An old Linux distro gets a new trick, and all Linux users get a few excellent quality of life updates.

Plus, the new initiative that has Apple, Google, and Microsoft all working together. Sponsored By:Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!Support Linux Action News Links: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


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Weekly Linux news and analysis by Chris and Wes. The show every week we hope you'll go to when you want to hear an informed discussion about what’s happening.

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Recent advances in embedded Linux, Canonical takes full control of LXD, ZFS gets a handy Btrfs feature, and updates on the show's production. Sponsored By:Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet. Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Support Linux Action News Links: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 yearThe 2023 State of The Embedded Linux EcosystemLXD 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 LXDNearly 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! 

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Why everyone is excited about the next Linux kernel, Valve's big hire, and Red Hat's clone war. Sponsored By:Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet. Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Support Linux Action News Links:Linux 6.4 Released — Released With Early Apple M2 Code, More WiFi 7, AMD Guided Autonomous ModeLinux 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 6.4Btrfs In Linux 6.5 May Bring A Cumulative Performance ImprovementLinux Kernel 6.4 Released with Interesting Mix of ChangesBcachefs File-System Pull Request Submitted For Linux 6.5Early 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 - YouTubeGoogle 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 EdgeValve 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 Streamgit.centos.orgA 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.

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What we really like in Debian 12, the big players backing RISC-V, and the improvements in NextCloud Hub 5.

Note: Linux Action News will be off next week. Sponsored By:Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet. Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Support Linux Action News Links: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 boringDebian 12 discussion on Hacker NewsLinux 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 TestersNextcloud 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!

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Ubuntu gets serious about the immutable desktop, red flags from Red Hat, and the little tricks Apple used to patch Wine. Sponsored By:Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet. Support Linux Action News Links: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 installsAsahi: Big Updates — Get your updater ready!OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi LinuxWine 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 WineApple 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. 

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How the recent XFS bug was squashed, insights into why Microsoft built their own Linux from scratch, and recent attacks on Archive.org. Sponsored By:Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet. Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Support Linux Action News Links:Those Using The XFS File-System Will Want To Avoid Linux 6.3 For NowXFS 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.

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