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Linux Action News
Linux Action News episodes
- Linux Action News 172
Impressive updates for some beloved open source projects, and AlmaLinux—a leading CentOS alternative—is born.
Plus Google's surprise for Chromium users, and we go hands-on with Podman's docker-compose support.
Sponsored By:
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- Datadog: Datadog - the unified monitoring and analytics platform for comprehensive visibility into cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
Support Linux Action News
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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.
31 min - Linux Action News 171
We explain the recent Qt upset, and then go hands-on with the new PeerTube release.
Plus Wendell from Level1Techs joins us to discuss his thoughts on porting Linux to the Apple M1.
Special Guest: Wendell Wilson.
Sponsored By:
- Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
- Datadog: Datadog - the unified monitoring and analytics platform for comprehensive visibility into cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
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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.27 min - Linux Action News 171
We explain the recent Qt upset, and then go hands-on with the new PeerTube release.
Plus Wendell from Level1Techs joins us to discuss his thoughts on porting Linux to the Apple M1.
Special Guest: Wendell Wilson.
Sponsored By:
- Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
- Datadog: Datadog - the unified monitoring and analytics platform for comprehensive visibility into cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
Support Linux Action News
Links:
- 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.
27 min - Linux Action News 170
A lot of open source development was packed into 2020, we recap some of the standout moments you should know about.
Sponsored By:
- Datadog: Datadog - the unified monitoring and analytics platform for comprehensive visibility into cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
- 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 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
- ledger, a powerful command-line accounting system
— Ledger is a powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line. Ledger, begun in 2003, is written by John Wiegley and released under the BSD license. It has also inspired several ports to other languages.23 min - Linux Action News 170
A lot of open source development was packed into 2020, we recap some of the standout moments you should know about.
Sponsored By:
- Datadog: Datadog - the unified monitoring and analytics platform for comprehensive visibility into cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
- 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 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
- ledger, a powerful command-line accounting system — Ledger is a powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line. Ledger, begun in 2003, is written by John Wiegley and released under the BSD license. It has also inspired several ports to other languages.
23 min - Linux Action News 169
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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- Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!
Support Linux Action News
Links:
- 2018 Review / 2019 Predictions: Linux Action News 86
- 2019 Review / 2020 Predictions: Linux Action News 139
28 min - Linux Action News 169
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.
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:
- 2018 Review / 2019 Predictions: Linux Action News 86
- 2019 Review / 2020 Predictions: Linux Action News 139
28 min - Linux Action News 168
Another Google project meets an untimely demise, but we find the silver lining.
Plus new Matrix goodies, why AWS is investing in Blender, and more.
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
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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.- Matrix.to
— Create shareable links to Matrix rooms, users or messages without being tied to any app- 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.32 min - Linux Action News 168
Another Google project meets an untimely demise, but we find the silver lining.
Plus new Matrix goodies, why AWS is investing in Blender, and more.
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:
- 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.
- Matrix.to — Create shareable links to Matrix rooms, users or messages without being tied to any app
- 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.
32 min - Linux Action News 167
We explain the major changes to CentOS this week and break down the top four criticisms.
Plus Google makes their Fuchsia intentions a bit more clear, and why Linux 5.10 is a BIG deal.
Sponsored By:
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Support Linux Action News
Links:
- 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
31 min
About Linux Action News
From the publisher's feed
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.