linux server with Docker installed and running.
• Ubuntu 23.04 Released — Our focus, as always, has been improving quality, performance and enjoyment for all our users, whether that’s more elegant update handling for snaps, improved UI for installation and quick settings or a more accessible gaming experience.
• Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster)
• Ubuntu 23.04 with GNOME 44 and a stable Steam Snap — [The] Snap of Steam [is] being promoted to stable. Canonical said over 150,000 people downloaded the preview version, so there was plenty of interest in it. This Snap bundles a bunch of dependencies needed allowing you to run new and old titles without messing with PPAs.
• Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster scuttles into public view — Lunar Lobster adds support for Microsoft Azure Active Directory — a first for a Linux desktop according to Canonical. The feature will allow users on Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans to authenticate Ubuntu Desktops using a common set of credentials.
• Ubuntu 23.04 Flavors: What’s New — Arriving alongside the Ubuntu 23.04 release are new versions of official community flavors.
• Azure AD authentication comes to Ubuntu Desktop 23.04 — Ubuntu Desktop 23.04 is the first and only Linux distribution to enable native user authentication with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).
• aad-auth: Azure AD authentication module for Ubuntu — Azure AD User Authentication will be included as part of an Ubuntu Pro subscription in Ubuntu 23.04 before being backported to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and future LTS releases from 2023.
• microsoft-authentication-library-for-go — The MSAL library for Go is part of the Microsoft identity platform for developers (formerly named Azure AD) v2.0. It enables you to acquire security tokens to call protected APIs. It uses industry-standard OAuth2 and OpenID Connect.
• Next Ubuntu 23.10 Name — The Ubuntu release that will be delivered in October 2023, designated 23.10.

What we like about Fedora 38, why the Rust foundation is in hot water, and more.

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• Announcing Fedora Linux 38 — The Fedora Linux 38 release is here! With this release, we’re starting a new on-time streak. In fact, we’re ready a week early!
• What’s new in Fedora Workstation 38
• Rust Foundation apologizes for trademark policy confusion — The Rust Foundation on Monday apologized for confusion caused by the organization's proposed trademark policy changes.
• A note on the Trademark Policy Draft
• Rust Foundation - Rust Trademark Policy Draft Revision
• Canonical Livepatch gets even better — Now supporting Hardware Enablement Kernels.
• Proton 8.0-1 Published With More Game Support — Proton 8.0-1 is the much awaited re-base of Proton against the Wine 8.0 state
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — “Proton 8.0 is now available with many changes. Our biggest rebase to date! Note: it requires a GPU with Vulkan 1.3 support. Experimental-8.0 will follow sometime this week.
• LFNW Call for Papers — We invite you to submit your proposal to speak at LFNW2023! We're seeking both experienced technical presenters, as well as first-timers to present to a hybrid audience.
• LinuxFest Northwest 2023
• In letter to EU, open source bodies say Cyber Resilience Act could have ‘chilling effect’ on software development — Penalties for non-compliance may include fines of up to €15 million, or 2.5% of global turnover.
• Cyber Resilience Act

A classic gadget gets a Linux-powered new lease on life, the next project getting Rusty, great news for Btrfs users, and more.

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• Linux Tech Sustainability — The mainline Linux 6.4 kernel is set to see a new touchscreen driver for supporting the Novatek NVT-ts.
• Acer Iconia One 7 B1-730
• Unlocking the bootloader and disabling dm-verity on Android-X86 devices
• Here Comes WebGPU — After years of development, the Chrome team ships WebGPU.
• Chrome 113 To Ship WebGPU By Default
• Muse on Twitter — Breaking news🚨 Chrome's Web GPU has launched after 6 years of development! 🚀
• A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
• Plasma 6 Early Builds — I’ve now got a working Plasma 6 dev session on my machine. It’s still rough, but it’s usable.
• Early KDE Plasma 6 Development State
• Rust Support Is Being Worked On For V4L2 — Daniel Almeida of Collabora sent out initial Rust V4L2 support patches on Thursday. This provides just enough for working with a prototype VirtIO camera driver written in Rust along with a Rust sample driver.
• Linux 6.4 Bringing Apple M2 Additions — Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month.
• Btrfs Improvments — This week a number of patches from SUSE engineer Qu Wenruo were queued into kdave's linux.git for-next branch of the Btrfs file-system driver development code.

A fresh take on open-source funding, Fedora’s plan for better encryption out of the box, and our impressions of the latest Ubuntu Beta.

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• New FOSS Fund to Support Free and Open Source Projects — To help maintain and sustain this ecosystem, companies and nonprofits alike have experimented with a framework called a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Contributor Fund.
• Bloomberg Launches Open-Source Funding Initiative
• Encrypted Fedora — Owen Taylor of Red Hat laid out a mailing list post and Discourse thread today around the future of encryption with Fedora.
• Google’s VM Turbo Charger — With this series, a workload running in a VM gets the same task placement and DVFS treatment as it would when running in the host.
• Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 CPUfreq/sched and VM guest workload problems
• Google Posts KVM-CPUFreq Driver To Dramatically Boost VM Performance, Power Efficiency
• KDE Discuss — KDE Discuss is a place for questions, requests, suggestions, banter, and in general interacting closely with the people actively involved in KDE, as well as with fellow users.
• KDE Discuss is a new discussion service from KDE for everybody who makes and uses KDE software
• New MSI Laptop Driver — Functions handled by the embedded controller on recent MSI laptops.
• new msi-ec driver patch
• Ubuntu 23.04 Beta Hands On
• Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup — Two meetups in the month of April, join us!

What we're liking about GNOME 44, how Microsoft's Linux distro is trying to attract more users, and we bust a CentOS myth.

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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!

Nextcloud moves to the front of the pack with their new release, a moment to appreciate curl, and Amazon goes all in with Fedora.

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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• curl 8.0.0 is Here — This a major version number bump but without any ground-breaking changes or fireworks. We decided it was about time to reset the minor number down to more a manageable level and doing it exactly on curl’s 25th birthday made it extra fun. There is no API nor ABI break in this version.
• Twenty-five Tears of curl — Taking curl this far and being able to work full time on my hobby project is a dream come real. curl is a huge part of my life.
• curl 8.0.0 with Daniel Stenberg [YouTube]
• curl 8.0.1: because I jinxed it
• Amazon Linux 2023 — When looking for a base to serve as a starting point for Amazon Linux 2023, Fedora was the best choice. We found that Fedora’s core tenets (Freedom, Friends, Features, First) resonate well with our vision for Amazon Linux.
• Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux — Today we’re releasing a big update to our GPU drivers for Asahi Linux, so I wanted to talk to you about what we’ve been working on since then, and what’s next!
• Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress On Apple Silicon Graphics, Promising OpenGL Speed
• Canonical joins the confidential computing consortium — Confidential computing is here to give you back control over the security guarantees of your workloads. As the consortium explains, confidential computing aims to “protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment.
• Introduction to Confidential Computing [YouTube]
• Hub 4 pioneers ethical AI integration for a more productive and collaborative future — Today, we are excited to announce a major step forward with Hub 4 – the very first on-premises collaboration platform to integrate intelligent features across its applications.
• Develop for Nextcloud — Write new applications, extend Nextcloud or integrate other software.
• Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating
• Berlin Meet Up — Friday, March 24, 2023

Docker's open-source crackdown, the Wayland regression solved this week, and why ipmitool's repo has been locked.

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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.

Nextcloud's big new customer, some last-minute surprises in GNOME 44, and Flathub's ambitious plans for 2023.

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• Nextcloud’s Big new Customer — After a silent migration of millions of users, Telekom and Nextcloud are now unveiling the first feature of the new MagentaCloud: a free office.
• Last Minute GNOME Awesome — GNOME Shell and Mutter 44 have reached their release candidate milestone ahead of the official release in just two weeks, all is going to plan, and to our surprise, there have been several last-minute additions.
• GNOME 44 Mutter Adds fractionalscalev1 Wayland Support
• GNOME Shell & Mutter Complete Their Migration Away From GTK3
• wp-fractional-scale-v1: New protocol for fractional scaling — This protocols allows for communicating preferred fractional scales to surfaces, which in combination with wp_viewport can be used to render surfaces at fractional scales when applicable.
• Asahi Linux Rust Drivers — This is my first take on the Rust abstractions for the DRM subsystem.
• Flathub in 2023 — It’s been quite a few months since the most recent updates about Flathub last year. We’ve been busy behind the scenes, so I’d like to share what we’ve been up to at Flathub and why—and what’s coming up from us this year
• Flathub in 2023 - Flathub Discourse

FFmpeg gets new superpowers, Plasma’s switch to Qt6 gets official; what you need to know. Plus we round up the top features coming to Linux 6.3.

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• Steam Deck one Year Later — The Steam Deck has been about a year on the market now (it started shipping at the end of February 2022). This first anniversary is a good chance to review what has happened since then.
• FFmpeg 6.0 Released — 6.0 was released on 2023-02-27. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 6.0 release branch, which was cut from master on 2023-02-19.
• FFmpeg 6.0 Released With NVIDIA NVENC AV1, VA-API Improvements
• FOSDEM 2023 - Dual presentation: FFmpeg 6 and VLC.js
• Plasma Switches to Qt6 — The master branch for Plasma repos will be made Qt6-only tomorrow.
• Hardware Noise “hwnoise” Tool for Linux 6.3 — hwnoise collects the periodic summary from the osnoise tracer running with interrupts disabled. By disabling interrupts, and the scheduling of threads as a consequence, only non-maskable interrupts and hardware-related noise is allowed.
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.3 — In the pull request Miguel Ojeda commented, "more core additions, getting closer to a point where the first Rust modules can be upstreamed."
• EXT4 Getting Direct I/O Performance Improvements With 6.3 — Improved performance for ext4
• Btrfs Enjoys More Performance With Linux 6.3 - Including Some 3~10x Speedups — Some of the performance work is quite juicy, as outlined in today's pull request.
• Btrfs updates for 6.3 - David Sterba
• Linux 6.3 Scheduler Updates Bring Fixes & Minor Optimizations
• RISC-V With Linux 6.3 Lands Optimized String Functions Via Zbb Extension — RISC-V with Linux 6.3 has improved its extension detection and alternative patching infrastructure for dealing with non spec compliant extensions.

Our favorite features in Linux 6.2, the Hollywood tool getting open-sourced, and a systemd update you need to know about.

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• DreamWorks’ Renderer Used for ‘Puss in Boots’ is Going Open-Source — DreamWork animation company is making its in-house renderer open-source very soon
• OpenMoonRay.org — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, and Puss In Boots: The Last Wish.
• MoonRay Documentation Home
• Systemd 253 — Systemd 253 has been released. As always, the list of changes is extensive. Support for version-1 control groups and separate /usr systems is going away later this year. There is a new tool for working with unified kernel images, a number of new unit-file options have been added, and much more.
• systemd 253: The future of enterprise Linux boot processes.
• Debian Installer Testing Call — Starting with this release, official images include firmware packages from main and non-free-firmware, along with metadata to configure the installed system accordingly.
• Linux 6.2 — Please do give 6.2 a testing. Maybe it's not a sexy LTS release like 6.1 ended up being, but all those regular pedestrian kernels want some test love too.
• Linux_6.2 - Linux Kernel Newbies — This release includes faster mitigration of the Retbleed vulnerability and a new FineIBT mitigation feature; Btrfs RAID5/6 and performance improvements, sysfs knobs that allow controlling block device writeback, support for TCP Protective Load Balancing, improved Rust support, BPF features like User defined objects, the runtime verification tool, and some optional RCU power savings.
• The Best Linux 6.2 Features From Intel Arc Graphics To Better Performance For Older PCs
• LUP 500 Micro Brewery Meetup — Sat, Mar 4, 2023, 4:00 PM at 192 Brewing Company in Mount Vernon, WA

Some Git flaws you need to know about, we reflect on 10 years of Steam on Linux, and then dive into the much anticipated Plasma 5.27.

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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.

We round up some news from FOSDEM 2023, update a 21-year-old project, and the Fedora fix that's been a few releases in the making.

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• FOSDEM 2023: Matrix 2.0 — In this talk we will explain the fundamental changes which are landing in Matrix 2.0, which speeds up Matrix to be at least as snappy as the fastest proprietary messaging apps - all while handling thousands of rooms spanning millions of users.
• FOSDEM 2023: Fedora Asahi — Asahi Fedora Remix exists to assist the Asahi community with Apple Silicon upstreaming and to provide a nifty ARM-based Fedora Workstation for those that own Apple Silicon hardware.
• Fedora Asahi Aims To Provide The Fedora Workstation Experience For Apple Silicon Systems
• SIGs/Asahi - Fedora Project Wiki
• FOSDEM 2023: Podcasting 2.0 — In this talk we will show how the Podcasting 2.0 community is reinventing Podcasting by adding tons of new features, while keeping all this interoperable.
• MythTV 33 Released — Some of the MythTV 33 highlights include a new web interface for the MythTV setup experience, a new waveform visualization for the MythMusic area, and switching to the latest upstream FFmpeg release.
• MythTV, Open Source DVR
• Linode's Green Light Beta Program — Get early access and test new Linode products before they hit the market, provide valuable feedback to influence product direction, and become part of a community of developers helping us build the cloud that works for you.
• Fedora 38 Change: Unfiltered Flathub — This change would remove the filtering from our Flathub offering, so that users can enable a complete version of Flathub using the third party repositories feature.
• Fedora 38 To Get Rid Of Its Flathub Filtering, Allowing Many More Apps On Fedora
• The Coder Robe | Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale — The Coder Robe is black and is a one-size-fits-most robe made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. It is embroidered on the left chest with a classic white on black Coder Radio logo.

A lot happened in the free desktop world this week, we cover the impressive releases, changes, and surprises.

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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.

An Ubuntu expiration date approaches, openSUSE has a new handy solution, and the container security issue that remains unfixed.

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• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS End Of Life — Ubuntu 18.04 ‘Bionic Beaver’ is reaching End of Standard Support this April, also known sometimes as End Of Life (EOL).
• Ubuntu 22.04.2 Point Release Delayed by 2 Weeks — Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS was due for release on Thursday, February 9. However, the release has had to be delayed by two weeks, and is now scheduled to arrive on Thursday, February 23.
• Ubuntu Pro
• Ubuntu Extended Security Maintenance
• Wine 8.0 is out now with major compatibility improvements — One of the major changes here is the conversion to the PE format for various modules. This format is used by Windows, and an important milestone for Wine to increase compatibility with copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers and more.
• openSUSE Making It Easier To Install H.264 Codec Support — Inspired by the Fedora / Red Hat and Cisco collaboration around OpenH264 support, openSUSE/SUSE set out for a similar arrangement with Cicsco and its OpenH264 codecs.
• Linux 6.2-rc5 Released — Due to an uptick in activity this week and the downtime around Christmas / end-of-year holidays, Torvalds is planning on this cycle spanning through Linux 6.2-rc8 before going gold.
• Linux 6.3 To Remove Obsolete GPU Drivers: ATI Rage 128, 3Dfx, S3 Savage, i810 & More — Hitting the chopping block with the Linux 6.3 kernel are the following DRM drivers: i810, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, and via.
• Kernel Security Korner — The issue involved in that compromise became known as CVE-2019-5736 and a complex workaround was implemented in runC to prevent similar vulnerabilities in the future.

A high-profile Linux kernel network flaw, we put JFS on a death watch, and break down the controversial Firefox update this week.

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• A new privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel — The vulnerability consists of a stack buffer overflow due to an integer underflow vulnerability inside the nftpayloadcopyvlan function, which is invoked with nftpayload expressions as long as a VLAN tag is present in the current skb.
• netfilter: nftpayload: add C-VLAN support · torvalds/linux@f6ae9f1
• CVE-2023-0179
• CVE-2023-0179- Red Hat Customer Portal
• [net,3/3] netfilter: nftpayload: incorrect arithmetics when fetching VLAN header bits - Patchwork
• oss-sec: Re: CVE-2023-0179: Linux kernel stack buffer overflow in nftables: PoC and writeup
• libvirt 9.0 Released For Latest Linux Virtualization API — Libvirt 9.0 adds support for external snapshot deletion with QEMU using its existing API, libvirt 9.0 with QEMU now supports PASST as "Plug A Simple Socket Transport" for connecting an emulated network device to the host's network, QEMU external back-end support for SWTPM as a software Trusted Platform Module (TPM), support for passing file descriptors rather than passing files for the QEMU disk, and other additions.
• JFS Filesystem’s Days are Numbered — IBM developed the JFS file-system originally in the 90's for AIX and the second-generation implementation then ported to Linux after it was made open-source.
• Firefox 109.0 Ships Manifest Version 3 — Manifest Version 3 (MV3) extension support is now enabled by default (MV2 remains enabled/supported). This major update also ushers an exciting user interface change in the form of the new extensions button.
• Here’s what’s going on in the world of extensions
• Manage your extensions using the extensions button in the toolbar
• Manifest v3 signing available November 21 on Firefox Nightly
• Google delays start of Manifest V2 Chrome extension deprecation — The original plan called for Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary builds to start experiments that turned off Manifest V2 extension support. Additionally, Manifest V3 would be required to get the “Featured” badge in the Chrome Web Store. 
• Firefox 109 Adds New Extensions Button, Manifest V3 Support — The biggest new feature is the new Unified Extensions button in the toolbar.
• Chrome’s “Manifest V3” plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed
• Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening — Manifest V3, or Mv3 for short, is outright harmful to privacy efforts. It will restrict the capabilities of web extensions

OpenZFS has performance gains inbound, the end of a Linux era, and the achievement unlocked by the open-source NVIDIA driver.

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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).

Android is getting RISC-Y, the handy new Google tool going open source, the next nail in the coffin for ZFS on Ubuntu, and why you were right about smart speakers all along.

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• Android Gets RISC-Y — Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit promises official, polished support.
• Keynote: The Android Open Source Project and RISC-V - Lars Bergstrom, Google Director of Engineering
• New Google Tool Goes Open — The OSV database is a distributed, open-source database that stores vulnerability information in the OSV format. The OSV-Scanner assesses a project's dependencies against the OSV database showing all vulnerabilities relating to the project.
• Ubuntu’s New Installer Milestone — With Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" in April that new desktop installer is poised to finally be used by default.
• HDR Beginning To Work For Linux Gaming — "New Linux gaming milestone: with the latest work from Josh Ashton, HDR can now be enabled for real games! Tested it tonight on my AMD desktop with Halo Infinite, Deep Rock Galactic, DEATH STRANDING DC. Very early and will still need some time to bake to be useful to most."
• Red Hat Planning HDR Hackfest
• GNOME Shell + Mutter 43 Alpha Released
• VKD3D-Proton 2.7 Released With Eight Months Worth Of Changes
• Google Home speakers allowed hackers to snoop on conversations — A bug in Google Home smart speaker allowed installing a backdoor account that could be used to control it remotely and to turn it into a snooping device by accessing the microphone feed.

There are some stories so big they need a little more air time.

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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

Why we won't see a new Raspberry Pi until 2025, the first steps to Plasma 6 are being taken, and PipeWire gets a major Bluetooth upgrade.

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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 🚀

Why the next kernel will be "the merge window from hell," a holiday gift for Wayland users, and how the open source community could do more to take on YouTube.

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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

The Linux kernel has some exciting updates this week, including a significant Asahi milestone and some good news for Android. Then we take openSUSE's new web-based installer for a spin.

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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

Old school Ubuntu has a new cool, Google calls out Google, and some IoT news you can use.

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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

The contested subsystem coming soon, a sobering assessment of wireless support in Linux, and a triumph for free software.

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• New subsystem for compute accelerator devices — This is the fourth (and hopefully last) version of the patch set to add the new subsystem for compute accelerators.
• Compute Accelerator Subsystem Hopes To Be Ready For Linux 6.2
• Peter's Talk at Linux Plumbers Conference — All types of wireless in Linux are terrible and why the vendors should feel bad - Peter Robinson
• Intel’s IWD 2.0 Released For Modern Linux Wireless Daemon — Released this week was IWD 2.0 as the latest milestone for this open-source wireless daemon.
• Phoronix Premium Black Friday Deal — For this year's deal, you can go premium for just $30 per year or $150 for a lifetime subscription.
• Asahi Linux Updates — This month’s update is packed with new hardware support, new features, and fixes for longstanding pain points, as well as a new bleeding-edge kernel branch with long-awaited support for suspend and the display controller!
• Feature Support · AsahiLinux/docs Wiki

We tried Fedora 37 on the Pi 4, the Google surprise this week, and our thoughts on the WSL 1.0 release.

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• Announcing Fedora Linux 37 — Fedora Editions are flagship offerings targeted at a particular “market”. With Fedora Linux 37, we’re adding two new Editions.
• Fedora 37 Now Available With GNOME 43 Desktop, Official Raspberry Pi 4 Support
• Meta OSS’ Sapling — A new source control system with Git-compatible client.
• Get ready for Google Summer of Code 2023! — We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and share the timeline with you to get involved! 2023 will be our 19th consecutive year of hosting GSoC.
• Google Summer of Code
• Rust in the Kernel Update — This patch series is the first batch of changes to upstream the rest of the Rust support.
• Rust Developers Preparing To Upstream More Code Into The Linux Kernel
• WSL 1.0 Released — Microsoft announces it is removing the Preview label and making WSL in the Microsoft Store "generally available".
• Release Notes for WSL kernel

We tried Fedora 37 on the Pi 4, the Google surprise this week, and our thoughts on the WSL 1.0 release.

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• Announcing Fedora Linux 37 — Fedora Editions are flagship offerings targeted at a particular “market”. With Fedora Linux 37, we’re adding two new Editions.
• Fedora 37 Now Available With GNOME 43 Desktop, Official Raspberry Pi 4 Support
• Meta OSS’ Sapling — A new source control system with Git-compatible client.
• Get ready for Google Summer of Code 2023! — We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and share the timeline with you to get involved! 2023 will be our 19th consecutive year of hosting GSoC.
• Google Summer of Code
• Rust in the Kernel Update — This patch series is the first batch of changes to upstream the rest of the Rust support.
• Rust Developers Preparing To Upstream More Code Into The Linux Kernel
• WSL 1.0 Released — Microsoft announces it is removing the Preview label and making WSL in the Microsoft Store "generally available".
• Release Notes for WSL kernel

Microsoft's new goodies for Linux users, the Ubuntu Summit wraps up, and our takeaways from the recent fireside chat with Linus Torvalds.

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• The Ubuntu Summit Just Wrapped Up — Vulture Towers Central Europe are in Prague – which, handily, is also the location for Canonical's 2022 Ubuntu Summit.
• Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 1! - YouTube
• Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 2! - YouTube
• Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 3! - YouTube
• Microsoft .NET 7 Released With Better Linux Support — Microsoft .NET 7 brings improved performance, enhanced .NET support on Linux throughout, native support for ARM64, developer productivity enhancements, better cross-platform mobile/desktop app support, HTTP/3 improvements for cloud native apps, 64-bit IBM Power support on Linux, and a variety of other run-time improvements.
• Microsoft Launches a Microsoft Teams PWA on Linux — The PWA enables us to ship the latest Microsoft Teams features faster to our Linux customers and helps us bridge the gaps between the Teams desktop client on Linux and Windows.
• Khronos Unveils Kamaros — An open, royalty-free standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets.
• The Khronos Group Announces “Kamaros” As Their Newest Forthcoming API
• Fwupd 1.8.7 is a Big Update — Linux firmware updating utility fwupd 1.8.7 has been released adding support for new devices, as well as various improvements.
• Fwupd 1.8.7 Adds Support for More Star Labs Linux Laptops, Intel Discrete GPU
• Pat Gelsinger and Linus Torvalds talk Linux, open source, technology and more - YouTube — Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger sat down with Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux who is also known as “the godfather of Open-Source,” to talk about everything from the beginning of Linux to Linus’ advice for Intel and why he chose a penguin as the Linux mascot.

What you need to know about that new OpenSSL vulnerability, the big bcachefs update we've been waiting for, and why the community is creating a Gitea fork.

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• OpenSSL 3.0.7 Released Fixing Critical Flaw — Today we published an advisory about CVE-2022-3786 (“X.509 Email Address Variable Length Buffer Overflow”) and CVE-2022-3602 (“X.509 Email Address 4-byte Buffer Overflow”).
• OpenSSL version 3.0.7 published
• /news/openssl-3.0-notes.html
• Fedora 37 Release Delayed To Mid-November Over Critical OpenSSL Vulnerability
• Linux 6.2 Power-Savings While Idle Or Lightly Loaded — The short story for Linux end-users is the Lazy RCU work can provide 5~10% power-savings for idle or lightly-loaded systems by this lazy/batching functionality.
• Linux 6.2 Picking Up Mainline Support For Apple M1 Pro/Max/Ultra Hardware — This gets the high-end Mac Studio systems with those premium SoCs now compatible with the mainline kernel.
• Hector's Deleted Tweet — I'm getting tired of arguing with kernel maintainers. The other day I spent 6 hours arguing on IRC about what should've been a 30 minute fix patch.
• Hector Martin on Twitter Follow Up Tweet — Like dude, if you aren't going to step into my world and actually understand what I'm trying to do here, just suck it up and ack my patch. It is not my job to drag you kicking and screaming until you either give up or have a lightbulb moment.
• Seems some Kernel Maintainers Noticed the Twitter Rant — Well they saw my tweets and apparently didn't like them 🤷‍♂️
• Bcachefs Rolling Out New Allocator, Performance Continues Improving — Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet on Friday published a new status update on this original file-system born out of Linux's block cache (BCache) code.
• FreeBSD Re-Introduces WireGuard Support Into Its Kernel — As of Friday, a new WireGuard driver implementation has been re-introduced with many fixes/improvements over the code state from 2020.
• Open Letter to Gitea - Restoring Trust in the Gitea Project — This unfortunately concludes the Gitea Open Letter has failed and there is no alternative but forking the project under a new name, with a healthy democratic governance.

The focus of the new Ubuntu release, Gitea's surprising announcement, and Linux prepares to drop another architecture.

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• Ubuntu 22.10 Released — Codenamed “Kinetic Kudu”, this interim release improves the experience of enterprise developers and IT administrators. It also includes the latest toolchains and applications with a particular focus on the IoT ecosystem.
• LINUX Unplugged 481: Just a Prompt Away — We take a look at Ubuntu 22.10 on a ODRID H3+
• Ubuntu 22.10 Pi Focused Features
• Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) Is Now Available for Download
• Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea — We’d like to announce that we have formed a company, Gitea Limited, to ensure the goals are met.
• Apple CPUFreq Driver Updated For Linux - Initial M2 Support Added — The new v3 patches have addressed feedback raised during prior review. One notable addition with the new patches is adding initial support for the Apple M2 SoC (T8112).
• Asahi Lina on Twitter — My Linux M1 GPU driver passes >99% of the dEQP-GLES2 compliance tests!
• Hector Martin on Twitter
• Linus Torvalds may pull '486 support from Linux kernel — As Torvalds surveyed contributors' code, he appears to have been frustrated by the need to include workarounds that cater to older CPUs. He therefore suggested ending support for old kit could be an easier way to solve memory matters.
• Red Hat releases a virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop on AWS — Red Hat is positioning the service as suitable for processing-intensive workloads like animation rendering or data visualization but without the associated hardware costs.
• Stratis Storage 3.3 Released — Stratis 3.3.0 includes one significant enhancement and several smaller enhancements as well as number of stability and efficiency improvements.
• Stratis Storage
• Matthew Miller on Twitter — Heads up: we are very likely to slip the official Fedora Linux 37 release in order to integrate fixes for the upcoming critical openssl vulnerability. Official decision on this tomorrow.
• Forthcoming OpenSSL Releases — OpenSSL 3.0.7 is a security-fix release. The highest severity issue fixed in this release is CRITICAL

What makes Google's new OS so secure, a critical WiFi vulnerability in the Kernel, and why Linus is tapping the hype breaks for Linux 6.1.

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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.

Plasma 5.26's standout features, Canonical flips the script on Red Hat, and why Android is leaking traffic outside VPNs.

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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.

Our thoughts on IBM slicing up more of Red Hat, what stands out in Nextcloud Hub 3, and a few essential fixes finally landing in the Linux kernel.

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• IBM Takes Over Red Hat Storage to IBM Offerings — IBM announced today it will add Red Hat storage product roadmaps and Red Hat associate teams to the IBM Storage business unit, bringing consistent application and data storage across on-premises infrastructure and cloud.
• Why Whitehurst is stepping away from IBM
• IBM Does A “Quasi-Acquisition” Of Red Hat Storage — Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is also being absorbed into IBM Spectrum Fusion. IBM is assuming the Premier Sponsorship role of the Ceph Foundation from Red Hat.
• Announcing Nextcloud Hub 3 — Our design always followed three principles. Focus on content, ease of use, and great accessibility. For this refresh, we added a fourth: make it your own.
• Introducing NVK — NVK is a new open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa.
• Debian’s firmware vote results — The winning option allows the installer image to include firmware necessary to use the system.
• Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 — After looking at some logs we do end up with potentially bogus panel power sequencing delays, which may harm the LCD panel.
• Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 To Avoid Potentially Damaging The Display - Phoronix
• Linux 6.0 Released With Many Intel & AMD Driver Additions — Linus Torvalds just promoted Linux 6.0 to stable on-schedule and thereby now ushering in the Linux 6.1 merge window to officially get underway tomorrow.
• Some 6.0 development statistics — A total of 2,034 developers contributed to the 6.0 release; of those, 236 made their first contribution during this cycle. The total number of developers is just short of the record (2,086) set for 5.19, but the number of first-time contributors is the lowest seen since the 5.6 release (216) in 2020.
• Linux 6.0 Supporting New Intel/AMD Hardware
• Btrfs Brings Some Great Performance Improvements With Linux 6.1
• The Initial Rust Infrastructure Has Been Merged Into Linux 6.1 — As a follow-up to the Rust infrastructure pull request for Linux 6.1, Linus Torvalds pulled the initial Rust code into the mainline Linux kernel this evening.

The controversial change for the GNU Toolchain, critical vulnerabilities in popular Matrix clients, and the significant milestone for the Ingenuity LinuxCopter this week.

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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)

GNOME 43 highlights, Canonical's new hardware partner, and why we're disappointed in the Framework Chromebook.

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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.

The Linux Foundation takes a victory lap, Google kills another community-loved project, and key moments from the Linux Plumbers Conference.

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• Shikitega - AT&T Alien Labs — New stealthy malware targeting Linux
• LINUX Unplugged 474: Linux’s Malware Inevitability
• New Linux malware combines unusual stealth with a full suite of capabilities — "Threat actors continue to search for ways to deliver malware in new ways to stay under the radar and avoid detection," AT&T Alien Labs researcher Ofer Caspi wrote.
• New Linux malware evades detection using multi-stage deployment
• Shape-shifting cryptominer savaging Linux endpoints and IoT — The malware was dubbed "Shikitega" for its extensive use of the popular Shikata Ga Nai polymorphic encoder, which allows the malware to "mutate" its code to avoid detection. Shikitega alters its code each time it runs through one of several decoding loops that AT&T said each deliver multiple attacks, beginning with an ELF file that's just 370 bytes.
• Next-Gen Linux Malware Takes Over Devices With Unique Tool Set
• OpenWrt 22.03 Released With Updated Firewall, Support For 180+ New Devices - Phoronix
• [OpenWrt Wiki] OpenWrt 22.03.0 - First Stable Release - 6 September 2022
• Linux Foundation Announces Open Wallet Foundation — The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the intention to form the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort to develop open source software to support interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases.
• Linux Foundation announces the OpenWallet Foundation to develop interoperable digital wallets
• Welcoming PyTorch to the Linux Foundation
• Facebook Transfers PyTorch AI Framework to Linux Foundation for Governance — Today we are more than thrilled to welcome PyTorch to the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it’s hard to capture how big a deal this is for us in a single post but I’ll try.
• PyTorch strengthens its governance by joining the Linux Foundation
• Google Pixelbook is no more, proving the world wasn’t ready for premium Chromebooks | TechRadar
• Linux Plumbers Conference - YouTube
• LPC 2022: Rust Linux Drivers Capable Of Achieving Performance Comparable To C Code - Phoronix
• IOuring Continues To Prove Very Exciting: Promising iouringspawn Announced — It also continues to be relentlessly optimized by Jens Axboe and others for maximum performance potential. The latest innovation around IOuring that was announced this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin is iouringspawn.
• An io_uring-based user-space block driver
• A pair of Rust kernel modules
• Compiling Rust with GCC: an update
• Mesa’s Rust OpenCL Implementation Merged
• Adding rusticl (!15439) · Merge requests · Mesa / mesa · GitLab
• LPC 2022 - Kernel Summit - Lansdowne - YouTube

Linux goes underwater, Microsoft kills the Teams' Linux app, and the nasty GRUB bug some of us could not avoid.

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• Mircosoft Teams desktop client on Linux is being retired — We are updating this message to indicate we will be retiring the Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux in 90 days
• Rish Tandon on Twitter — “With this change, we are taking a major step in #MicrosoftTeams Teams architecture. We are moving away from Electron to Edge Webview2. Teams will continue to remain a hybrid app but now it will be powered by #MicrosoftEdge. Also Angular is gone. We are now 100% on reactjs”
• Teams 2.0 Moves Away from Electron to Embrace Edge WebView2
• Full transparency on the Grub issue — After updating to grub 2.06.r322 many users reported that their machines could fail to boot or booted directly into the BIOS or another OS.
• Problem with booting after last upgrade to Grub 2.06.r322
• Grub bootloader upgrade and configuration incompatibilities - Arch News
• Latest Grub update - Testing Repo - couldnt boot
• grub.git - GNU GRUB
• Possible Fix for those Impacted
• PipeWire 0.3.57 Released — An AAC decoder was added so that PipeWire can now also function as an A2DP AAC receiver.
• PipeWire 0.3.57 Adds AAC Decoder, Opus For Bluetooth
• Nmap 7.93 the 25th anniversary edition has been released — Twenty five years ago, I released the first version of Nmap in a Phrack article named The Art of Port Scanning.
• SUSE turns 30 — From our start in Nuremberg on September 2, 1992 to our record-breaking IPO in 2021 and continued growth, SUSE has always put community first, including our employee community.
• Commercial underwater datacenter goes online this year — The company claims that placing its datacenter modules underwater can reduce power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, as well as lowering latency by allowing the datacenter to be located closer to metropolitan areas, many of which are located near the coast.
• Subsea Cloud announces three underwater data center projects - DCD
• Underwater data centres are coming. Can they slash CO2 emissions and make the Internet faster? | Euronews

Debian’s firmware future is up for debate, Pine64 teases a RISC-V SBC, and some of your favorite tools just got new tricks.

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• New fwupd 1.8.4 starts work on BIOS control — fwupd now reads your system BIOS settings, and has the ability to change them if the user desires (and has authorization to do).
• Fwupd 1.8.4 Supports More Hardware, Starts Allowing To Make BIOS Changes From Linux
• Canonical Continues Snap’ing Up Linux Gaming For Ubuntu — Canonical has been indicating they want to improve the Linux gaming experience on Ubuntu (and hiring for it) and ensure its a dominant platform for Linux gaming.
• Pine’ Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer
• Pine64 reveals the Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer — Along the long leading edges you’ll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you’ll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you’ll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas – one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi.
• NetworkManager 1.40 Released With Multi-Path TCP Support — Multi-Path TCP has come together in the kernel over the past two years for this standard, allowing TCP connections to use multiple paths for greater performance/efficiency and added redundancy.
• Debian General Resolution To Decide What To Do With Non-Free Firmware — The basic problem is that the use of downloadable firmware in computer systems is on the rise and most of that firmware is not free software. The official Debian installer only incorporates free software (and firmware), which leads to serious problems for many users.
• Debian Proposes Better Discovery of non-free Firmware Images
• General Resolution: non-free firmware
• Office Hours 11 — We launch our new site LIVE!

Details on two new efforts in the Linux kernel, the Pi-like RISC-V board that just hit its funding goal, and a significant milestone for Asahi GPU driver development.

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• Experimental Kernel Patches — Patches sent out today clean-up the code taken on those architectures for bringing CPU cores down and allow for parallelism. With these patches and an 80-core Arm server, a Kexec reboot can go from taking around 15 seconds to now just around one second.
• ByteDance Working To Make It Faster Kexec Booting The Linux Kernel
• [RFC 00/10] arm64/riscv: Introduce fast kexec reboot - Pingfan Liu
• [PATCH 0/4] faster kexec reboot - Albert Huang
• VisionFive 2 — Kickstarter — High-performance quad-core RISC-V single board computer (SBC) with an integrated 3D GPU, 2G/4G/8G LPDDR.
• Linux Foundation TAB election: call for nominees — The 2022 election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) will be held during the Linux Plumbers Conference, September 12 to 14.
• Webmin 2.0 Released — Webmin is a web-based system administration tool for Unix-like servers and services with over 1,000,000 installations worldwide.
• Flatpak 1.14.0 Released — Flatpak 1.14 brings a variety of mostly small and lower-level improvements to this Linux app sandboxing tech
• Flatpak 1.14 Released With Improvements For Sandboxed Linux Apps
• Firefox 104.0 — The Firefox UI itself will now be throttled for performance and battery usage when minimized or occluded, in the same way background tabs are.
• Rosenzweig – Clip control on the Apple GPU — After a year in development, the open source “Asahi” driver for the Apple GPU is running real games.
• Asahi Linux May Have OpenGL 2.1 For Apple M1/M2 By Year’s End — " I’m optimistic that we’ll have native OpenGL 2.1 in Asahi Linux by the end of the year."

A Linux jailbreak that's a win for Right to Repair, our favorite things in Android 13, and the major features that just missed the Linux 6.0 window.

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• Android 13 is in AOSP — Today we’re pushing the Android 13 source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and officially releasing the newest version of Android.
• Android 13 Sources Released To AOSP
• Glibc 2.36 Dropping DTHASH Has Been Breaking Easy Anti Cheat Games — The breakage stems from the DTHASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DTGNUHASH.
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — Unfortunate that upstream glibc discussion on DTHASH isn't coming out strongly in favor of prioritizing compatibility with pre-existing applications. Every such instance contributes to damaging the idea of desktop Linux as a viable target for third-party developers.
• Carlos O’Donell on Twitter — How far should Linux ELF follow the generic ELF standard (gABI)? We recently let distributions drop DTHASH from glibc builds (mandatory under the gABI). This broke EPIC's Easy Anti-Cheat. We should ask the gABI for DTHASH to be optional.
• GLIBC update broke EAC for most games that use it — Issue #6051 · ValveSoftware/Proton
• Should we make DTHASH dynamic section for glibc?
• gapi discussion: Making DTHASH optional?
• Linux 6.0 debuts, missing some Rusty bits — Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn't mind what you call it.
• Linux 6.0 arrives with performance improvements and more Rust coming
• Linux 6.0-rc1 Released With Exciting Performance Optimizations
• Real-Time “PREEMPTRT” Not in 6.0-rc1 — Of the 50 patches, it's not too bad either as there are five patches for example that are rather trivial for just enabling real-time (RT) support in the Kconfig files for ARM / ARM64 / POWER / x86 / x86_64. There are also a handful of patches each specific to POWER and the i915 graphics driver code.
• Debian turns 29! — Today is Debian's 29th anniversary. We recently wrote about some ideas to celebrate DebianDay, and several events have been planned in more than 14 locations.
• LocalGroups - Debian Wiki
• A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave — An exploit that provides root access to two popular models of the company’s farm equipment.
• mu on Twitter — Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere, and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.
• How a version of Doom running on a John Deere tractor champions the right-to-repair movement — Sick Codes achieved this by working with different tractor control touchscreen consoles, narrowing it down to a select few models, and finding a way to exploit these devices.
• Right to repair movement goes Deere hunting
• The debate over right to repair in 2022 | Successful Farming
• Deere Hit with Class Action Lawsuit Over Right to Repair
• Late Night Linux – Episode 190

GitHub steps in it this week, Microsoft's Linux distribution now runs on bare metal, FFmpeg gets IPFS support, and the odd thing going on with the kernel.

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• Microsoft Continues Improving Its Internal Linux Distro With Another Update — Microsoft has kept up with issuing one or more CBL-Mariner updates per month. This summer they rolled out CBL-Mariner 2.0 with many changes over its former 1.0 state, which continues to be maintained too. CBL-Mariner relies upon RPM SPEC files and other assets from Fedora, Photon OS, Openmamba, and Linux From Scratch. This week marked the release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2.
• CBL-Mariner GitHub
• GitHub Moves to Guard Open Source Against Supply Chain Attacks — The popular Microsoft-owned code repository plans to roll out code signing, which will help beef up the security of open source projects.
• GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash — GitHub over the past week has tested the trust of its users by enacting policies that call into question its commitment to free speech and privacy.
• ‘It Doesn’t Change Anything’ Says Tornado Cash After Code Disappears From GitHub
• Projects impacted by Tornando cash ban — TIL the creator address of the Eth2.0 Deposit contract was funded with Tornado cash, created the contract and donated the rest to Wikileaks
• Samuel JJ Gosling on Twitter — “@TornadoCash For those looking to host the frontend locally, I’ve uploaded the source code to @IPFS as I suspected this happening. Disclaimer: I’m a contributor to tornado but you should still verify the source code.
• Lucas Garron on Twitter
• Privacy Statement Updates September 2022 by olholder
• IPFS Supported In FFmpeg 5.1, IPFS Devs Envision Support In More Open-Source Projects — July's release of FFmpeg 5.1 introduced native IPFS support for this distributed peer-to-peer protocol.
• IPFS.io
• Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Delayed Due To An OEM Install Issue Leading To Broken Snaps — Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS had been due for release today but has now been pushed back by one week after discovering an installer issue that led to Snaps like the default Mozilla Firefox browser failing to launch once installed.
• Linux 5.20 Likely To Be Called Linux 6.0 — With Linus Torvalds' modern versioning after 19~20 point releases has been when he bumps to the next major version number... Linux 4.0 succeeded Linux 3.19 while Linux 5.0 came after Linux 4.20.
• An iouring-based user-space block driver [LWN.net] — The ublk driver starts by creating a special device called /dev/ublk-control. The user-space server (or servers, there can be more than one) starts by opening that device and setting up an iouring ring to communicate with it.
• Linus' kernel source tree

The real story behind the "Massive GitHub Malware attack," significant updates for the Steam Deck, and the inside scoop on Lenovo's big Linux ambitions.

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• Massive GitHub Malware Attack? — It was revealed by Stephen Lacy in his tweet, he shared his findings of a large-scale campaign targeting random GitHub repositories with project clones containing credential stealing malware and remote shell execution on top of the original code.
• Stephen Lacy on Twitter — “I am uncovering what seems to be a massive widespread malware attack on @github. - Currently over 35k repositories are infected - So far found in projects including: crypto, golang, python, js, bash, docker, k8s - It is added to npm scripts, docker images and install docs”
• Checkmarx on Twitter — “A recent tweet uncovered a widespread malware attack on @github. This turned out to be a false alarm of sorts, as the infected repositories are simply forks and clones of the original ones - which were mostly deleted by Github by now. Stay safe!"
• No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin’s legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto
• Steam Deck Client Update and SteamOS 3.3 — We have just shipped SteamOS 3.3 and an updated Steam Client to the Stable channel. This update includes all the changes and improvements that have been undergoing testing in the Beta and Preview channels.
• SteamOS 3.3 Now Available With Many Improvements For The Steam Deck
• Steam For Linux In July Shows A 1.23% Marketshare — AMD CPUs Now More Common Than Intel On Linux
• DXVK 1.10.3 Released With Shared Fences
• Chris’ Steam Deck Review LINUX Unplugged 467
• Lenovo Expects 30+ Platforms With Linux Support This Year, Both AMD & Intel Systems — Lenovo's Mark Pearson provided an update on Linux for their laptops/PCs, including 30+ platforms for 2022 with Linux support.
• Lenovo Linux 2022 - DebConf 22
• Fedora Pi Support Gets Real — The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. With Fedora 37, Raspberry Pi 4 is now officially supported, including accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU.
• Fedora 37 To Offer Official Support On Raspberry Pi 4 Devices
• Linux 5.19 Released
• Some 5.19 development statistics
• Linux Kernel 5.19 Released with Major Networking Tweaks
• Rust Code For The Linux Kernel Updated With More Features
• Asahi Linux Confirms M2 MBA on Twitter — Linus is using an M2 MacBook Air, running ARM64 Fedora. He does his own kernel builds, of course, with our Asahi kernel branch merged in, and he's been building and testing kernels on it.
• Asahi Alternative Distros docs

Red Hat hints at its future direction, why realtime might finally come to Linux after all these years, and our reaction to Google's ambitious new programing language.

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• Red Hat’s next steps, according to its new CEO — "We expect to see an 800% increase in edge applications built by 2024. We want those applications to be part of the open hybrid cloud. We think we have a unique position to connect end devices back to the assets that you have in your data centers and cloud that you use to run your company today."
• PREEMPT_RT Might Be Ready To Finally Land In Linux 5.20 — The Linux real-time patch series has been getting smaller with time and quite close to crossing the finish line with just around 50 patches to be merged.
• Google Engineers Go Big on Carbon - A Hopeful Successor To C++ — The Carbon programming language hopes to be the gradual successor to C++ and makes for an easy transition path moving forward.
• ByteDance Working To Make Kernel Booting Faster — This patch series touching around 100 lines of Linux kernel code is what they are now hoping to upstreamed.
• Happy Birthday This Week in GNOME — I am pleased to announce that TWIG is having its first anniversary!
• This Week in GNOME
• This Week in KDE
• #53 GUADEC 2022 · This Week in GNOME
• Btrfs Native Encryption Being Worked On — My goal in sending out this RFC is to get feedback on whether these are going in a reasonable direction; while there are a couple of additional parts, they're fundamentally minor compared to this.

Microsoft makes a hard about-face, a significant fix for Ubuntu 22.04 is in the works, and the recent breakthrough by the Asahi Linux project.

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• Microsoft changes its mind about open source monetization — Microsoft was trying to do the right thing, but it turns out doing nothing is better.
• Giorgio Sardo on Twitter — To clarify our intent, we removed the previous mention to open source pricing. We're committed to building an open Store and enabling dev choice and flexibility. If there are intellectual property concerns about an app, please report it.
• An Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Fix Is Coming For A Very Annoying & Serious APT Problem — "installing the package libudev1 results in a large number of critical packages being removed and rendering the system essentially unusable."
• Bug #1974196 “Installing libudev1 on a new Jammy installation"
• Draft: Mark broken reverse depends for upgrade (!248) · Merge requests
• Drop-in, drop-out chats with Video Rooms in Element — This has been a long time coming and, frankly, we’re really excited to be introducing Video Rooms to you. It’s a major step towards richer video (and soon voice) rooms!
• SCALE 19x — SCaLE 19x is coming up July 28th - the 31st at the LAX Hilton. Promo code LAS50
• M2 is here! July 2022 Release & Progress Report — Welcome to another long overdue progress report! As usual, things have been busier than expected… and we have some big news! We’ve just released a new Asahi Linux update with Mac Studio, Bluetooth, and M2 support!
• Asahi Linux Update Brings Experimental Apple M2 Support

Why Google says we should all go rolling, Red Hat's got a new boss, Microsoft gets called out, and why it might be the year of Linux hardware.

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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

The new movement to leave GitHub, an Ubuntu bug biting 22.04 users, the hardware platform Fedora might start taking seriously, and a major desktop dev departs Red Hat.

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• Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! — Today, we take a stronger stance. We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub.
• Roma, one of the first RISC-V laptops, may ship in September — As for the specs, the Roma laptop will, we're told, come with a quad-core RISC-V processor, an Arm security enclave core, a GPU/NPU accelerator for video and AI workloads, up to 16GB of LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X memory, and up to 256GB of storage.
• System76 Announces New Alder Lake Laptop With Coreboot Firmware — System76 has announced a new Lemur Pro laptop model that is now offering 12th Gen "Alder Lake" Intel processors while continuing to feature Coreboot firmware.
• System76.com
• Fedora May Finally Provide Official Support For The Raspberry Pi 4 — The hope with this change proposal is to provide more "official" support for Fedora Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4B / 400 / CM4 hardware.
• Changes/RaspberryPi4 - Fedora Project Wiki
• Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
• Fedora 37 Looks To Better Manage Its 175MB+ Of Linux Firmware Blobs
• Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved
• New Ubuntu MATE Release — Improved compositor and video playback performance, zswap (lz4) by default & optimised image sizes
• Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft — The prominent open-source developer responsible for several prominent projects joined Microsoft and is continuing his focus on systemd development.
• Lennart Poettering - systemd + PulseAudio Creator - Departed Red Hat
• Linode Now Supports Kali Linux
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Has A Change On The Way For Systemd-OOMD Being Kill-Happy With Apps
• ManagedOOMSwap docs
• Discussion: systemd-oomd issues on desktop
• 249.11-0ubuntu3.4 : systemd package : Ubuntu

Fedora gets serious about its server editions, our thoughts on Valve's increased Steam Deck production, and the surprising results of booting Linux on the Apple M2 SoC.

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• Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved — Fedora 37 is working its way toward release before the end of October.
• The Performance Cost To A Proposed Fedora 37 CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS Change
• Fedora CoreOS Hopes To Become An Official Edition With Fedora 37
• Fedora 37 Looks To Ship With Stratis Storage 3.1 Support
• Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
• Fedora Magazine: Accessibility in Fedora Workstation — I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!
• Firefox 102 Available With Transform Streams, Geoclue On Linux — Firefox 102.0 isn't the most exciting end-user update but does have some developer additions like Transform Streams support and support for Geoclue with Firefox Linux builds for geolocation.
• Thunderbird 102 Released With Big Improvements To This Leading Open-Source Mail Client — Thunderbird 102 introduces a new address book implementation, a new spaces toolbar, a new import/export wizard, a redesigned message header, and other "quality of life" updates. There are also some extras with Thunderbird 102 like adding Matrix chat support.
• Matrix.org Security release: Synapse 1.61.1 — Today we're exceptionally releasing Synapse 1.61.1, which comes as a security release. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
• Synapse Release v1.61.1
• Synapse Advisory — URL previews of unusual or maliciously-crafted pages can crash Synapse media repositories or Synapse monoliths.
• Valve More Than Doubles Steam Deck Production, Q3 Reservations Starting Soon — Valve just tweeted out some great news for SteamDeck fans, saying it has more than doubled the number of Steam Decks being produced every week. The company also says it just sent out the last batch of Q2 reservation emails and is prepared to start kicking off Q3 reservations on June 30th 2022.
• Check Your Steam Deck Order Status
• Vim 9.0 — The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.
• Vim 9.0 Released With New Vim9 Script For 10~100x Execution Speed
• Linode Security Digest — June 20-26, 2022
• Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress — Hector Martin on Monday began his Linux M2 bring-up effort, including with a livestream of this reverse engineering / debugging / kernel hacking effort. Hector confirmed NVMe, USB, and SMC functionality are working for the M2 on the first day of the effort.
• M2 Asahi Linux bring-up YouTube Stream

Some highlights from Linus' recent fireside chat, Qt gets a new leader and a Linux botnet we should probably take seriously.

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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 idrsa and knownhosts 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

We get the details behind Thunderbird acquiring K-9 Mail, share the best new features of Plasma 5.25, check-in on Ubuntu's RISC-V development status, and discuss Photoshop coming to Linux via the web.

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• K9 mail to become Thunderbird on Android — Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.
• K-9 Mail – Open Source Email App for Android
• K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family
• Frequently Asked Questions: Thunderbird Mobile and K-9 Mail
• Ubuntu Working To Provide Good Support For The VisionFive Low-Cost RISC-V Board — The Starfive VisionFive is a currently $179 USD RISC-V board that is intended to run full-blown RISC-V Linux distributions.
• Fedora 37 Looks To Boost Its Cloud Posture As An Official Edition — Approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee this week is returning Fedora Cloud base to be listed as an official Fedora edition.
• Plasma 5.25 - Released — Plasma 5.25 brings new features and concepts to the desktop environment.
• 5 Neat New Features in KDE Plasma 5.25, Released Today
• Ventoy 1.0.76 — Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
• Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk: Boot any OS or .efi file without disabling UEFI Secure Boot
• Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone — The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
• Photopea | Online Photo Editor

SUSE Enterprise is already switching to the new NVIDIA open kernel driver, a Matrix-powered Walkie-Talkie, and the details on Apple's Rosetta for Linux.

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• SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 Released - Switches To NVIDIA’s Open Kernel Driver — Notable with SLE 15 SP4, SUSE is already switching to using NVIDIA's open-source GPU kernel-mode driver that NVIDIA open-sourced last month
• openSUSE Leap 15.4 Released
• Element Call Beta 2 includes lots of exciting new updates! — In a walkie-talkie call, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the ‘push-to-talk’ (PTT) button, either by pressing it on the screen or by holding the spacebar. The catch is that, just like a walkie-talkie or two-way radio, only one person can speak at a time. When someone else is speaking, your PTT button will be disabled, and if you try to push it you’ll hear a warning beep.

• Fedora and Ubuntu EOL announcements — If you are running Fedora 34, the time has come to move on; that distribution will reach the end of its support life on June 7. Users of Ubuntu 21.10 have a little longer, but that release loses support on July 14 and users should update to 22.04.
• Fedora 34 is going EOL in one week
• Ubuntu 21.10 reaches End of Life on July 14 2022
• HP Dev One Now Shipping — Unplug and work from any location. At 3.24 lbs, with up to 12 hours of battery life and an ultra-bright display, HP Dev One was made to perform on the go.
• Managed PostgreSQL and MongoDB are Here | Linode
• Apple will allow Linux VMs to run Intel apps with Rosetta in macOS Ventura — You can even use Rosetta with non-Apple Arm CPUs, though you probably shouldn't.
• Running Intel Binaries in Linux VMs with Rosetta
• Hector Martin on Twitter — “Huh, so Rosetta is now a Linux app. Without Linux kernel patches this can’t use any special M1 features, so if this runs significantly better than FOSS offerings that should help dispel the myth that “the M1 has magic make-Rosetta-fast features”.
• Longhorn on Twitter — Well. Rosetta 2 needs a quite recent CPU (post v8.2) to work because of the instructions used. Does it work on non-Apple arm64 CPUs? 🤔 Yes. (allows to settle the argument once and for all that this needs anything Apple specific outside of TSO support*. Answer is a no.)

Our thoughts on NixOS' new GUI installer, winning hearts and minds one firmware update at a time, the performance bug that hit Linux 5.18, and preparation begins for the open-source NVIDIA driver.

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• LVFS Has Served More Than 52 Million Firmware Files To Linux Users — LVFS has served up 52.1 million firmware files to end-users over its lifetime. There has also been over a 99% success rate on the firmware being deployed correctly to users.
• Fwupd 1.8.1 Released With Firmware Updating For More HP, Corsair, PixArt, Lenovo Devices
• A Fix Is On The Way For A Previously-Reported Linux 5.18 Performance Regression — Back during the Linux 5.18 merge window in March I wrote about a big NUMA benchmark performance regression I noticed and bisected.
• Nouveau Begins Shifting Around Code For Use By New Driver — "This just moves the codegen build into a separate library, this is just prep work for a future where another drivers wants to reuse this code. this isn't perfect for plugging into a vulkan driver, but doing that requires more in depth surgery."
• NVIDIA 515.48.07 Linux Driver Released As Stable With Open Kernel Driver Option
• Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix! — We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation!
• Rocket.Chat Leverages The Matrix Protocol for Decentralized and Interoperable Communications
• AlmaLinux 9.0 Released — AlmaLinux OS 9.0 is based on upstream kernel version 5.14 and contains enhancements around cloud and container development and improvements to the web console.
• AlmaLinux 9 Now Available! - AlmaLinux OS Blog
• GPU Price-Performance Benchmarking Report
• NixOS 22.05 Released With New Graphical Installer — NixOS 22.05 builds atop the Nix 2.8 package manager, which brings better performance, general improvements, the experimental nix fmt command that applies a formatter defined by the flake output to the Nix expressions in a flake, and other additions.
• NixOS GUI Configuration Editor — A simple NixOS configuration editor application built with libadwaita, GTK4, and Relm4. The goal of this project is to provide a simple graphical tool for modifying and managing desktop NixOS configurations.
• NixOS - Blog → Announcements
• Calamares Installer — Calamares aims to be easy, usable, beautiful, pragmatic, inclusive and distribution-agnostic
• NixOS Calamares PR: fix calamares modules, add nixos modules, and add new iso by vlinkz
• NixOS/calamares-nixos-extensions: NixOS Calamares Extensions

The controversial Intel code now shipping in Linux, why F-Droid is getting more attractive for developers, and the rumor that could change the industry.

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• Linux 5.18 Released With Intel SDSi, New CPU & GPU Features — Linux 5.18 brings the controversial Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) functionality.
• Thoughts on software-defined silicon — Its purpose is to disable access to specific processor capabilities in the absence of a certificate from Intel saying otherwise.
• Statistics from the 5.18 development cycle
• Btrfs Gets Some Buttery Good Improvements With Linux 5.19 — David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the ~4k lines of code worth of feature changes for the Btrfs file-system driver in the Linux 5.19 kernel.
• Our build and release infrastructure, and upcoming updates — This work will be incrementally deployed as each bit is finished. So be patient, and you will notice releases happening faster and faster!
• Google Summer of Code (GSOC 2022) Highlights of FOSS Projects — Google announced the GSoC 2022 projects, and the list includes some exciting improvements to the mainstream foss projects such as GNOME, Xfce, LibreOffice, etc.
• Ubuntu 22.10 Makes PipeWire Default for Audio — “That’s right, as of today the Kinetic ISO (pending, not yet current since the changes were just made) has been updated to run only PipeWire and not PulseAudio […] you can look forward to this for Kinetic”
• Broadcom-VMware Deal Said to Be Ready as Soon as This Week — Broadcom Inc. could announce an agreement to acquire cloud-computing company VMware Inc. as soon as this week
• Broadcom’s Potential VMware Acquisition: 5 Things About Dell, Stock Prices And Hock Tan To Know
• Broadcom in Talks to Pay About $60 Billion for VMware
• Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Has Mixed Feelings on a Broadcom-VMware Deal

Why Google's new open-source security effort might fall a bit short, the Arch snag this week, a big win for Right to Repair, and why you might soon have a new favorite filesystem.

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• New from Google Cloud: Assured Open Source Software service — Assured OSS enables enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows.
• OSS-Fuzz — continuous fuzzing for open source software.
• Google will start distributing a security-vetted collection of open-source software libraries
• Shared success in building a safer open source community
• White House joins OpenSSF and the Linux Foundation in securing open-source software
• Software Freedom Conservancy right-to-repair lawsuit against California TV manufacturer Vizio, Inc. remanded to California State Court - Software Freedom Conservancy — "The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleft licensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both as copyright licenses and as contractual agreements" says Karen M. Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy.
• Arch Linux Temporarily Steps Back From WirePlumber After Snafu — With the recent attempt to switch to WirePlumber, that modern session manager was unconditionally taking over audio responsibilities even if the user had configured their system to use PulseAudio or ALSA directly.
• Arch Linux News — Undone replacement of pipewire-media-session with wireplumber.
• Bringing bcachefs to the mainline — Bcachefs is a longstanding out-of-tree filesystem that grew out of the bcache caching layer that has been in the kernel for nearly ten years. Based on a session led by Kent Overstreet at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), though, it would seem that bcachefs is likely to be heading upstream soon. He intends to start the process toward mainline inclusion over the next six months or so.
• bcachefs Principles of Operation

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.

Special Guest: Christian F.K. Schaller.

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• Why is the open source driver release from NVidia so important for Linux? | Christian F.K. Schaller — 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 this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.

• NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules — This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back.

New firmware superpowers are coming to a future Linux kernel, why Google is working on encrypted hibernation support, and a sneak peek at SteamOS 3.

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• Google Working On Linux Encrypted Hibernation Support — Google engineers are working on "enabling hibernation in some new scenarios."
• Encrypted Hibernation - Evan Green
• Update on Linux hibernation support when lockdown is enabled
• uswsusp - ArchWiki
• Rewritten Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Posted For Linux — The new patches posted today are a "complete rewrite" of the earlier Apple SoC CPUFreq driver attempt.
• Apple Silicon Exclusively Hit With World-First “Augury” DMP Vulnerability — Apple's DMP can potentially leak the entire memory content even if it's not being actively accessed.
• Linux 5.19 Adding Ability To Initiate Firmware Updates Using Sysfs — Thanks to Intel there is firmware-upload support being added to sysfs that user-space software can use for initiating a firmware update.
• 0.34.0 security release for matrix-appservice-irc — Incorrect handling of a CR character allowed for making part of the message be sent to the IRC server verbatim rather than as a message to the channel.
• Adopting Matrix at the GNOME Foundation
• IRC, Matrix, and thanks for all the kicks
• holoiso: SteamOS 3 — This project attempts to bring Steam Deck's Holo OS into a generic, installable format and replicate close-to-official SteamOS experience.
• HoloISO brings Valve’s SteamOS 3 from the Steam Deck to everyone

PopOS! 22.04 has a surprise you might not have noticed, we get the details on Ubuntu’s new Real-Time kernel, and the clever idea from the Framework laptop team.

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• Pop!OS 22.04 by System76 — Pop!OS is designed for fast navigation, easy workspace organization, and fluid, convenient workflow. Your operating system should encourage discovery, not obstruct it.
• System Updater Nix Support
• Pop System Updater
• Ubuntu Outlines How To Use Its Real-Time Kernel Beta - It Requires Ubuntu Advantage — The RT kernel for x8664 and AArch64 is tailored to meet the low latency needs and other guarantees for the teclo industry, robotics, critical infrastructure, and other industries.
• Concerns Raised Over The “New” NTFS Linux Driver That Merged Last Year — Less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained.
• Steam Deck Client and OS Updates — Today's update includes Steam, OS, and firmware updates, and may take a few minutes to apply after restarting. Please be patient while your Steam Deck updates.
• Order Email Megathread (04/14/2022) : SteamDeck
• Proton 7.0-2 Out — . Proton 7.0-2 is the new main stable version, not to be confused with Proton Experimental that was also updated recently.

• Element Introduces Threads in Beta — Threads help you separate conversations from the main timeline. Starting a new Thread opens the thread view where you can continue your conversations without interruption from other messages or topics pinging through in the timeline.
• Linux Action News Feedback - Matrix Channel — A place to provide real-time feedback on the show, stories, and more.
• Framework Mainboard Availability and Open Source Release — The Framework Laptop Mainboard is now available in the Framework Marketplace 69. You can order one today in the US and Canada with newly reduced pricing.
• Framework Mainboards
• Framework Mainboar Developer Giveaway Program — To accelerate the ecosystem of projects using Framework Laptop Mainboards, we’re giving away 100 i5-1135G7 Mainboards for free to creators and developers!

Our take on why Fedora's Legacy BIOS plans have stirred up such a strong debate, how NVIDIA's Linux strategy seems to be changing, and a surprising kernel patch from Sony.

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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.

SUSE has a skunkworks distro in development, the transition Debian is struggling with, and some long-awaited improvements to Raspberry Pi OS.

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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

Docker surprises everyone, new Fedora tools in the works, and an old debate with a fresh take.

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• Docker rebounds with $105m Series C funding and $2.1b value — Troubled container company may escape confines of its doldrums
• LXD 5.0 LTS has been released — This is our 4th LTS release and quite an exciting one for anyone coming from LXD 4.0 as it significantly steps up LXD’s abilities, especially when operating in clustered environments.
• Anaconda is getting a new suit and a wizard — Before starting the redesign work for the Anaconda installer, the team reviewed user feedback and usability study data that we’ve gathered over the years.
• Fedora Workstation Brainstorming A Possible GUI-Based Linux Recovery Environment — This currently hypothetical GUI-driven recovery environment sounds like it could almost be like Apple's macOS recovery mode in that there may be the possibility of even downloading a new system image from this environment.
• Fwupd 1.7.7 Released For Firmware Updating More Logitech Devices On Linux - Phoronix
• Lutris 0.5.10 Released With Steam Deck Support — Lutris 0.5.10 brings proper Steam Deck support thanks to their collaboration with Valve and receiving a Steam Deck developer kit. Lutris' Flatpak version is still being improved upon as the next step in enhancing the Steam Deck support for this game manager.
• Mathieu Comandon on Twitter — We gotta stop this culture of "only install Flatpaks / using root is dangerous" before it extends beyond the Steam Deck. Last thing I want is for desktop Linux to become like Android or ChromeOS.
• meetup.com/jupiterbroadcasting

A new rolling remix of Ubuntu is grabbing attention, AMD has big Linux plans, and why Linux 5.18 looks like another barn burner release.

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• Ubuntu gets a new rolling-release remix — The new flavor is the brainchild of MrBeeBenson, building on work by Martin Wimpress, who is the project leader of the Ubuntu MATE remix.
• AMD Recruiting More Linux Engineers For Debug, CXL Enablement & More — Notable with their latest batch of Linux openings is hiring a CXL engineer. This role will focus on AMD's support for Compute Express Link (CXL) hardware enablement under Linux.
• WirePlumber 0.4.9 Fixes Surround Sound For Some Linux Games — It was reported that some games within Steam were not able to enjoy 5.1 surround sound with PipeWire in a year-old bug report. A fix landed in WirePlumber a month ago to relax the format parsing within the si-audio-adapter module and this appears to fix up that issue
• New Linux kernel patch speeds up server shutdowns — The problem is caused by the relatively long time it takes to properly shut down an NVMe drive: apparently, as much as four-and-a-half seconds.
• Linux 5.18 Hardens The Kernel For 64-bit Arm With Shadow Call Stack Support — With the Linux 5.18 hardening updates there is support added for ARM64 (AArch64) Shadow Call Stack support when building the Linux kernel with GCC 12 and newer.
• Linux 5.18 Power Management Brings Improvements For Both Intel & AMD — Intel's P-State driver will now use the default default Energy Performance Preference (EPP) exposed by the firmware, and over on the AMD CPU side, the CPUPower utility that lives within the kernel source tree now supports running in conjunction with the AMD P-State driver.
• Linux 5.18 Moves Ahead With Deprecating ReiserFS — The plan is to treat it as deprecated and formally remove it from the mainline Linux kernel in 2025.
• XFS Online Repair Functionality To Undergo A Massive Design Review — XFS online repair has been talked about for years along with online scrubbing and it looks like it's about all buttoned up. Darrick Wong will be spending the next roughly two months focusing on the "massive" design review for XFS online repair code.
• Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random — A bunch of changes for the kernel random-number generator (RNG) were merged by Linus Torvalds on March 21. Unfortunately a user-space regression surfaced that led Torvalds to say that he would revert the patch. The idea was good, but it "causes problems for various platforms that can't do jitter entropy and have nothing else happening either".

A significant follow-up to one of the biggest Linux stories, the Pandora's box the MIT Technology Review claims open-source devs just opened, and Linux on the M1 finally ships.

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• Documentation/process: Add Researcher Guidelines — This document seeks to clarify what the Linux kernel community considers acceptable and non-acceptable practices when conducting such research. At the very least, such research and related activities should follow standard research ethics rules.
• Guidelines for research on the kernel community [LWN.net]
• Activists are targeting Russians with open-source "protestware" — At least one open-source software project has had malicious code added which aimed to wipe computers located in Russia and Belarus.
• Activists are targeting Russians with open-source "protestware"
• SiFive bags $175m to further challenge Arm with RISC-V — The Silicon Valley-based chip designer said Wednesday it had raised a $175m Series F financing round at a more than $2.5bn valuation
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Default To Wayland With NVIDIA — Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now default to using the GNOME Wayland session when running the NVIDIA proprietary driver.
• The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here! — We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward!
• Hector Martin on Twitter — We've been getting a steady trickle of users with the installation failing because the APFS resizer does a fsck and finds corruption.

  This confirms my personal experience that Apple's APFS code is just buggy... it seems a lot of people have latent filesystem corruption :(

• Apple M1 Performance On Linux: Benchmarks Better Than Expected For Its Alpha State — I eagerly loaded up Asahi Linux on an M1-powered Apple Mac Mini knowing the various early limitations of the Linux kernel support that is still settling. Overall the Apple M1 Linux performance ended up exceeding my expectations for the performance in its early alpha state.
• Jupiter Broadcasting East Coast Meetup — Let's hang out at the park across the street from Prime BBQ.
• Howto Install NixOS on Apple Silicon Macs

Steam comes to ChromeOS, our thoughts on Arch turning 20, and our first look at GNOME 42.

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• Arch Linux turned 20 years old
• Steam for Chrome OS teased at Google for Games Developer Summit — Steam for Chrome OS was announced as being available "right now" at the Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15, 2022.
• Google Finally Announces Steam For Chrome OS
• Valve sent the developer of Lutris a Steam Deck to help development
• Steam Survey Results For February 2022 Put Linux Right Above 1.0%
• Roadtest Proposed As A New Driver Testing Framework For Linux — Roadtest is a device driver testing framework whereby drivers are tested under User-Mode Linux against mocked/modelled hardware.
• GNOME 42 News
• The Best New Features in GNOME 42
• Download Fedora 36 Beta
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) Daily Build

Why Dirty Pipe is a dirty dog, the explosive adoption of Linux at AMD, and an important update on elementary OS.

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• Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years — Dirty Pipe has the potential to smudge people using Linux and Linux derivitives.
• Catalin Cimpanu on Twitter — “DirtyPipe (CVE-2022-0847) is a vulnerability in the Linux kernel since 5.8 which allows overwriting data in arbitrary read-only files. This leads to privilege escalation. It is similar to CVE-2016-5195 “Dirty Cow” but is easier to exploit.
• Ron Amadeo on Twitter — “By my count, Dirty Pipe affects only brand-new Android 12 devices like the Pixel 6 and S22. Linux 5.8 and above has only been an Android option for five months."
• Canonical Patches “Dirty Pipe” Vulnerability in Ubuntu 21.10 and 20.04 LTS
• BLASTY on Twitter: “Hacked up a quick Dirty Pipe PoC that spawns a shell by hijacking (and restoring) the contents of a setuid binary.”
• The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability — The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability documentation
• AMD Posts Some New Linux Job Openings From Client CPU To Server — AMD would need a lot more Linux engineers to achieve the same level of timely Linux support and low-level kernel enhancements that Intel has been focused on for years, especially when it comes to Intel's open-source work beyond just the actual hardware device enablement.
• Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call! — What’s more, Element Call is built entirely on Matrix: it doesn’t need any additional servers to get going. You can run it against your existing Matrix homeserver to provide complete self-sovereignty… while still being able to talk to anyone else anywhere on the wider Matrix network! We will also be able to automatically use Matrix’s end-to-end encryption to secure all Element Call conferences
• call.element.io
• https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues
• Extending Matrix’s E2EE calls to multiparty
• Danielle Foré on Twitter — Okay it’s been a full month and this situation still isn’t resolved, and it sucks for you to just be completely in the dark and it’s pretty obvious something is up and people are asking what’s going on, so here is my side of the story 🧵
• Danielle gives an update on elementary Reddit Thread
• Jupiter Broadcasting East Coast Meetup

Why it might be time to lower your RISC-V expectations, Intel's moves to close up CPU firmware, and a quick state of the Deck.

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• Valve expect to make ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Steam Decks next month — The good news is though, production is quickly ramping up. Yang mentioned how "in production terms it'll ramp very quickly, in the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands and beyond that it'll grow even quicker".
• Steam Deck gets an OS update to help solve stick drift
• Bungie rejects Steam Deck’s Linux, threatens to ban Destiny 2 players there
• Collabora talk briefly about their work with Valve on SteamOS, Steam Deck — With its new “A/B” design, there are now two operating system partitions, with two different versions of SteamOS. When upgrading, a new operating system image is written to whichever partition is not currently in use, before rebooting the system. A specialized bootloader module then automatically selects the newer operating system and boots into it.
• Portable Linux gaming with the Steam Deck
• Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS — The problem was that ReiserFS code in the kernel used some API calls that nothing else did, preventing them from being changed or enhanced. For now, one of the other ReiserFS developers has contributed a patch that removes the issue.
• CentOS New “AutoSD” Distribution Announced For In-Vehicle Linux Distro — CentOS Automotive Stream Distribution is their binary distribution that will serve as a public, in-development preview of Red Hat's upcoming in-vehicle operating system. CentOS formed their Automotive SIG last year with Red Hat working on a RHEL-based in-vehicle Linux platform that is yet to be publicly released.
• Future Intel Systems To Reportedly Be Even Less Friendly For Open-Source Firmware
• Zaolin on Twitter — For everyone wondering what’s @IntelSoftware planning for the Firmware Support Package 3.0 #fsp and USF is basically going fully closed-source on the firmware side. This means Intel’s #fsp decides to drop #OSF open-source firmware. It’s really a shame…
• Why RISC-V Is Succeeding
• Intel’s software-defined silicon set to debut in Linux 5.18 — The existence of software-defined silicon (SDSI) emerged in October 2021 when Intel staffers posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list with hints about new functionality that would allow users to purchase licenses that turned on capabilities physically present in processors, but which are not available to use out of the box.

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 PREMPTRT 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 PREEMPTRT (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=newsitem&px=PREEMPTRT-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

Canonical has a big week, why bcachefs looks like it's taking another step forward, and ChromeOS Flex for PCs is released.

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• Proton 7.0 out with Easy Anti-Cheat improvements — Proton 7.0 pulls in Wine 7.0 which it's based upon along with: upgrades to DXVK 1.9.4 for DirectX 9 / 10 / 11, newer VKD3D-Proton for DirectX 12 to Vulkan
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter
• Proton 7.0-1: A Major Milestone for Linux Gaming
• Canonical Will Begin Certifying Gigabyte Servers For Ubuntu Linux — Moving forward Gigabyte's server platforms are expected to obtain Ubuntu Server certification.
• GIGABYTE Partners with Canonical to Certify Servers for Ubuntu
• Canonical at MWC 2022
• Bcachefs Might Be Ready For Upstreaming In Linux This Year — The Bcachefs file-system that was born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has over the past few years matured greatly. Now in 2022 the core fundamentals of the file-system are "pretty close to done" and will hopefully be mainlined this calendar year into the Linux kernel.
• Linux On The Apple M1 Preparing Better Performance With In-Development CPUFreq Driver — Fortunately, a proper CPUFreq driver for the Apple M1 is in development for Linux and is allowing for a combination of enticing performance and good battery life for this community-driven, open-source support around the Apple Silicon.
• Get Chrome OS Flex for PC or Mac — Chrome OS Flex is a free and sustainable way to modernize devices you already own. It’s easy to deploy across your fleet or simply try it to see what a cloud-first OS has to offer.
• Google announces Chrome OS Flex for ordinary PCs, Macs • The Register
• Chrome OS Flex is an ideal off-ramp for millions of PCs that can’t run Windows 11
• Google’s free Chrome OS Flex could breathe new life into old PCs and Macs

A last-minute kernel patch for the Steam Deck, why Intel is supporting RISC-V development, and we go hands-on with Plasma 5.24.

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• $66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses — SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.
• Analysis: Relief and challenges for chipmakers as Nvidia-Arm megadeal collapses
• What Nvidia Can’t Buy, It Can Still Get Through An Arm Partnership — While a $1.25 billion hit to the Nvidia books after the company terminated its $40 billion deal to acquire chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group this week is a big deal
• The Collapse of the Nvidia Deal Leaves Arm Exposed
• Steam Deck Platform Driver Posted For The Linux Kernel — This platform driver is for supporting the Steam Deck Specific "VLV0100" device presented by the embedded controller (EC) firmware. This is ultimately used for functionality like CPU/device fan control, access to DDIC registers, battery temperature measurements, display-related settings, and USB Type-C event notifications.
• Engineer hired back in 2018 to work on kernel projects
• Open-Source Firmware Foundation Established For Advancing Open Firmware — The Open-Source Firmware Foundation (OSFF) is getting up and running with hopes of expanding open-source firmware usage throughout the industry.
• Open Source Firmware Foundation on Twitter
• FreeCAD Also Gets a Foundtation
• Intel Joins RISC-V International, Will Help With RISC-V Open-Source Software — Intel is joining the RISC-V International organization as a Premier member.
• Intel Promotes RISC-V, Pledges $1B to Help Chip Startups | Tom’s Hardware
• RAID-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS In the Home Stretch — While all capabilities of this feature have been implemented and all tests so far have been passed, there are still a few loose ends to tie up.
• RAIDZ Expansion Feature Pull Request by ahrens
• ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon
• Plasma 5.24 - Released — Plasma 5.24 improves in looks, ease of use and consistency.
• KDE Plasma 5.24 Released With Wayland Support In Increasingly Great Shape — KDE Plasma 5.24 is out as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment that will also be their new Long-Term Support (LTS) release.
• Try a New Podcast App

Plus, a batch of essential project updates.

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• system76-scheduler — Auto-configure CFS and process priorities for improved desktop responsiveness
• System76-Scheduler Is A New Pop!_OS Rust Effort To Improve Desktop Responsiveness
• Improve desktop application and game performance with system76-scheduler
• Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit — Over the past year, we’ve been trialling a beta of Raspberry Pi OS in glorious 64-bit. Now it’s time to open it up to a wider audience.
• Framework’s Series A and the Years Ahead — We’ve just raised an $18M Series A round to pull in the future of consumer electronics, with Spark Capital as our lead investor.
• Framework Laptop Now Enjoys Open-Source EC Firmware
• Docker Desktop for Linux (Tech Preview) — Docker Desktop is an easy-to-install application that enables you to build and share containerized applications and microservices
• Docker makes comeback with over $50M in ARR two years into restructuring
• SUSE unveils Rancher Desktop 1.0 for Kubernetes on your PC
• Trio of Rust Core Team members hit the road — This week has kicked off with three of Core Team taking their leave.
• Mod team resigns back in Nov 2021
• Redis 7.0 Is Near With “Significant Performance Optimizations” — Redis 7.0-rc1 comes with performance optimizations and more but as well a number of changes that break backwards compatibility support for this popular open-source project.
• Release 7.0-rc1 · GitHub
• MariaDB Corporation Ab to Become a Publicly Traded Company — In the transaction, Angel Pond will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Mangomill plc, an Irish public limited company (which will be renamed MariaDB plc), through a domestication merger with a wholly owned subsidiary of MariaDB plc. Immediately following such domestication merger, the current MariaDB will merge with and into MariaDB plc. Angel Pond will then be liquidated.
• MariaDB announces intent to go public
• Linux 5.16.5 Released To Fix Up Btrfs’ Botched Up Defragging — Btrfs up to now on Linux 5.16 was consuming high amounts of I/O and causing performance degradation of the
• Btrfs Extent Tree v2 Work Progressing For Improving The File-System’s On-Disk Format

The big disruption that looks like a bust, a security issue you need to pay attention to, and some great news for the Steam Deck.

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• Nvidia is reportedly preparing to abandon its $40 billion takeover of Arm — The deal has faced close scrutiny from regulators around the world, who worry it would give Nvidia an unfair advantage in the semiconductor industry.
• SiFive Shifting Production Focus To Next-Gen HiFive Development Board — "With such great ecosystem adoption, demand has exceeded our already high expectations, and we’re close to selling out our production inventory. Given the challenge of supply chain issues that we overcame for the first run of these boards (issues that we continue to face), we’ve decided to focus on the next generation SiFive HiFive development systems rather than trying to put together another build of the HiFive Unmatched platform in 2022."
• Linux system service bug gives root on all major distros, exploit released — Qualys has uncovered a truly dangerous memory corruption vulnerability in polkit's pkexec, CVE-2021-4034. Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program.
• Major Linux PolicyKit Security Vulnerability Uncovered: Pwnkit
• KDE-Powering Qt’s New Framework Lets Developers Bring Ads Into Their Apps — Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications.
• Qt Digital Advertising Platform
• Steam Deck launches February 25, weekly purchase invites planned — Valve has today officially announced their Steam Deck handheld will launch officially on February 25.
• Steam Dynamic Cloud Sync — Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on Steam, and it's a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via the Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC.
• Valve sponsors more work to improve Linux graphics drivers

We explain SUSE Liberty Linux and contemplate why the community seems to be selecting distributions with newer kernels.

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• LVFS Activity Going Wild Ahead Of New Security Disclosure Requiring Firmware Update — Last summer LVFS shot up with activity and when that huge uptick in LVFS activity occurred it ended up being due to Dell BIOS/UEFI updates due to new security vulnerabilities.
• Fwupd 1.7.4 Supports More Hardware For Firmware Updating On Linux — The Fwupd 1.7.4 release adds firmware branch support for ModemManager devices, support for firmware engineers to be able to patch files at known offsets, and a variety of bug fixes.
• GNOME 42 Desktop Environment Is Now Available for Public Testing — The next development release in the GNOME 42 cycle will be the beta version, currently scheduled for release on mid-February. The final release of the GNOME 42 desktop environment is expected on March 23rd, 2022.
• GNOME 42.alpha released — The gnome-desktop module can be built against GTK 4 now and the internals were split in 3 libraries.
• SUSE Liberty Linux Announced For Mixed Linux Environments — With SUSE Liberty Linux, you get trusted support with optional proven management tools that are optimized for mixed Linux environments, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and as you would expect openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
• Wine 7.0 Released with Tons of Improvements, Including a New Theme — This release represents a year of development effort and over 9,100 individual changes.
• The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 7.0
• Intel’s Former Vulkan Driver Lead Dev Lands Great Role For Improving Linux Graphics — "I’m now free to put my effort wherever it’s needed in the stack without concern for corporate priorities."
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Planning To Stick With Linux 5.15 By Default — In the discussion over Ubuntu 22.04's GNOME plans, it was mentioned by Sebastien Bacher of Canonical that "the plan is to use 5.15 for the LTS but the oem and hwe variants will get 5.17 as some point."
• oss-security - Linux kernel: Heap buffer overflow in fscontext.c since version 5.1 — Exploitation relies on the CAPSYSADMIN capability; however, the permission only needs to be granted in the current namespace. An unprivileged user can use unshare(CLONENEWNS|CLONENEWUSER) to enter a namespace with the CAPSYS_ADMIN permission, and then proceed with exploitation to root the system.
• CVE-2022-0185- Red Hat Customer Portal
• CVE-2022-0185 | Ubuntu

• All Roads Lead to Arch: The Evolution of Linux Distros Used for Gaming Over Time — Not only has Arch Linux gained progressively some share to be solidly at 20% now for several months, but the whole landscape looks a lot like Arch derivatives now. Manjaro is almost as big as Arch (but seems to be stagnating in adoption below 20%) and Garuda Linux and EndeavourOS add 6-7% to the mix. In effect, almost half of the gamers on ProtonDB are running some form of Arch.
• Linux Mint’s Brand New Edge ISO is Available to Download! — Linux Mint 20.3 now offers a separate Edge ISO for the Cinnamon Edition to help users with latest-gen hardware.

Fedora and Red Hat users are getting a web-based installer, and a new legal situation for Bitcoin smells like retro SCO FUD.

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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

GnuPG has some great news, Libadwaita 1.0 has arrived and we share our thoughts, plus a big batch of updates from the Matrix project.

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• Koch: A New Future for GnuPG — Longtime GnuPG maintainer Werner Koch has posted an update on the project, mostly focused on the new associated "GnuPG VS-Desktop" business that is, it seems, going quite well.
• A Short introduction to Fuchsia — FuchsiaOS, by now just Fuchsia, was designed to be an entirely modular system, allowing its libraries and applications to be entirely removed, updated and added on it without the system get affected .
• fimage — Portable Fuchsia Emulator
• More Troublesome x86 Android Tablets Being Fixed Up By New Linux Driver — The forthcoming x86-android-tablets driver is focused on the issue of many x86 tablets having invalid entries within their ACPI DSDT tables.
• Libadwaita 1.0 Released For Kicking Off A New Year Of GNOME App Development — GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit.
• The Mega Matrix Holiday Special 2021 — Looking back at 2021, it’s unbelievable how much stuff has been going on in the core team.

We kick off our annual predictions episode with what we got right and wrong this year and then attempt to predict what will happen in 2022.

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• Previous Predictions: Linux Action News 169
• Year in Review: How we’re curating the web with you and our top Pocket features
• Mozilla expects to generate more than $500M in revenue this year
• Pocket and Slate Podcast Partnership Announcement
• Asahi Linux

Plus how the work to port Linux to the Apple M1 resulted in fixing a bug that impacted all Linux distros.

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• Log4j 2.15.0 and previously suggested mitigations may not be enough — It was discovered that version 2.15.0 would still be vulnerable when the configuration has a pattern layout containing a Context Lookup.
• Statement from CISA Director Easterly on “Log4j” Vulnerability
• PipeWire 0.3.41 Offers Improved Flatpak & JACK Compatibility, Apple AirPlay Streaming — PipeWire 0.3.41 also adds a new RAOP module (raop-sink and raop-discover) that can be used for streaming to Apple AirPlay devices.
• EXT4 Prepared To Switch To Linux’s New Mount API — Linux's new mount API is what came about in recent times as a set of system calls offering more flexibility than the long-standing mount syscall that is a one-shot effort while this new multi-step mounting procedure allows for more options.
• The End-Of-Year 2021 State Of Linux On Apple’s M1 SoC — The Asahi Linux project has published their October and November status update to provide an overview of where the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 open-source support is now at as we approach the end of 2021.
• Asahi Linux looks forward to exciting 2022 on Apple silicon
• Hector Martin on Twitter — Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they also added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os.

  And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.

• Podcastindex.org — The Podcast Index is here to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem.
• Linux Action News on Podcastindex.org

Plus, some good news for the Desktop and systemd-homed gets one step closer.

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• GNOME 42 To Finally Allow Input Events To Happen Full-Rate — Up to now GNOME Shell has been compressing pointer motion events so they are synchronized to the monitor refresh rate, which can be anywhere from around 30 to 144 events per second depending upon display.
• An Eventful Instant – GNOME Shell & Mutter
• Do not throttle input in wayland event delivery
• FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE Announcement — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/12 branch.
• systemd 250 Is Coming With A Boat Load Of New Features — systemd 250 is packing a rather large number of new features and changes across the board for this dominant Linux init system and service manager.
• Log4Shell — RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j2, a popular Java logging package
• Apache - The ASF on Twitter — “Did you know that Ingenuity, the Mars 2020 Helicopter mission, is powered by Apache Log4j? https://t.co/gV0uyE1ylk #Apache #OpenSource #innovation #community #logging #services
• Tom (^-^) on Twitter
• Kevin Beaumont on Twitter — “Starting a new thread for log4j security vulnerability and fallout. Spoiler: although this emerged as a Minecraft issue (lol) there is going to be impacts across a wide range of enterprise software for some time.”
• Log4jAttackSurface MEMES

Industry-changing open-source project releases, and why the new CentOS Stream 9 might be more noteworthy than you realize.

Special Guest: Carl George.

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• Blender 3.0 Released — Blender Foundation announces the release of Blender 3.0, to mark the beginning of a new era for open source 2D/3D content creation.
• Blender - YouTube
• Blender 3.0 Shines As A Huge Update For This Leading Open-Source 3D Modeling Software
• Blender 3.0 is out now with a visual refresh, huge new features
• Firmware “Best Known Configuration” in fwupd — These are used by server vendors to identify a known-working (or commercially supported) set of firmware on the machine. This is currently opt-in for each vendor to avoid the UI clutter on the components view, and so if you’re a vendor reading this post and realize you want this feature, let me know and it’s two clicks on the admin panel.
• FWUPD Linux Firmware Updater Prepares “Best Known Configuration” Feature
• Linux Vendor Firmware Service Serves Up 40 Millionth Download
• Introducing CentOS Stream 9
• CentOS Stream 9 Now Available To Live On The Bleeding-Edge Of RHEL9
• EPEL 9 is now available

Fedora's massive endorsement this week that went unnoticed, why RISC-V mobile devices might be getting near, and the significant change coming to a critical open-source tool.

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• The world’s first RISC-V phone might be just around the corner — The Sipeed Maix Amigo kit from 2020 was among the first RISC-V PDAs
• A $16.90 Allwinner D1 Linux RISC-V board
• Sipeed’s $17 LycheeRV Board Has Allwinner RISC-V Processor
• LLVM Is Still Working On Relicensing, Needs Help Locating Some Past Contributors — LLVM is seeking help in trying to track down some past individual contributors and organizations so they can proceed with their relicensing of the massive code-base.
• LLVM relicensing - long tail - Google Sheets
• The LLVM Project Blog
• German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice — The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software, including LibreOffice, in its administration and schools.
• READ: Linode - HedgeDoc
• READ: Ting
• Amazon Linux 2022 Released - Based On Fedora With Changes — Amazon Linux / Amazon Linux 2 had been based on a combination of RHEL and Fedora packages while in today's Amazon Linux 2022 release they note it's explicitly based on Fedora.
• amazon-linux-2022: Amazon Linux 2022
• Announcing preview of Amazon Linux 2022

Just how severe is this DNS cache poisoning attack revealed this week? We'll break it down and explain why Linux is affected. Plus, the feature now removed from APT, more performance patches in the Kernel, and a big batch of project updates.

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• Linux has a serious security problem that once again enables DNS cache poisoning — We can actually guess the ephemeral port in the embedded UDP packet and package it in an ICMP probe to a DNS resolver. If the guessed port is correct, it causes some global resource in the Linux kernel to change, which can be indirectly observed. This is how the attacker can infer which ephemeral port is used.
• Ubuntu Maker Canonical Planning To Vastly Improve Its Documentation — This is a permanent, on-going commitment. It’s work that will never end. It has already started, and will become part of the fundamental Canonical discipline of making software.
• The future of documentation at Canonical
• APT 2.3.12 package manager released, will no longer let you break everything — After the issues that happened with Linus from Linus Tech Tips breaking Pop!_OS during the switch to Linux challenge, the APT package manager has been upgraded to prevent future issues happening.
• KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system — Another change to make things look a bit friendlier in Discover is if you have issues upgrading, it will instantly shove a load of technical details in your face. To normal consumers, that's clearly not going to do much to help and probably scare them away. Now, instead, it will provide a very clear and friendly message, with the option to get more details to report the issue.
• Add support for list issue - Jens Axboe — With the support in 5.16-rc1 for allocating and completing batches of IO, the one missing piece is passing down a list of requests for issue.
• Linux 5.17 To Continue With I/O Optimizations, 5~6% Improvement Pending For NVMe — With the merge window for 5.16 closed, time to submit for review some of the performance optimizations that didn't make this release. Here's batched issue for blk-mq with an NVMe implementation included. 5-6% improvement.
• Linux 5.17 To Boast A Big TCP Performance Optimization
• Linux 5.17 To Bring DRM Privacy-Screen Support, Intel VESA PWM Backlight Handling — The Linux 5.16 merge window now past, an initial batch of changes from drm-misc-next has been sent in to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.17 cycle kicks off around the start of the new year.
• Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 Released for Linux Phones, Here’s What’s New — The UBports Foundation released today the Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices with various improvements and more bug fixes.
• FWUPD 1.7.2 Released With Fixes, Faster & Smaller Daemon — FWUPD 1.7.2 adds support for handling exported MTD block devices, tweaking the compiler flags to reduce the install size by around 300 Kb, speeding up the FWUPD daemon startup by ~40% by postponing some work, and a variety of fixes. The fixes range from a possible DFU crash to DLI download troubles and other device-specific corrections.
• Alma and Rocky Linux release 8.5 builds, Rocky catches up with secure boot — AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, both of which provide community builds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), have released builds matching RHEL 8.5, with Rocky's work catching up with Alma by being signed for secure boot.
• Proxmox VE 7.1 released! — Proxmox VE 7.1 is based on Debian 11 but uses a newer Linux kernel, 5.13, QEMU 6.1, and OpenZFS 2.1.
• Proxmox 7.1 release notes
• Proxmox Downloads

Plus, the new tech in SteamOS 3 that might make it a great desktop OS.

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• Raspberry Pi OS hits the bullseye — Raspberry Pi announced the release of a new version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), which advances to the Debian 11 “bullseye” release.
• What’s new in RHEL 8.5 — Customers running Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL will see a number of enhancements to help configure, manage and operate RHEL more efficiently.
• Major Changes in 8.5
• Red Hat 8.5 released with SQL Server and .NET 6
• AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Stable Now Available — AlmaLinux OS 8.5 includes features and improvements to container tools to reduce friction and make the build and deploy processes more flexible, support for OpenJDK 17, additional OpenSCAP profiles for hardening and security compliance, new system roles, and Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP, amongst other additions and enhancement.

• Canonical Makes It Easier to Run Ubuntu VMs on Apple M1 Macs with Multipass — Multipass promises to offer Apple M1 MacBook developers interesting in developing apps for the Linux/Ubuntu desktop the fastest way to run Linux cross-platform, running a Ubuntu VM in as little as 20 seconds.
• Hector Martin on Twitter — Say hi to an M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM! Notch compatible!

  I made NVMe work today and decided it's time to properly install a distro ;)

• Hector Martin on Twitter: “It’s been running the glxgears demo (60% all-core CPU usage) all night, lid closed, no display sleep. It’s barely warm to the touch, and I can only hear the fan if I put my ear 15cm away from the vents. This is why I’m putting Linux on these machines :-) https://t.co/HPBDskirSf” / Twitter
• Big Btrfs Changes in the Works — I’m working on a large set of on-disk format changes to address some of the more painful parts of Btrfs’s design. There’s a lot of discrete changes here, but they’ll all go under the single umbrella of “extent-tree-v2.”
• On-Disk Format Changes Ahead To Improve “Painful” Parts Of Btrfs Design
• Steam Deck Release Pushed Back To February 2022 — For those that pre-ordered the Steam Deck your position in the queue remains, but is now all shifted back by approximately two months.
• Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing — Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
• Valve Says SteamOS 3.0 Will Be Available for Everyone to Download and Install
• Steam Deck Development Live Stream - YouTube
• Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now

Significant changes at GitHub, Ubuntu starts work on a new desktop tool, why WirePlumber is a big deal, and we bust some Red Hat FUD.

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• Nat Friedman quits as CEO of GitHub — GitHub CEO Nat Friedman announced today he's leaving the organization on November 15 and will be replaced by chief product officer Thomas Dohmke.
• GitHub gets a new CEO
• Google Will Now Pay $31,337 To $50,337 For New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities — Google is effectively tripling its previous reward amounts and promise to honor it for at least the next three months. They are hoping these $31,337 or $50,337 rewards will encourage more security researchers to explore the kernel and report their findings.
• Ubuntu is Building a New Firmware Updater App — This new GUI utility is being built using Flutter and Dart, further cementing Ubuntu’s commitment to go all in on Flutter for future desktop apps. The tool will be distributed as a Snap and provide a Ubuntu-style front-end to the fwupd tool and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service.
• canonical/firmware-updater
• Desktop Team Updates - Monday 1st November 2021 - Desktop / Team Updates
• Ubuntu Continues Work On Flutter+Dart Written Firmware-Updater Utility
• Asahi Linux Boots on M1 Pro — Linux on the M1 Pro status: boots to a shell with working USB ports

  Working: SMP, IRQs, IPIs, framebuffer console, DART, USB, USB-PD, I²C, GPIO. Next I'm looking at PCIe (WiFi & SD card reader).

• Apple M1 PCIe Driver Leads The PCI Changes For Linux 5.16
• WirePlumber in Fedora 35 — Today marks an exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, with WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire!
• Master your PipeWire streams with WirePlumber | Linaro Virtual Connect Fall 2021
• LXQt 1.0.0 Desktop Environment Released After 8 Years of Development — The LXQt team proudly announced today the release and general availability of the LXQt 1.0.0 desktop environment as a major release bringing new features and improvements.
• LXQt 1.0 Released For Lightweight Qt5 Desktop
• Release 1.0.0 · lxqt/lxqt
• Red Hat to hire fewer senior engineers after budget frozen — Next year, IBM's Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort largely aimed at controlling costs.
• Next year, IBM’s Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort aimed largely at controlling costs. : linux
• The first fruits of CentOS Stream: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Enters Beta with Exciting New Features and Many Improvements

New Raspberry Pi hardware has a few surprises, the most impressive things in Linux 5.15, and our reaction to classic functionality under consideration for removal from Fedora.

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• New product: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W on sale now at $15 — Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM.
• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with Ubuntu Server 21.10 support is here
• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Launches As Newer, Faster $10 Single Board Computer
• Microsoft Edge finally arrives on Linux – “Official” build lands in repos — We’re happy to see Edge for Linux finally make Stable and Official status, because we find it handy to have two distinct browsers on any operating system platform we use.
• Element One - Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place — Element One is a huge step change. It’s a very affordable, unlimited usage way for people to have all of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place - that’s a combined three billion users!
• Element 1.9.1 - Chat Export is finally here!!
• The 15 Most Interesting Linux 5.15 Kernel Features From NTFS3 To KSMBD — Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week.
• Linux 5.15 Released
• Fedora considers removing NIS support — The change proposal does note that: "For some users this change may be a bit disruptive and it may require some learning curve for switching to alternative solutions".
• What is the support status of Network Information Service — As seen from the RHEL8.3 release notes the yp rpms (ypserv, ypbind, yp-tools) have been marked as deprecated. Furthermore those components will no longer be available in RHEL-9.
• Fedora 35 Cleared For Release Next Week — Confirmation of Fedora 35 being ready to ship next week was announced today.

Major performance milestones are being hit with new code inbound for Linux, Plasma and GNOME desktops are set to run Wayland on NVIDIA's binary driver, and why the SFC's new GPL fight could have implications for you.

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• Newest Linux Optimizations Can Achieve 10M IOPS Per-Core With IOuring — These optimizations today were primarily within the kernel's block / NVMe / IOuring 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

Plus a low key update to the Raspberry Pi 4, and the changes in the new Docker Compose 2.0.

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• Linus Torvalds on Community, Rust and Linux’s Longevity — The ceremony opened by acknowledging a special moment in time with a birthday cake ceremoniously delivered to Torvalds to mark Linux’s 30th anniversary, drawing a round of applause from the audience.
• Fedora To Focus On Driving New Linux Video Improvements Around PipeWire — The ceremony opened by acknowledging a special moment in time with a birthday cake ceremoniously delivered to Torvalds to mark Linux’s 30th anniversary, drawing a round of applause from the audience.
• PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack | Christian F.K. Schaller
• Docker Compose 2.0
• docker - compose-switch
• Raspberry Pi 4 model Bs arriving with newer ‘C0’ stepping — The local Micro Center only had the 8 GB model in stock, so I went a little over budget and bought it. When I arrived home, I checked the board, and noticed a bit of a difference on the Broadcom SoC
• What’s In A Raspberry Pi Processor Update?
• Linode on Twitter — We’re rolling out ultra-fast, better-performing, and more reliable NVMe block storage across all 11 of our global data centers
• Ubuntu Community on Twitter — An experimental open-source/libre snap server and wrapper by @RudraSaraswat1 is ready with the name 'lol'. You can daily-drive it on most distributions which support snaps.
• Announcing Project Kebe
• Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Object Storage, minus the egress fees — Cloudflare R2 Storage includes full S3 API compatibility, working with existing tools and applications as built.
• Sad Server Stories | LINUX Unplugged 425 — Sometimes things go wrong; this week, we admit we've got a problem.

Plus how AlmaLinux just rounded out their offering.

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• Canonical extends support for 14.04 and 16.04 LTS • The Register — Users still running on 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), released back in April 2014, now have until April 2024 (up from 2022) to make the move to something more recent. 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), which dropped into Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) in April this year, has had this extended from April 2024 to April 2026.
• Google Finally Shifting To “Upstream First” Linux Kernel Approach For Android Features — Google's Todd Kjos talked today during Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC2021) around their Generic Kernel Image initiative.
• LPC 2021 - Android MC - YouTube
• Epic Games announce full Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux including Wine & Proton — Easy Anti-Cheat from Epic Games / Epic Online Services has officially announced a full expansion for Linux including native builds and Wine + Proton. This is big for Linux Gaming and the Steam Deck.
• Epic Online Services launches Anti-Cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
• BattlEye on Twitter — “BattlEye has provided native Linux and Mac support for a long time and we can announce that we will also support the upcoming Steam Deck (Proton). This will be done on an opt-in basis with game developers choosing whether they want to allow it or not.”
• Valve Publishes New Steam Deck FAQ With A Few New Details Shared
• Steam Client Beta updated with PipeWire desktop capture for Remote Play
• AlmaLinux Container Images Update - Full RHEL UBI Compatibility — We are thrilled to announce that as of today, AlmaLinux now provides fully compatible alternatives for Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI)!
• Linode on Twitter — “We’re rolling out ultra-fast, better-performing, and more reliable NVMe block storage across all 11 of our global data centers 🚀
• GNOME 41 Released With Wayland Improvements, More Performance Tuning — This morning's GNOME 41 release announcement sums up the new release as "Highlights in this release include improvements to the Software app, new multitasking settings and enhanced power management. Beyond that, there is a new Connections application, a refreshed Music application, performance improvements from the compositor to the toolkit, and much more."
• GNOME 41 Released: The Most Popular Linux Desktop Environment Gets Better
• GNOME 41 Released with New Settings, Power Savings, and More
• GNOME 41 Desktop Environment Officially Released, This Is What’s New
• Fedora Linux 35 Beta is GO
• Contact the Show

Desktop Linux graphics are about to get a significant investment, Mozilla and Canonical work together on a Firefox Snap, and some key new insights into the Linux port to Apple’s M1.

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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 Microsoft’s Linux distro, and some thoughts on our editorial style.

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• 5.15 Merge window — 3,440 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.15 development cycle.
• Amazon’s DAMON Merged Into Linux 5.15
• Linux 5.15 Hit By Some Early Performance Regressions
• AMD Posts New “AMD-PSTATE” CPUFreq Driver — Leveraging CPPC For Better Perf-Per-Watt
• Linux 5.15 Readies More Code For Compile & Run-Time Detection Of Buffer Overflows
• AMD Finally Releases Overdue Linux CPPC Driver
• OverlayFS On Linux 5.15 Improves Performance
• Linux 5.15’s New “-Werror” Behavior Is Causing A Lot Of Pain — That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build.
• Re: [GIT PULL] ntfs3: new NTFS driver for 5.15 - Linus Torvalds
• Red Hat will officially support EPEL in the future — The new team is being formed and is expected to start work in October.
• History and Philosophy of EPEL - Fedora Project Wiki
• Microsoft Releases Its August Update For The CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution — One of the big fundamental changes with CBL-Mariner August 2021 is Microsoft now provides a public ISO to download of this Linux distribution.
• CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances

Plus RISC-V gets a surprising benefactor, and the kernel feature we never thought would get merged that was just approved by Linus.

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• SUSE Rancher 2.6 Launches After the Acquisition of Rancher Labs — The number of Kubernetes distributions SUSE Rancher 2.6 can support has been raised by two, with the addition of Microsoft Azure’s AKS and Google Cloud Platform’s GKE. Rancher 2.6 also will add support for SLE’s Base Container Images.
• SUSE Updates Rancher Platform for Kubernetes — Version 2.6 of SUSE Rancher adds a revamped user interface with improved logic-based workflows along with providing integration with SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images (SLE BCI), a repository for container images for SUSE Linux.
• SUSE Rancher 2.6 Brings Enterprise Customers Improved Interoperability Across Multi-Cloud Cluster Environments
• Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies: New ‘Business’ subscription is here — Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model.
• Docker is Updating and Extending Our Product Subscriptions - Docker Blog — The new Docker Personal subscription replaces the Docker Free subscription. With its focus on open source communities, individual developers, education, and small businesses – which together account for more than half of Docker users – Docker Personal is free for these communities.
• MongoDB tops $30 billion market cap in banner week for open source — MongoDB said second-quarter revenue climbed 44% to $199 million, while its Atlas cloud database grew 83% and now makes up more than half of total revenue.
• [Video] MongoDB CEO — "We now have 29,000 customers."
• CloudLinux offers CentOS 8 users a support lifeline — CloudLinux has announced it will provide updates and support for CentOS 8 through December 31, 2025.
• Linux on the Framework Laptop — We recommend using 5.12 or newer for a kernel to get solid platform, WiFi, and bluetooth functionality, along with libfprint 1.92.0 or newer for the fingerprint reader. All of the other hardware like speakers, microphones, headphones, webcam, hardware privacy switches, keyboard media keys, ambient light sensor, and all of the Expansion Cards should work completely.
• Apple Possibly Exploring Open-Source Alternative to Arm Architecture — According to a newly posted job alert, spotted by Tom's Hardware, Apple is looking for an engineer that specializes in RISC-V, an open-source architecture instruction set that allows device makers to build their own chips without having to pay a license or royalty.
• Apple M1 IOMMU Driver Merged For Linux 5.15, Intel Scalable Mode By Default — This IOMMU on the Apple M1 has been a bit challenging for the developers to deal with as the hardware is fixed to using a 16K pagesize while there is ongoing work to improve the infrastructure so it will play happy when using a kernel with 4K CPU pagesize.
• [Twitter] The M1 IOMMU driver (required for PCIe,WiFi,USB,display and almost everything else) was just merged by Linus — "Thanks again to Robin Murphy and @alyssarzg for reviewing and testing and ofc to @joergroedel for accepting it!"
• Merge tag 'iommu-updates-v5.15'
• KSMBD As An In-Kernel SMB3 File Server Merged For Linux 5.15 — KSMBD, developed by Samsung, is focused on delivering speedy SMB3 file serving performance and also supporting features more implemented in kernel-space, like RDMA support for SMB Direct. KSMBD doesn't aim to be as comprehensive as well known Samba for CIFS/SMB support in user-space but is just focused on the performance and kernel feature angle.
• KSMBD Kernel Docs

Why the Linux kernel received so much mainstream attention this week, some of our favorite open-source projects get great updates, and why we're concerned about Linux Foundation members transferring innovation from Linux to closed source software at an industrial scale.

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• Linux 5.14 set to boost future enterprise application security — A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help with several new capabilities. Mike McGrath, vice president, Linux Engineering at Red Hat told TechCrunch that the kernel update includes a feature known as core scheduling, which is intended to help mitigate processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown
• Linux 5.14 Features Aplenty With New AMD GPUs, SmartShift, More Alder Lake, Core Scheduling
• QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes — RISC-V on QEMU has updates around OpenTitan platform support, support for VirtIO VGA, and a variety of other architecture improvements.
• PipeWire 0.3.34 Released — Bluetooth battery status support for head-set profile and using Apple extensions. aptX-LL and FastStream codec support was added.
• CodeWeavers still hiring for a ‘General Wine Developer' — CodeWeavers announced recently they need a bit of help on finding more developers, with a spot still currently open for a 'General Wine Developer' who will work on Wine and Proton.
• Microsoft, Google partner on eBPF — Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the new eBPF Foundation, which was unveiled August 12, plans to expand eBPF and extend it beyond Linux.
• eBPF Summit 2021
• The State & Future of eBPF - Thomas Graf
• eBPF for Windows - Dave Thaler (Microsoft)
• Linux On The Apple M1 Can Now Boot To The GNOME Desktop — Alyssa Rosenweig, who has been working on reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU since January, has now posted a screenshot of "GNOME Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal."
• ‘Not great, but usable’: GNOME desktop boots on Asahi Linux for Apple M1
• 30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat
• Linux turns 30: ​Linus Torvalds on his “just a hobby” operating system
• Happy birthday – 30 Years of Linux
• Happy Birthday, Linux: From a Bedroom Project To Billions of Devices in 30 Years
• 30th Anniversary of Linux - Linux Foundation
• Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years • The Register
• Linode Joins Jupiter Broadcasting In Denver - YouTube
• Chris remains on the road! Track is trip live: colonytracker.live

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, why Western Digital might be to thank you for your next ultimate Linux workstation.

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• Debian 11 “bullseye” Released — After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.
• Phoronix: Debian 11 “Bullseye” Released
• Debian Live install images
• Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation - Phoronix — For driving eBPF usage moving forward for these sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel, the eBPF Foundation has been formed with backing from The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Google, and others.
• Linux Foundation Press Release
• eBPF - Introduction, Tutorials & Community Resources
• RISC-V Developers Continue Working On KVM Support — This KVM RISC-V support has been led by Western Digital who remains very active with various elements of RISC-V Linux support.
• Progress Report: August 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Restore/upgrade firmware of iOS devices
• Apple M1 PCIe Driver Under Review For The Linux Kernel
• Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a ‘pay what you want’ basis • The Register
• Pantheon-tweaks: A system settings panel for the Pantheon desktop environment.

Plus how PipeWire will improve day-to-day desktop life, Google's push for more kernel investments, and a lot more.

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• Google Calls On Companies To Devote More Engineers To Upstream Linux, Toolchains — The post notes that stable Linux kernel releases see close to 100 new fixes each week, but given that rate of change vendors are not always picking up the latest fixes or in some cases just trying to cherry-pick the "important" fixes. Besides acknowledging the need for more upstream kernel developers, the post also encourages vendors to go the route of chasing the latest Linux stable or LTS kernel releases in order to incorporate all fixes.
• Google Online Security Blog: Linux Kernel Security Done Right
• It’s time to improve Linux’s security | ZDNet
• Google slams Linux kernel, says it needs major security investment | TechRadar
• Bug in Lynx’ SSL certificate validation
• Intel Proposes Linux Kernel Driver Allow/Deny Filtering — Given the VMM is an untrusted entity and the VMM presents emulated hardware to the guest, a threat vector similar to Thunderclap [1] is present. Also, for ease of deployment, it is useful to be able to use the same kernel binary on host and guest, but that presents a wide attack surface given the range of hardware supported in typical builds.
• [PATCH v1] driver: base: Add driver filter support
• PipeWire 0.3.33 Released — Bluetooth can now automatically switch between headset and audio profile
• 0.3.33 · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab
• Samsung's In-Kernel SMB3 Server Gets Closer to Real — Samsung has been developing "KSMBD" (formerly also known as CIFSD) as an in-kernel SMB3 file sharing server.
• I tried Steam Deck early and it’s AWESOME! - YouTube — It's my lucky day! Valve let me try the Steam Deck early - And it destroyed my expectations. Just how good is it? Let me explain...
• I Have MORE to Say About Steam Deck - WAN Show August 6, 2021 - YouTube
• A major bug fix week over at the KDE project — We are really trying to improve the stability of our software now that it’s starting to be used in more 3rd-party products like the Steam Deck.
• Lutris 0.5.9 Beta Released With Epic Games Store Support — The Lutris 0.5.9 beta delivers on initial support for the Epic Games Store, support for DXVK-NVAPI and DLSS, FidelityFX Super Resolution is now an exposed option for compatible Wine versions, Valve's Gamescope Wayland game compositor is now an option, Esync usage is now enabled by default, the Dolphin emulator is now available as a game source, improved process monitoring, and other enhancements. It's quite a hearty update for this game manager.
• Many Interesting Talks On Deck For The X.Org Developers Conference 2021 - Phoronix
• Join our Telegram Group — jupiterbroadcasting.com/telegram
• Get Linux Action News weekly by subscribing for free

Microsoft's next kernel patch fixes a long-standing Linux issue, we'll share the details. Plus ChromeOS's next power user feature you haven't heard of, and Valve's broader plans that came into focus this week.

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• Linux Action News Sticker
• Microsoft Effort For A Global Counter On Block/Disk Changes — This global counter for block device changes is sought after to better correlate events for devices that may end up re-using the same device, commonly for cases like /dev/sda or /dev/loop0 when a device is detached and then later reattached but not necessarily the same device.
• linux-block - Linux 5.x block layer tree(s)
• The New NTFS Driver Looks Like It Will Finally Be Ready With Linux 5.15 — Following those v27 patches, on Friday there was Paragon developer Konstantin Komarov who responded to Torvalds and reaffirmed the company's support for maintaining this driver.
• Microsoft: Component Shortages Not Going Away Any Time Soon — Supply-chain pressures also will continue to impact Microsoft's Xbox gaming consoles and PCs made by its partners, company officials conceded. Hood told analysts to expect Windows OEM revenues in Q1 FY22 to decline mid to high single digits and Surface revenue to decline by low teens.
• Mozilla VPN unveils major security boost — Split tunneling is now available in Mozilla VPN on iOS and Android.
• Steam Beta Brings New Downloads Page, Linux Container Updates — This Steam beta update is a bit meatier than normal with a new downloads page implementation, several Linux-specific updates.
• Steam Community :: Group :: Steam Client Beta
• Chrome OS persistent desk bar receives a vital pre-release fix — Last month, the Chrome OS development team decided that virtual desks weren’t being used enough by well, practically anyone, so they created what’s called Bento – or the ‘Persistent Desk Bar’.
• Alyssa Rosenzweig gets Debian running on the M1 — Debian GNU/Linux running bare metal on the Apple M1 with a mainline kernel.
• HackerSploit Docker Security Essentials eBook — This guide focuses on securing the Docker platform on Linux.
• Google to Officially Announce Subsea Cable to Connect Europe and Asia — The laying of the cable is part of the arms race between the tech giants, with Google competing against Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft in the cloud and data center sectors. Owning a cable, as opposed to renting one, secures a company’s control of the traffic on the cable and ensures the company can serve its clients first before sharing traffic with its competitors.
• How Hyperscale Cloud Platforms Reshaped the Submarine Cable Industry — For a lot more on how hyperscalers are changing the game in the world of submarine cables, listen to our interview with TeleGeography’s Alan Mauldin in full on The Data Center Podcast.

Plus, how hard is it to port Linux software to Fucshia? We get the answer from Google's Adam Barth.

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• Denial of Service in systemd — The Qualys Research Team has discovered a stack exhaustion denial-of-service vulnerability in systemd, a near-ubiquitous utility available on major Linux operating systems. Any unprivileged user can exploit this vulnerability to crash systemd and hence the entire operating system (a kernel panic).
• Nasty Linux systemd security bug revealed — It works by enabling attackers to misuse the alloca() function in a way that would result in memory corruption. This, in turn, allows a hacker to crash systemd and hence the entire operating system.
• Debian 11.0 “Bullseye” Gets An August Release Date — Debian developers are aiming to release Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" on Saturday, August 14th, 2021.
• Audacity publishes updated Privacy Policy and an Apology — The update addresses the main points of criticism leveled against the previous version of the privacy policy.
• Apologetic Audacity rewrites privacy policy after ‘significant lapse in communication’ — Open-source audio editor Audacity this week posted an apology on GitHub in response to the entirely predictable furore over the platform's privacy policy.
• Valve corrects the RAM specs for the Steam Deck — Yang also confirmed on Twitter that when docked you can run Steam Deck games off of an external SSD.
• Faster Zombies to Steam Deck: The History of Valve and Linux Gaming — Well, Valve and Linux Gaming together have come a very long way since the early blogs posts about getting Left 4 Dead 2 running fast on Linux to the new Steam Deck. But just how far have they come? Let's do a little reminiscing.
• The Framework Laptop is now shipping, and press reviews — We’re excited to see the first press reviews go live for the Framework Laptop and the first orders land on your doorsteps today! With the FTC unanimously voting to enforce the Right to Repair just yesterday, our timing couldn’t be better for delivering a great, high performance, easy to repair product.
• Framework Laptop pre-orders are now open
• Two Googlers offer a tour & demo of Fuchsia OS — Rubber Duck Engineering, a weekly web show hosted by Fuchsia software engineer Adam Barth and Flutter engineer Eric Seidel, was able to record a dedicated episode teaching about the current state of Fuchsia OS.
• [Video] Rubber Duck Engineering Episode #57 — A Tour of the Fuchsia Operating System

Plus, how Microsoft just gave a boost to the Linux Desktop and more.

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• Valve has formally announced the Steam Deck — Valve has now formally revealed the Steam Deck, a portable handheld gaming console powered by a new version of their Linux-based SteamOS operating system.
• Valve Making Linux Anti-Cheat a Reality for Steam Deck Launch — Valve's newly-announced Steam Deck has a nice bonus for Linux gamers — it's helping to improve Linux anti-cheat by working with Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye to provide Proton support for their software.
• Steam Deck FAQ: 31 Big Questions Answered - YouTube
• First Hands-On With Valve’s Handheld Gaming PC - YouTube
• Steam Deck :: Tech Specs
• Valve has confirmed to me that we will have access to the Arch repository
• Gabe Newell expects Steam Deck to sell ‘millions of units’ — "Our view is, if we're doing this right, we're going to be selling these in millions of units, and it's clearly going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in."
• Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 Officially Released — Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 is here as a maintenance update that plugs various annoyances and bugs to make the entire Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system more stable and reliable.
• Amazon’s Elasticsearch fork OpenSearch hits prime time — Amazon has launched the first production-ready version of its Elasticsearch fork OpenSearch. This comes six months after Amazon’s AWS first revealed plans to fork Elasticsearch
• Introducing OpenSearch
• OpenSearch reaches 1.0 milestone
• Windows 365 Cloud PC — Securely stream your Windows experience—including your personalized apps, content, and settings—from the Microsoft cloud to any device with your Windows 365 Cloud PC. Available August 2.
• Microsoft reveals $31 per user per month price tag — Microsoft isn't sharing pricing for its just-announced Windows 365/ Cloud PC service until early August. But the pricing of one of its lower-end SKUs seemingly has leaked already.
• Introducing a new era of hybrid personal computing — Windows 365 supports your business apps—Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform—line of business apps, and more. With Windows 365, we also stand by our promise of app compatibility with App Assure, a service that helps customers with 150 or more users fix any app issues they might run into at no additional cost.
• Microsoft is bringing Windows to a web browser, and it will work on iPad and the Mac — Microsoft unveiled a new service called Windows 365, and it makes it possible for users to run a full version of Windows in a web browser on any device.

Plus, our take on the Audacity fork drama and the milestone reached this week that none of us have been looking forward to.

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• Nextcloud Hub 22 Released — At a virtual presentation streamed worldwide, the Nextcloud team introduced the availability of Nextcloud Hub 22, the second major product launch this year.
• Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with ‘Tenacity’ name • The Register — A disagreement over the project's name. Being unable to use the Audacity trademark, now owned by Muse Group, cookiengineer ran a poll to find a new name for the fork.
• will you switch to temporary-audacity/audacity after the new audacity drama · Issue #72 · flathub/org.audacityteam.Audacity · GitHub
• Stepdown as Maintainer of this Fork · Issue #99 · tenacityteam/tenacity · GitHub
• Breakdown of All Data Collected By Audacity : linux
• ocenaudio — Easy, fast and powerful audio editor
• ardour — Any number of tracks and busses. Non-linear editing. Non-destructive (and destructive!) recording. Any bit depth, any sample rate. Dozens of file formats.
• REAPER — REAPER is a complete digital audio production application for computers, offering a full multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing and mastering toolset.
• Microsoft Edge Beats Firefox To Become the Third-Most Popular Browser — Microsoft Edge puts daylight between itself and Mozilla Firefox
• Contribute to Fedora Linux Kernel 5.13 Test Week — Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, July 11, 2021 through Sunday, July 18, 2021
• USB Low Latency Audio Support Re-Submitted For Linux 5.14 — Submitted on Friday as part of sound fixes was that work to reduce the latency at playback start with the usb-audio driver.
• Experimental Rust Support Patches Submitted to Linux Kernel Mailing List
• [PATCH 00/17] Rust support - ojeda
• Samsung Posts Newest “KSMBD” Linux Patches For In-Kernel SMB3 Server — The focus remains on being able to deliver optimal performance and supporting more features like RDMA integration compared to what can be implemented efficiently in user-space with the likes of Samba.
• Chromium OS Integrates CloudReady Installer — Ever wanted to have a Chrome OS experience on a device that isn’t a Chromebook or a Chromebox?
• [CrOS] Add install cloudready shelf button · Gerrit Code Review
• CloudReady Home Edition USB Installation | Neverware Install Guide
• Google bought CloudReady, the largest ChromiumOS distribution | Ars Technica

Plus the good, the bad, and the impressive in the new Linux 5.13 release.

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• System76 Blog — Pop!OS 21.04: A Release of COSMIC Proportions — Pop!OS COSMIC (Computer Operating System Main Interface Components) gives you the freedom to navigate your workflow via your mouse, keyboard, and/or trackpad.
• Pop OS 21.04 Cosmic Desktop Brings Much Needed Productivity Boost
• Pop!_OS 21.04 Released with New ‘Cosmic’ Desktop
• Audacity Is Now A Possible Spyware, Remove It ASAP — The updated privacy policy page for Audacity includes a wide range of data collection mechanisms. It states for example that it can hand any user data to state regulators where it is located, which is basically Russia, USA and the EEA zone.

• Audacity GitHub: Clarification of Privacy Policy
• Audacity GitHub: New privacy policy is completely unacceptable!
• Audacity Desktop Privacy Notice
• GitHub - cookiengineer/audacity: Audacity Fork without any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting.
• HN Audacity Discussion
• Fedora Audacity discussion
• Google is moving away from APKs on the Play Store — Starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps will have to be published using the Android App Bundle format. Your phone will still download apps as APKs, but the app bundles will create APKs that are optimized for your device.
• Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.13 after seven release candidates — “In fact," he said, "it’s one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers.
• Some 5.13 development statistics [LWN.net]
• Linux Git: Merge tag ‘landlock_v34’
• (2016) Sandboxing with the Landlock security module [LWN.net]
• NFS is broken in Linux 5.13 — This made it into 5.13 final, and completely breaks NFSD for me. Existing mounts on clients hang, as do new mounts from new clients.
• Ubuntu 20.10 End of Life Warning — Official support for Ubuntu 20.10 ends on July 22, 2021.

Plus, our thoughts on WD Live users getting their data wiped and Rocky Linux's gold master.

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• Rocky Linux 8.4 Available Now — The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the General Availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 for x86_64 and ARM64.
• Ubuntu-maker Canonical will support open source Blender on Windows, Mac, and Linux — The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. Canonical’s engineers will engage directly with customers to provide comprehensive technical support to users by understanding, diagnosing and resolving issues as swiftly as possible.
• Canonical Partners With Blender Around Paid LTS Application Support
• Canonical Gives RISC-V a HiFive — Canonical have announced that its Ubuntu operating system now supports two RISC-V boards from SiFive, the HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched.
• “I’m totally screwed.” WD My Book Live users wake up to find their data deleted — On its website, Western Digital advised customers to disconnect their My Book Live devices to prevent further attacks while the company investigates the mass wiping.
• WD My Book NAS devices are being remotely wiped clean worldwide
• Why Windows 11 is forcing everyone to use TPM chips — While Microsoft has required OEMs to ship devices with support for TPM chips since Windows 10, the company hasn’t forced users or its many device partners to turn these on for Windows to work. That’s what’s really changing with Windows 11, and combined with Microsoft’s Windows 11 upgrade checker, it has resulted in a lot of understandable confusion.
• Windows 11 System Requirements: Will TPM 2.0 be mandatory for Windows 11 Build 21996?
• TrueNAS SCALE 21.06-BETA Now Available! — With this first BETA, we kickoff the official pre-release testing cycles and prepare for a release version in the coming months. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on any issues found to our bug ticketing system so we can continue the work to make SCALE the best, most stable release possible.
• SCALE 21.06-BETA.1
• TrueNAS SCALE Announcement and Nightly Image Downloads
• TrueNAS SCALE Release Plan
• TrusNAS Developer Notes
• TrueNAS SCALE 21.06 BETA ISO

Plus, our thoughts on Steam possibly coming to ChromeOS and the game-changing feature coming to ZFS.

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• Rust in the Linux kernel just got a big boost from Google — The main goal of the push to bring Rust to Linux is to wipe out an entire class of memory-related security bugs in the kernel. This is important because, as Microsoft has recently highlighted, 70% of all bugs it fixes are memory-related. Historically, key Linux drivers that make up the kernel have been written in C, which is not memory-safe.
• Supporting Miguel Ojeda’s Work on Rust in the Linux Kernel — While this is the first memory safety effort we’ve announced under our new Prossimo project name, our memory safety work began in 2020. You can read about our efforts to bring memory safety to curl and the Apache HTTP server, and to add improvements to the Rustls TLS library.
• ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon — OpenZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens opened a PR for one of the most sought-after features in ZFS history—RAIDz expansion—last week. The new feature allows a ZFS user to expand the size of a single RAIDz vdev.
• June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit - YouTube
• openzfs Pull Request: RAIDZ Expansion feature by ahrens
• ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance
• Systemd 249-rc1 Released — The first release candidate of systemd 249 is now available for testing with yet more new and improved features.
• Systemd 249 release candidate includes better support for immutable OSes and provisioning images — The journey from RC1 to full release is likely to take a month or so, judging by past releases, so we can expect systemd 249 sometime in July.
• CloudLinux releases UChecker security tool for Linux servers — This newly open-sourced program, part of the company's TuxCare security services, scans Linux servers for out-of-date libraries both on disk and in memory.
• kernelcare.com — Live patching for Linux kernels & shared libraries, vulnerability scanners reporting & patch management assistance.
• cloudlinux/kcare-uchecker — A simple tool to detect outdated shared libraries
• Steam on ChromeOS: Not a Rumor Anymore — There are now some QA testers being hired to work on the “ChromeOS Steam Launch Team” to triage games, find defects and test performance in specific configurations.
• 🎉 nano-5.8 is released — "Why is it necessary to be special?"

Plus the critical kernel feature that lacks funding, and our take of 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, the new initiative that has Apple, Google, and Microsoft all working together.

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• GRUB Adds Backup/Restore Safeguard
• grub-install: Add backup and restore
• fs: Use 64-bit type for filesystem timestamp
• fs/xfs: Add needsrepair incompat feature support
• fs/xfs: Add bigtime incompat feature support
• PipeWire 0.3.29
• WebRTC Work
• Firefox 89.0, See All New Features, Updates and Fixes
• Forming the WebExtensions Community Group | WebExtensions Community Group
• WebExtensions Community Group
• Browser Extension Community Group — Browser Extension Community Group
• Web Extensions Group Charter
• Phoronix Turns 17 Years Old This Week - Phoronix
• The Insane Power Use Of Benchmarking Linux Every Day
• OpenBenchmarking.org
• LinuxBenchmarking.com
• openSUSE Leap 15.3 Released - Built Using Same Binary Packages As SUSE Linux Enterprise - Phoronix
• openSUSE Leap 15.3 Bridges Path to Enterprise
• GNOME’s Need To Broaden Its Audience For Greater Impact & Funding
• Atari VCS finally actually launches (in the US) on June 15 | GamingOnLinux
• Atari VCS Controller Support Added To SDL2 - Phoronix

Plus Pwned Passwords goes open source, the public release of Fuchsia, and Valve's rumored Linux handheld.

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• After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for ‘policy violations’ — All told, it appears something like 700 Freenode channels have been seized and re-permissioned, supposedly because the channels mentioned Libera Chat in violation of Freenode's advertising policy.
• Freenode IRC staff resign en masse after takeover by Korea’s “crown prince”
• IRC Announcement - Fedora Magazine
• Ubuntu, Wikimedia jump ship to the Libera Chat IRC network after Freenode channel confiscations
• One week of Libera Chat — It’s been an exciting first week, and we’d like to say a massive thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and patience as we continue to work to bring Libera.Chat up to full capacity. In these first few days, we’ve been able to reach 16,500 simultaneous connections and 20,000 registered accounts.
• kline󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on mastodon: “andrew lee just seized over 700 channels on freenode”
• PSA: Ubuntu’s IRC Channels Have Moved from Freenode to Libera Chat
• Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked — Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.
• Pwned Passwords, Open Source in the .NET Foundation and Working with the FBI
• Pwned Passwords is now open source!
• Troy Hunt on Twitter RE: the news
• The FBI will feed compromised passwords to Have I Been Pwned — As Hunt explained, the FBI is involved into all sorts of investigations into digital crimes, such as botnets, ransomware, online child sexual exploitation and terrorism. The compromised passwords they find are often being used by crime rings, so the passwords' quick addition to the HIBP database would be extremely helpful. That said, the website doesn't have a way for the feds to quickly feed passwords into its database yet.
• Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub — Google’s long-in-development, from-scratch operating system, Fuchsia, is now running on real Made by Google devices, namely, the first-generation Nest Hub.
• Here’s an easier way to try Fuchsia OS on your computer
• Linux Action Show 431
• Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC — On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Djundik spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named "SteamPal".
• New Audacity Owners Want a CLA — For those not yet aware, we are introducing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which contributors to Audacity will need to sign in order to contribute code to the project.
• Information About Our New Contributor License Agreement
• Nextcloud iOS app Open Sourced
• GitHub: nextcloud/ios/COPYING.iOS
• Nextcloud iOS app License Guidelines
• List of Open-Source iOS Apps
• Jami on the Mac App Store
• mediaU on the App Store
• Linux Game Development at Tesla? — Some of you might have heard, our dear technoking is bullish on games and making an awesome platform for all gamers in Tesla vehicles. The latest Model S on our website can give you a hint of what we're aiming for in terms of platform capability (sorry, can't divulge much more for now). The Tesla infotainment OS and platform software are based on a standard Linux, so of course, we're interested in helping the gaming community make Linux gaming excellent.

Plus the new Firefox security features in beta, great news for F-Droid, and Apple transfers CUPS to a new home.

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• Chrome OS’s Linux app support is leaving beta — Google announced at I/O that Linux on Chromebooks would finally be coming out of beta with the release of Chrome OS 91.
• Android 12 will finally let alternative app stores update apps on their own — In Google's official blog post announcing Android 12 the company confirmed that it’s "delivering on [its] promise to make third-party app stores easier to use on Android 12."
• Red Hat Is Hiring Even More Graphics Engineers — Red Hat is now hiring two more graphics engineers working on the Linux graphics drivers. This will be focusing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and upstream graphics drivers for the open-source code around Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
• Senior Software Engineer - GPU Hardware Enablement
• Software Engineer - GPU, Input and Multimedia
• Principal Engineer - Hardware Enablement for Infotainment/Automotive
• New opportunities in the Red Hat Desktop team — Christian F.K. Schaller — We also have flexibility for people who want to work remotely, so as long as there is a Red Hat office in your home country you can work remotely for us.
• OpenPrinting Now Developing Upstream CUPS, Apple Bows Out — Apple has decided not to pursue feature development further on CUPS and upstream feature development has been effectively transferred to the OpenPrinting project.
• Introducing Firefox’s new Site Isolation Security Architecture — Site Isolation builds upon a new security architecture that extends current protection mechanisms by separating (web) content and loading each site in its own operating system process.
• Linux 5.13 Reverts + Fixes The Problematic University of Minnesota Patches — Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches.
• Freenode IRC staff quit after new owner "seizes" control of network — Founded 26 years ago and home to some 80,000 users over 40,000 channels, the freenode is reportedly the largest IRC network and has enjoyed something of a rollercoaster history.
• Freenode Debacle Prompts Staff Exodus, New Network — Through a complex series of events which actually started several years ago, control of Freenode has been taken from the community and put into the hands of an enigmatic and wealthy entrepreneur who claims his ultimate goal is to revolutionize IRC and return it to the forefront of online communication.
• Upheaval at freenode — Evidently there has been a change of control within the volunteer-run organization that has led to the resignations of multiple different volunteers, at least in part due to a concern about the personal information of freenode users under the new management.
• Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management
• Welcome to Libera Chat — We’re excited to announce the launch of Libera.Chat, and welcome you to a next-generation IRC network for free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours.
• [HN comments] Welcome to Libera Chat
• CentOS IRC channels moving to irc.libera.chat
• Freenode IRC and Gentoo
• Spaces: The next frontier — Spaces rethink groups in Element and Matrix, and today we’re launching public beta testing on Element Web, Desktop and Android (with iOS coming soon!).
• [FOSDEM 202] Building massive virtual communities in Matrix — In this talk, we'll explain all the features we've been adding to let Matrix scale to support massive virtual communities such as FOSDEM itself, Mozilla, KDE and others.
• JB Matrix Server

Our reaction to System76's Launch keyboard, Google's new Fuchsia contributor that's a big name, and the repairable Linux Laptop with a few new tricks.

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• Audacity’s new management hits rewind on telemetry plans following community outrage • The Register — "What wrong-footed us completely was that the news got out before we were ready to make an announcement about it."

  "It was a completely innocent mistake that ended up doing the announcing for us... in the worst way imaginable."

• Actions we propose to take on PR #835 · Discussion #889 · audacity/audacity · GitHub
• USPTO Audacity Trademark Assignment — Recorded: 12/29/2020
• Samsung is now a contributor to Google’s Fuchsia OS - 9to5Google — Samsung’s “Flash-Friendly File System.” Better known as “F2FS,” the project is an alternative system for managing the files on a storage device, such as the built-in storage of a smartphone.
• Ubuntu Touch OTA-17 Released for Ubuntu Phones with NFC Support, Many Improvements - 9to5Linux — According to UBports, NFC support can allow app developers to implement the ability to read and write NFC tags in their apps, as well as to communicate with another device that supports the NFC protocol.
• Framework Laptop pre-orders are now open — A thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5” notebook that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can.
• Framework’s repairable laptop is up for preorder, starting at $999 | TechCrunch
• Framework Laptop upgradable, repairable & modular laptop pre-orders opened for $799 and up - CNX Software
• Launch Keyboard - System76 — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.
• Meet System76’s First Mechanical Keyboard
• Launch's Firmware based on Qmk

We start you off with the headlines that matter this week, then share our thoughts on Audacity's new owners proposing user tracking.

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• Linux 5.10 LTS Will Be Maintained Through End Of Year 2026 — Linux 5.10 as the latest Long Term Support release when announced was only going to be maintained until the end of 2022 but following enough companies stepping up to help with testing, Linux 5.10 LTS will now be maintained until the end of year 2026.
• Visual Studio Code April 2021
• Native wayland support with newest electron — Use --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland.
• VMware Prepares Linux Driver For Next-Gen Virtual GPU — With SVGA v3 also comes the ability to enjoy 3D guest acceleration on 64-bit ARM.
• Audacity ‘scared and excited’ to be bought and brought under Muse Group’s roof, promises to stay free and open source — Veteran audio editor Audacity has been purchased by Muse Group, although its new management has pledged to keep the platform free and open source.
• ‘A massive middle finger’: Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture
• Audacity Telemetry and Why Free Software Means Better Privacy – Purism — The ultimate reason that free software means better privacy is the fact that users can remove any code that violates their privacy and use the rest.
• The Audacity Pull Request
• Policies/Telemetry Policy - KDE Community Wiki
• [pdf] IEEE Statement — One of the PC members briefly mentioned a possible ethical concern in their review, but that comment was not significantly discussed any further at the time; we acknowledge that we missed it.
• LKML: Kees Cook: Report on University of Minnesota Breach-of-Trust Incident — This report summarizes the events that led to this point, reviews the "Hypocrite Commits" paper that had been submitted for publication, and reviews all known prior kernel commits from UMN paper authors that had been accepted into our source repository. It concludes with a few suggestions about how the community, with UMN included, can move forward.

Plus a major step in Apple M1 GPU support.

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• FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates — CentOS Stream 9 will launch in Q2 2021 as part of the RHEL 9 development process.

• Fedora Linux 34 is officially here! — Following the introduction of BTRFS as the default filesystem on desktop variants in Fedora Linux 33, we’ve introduced transparent compression on BTRFS filesystems.
• Fedora 34 Changes
• Gnome40
• DefaultPipeWire
• XwaylandStandalone
• WaylandByDefaultForPlasma
• BtrfsTransparentCompression
• EnableSystemdOomd
• Remove Support For SELinux Runtime Disable
• UnifyGrubConfig
• An update on the UMN affair — None of the three patches that contained real bugs were accepted by maintainers, though the reasons for rejection were not always the bugs in question. The paper itself has been withdrawn and will not be presented in May as was planned.
• Owncast Streaming Application | Linode Marketplace | Linode
• “Full disclosure” from the University of Minnesota — The researchers at the University of Minnesota have posted a description of the work they did as part of their "hypocrite commits" project. It includes a list of the buggy commits they posted and how they were handled.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 arrives — The latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux operating system is designed to be deployed on the computing edge.
• Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 Released For This New RHEL Alternative — The first release candidate of Rocky Linux 8.3 is out, the project's inaugural release as a new binary-compatible alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

• Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 — The intent of a release candidate is for the community to test and validate expected functionality of Rocky Linux and report any bugs if present.
• CentOS replacement distro AlmaLinux gets commercial support options — CloudLinux Inc has announced that it will offer commercial support for the AlmaLinux community distribution. The new support plans will include regular patches and updates for AlmaLinux's kernel and core packages, patch delivery SLAs, and 24/7 incident support.
• Commercial Support for AlmaLinux OS from CloudLinux — CloudLinux Inc will start providing multiple support options for AlmaLinux OS in May 2021.
• 8.4 Beta of AlmaLinux Released — This is a BETA release and should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines, unless you don't mind if something breaks. 😉
• Ubuntu Bug Breaks EFI on 21.04 Update With Older Machines — The exact nature of the hardware likely to fail is still unclear. Canonical software engineer Dave Jones suggested modern machines would be unaffected but older machines such as a ThinkPad 420 from 2011 and a MacBook Air from 2012 were affected by the bug.
• elementary OS 6 Beta Available Today — Developers and testers, it’s the day you’ve been waiting for: elementary OS 6 Beta is available now! We first started talking publicly about elementary OS 6 in August of last year.
• New Spectre Exploits Beat All Mitigations: Fixes to Severely Degrade Performance — Researchers from two universities have discovered several new variants of Spectre exploits that affect all modern processors from AMD and Intel with micro-op caches. Existing Spectre mitigations do not protect the CPUs against potential attacks that use these vulnerabilities.
• PDF: I See Dead ﾂｵops: Leaking Secrets
• M1 Mesa Driver Upstreamed — I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run OpenGL workloads like glxgears and scenes from glmark2 on the M1 with an open-source stack. To top it off, the compiler and driver are now upstreamed in Mesa!
• mesa - Add asahi Gallium driver

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 gssreleasemsg - 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 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 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 our reaction to SCO reigniting their decades-long fight with IBM and Red Hat, and the big news in GTK-land you might have missed.

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• AlmaLinux Now Available For Download As RHEL/CentOS Alternative — As scheduled, AlmaLinux's initial release is available for download today from AlmaLinux.org. This initial AlmaLinux release is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 sources.
• AlmaLinux OS on GitHub
• AlmaLinux Repo
• AlmaLinux Wiki
• Shop Almalinux
• CloudLinux Launches AlmaLinux, CentOS Linux clone
• How to migrate CentOS to AlmaLinux and avoid downtime in your data center
• AlmaLinux OS Homepage
• IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos — Xinuos' lawsuit contends that IBM stole UnixWare and OpenServer code and incorporated it into the heart of its AIX, z/OS mainframe, and its midrange server operating systems.
• SCO vs. IBM looks like it’s over for good
• SCO slapped in latest round of eternal ‘Who owns UNIX?’ lawsuit
• Judge spanks SCO in ancient ownership of Unix lawsuit
• SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
• SCO keeps dying, and dying, and dying
• SCO trading suspended in US
• Xinuos sues IBM
• SCO Linux FUD returns from the dead
• Xinuos file suit against Red Hat and IBM
• Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave — The setup is more user-friendly thanks to the Subiquity installer, and a utility called ubuntuwsl.
• Announcing Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview
• Super Sneaky Ubuntu Link
• NVIDIA Proposes Mesa Patches To Support Alternative GBM Back-Ends — It looks like NVIDIA is finally taking the GBM route for supporting Wayland compositors with their proprietary driver...
• Mesa GitLab WIP Merge request — GBM alternate backend discovery and loading
• Introducing Libadwaita — This new libadwaita library intends to extend that concept by being the missing code part of Adwaita. and will be implemented as a direct GTK 4 continuation and replacement of libhandy.
• OBS Studio Now Ready With Wayland Capture Support — Well-known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has been working on allowing good and native Wayland support for OBS Studio with the last of that work being merged upstream today.
• OBS Studio on Wayland – Georges Stavracas
• Arch Linux Packages - archinstall 2.1.3-1
• Arch Linux installer GitHub

Plus the facts around RMS’s return to the FSF board, and our analysis of the situation.

Special Guest: Neil McGovern.

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• GNOME 40 Release Notes — GNOME 40 is the latest version of GNOME, 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 24571 changes, made by approximately 822 contributors.
• Feeling brave? GNOME 40 is here and you can have a poke around in the Fedora 34 beta
• GNOME 40
• GNOME 3.38.5 Released with Support for Handling Monitor Changes During Screencasts — Coming a month after the GNOME 3.38.4 point release the GNOME 3.38.5 update is here with more bug fixes and various improvements to make the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series more stable, secure, and reliable.
• Forthcoming OpenSSL release — This release will be made available on Thursday 25th March 2021 between 1300-1700 UTC.
• CVE-2021-3450: CA certificate check bypass with X509VFLAGX509STRICT — Starting from OpenSSL version 1.1.1h a check to disallow certificates in the chain that have explicitly encoded elliptic curve parameters was added as an additional strict check.
• Cloud CPU Benchmarking Report | Linode
• Run Windows on Linode
• RMS is Back — Free software advocate Richard Stallman is rejoining the board of the Free Software Foundation.
• An open letter to remove Richard M. Stallman from all leadership positions
• An open letter in support of Richard M. Stallman
• Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board | Ars Technica
• Statement on the Re-election of Richard Stallman to the FSF Board | Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Free Software Community Condemns Richard Stallman’s Reinstatement to FSF Board of Directors
• Richard Stallman returns to the Free Software Foundation
• SUSE joins open source bodies calling for Stallman to go
• From PS5 to Ford F-150: How a global chip shortage is 'impacting everything' — The biggest news in the automotive industry right now isn't new electric vehicles or Tesla CEO Elon Musk's latest comments. It's a major semiconductor shortage that's hurting automakers across the globe.
• [Video] How The Global Computer Chip Shortage Happened

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

The A-Team assembled to make open source more trustworthy, why we might be about to find out how much SUSE is worth, and some essential project updates.

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• Linux Foundation serves up free code-signing service — The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.
• Linux Foundation announces new open-source software signing service
• Introducing sigstore — Installing most open source software today is equivalent to picking up a random thumb-drive off the sidewalk and plugging it into your machine.
• rekor: Signature Transparency Log — Rekor's goals are to provide an immutable tamper resistant ledger of metadata generated within a software projects supply chain.
• Fulcio: SigStore WebPKI — fulcio is a free Root-CA for code signing certs - issuing certificates based on an OIDC email address.
• cosign: Container Signing — Container Signing, Verification and Storage in an OCI registry.
• Diversity, Flexibility, and Linux: Prioritizing Generous Transfer
• German software company SUSE targets pre-summer IPO — SUSE is targeting a pre-summer initial public offering in a deal that may value the private equity-backed company with German roots at 7-8 billion euros ($8.3-9.5 billion), people close to the matter said.
• SUSE prepares for multi-billion Euro IPO
• VirtIO Sound Driver Coming — The virtual sound driver for VirtIO has been queued up into the sound-next code ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window this spring.
• GNOME 40 Introducing Virtual Monitors — This headless native back-end that was merged today into GNOME 40's Mutter allows for running the native back-end atop a render node in a headless configuration without a physical display attached.
• GRUB 2.06 Release Candidate Available For Testing — Among the changes coming with GRUB 2.06 are expanded Btrfs RAID support, LUKS2 encrypted disk support, the BootHole patches and other security work,
• Progress Report Asahi Linux — To adapt the Apple world into a devicetree world, we are developing m1n1.
• Current status of the Corellium team's effort — Wifi now works on Linux on the M1.

Canonical reveals long-term Ubuntu plans that you might have missed, and the "double ungood" warning from Linus this week.

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• Canonical: Flutter Is The Default Choice For Future Ubuntu Apps — Along with the new installer, Ken Vandine, Engineering Manager, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical revealed that the out-of-the-box experience for devices preloaded with Ubuntu will also be powered by Flutter.
• Ubuntu on Twitter — Flutter is the default choice for future Ubuntu apps. @kenvandine, Engineering Manager, is here to tell you about some of Canonical’s contributions to Flutter at #FlutterEngage.
• Getting started with Flutter on Ubuntu
• Version 2 of Google’s Flutter toolkit adds support for desktop and web apps
• The Linode network model — As we worked on expanding our global network, three things were non-negotiable: maintaining vendor diversity, balancing flexibility and control, and incorporating Linux starting at the network level as much as possible.
• Chrome (Chromium) release cycle shortened to 4 weeks, Chrome(ium) gets “Extended Stable” release every 8 weeks — We are excited to announce that Chrome is planning to move to releasing a new milestone every 4 weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021.
• Chrome Moving To A 4-Week Release Cycle
• (2019) Mozilla Shifting Firefox To A Four-Week Release Cycle
• Linux Mint may start pushing high-priority patches to users — Besides looking for available updates, the Manager will also track cases where updates are overlooked. This will include metrics on when updates were last applied; when were packages last upgraded; and how many days have passed since a particular update was made available.
• Linux Mint Finds Many Of Its Users Are Running Behind On Security Updates
• Linux Mint emits fix for memory-gobbling Cinnamon
• Update your computer! – The Linux Mint Blog
• A warning about 5.12-rc1 — This merge window, we had a very innocuous code cleanup and simplification that raised no red flags at all, but had a subtle and very nasty bug in it: swap files stopped working right. And they stopped working in a particularly bad way: the offset of the start of the swap file was lost. Swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results.
• That Linux 5.12 Severe Data Corruption Bug Hits Intel CI Systems - Issue Caused By Swap File
• Watch Out For Possible Data Loss On Early Linux 5.12 Kernels
• Save the Date! | Container Plumbing Days — The Container Plumbing Days will be a 2-day event to investigate, discuss, hack, learn, and celebrate the “lower-level” open source container technologies, everything from the container runtime on down to the Linux kernel.

Plus why we've recently switched back to Firefox, and more.

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• Red Hat Announces Free “RHEL For Open-Source Infrastructure” — Eligible organizations will be able to enjoy no-cost RHEL for use within their infrastructure for continuous integration, web servers, and more.
• Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff
• Red Hat Announcement — Extending no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux to open source organizations
• Red Hat opens the door for both VMs tand containers in its latest OpenShift release
• Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Blurs The Line Between VMs And Containers — With OpenShift 4.7, Red Hat attempts to simplify the migration of virtual machines to containers.
• Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Is Now Available
• OpenShift Container Platform 4.7 release notes
• [Video] What’s new in Red Hat OpenShift 4.7
• Introducing the Framework Laptop — We’re here to prove that designing products to last doesn’t require sacrificing performance, quality, or style.
• Framework Laptop
• Google Funds Linux Kernel Developers to Focus Exclusively on Security — Silva and Chancellor’s exclusive focus is to maintain and improve kernel security and associated initiatives in order to ensure the world’s most pervasive open source software project is sustainable for decades to come.
• Latest Firefox release includes Multiple Picture-in-Picture and Total Cookie Protection — In today’s release, we added multiple picture-in-picture views, available on Mac, Linux and Windows, and includes keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. Total Cookie Protection stops cookies from tracking you around the web by creating a separate cookie jar for every website.
• Firefox 86.0 released
• Total Cookie Protection
• Firefox for Enterprise 86 Release Notes.

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 zwplinuxdmabuf_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

The story behind a Microsoft repo shipping in Raspberry Pi OS, Canonical updates a special version of Ubuntu, and a couple of milestones the Linux world hit this week.

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• Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s Linux OS
• Microsoft repo installed on all Raspberry Pi’s
• Eben Upton on Twitter — I can’t understand why you think this was a controversial thing to do. We do things of this sort all the time without putting out a blog post about how to opt out.
• Ubuntu Core 20 Released For IoT/Embedded Linux Use-Cases — Ubuntu Core 20 is offered for x86_64 and ARM hardware and is backed by Canonical with ten years of support.
• Containerize all the things with Ubuntu Core 20
• Ubuntu Core
• How to Deploy Guacamole with Marketplace Apps
• Donating Docker Distribution to the CNCF — To make the project clearly an industry wide collaboration, hosting it in the CNCF was the obvious place, as it is the home of many successful collaborative projects, such as Kubernetes and Containerd.
• Distribution — The toolkit to pack, ship, store, and deliver container content.
• AlmaLinux, the CentOS Linux replacement, beta is out — AlmaLinux, the open-source enterprise-level Linux distribution created as an alternative to CentOS, has been released in beta with most Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages.
• Google funds project to secure Apache web server with new Rust component — The module will be based on Rustls; a Rust open-source library developed as an alternative to the C-based OpenSSL project.

• LKML: Hector Martin: [PATCH 00/18] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up — This series brings up initial support for the Apple M1 SoC, used in the 2020 Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air models.
• Hector Martin's Development Streams

Google removes Matrix chat-client Element from the Play store, sudo has a major flaw with a long-tail, and Rocky Linux gets a boost.

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• Element suspended on Google Play Store — At 2021-01-29 at 21:35 UTC Google suspended Element from the Play Store without warning or notification
• Element sees fivefold increase in signups after Whatsapp privacy debacle — After Whatsapp’s announcement, rival app Telegram reported a 500% increase in users and Signal saw an 18-fold increase in download numbers, putting it on track to cross 1m new users each day.
• Element team waiting hours — Update: we’re still waiting for a response from Google to our explanatory mail sent ~8 hours ago. Thanks all for your patience while we get this sorted...
• New Linux SUDO flaw lets local users gain root privileges — The issue is a heap-based buffer overflow exploitable by any local user (normal users and system users, listed in the sudoers file or not), with attackers not being required to know the user's password to successfully exploit the flaw. The vulnerability was introduced in the Sudo program almost 9 years ago, in July 2011.
• 10-year-old Sudo bug lets Linux users gain root-level access
• Buffer overflow in command line unescaping
• Sudo vulnerability allows attackers to gain root privileges on Linux systems (CVE-2021-3156) - Help Net Security — "This vulnerability is perhaps the most significant sudo vulnerability in recent memory (both in terms of scope and impact) and has been hiding in plain sight for nearly 10 years."
• New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in All Supported Ubuntu Releases
• Mitre - CVE-2020-28374
• Red Hat Customer Portal: CVE-2020-28374
• Debian: CVE-2020-28374
• Ubuntu: CVE-2020-28374
• The killing of CentOS Linux: ‘The CentOS board doesn’t get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do’ — Brian Exelbierd, responsible for Red Hat liaison with the CentOS project and a board member of that project, has told The Register that CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat simply refused to invest in it.

• Rocky Linux gets a new sponsor—Gregory Kurtzer’s startup, Ctrl IQ — Rocky Linux is to be a beneficiary of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."
• Linux maintainer says long-term support for 5.10 will stay at two years unless biz world steps up and actually uses it — Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has responded to complaints that the current promise of two years for 5.10 is not enough, explaining that support is not automatic but requires commercial help.
• Rust Game Server One-Click App Linode — A free-for-all battle in a harsh open-world environment.

Why we don't think Red Hat's expanded developer program is enough, our reaction to Ubuntu sticking with an older Gnome release, and a tiny delightful surprise.

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• New Year, new Red Hat Enterprise Linux programs: Easier ways to access RHEL — When we announced our intent to transition to CentOS Stream, we did so with a plan to create new programs to address use cases traditionally served by CentOS Linux.
• Staying on GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle - Desktop - Ubuntu Community Hub — The topic of what to do about the new GNOME started being discussed and after some consideration, we decided to stick to GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle.
• Welp, Ubuntu 21.04 Won’t Ship with GNOME 40 or GTK4 - OMG! Ubuntu!
• Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog — In order to ensure open source versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
• AWS, as predicted, is forking Elasticsearch | ZDNet
• The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let’s Encrypt - Let’s Encrypt - Free SSL/TLS Certificates — By going with AMD EPYC, we were able to get 64 physical CPU cores while keeping clock speeds high: 2.9GHz base with 3.4GHz boost. More importantly, EPYC provides 128 PCIe v4.0 lanes, which allows us to put 24 NVMe drives in a single machine.
• Ubuntu Can Run on Apple Silicon, Devs Say It’s ‘Completely Usable’ - OMG! Ubuntu! — Developers at ARM virtualisation company Corellium have managed to get Ubuntu 20.04 up and running on the new Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
• How We Ported Linux to the M1
• [RFC PATCH 0/7] Linux on Apple Silicon [LWN.net]
• Raspberry Pi Foundation launches $4 microcontroller with custom chip | TechCrunch — It has a dual-core Arm processor (running at 133MHz), 264KB of RAM, 26 GPIO pins including three analog inputs, a micro-USB port, and a temperature sensor.
• Raspberry Pi Foundation Release Their Own Silicon, the Raspberry Pi Pico - 9to5Linux

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.

A lot of open source development was packed into 2020, we recap some of the standout moments you should know about.

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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

Our annual predictions episode kicks off with a review of what we got right and wrong for 2020, and then we speculate wildly about what could happen in 2021.

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• 2018 Review / 2019 Predictions: Linux Action News 86
• 2019 Review / 2020 Predictions: Linux Action News 139

Plus new Matrix goodies, why AWS is investing in Blender, and more.

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• Google kills Android Things, its IoT OS, in January — Google announced it had basically given up on the project as a general-purpose IoT operating system in 2019, but now there's an official shutdown date thanks to a new FAQ page detailing the demise of the OS.
• Android Things Shutdown FAQ
• Ron Amadeo on Twitter — Oof, Google promised three years of updates when Android Things launched in May 2018, the actual support it delivered? One year, three months.
• Google, Qualcomm partner to bring 4 OS Android updates to new chipsets — The new plan is three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates.
• Qualcomm promises three years of Android updates for its entire SoC lineup
• Google acquires CloudReady OS to make PCs Chromebooks — Neverware lets you turn old PCs and Macs into Chromebook-esque devices through its CloudReady OS. While primarily aimed at schools and enterprises, a free “Home” edition for everyone is available. Google has now acquired Neverware and CloudReady with plans to integrate it with Chrome OS.
• Native Steam (Borealis) on Chrome OS likely arriving mid-2021
• GTK 4.0 Officially Released After More Than 4 Years of Development — The GTK development officially released today the next generation of the GTK toolkit, GTK 4.0, after being in development for more than four years.

• GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released
• GTK 4.0 – GTK Development Blog
• Matrix.to: Reloaded — A challenge we regularly face is all the factors which make Matrix flexible and powerful as an open, secure decentralised protocol also increase the difficulty of getting started.
• Introducing Cerulean — Alongside all the normal business-as-usual Matrix stuff, we’ve found some time to do a mad science experiment over the last few weeks - to test the question: "Is it possible to build a serious Twitter-style decentralised microblogging app using Matrix?"
• Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play — Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating this week as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition.
• I have resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee – Terence Eden’s Blog — I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.
• AWS joins the Blender Development Fund — AWS committed to a period of three years, specifically to support character animation tools development.

Plus Google makes their Fuchsia intentions a bit more clear, and why Linux 5.10 is a BIG deal.

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• Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About… — But, before you get angry, please read this. I’ve been surfing Twitter, Reddit, and HackerNews threads just like many others. I’ve gathered some major buckets of complaints which seem to come up, and I’d like to address each of them.
• CentOS project lead disappears
• Usage Statistics and Market Share of Linux for Websites, December 2020
• Red Hat and the CentOS Project Join Forces to Speed Open Source Innovation
• Transforming the development experience within CentOS
• CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream
• FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates
• Google is opening Fuchsia OS development to the public — To both support developers and make the Fuchsia development process less skunkworks and more public, Google is opening Fuchsia’s bug tracker to the public.
• Expanding Fuchsia’s open source model | Google Open Source Blog
• Linux 5.10 LTS Released As One Of The Biggest Kernel Releases In A While
• Linux 5.10 Released — Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, this is a significant milestone in that it's also a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel to be maintained for at least the next five years and also is a huge kernel update in general with many new features.
• The 10 Most Interesting Features Of Linux 5.10

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