Linux Action News

NextCloud goes global, Devuan hits one, Solus keeps expanding, Firefox is trying, but Chrome has won. And more progress on Coreboot.

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• Nextcloud announces Global Scale architecture as part of Nextcloud 12 — Achieve several orders of magnitude greater scaling. It is hard to scale the standard architecture to instances over hundred thousand users.
• Devuan finally reaches 1.0.0 — There have been no significant bug reports since Devuan Jessie RC2 was announced only three weeks ago and the list of release critical bugs is now empty. So finally Devuan Jessie Stable is ready for release!
• Debian Stretch is just weeks away. — We plan to release on 2017-06-17.
• SteamVR Home Now Works Under Linux — SteamVR Home is a beta feature from Valve for making a social, interactive launcher experience in virtual reality. Those unfamiliar with SteamVR Home can learn about it via this earlier announcement.
• SteamOS Brewmaster_beta gets huge update — SteamOS 2.115 also implements AMD Vulkan support. Please note that this will only work if you’re using Steam Beta Client.
• Solus adds experimental KDE Plasma support — For the sake of clarity, please note that the Plasma Desktop from KDE is not officially supported at this moment in time. It is however a project that Peter is working on, and slowly building up to be something useful. This in itself was enabled by the vast amount of KF5 (KDE Frameworks) software required in the repositories already for the “Big Items” (Kdenlive, etc).
• Firefox is Trying... — It’s because of our newfound internal confidence with Firefox that Mozilla has started to be more aggressive externally again. Firefox’s campaign launching today, called “browse against the machine”, is a perfect example.
• Chrome has won — From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere. That means that the esteemed Fox will be around for many many years, albeit with an ever diminishing market share. It also, unfortunately, means that a turnaround is all but impossible.

Ubuntu's Gnome plans start to form, and they want your input. The Linux subsystem is coming to Windows Server, and Mycroft is finally ready to ship.

Plus the Tizen surprise, elementary OS' pay-what-you-want AppCenter, and what's new Android O.

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• Ubuntu Desktop Team Discuss Their Plans for GNOME in Ubuntu 17.10 — “may consider a few tweaks here and there to ease our users into the new experience
• The Ubuntu Desktop Team Wants YOUR Feedback — The results of this survey will help inform and shape the Ubuntu desktop team’s approach to GNOME in Ubuntu 17.10.
• OMG! UBUNTU! on Twitter: 16,000+ Ubuntu users have taken the survey — 16,000+ #Ubuntu users have taken the 17.10 GNOME desktop survey
• Windows Server will add the Linux subsystem, join the Insider program — Microsoft announced that WSL will be included in Server later this year.
• Will Linux distros run on Windows 10 S? — Just because an “app” comes from the Windows Store does NOT automatically mean that it’s safe & suitable for running in Windows 10 S. There are some apps that are not allowed to run on Windows 10 S, including all command-line apps, shells and Consoles.

Canonical IPO is a go, Microsoft brings more Linux to Windows, OpenWRT, LEDE agree on Linux-for-routers peace plan & Google launches project Treble.

Welcome to Linux Action News's debut episode. It’s our goal to build the show you go to when you want to hear an informed discussion about what’s happening.

We kick things off with a busy news week.

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• Canonical starts IPO path — At OpenStack Summit, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth revealed in an interview that the recent changes in the Linux and cloud power were to ready Canonical for an IPO.
• Microsoft is bringing Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora to the Windows Store — With the new Fall Creators Update, users will be able to install Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora as apps on their device, allowing them to run Windows and Linux applications side-by-side without dual-booting.
• OpenWRT and LEDE agree on Linux-for-routers peace plan • The Register — The terms will see LEDE fold back into OpenWRT. Persisting with the latter name was deemed non-negotiable by the OpenWRT faction. The agreement also proposes closing the LEDE GitHub repo, rebuilding LEDE's web site so it ha OpenWRT branding and basically burying the LEDE brand. LEDE code will live on as OpenWRT will be required to keep forked trees available.
• Here comes Treble: A modular base for Android | Android Developers Blog — With Android O, we've been working very closely with device makers and silicon manufacturers to take steps toward solving this problem, and we're excited to give you a sneak peek at Project Treble, the biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date.
• Google’s “Project Treble” solves one of Android’s many update roadblocks | Ars Technica — Project Treble" is a plan to modularize the Android OS, separating the OS framework code from "vendor specific" hardware code. In theory, this change would allow for a new Android update to be flashed on a device without any involvement from the silicon vendor. 
• Google’s “Fuchsia” smartphone OS dumps Linux, has a wild new UI | Ars Technica — Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called "Magenta." With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0. 

It's not even the first proper episode but Chris and Joe talk about kernel security, UEFI Secure Boot, the latest Raspberry Pi news, Nexus devices being abandoned and MP3 becoming (sort of) free.

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