Linux Action News

Microsoft is moving to Chromium, and Mozilla isn't too thrilled about it.

Plus the Kernel team's clever Spectre slowdown fix, Emby goes proprietary, Steam Link lives on, and more.

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• Microsoft Edge to move to a Chromium base — Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.
• Mozilla not exactly thrilled about it — Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet.
• Chrome and Firefox to have native Arm builds on Win10 — Mozilla announced today it is working on bringing a native version of Firefox to Windows 10 on ARM. The organization is doing so in cooperation with Qualcomm.
• WordPress 5 Released — The new block-based editor won’t change the way any of your content looks to your visitors. What it will do is let you insert any type of multimedia in a snap and rearrange to your heart’s content.
• Emby becomes proprietary — we are modularizing and open sourcing as many standalone components as we possibly can.
• Spectre slowdown fix — Linux 4.20-rc5 addresses the performance issue by making the security defense optional.
• NVIDIA open sources PhysX — We’re doing this because physics simulation — long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought.
• Steam Link lives on via the Raspberry Pi — The Steam Link app is now available in beta on the Raspberry Pi 3 and 3 B+ running Raspbian Stretch

Clear Linux doubles down on the desktop, Fedora 31 is likely canceled or delayed, and why Firecracker is being called the new "Docker killer".

Plus AMP's new governance model kicks in, and the Necuno Mobile Plasma tease.

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• Clear Linux now easier to try and to install — The addition of the desktop-live image itself is also certainly a welcome addition for those planning a desktop install rather than first having to install the basic Clear Linux without any desktop environment, especially if you first want to verify your system's hardware support/compatibility before proceeding with the installation. From their downloads area the new images are the "live-desktop-beta" images.
• Fedora 31 Will Likely Be Cancelled Or Significantly Delayed — Following the release of Fedora 30 in May, there might not be another major Fedora Linux release for about one year's time.
• Fedora may move to annual releases — Not formally drafted besides a mailing list thread, there is a new proposal about moving Fedora to an annual platform release following Fedora 30. This was suggested by Red Hat's RHEL development coordinator, Brendan Conoboy.

The Fuchsia bomb ticks closer, Valve's Steam Link end of life shocks us, and Amazon's new, rather obvious feature.

Plus the surprise use for Red Hat Enterprise, and an update on the Linux powered Atari VCS.

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• Huawei testing Fuchsia on the Honor Play — A new commit in the Fuchsia source code has revealed that Huawei has managed to boot the Zircon kernel on the Honor Play.
• Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
• Atari VCS update — Mostly unfiltered excerpts of some of Rob Wyatt’s internal notes to the Atari VCS team over the past several months of development that reveal some of the story around the origins of the Atari VCS Operating System.
• Predictive Scaling for EC2, Powered by Machine Learning — Today we are making Auto Scaling even more powerful with the addition of predictive scaling. Using data collected from your actual EC2 usage and further informed by billions of data points drawn from our own observations, we use well-trained Machine Learning models to predict your expected traffic (and EC2 usage) including daily and weekly patterns.
• Free continuous delivery service for open-source developers — “It’s free for the open-source community. So it’s an open source only offering. There’s no paid plan, and it’s only available to public GitHub repositories,”
• America’s nuclear arsenal relies on supercomputer running RHEL — Sierra looks like an unassuming server farm, but is actually a massive connected hive of 190,000 processing cores.

Mark Shuttleworth announced 10 years support of Ubuntu 18.04, but there's a catch. Why we're buying the new Raspberry Pi, and we have a laugh at folding Android screens.

Plus the new Red Hat Enterprise beta has modularity, why Canonical might be ready for investors, and the bad week for cryptocurrencies.

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• New mid-range Raspberry Pi launched — TL;DR: you can now get the 1.4GHz clock speed, 5GHz wireless networking and improved thermals of Raspberry Pi 3B+ in a smaller form factor, and at the smaller price of $25.
• Raspbian updated — Today we’re releasing a new update for Raspbian, including a multimedia player, updated Thonny, and more.
• Kodak's new 3D printer has a Raspberry Pi inside
• Android prepares for folding screens — The multi-resume feature now makes it possible for multiple apps to be open and actually be running at the same time. Google is now allowing manufacturers to keep all apps resumed/active when in multi-window.
• Essential launches $149 clip-on headphone jack — It’s the $149 magnetic headphone jack adapter Essential promised way back in September 2017. The company first announced in June that the accessory would start shipping in the summer, but it apparently missed that deadline.
• Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for 10 years — "I'm delighted to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for a full 10 years," said Shuttleworth
• Ubuntu Advantage — $2,500 cart minimum applies.
• Canonical looking for investors — Shuttleworth likens this program of getting the company ready to IPO to getting fit. “There’s no point in saying: I haven’t done any exercise in the last 10 years but I’m going to sign up for tomorrow’s marathon,” he said.
• RHEL 8 beta released — Allows updating user space without breaking everything.
• Cryptocurrency market tanks — Within one brutal hour yesterday, Bitcoin’s price plummeted by around $800. The coin is trading under $5,800 for the first time since its October 2017 boom
• Linux Academy Black Friday Sale — Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale is happening now! Transform your cloud skills here at Linux Academy. Take your career to the next level with hands-on cloud and Linux training.

Ubuntu on select Samsung devices goes into beta, we cover the technicalities of Linux on the new Macs, one of our favorite desktop projects gets a big update, and the Librem 5 slips.

Plus it's the end of the line for the Nexus devices, and more!

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• Booting Linux on new Macs — Apple's T2 security chip being embedded into their newest products provides a secure enclave, APFS storage encryption, UEFI Secure Boot validation, Touch ID handling, a hardware microphone disconnect on lid close, and other security tasks. The T2 restricts the boot process quite a bit and verifies each step of the process using crypto keys signed by Apple.
• WSL gets new features — A slate of improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update. 
• Samsung announce Linux on DeX — Samsung is announcing the beta launch of Linux on DeX which extends the value of Samsung DeX to Linux developers. Linux on DeX empowers developers to build apps within a Linux development environment by connecting their Galaxy device to a larger screen for a PC-like experience.
• Linux on Dex
• KDE Connect Updated — Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.
• GSConnect updated — The GNOME Shell UI has been rewritten to better conform to design guidelines. Appearance is important to everyone and work will continue to improve usability for touchscreens, HiDPI and users requiring accessibility features.
• Librem 5 slips again — I am reluctant to give a new timeline for shipping the dev kits… What we know is that our new PCB fabrication here in the USA will be 11 business days. We will make over 300 of these boards, which are pretty complex—we have over 160 different parts and more than 500 components in total per board. This takes some time, even with the amazing SMT machines placing tiny parts.
• Nexus devices finally dead — An over-the-air (OTA) update, which is based on Android 8.1 Oreo, is now rolling out to both the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P (as well as to the Pixel/Pixel XL, the Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL, and Pixel 3/Pixel 3 XL), bumping up both phones to the latest November security patches. But if Google’s update policies are to be followed here, then this will be the last update to be released to both Nexus phones, meaning that the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P have now officially reached end-of-life (EOL) status. Furthermore, online and phone support for both devices is also being discontinued.

The new Fedora has a neat trick, The Register's KDE klickbait, and GhostBSD impresses.

Plus Sailfish's release strategy gets refined, System76 announces their Thelio Linux hardware, and more.

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• Fedora 29 released — This release is particularly exciting because it’s the first to include the Fedora Modularity feature across all our different variants. Modularity lets us ship different versions of packages on the same Fedora base. This means you no longer need to make your whole OS upgrade decisions based on individual package versions.
• RHEL 7.6 released
• The Register RHEL klickbait — KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment.
• Jonathan Riddell explains things — It is a pity that RHEL users won’t be there to enjoy it by default. But, then again, they never really were. KDE is collaborative, open, privacy aware and with a vast scope of interesting projects after 22 years we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible and fun.
• Sailfish 3 released — I’m happy to share with you that we have today released the first Sailfish 3 software release, and made it available for all Sailfish users who have opted-in for the early access updates.
• GhostBSD 18.10 released — GhostBSD 18.10 is our first official release of GhostBSD with TrueOS under the hood, and the official desktop is MATE
• Endless OS shipping on (more) Asus hardware soon — Kids get their own laptop great for school projects and a safe, virus-resistant space to explore, tinker and learn. Parents, prepare to reclaim your computers!
• System76 release new desktop machines — Thelio, Thelio Major, Thelio Massive, and Thelio Io are OSHWA certified open source hardware. Licensed under GPL v3 and CC-BY-SA, everyone can learn from what we've created, adapt it, improve it, and make derivative works inspired by the Thelio design.

Linus is back in charge with the whole world watching, IBM is buying Red Hat, and Pine64 says they’re working on a Plasma phone.

Plus Firefox has a new sales pitch for you, and how HTC's blockchain future is already fizzling out.

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• Linus back in charge of the kernel — And with that, Linus, I'm handing the kernel tree back to you. You can

The Cosmic Cuttlefish is out, and we share our quick take. Juno finally lands and this one sets the bar, MongoDB gets hip to the license changes, and watch out Linux... Here come the pros!

Plus we go over the newly publish Ubuntu statistics, and Google's new Android licensing scheme in Europe.

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• Ubuntu 18.10 released — Ubuntu 18.10 introduces the GNOME 3.30 desktop and Yaru, the new community-developed default theme.
• More Ubuntu statistics published — This report is generated from basic, non-identifiable system data that was provided by users when installing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
• elementary OS 5.0 Juno released — Juno is such an incredible release, and it’s here thanks to all of our supporters.
• MongoDB makes change to license — The SSPL explicitly states that anybody who wants to offer MongoDB as a service — or really any other software that uses this license — needs to either get a commercial license or open source the service to give back the community.
• Google changes Android licensing policy in Europe — Ad giant to charge for key applications amid license shakeup and antitrust fine
• CoC Committee Added Plus Interpretation & Mediator — It turns out Greg KH was working in private with various kernel maintainers/developers on addressing their feedback and trying to come up with solutions to the contentious issues in private.

Another fork is brewing, Microsoft hands over their patents of mass destruction leaving us with a few questions, and the best features of the new Plasma release.

Plus Google's new Linux hardware, Flatpaks have met their critic, and more.

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• Ubuntu Touch OTA 5 released — While many have already joined the community on 16.04 with OTA-4, in addition to the long-term support of upstream Ubuntu development, OTA-5 will include a more stable experience, new tweaks, and new features to show off this next stage of Ubuntu Touch development.
• Plasma 5.14 released — A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.
• User Error Episode 50: Understand The Hype — It seems to be all about Plasma these days so we want to know if the hype is justified.
• Website criticises Flatpaks — To make matters worse, the users are misled to believe the apps run sandboxed. For all these apps flatpak shows a reassuring "sandbox" icon when installing the app
• Redis modules forked — Redis put some of the program's code under the anti-open-source Common Clause license. Now, developers are counterattacking by forking the code.
• Microsoft joins OIN — Joining OIN reflects Microsoft’s patent practice evolving in lock-step with the company’s views on Linux and open source more generally.
• ChromeOS tablet launched — The Pixel Slate is a Chrome OS tablet with a detachable keyboard cover that turns it into something very closely resembling a laptop.
• Restyling apps at scale

Red Hat's Stratis project reaches a major milestone, Microsoft's Linux powered dev boards go up for sale, and Fedora's hunt for buggy hibernation under Linux has begun.

Plus Android App mirroring, how the islands of the clouds are getting bridged, and Chris channels his inner Shuttleworth.

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• Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches Its 1.0 Stable Milestone — Stratis has been the Red Hat play two years in development for delivering next-gen Linux storage following their decision to abandon Btrfs support. Stratis offers ZFS and Btrfs like functionality and a lot of other new capabilities while this past week marked its first stable release.
• Stratis Whitepaper
• ​Red Hat Satellite integrated new, improved Ansible DevOps — Red Hat is adding Ansible DevOps capabilities to its Red Hat Satellite system management program.
• hibernation — does it work for you? — We have had a long discussion about hibernate (suspend to disk) being unreliable. But there seems to be no hard data.