Hi all!
We continue to digest news and other materials about free and open source software and a bit about hardware. All the most important things about penguins and not only, in Russia and the world. About the direction of Linux development and problems with its development process, about tools for finding the best FOSS software, the pain of using the Google Cloud Platform and arguments about how much backwards compatibility should be maintained, videos about GNU / Linux distributions for beginners, about the KDE Akademy Awards and much more other.
Table of contents
Main news
What's new in the Linux kernel and in what direction is it developing?
An article has appeared on the HP Enterprise website discussing the future of Linux. The author, Vaughan-Nichols & Associates CEO Stephen Van Nichols, writes: “After all these years, Linux developers continue to innovate. New versions will be faster and more stable. Linux runs almost everywhere: all 500 of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world; most public clouds, even Microsoft Azure; and 74 percent smartphones. Indeed, thanks to Android, Linux is the most popular operating system for end users, outperforming Windows by 4% (39% vs. 35%). So what's next for Linux? I've talked about Linux for nearly all of its 29 years of history and have known just about everyone in Linux development circles, including Linus Torvalds, and I think I have a clue as to where Linux is heading.».
Why is there no handy tool to compare and select the best Open Source software?
An article appeared on Functionize describing an attempt to figure out how to choose the best FOSS software, the author writes: “The “wisdom of crowds” has inspired the creation of all sorts of online services where people share their opinions and guide others in making decisions. The online community has created many ways to do this, such as Amazon reviews, Glassdoor (where you can rate employers), and TripAdvisor and Yelp (for hotels, restaurants, and other service providers). You can also rate or recommend commercial software, such as in mobile app stores or on sites like Product Hunt. But if you're looking for advice to help you choose open source apps, the results are disappointing».
“Dear Google Cloud, not being backwards compatible is killing you.”
A translated article appeared on Habré describing the pain experienced by an author who has worked at Google for several years due to the approach used in the Google Cloud Platform, similar to “planned obsolescence” and forcing users to make significant changes to their code using this cloud provider every couple of years. The article describes, for contrast, solutions that have been supported for many years and where backwards compatibility is really taken care of (GNU Emacs, Java, Android, Chrome). The article will probably be of interest not only to GCP users, but also to software developers that should work for at least a few years. And since the article mentions many examples from the FOSS world, the article fit into the digest.
Linux development process: is it worth the candle?
Habré published a translated material from an author with solid development experience, where he talks about how the Linux kernel development process is now organized and criticizes it: “By now, Linux has been around for almost three decades. In the early days of this OS, Linus Torvalds managed the code himself, written by other programmers contributing to the development of Linux. There were no version control systems back then, everything was done manually. In modern conditions, the same problems are solved using git. True, all this time some things remained unchanged. Namely, the code is sent to a mailing list (or several lists), and there it is checked and discussed until it is considered ready for inclusion in the Linux kernel. But while this coding process has been used successfully for many years, it has been constantly criticized. … I believe that my position allows me to offer some ideas regarding the development of the Linux kernel».
Choosing a Linux distribution for your home
On the YouTube channel of Alexei Samoilov, a popular video blogger who makes videos about Linux, a new video has appeared - “Choosing a Linux distribution for home (2020)”. In it, the author talks about the best, in his opinion, distributions for the home, updating his video 4 years ago. The distributions described in the video require little to no configuration after installation and are best suited for beginners. The video covers: ElementaryOS, KDE Neon, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Solus.
KDE Akademy Awards Winners Announced
OpenNET writes:
«
The last KDE Akademy 2020 conference has announced the winners of the KDE Akademy Awards, honoring the most outstanding members of the KDE community.
- Bhushan Shah received the award for Best Application for the development of the Plasma Mobile platform. Last year, the award was given to Marco Martin for developing the Kirigami framework.
- The Non-Application Contribution Award went to Carl Schwan for his work on modernizing the KDE sites. Last year, Nate Graham won the award for blogging about the progress of KDE development.
- The Special Jury Prize was awarded to Ligi Toscano for their KDE localization efforts. Last year, Volker Krause received the award for his involvement in the development of various applications and frameworks, including KDE PIM and KDE Itinerary.
- A special prize from KDE eV went to Kenny Coyle, Kenny Duffus, Allyson Alexandrou and Bhavisha Dhruve for their work on hosting the KDE Akademy conference
»
Short line
Events
- Free webinar "Kubespray Features Overview"
- Zabbix online meetup and Q&A session with Alexey Vladyshev
Opening code and data
- LZHAM and Crunch compression libraries moved to public domain
- IBM discovers developments related to the A2O POWER processor
- Google Opens Code for Makani Wind Power Platform
- Comodo plans to open source its Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) product
- VPN provider TunnelBear is cracking down on censorship in Iran and is releasing some of their work open source, allowing ESNI support to be added to OkHttp [→ , ]
News from FOSS organizations
- Red Hat Develops New NVFS, Efficient for NVM Memory
- GitHub Publishes GitHub CLI 1.0
- Mozilla Interested in YouTube's Algorithms for Weird Video Recommendations
Legal Issues
- Wargaming has filed a new charge against the Battle Prime developers by adding a 2017 tech demo [→ , ]
- Open Usage Commons: Google's trademark management initiative for open source projects sparks controversy
Kernel and distributions
- I support tp-link t4u driver for linux
- A universal assembly with 13 distribution kits has been prepared for PinePhone
- Gentoo has begun distributing universal builds of the Linux kernel [→ , ]
- Support for scrolling text has been removed from the text console in the Linux kernel [→ , ]
- FreeBSD 12.2 Beta Started
- Deepin 20 review: a great Linux distro just got more beautiful (and more functional) [→ , , ]
- Manjaro 20.1 Mikah
- Release of Zorin OS 15.3 distribution kit
Security
- Vulnerability in Firefox for Android that allows browser control over shared Wi-Fi
- Mozilla is shutting down Firefox Send and Firefox Notes services
- Vulnerability in FreeBSD ftpd that allowed root access using ftpchroot
- WSL experiments (from a security point of view). Part 1
- There has been a growing interest among attackers in Linux systems
DevOps
- From Threat Modeling to AWS Security: 50+ open-source tools for building DevOps security
- Google Adds Kubernetes Support to Confidential Computing
- Storing data in a Kubernetes cluster
- How and why Lyft improved Kubernetes CronJobs
- We have Postgres there, but I don’t know what to do with it (c)
- go? Bash! Meet the shell-operator (review and video talk from KubeCon EU'2020)
- Bloomberg Storage Support Team Relies on Open Source and SDS
- Kubernetes for those over 30. Nikolay Sivko (2018)
- A practical example of connecting Ceph-based storage to a Kubernetes cluster
- Monitoring NetApp Volumes via SSH
- A quick guide to developing charts in Helm
- Easy work with complex alerts. Or the history of Balerter
- Support for blacklisting and whitelisting for agent-side metrics in Zabbix 5.0
- Developing and testing Ansible roles using Molecule and Podman
- About updating devices remotely, including firmware and bootloaders, using UpdateHub
- How Nextcloud simplified the registration process for decentralized architecture
Website
End of Moment.js library development with 12 million downloads per week
For developers
- Launched a new site about the KDE platform for developers
- How to remove files with confidential information from a Git repository
- PHP development environment based on Docker
- Pysa: How to Avoid Security Issues in Python Code
- Rust State Survey 2020
- 3 ways to protect yourself from the "imposter syndrome" (not directly related to FOSS, but published on a thematic resource and suddenly it will be useful to someone)
- Adding throwing mechanics to a Python game
- Setting up a Project Management Server with Wekan Kanban on GNU/Linux
Custom
- This week in KDE: Akademy works wonders
- How to use iperf
- Choosing the best printer for Linux
- Installing PopOS
- Overview of Ext4 vs Btrfs vs XFS
- Installing Gnome Tweak Tool in Ubuntu
- Release of Twitter client Cawbird 1.2.0. What's new
- How to fix "Repository is not valid yet" error on Ubuntu Linux?
- How to run multiple commands at once in GNU/Linux terminal? (for complete beginners)
- Linuxprosvet: what is the Long Term Support (LTS) release? What is Ubuntu LTS?
- KeePassXC, a great open source password manager developed by the community
- What's new in rdiff-backup after migrating to Python 3?
- About analyzing Linux startup speed with systemd-analyze
- About improving time management with Jupyter
- Comparison of how different programming languages solve the same charity model problem. Python queue
Hardware
Slimbook Essential laptops offer a wide choice of Linux systems
Miscellanea
- ARM starts supporting the free Panfrost driver
- Microsoft has implemented root environment support for Linux-based Hyper-V [→ , ]
- About controlling Raspberry Pi with Ansible
- About learning Python with Jupyter Notebooks
- 3 Open Alternatives to Confluence
- On overcoming resistance to an open approach to management
Releases
Kernel and distributions
- The Genode Project has published the Sculpt 20.08 General Purpose OS release
- Autumn update ALT p9 starterkits
- Solaris 11.4 SRU25 available
- FuryBSD 2020-Q3 Release, FreeBSD Live Builds with KDE and Xfce Desktops
System software
Release of NVIDIA driver 455.23.04 with support for GPU RTX 3080 (the driver is not FOSS, but for FOSS operating systems and is important, therefore it is included in the digest)
Security
- Release of new stable branch Tor 0.4.4
- Cisco has released a free antivirus package ClamAV 0.103
For developers
- Java SE 15 release
- Compiler release for the Vala programming language 0.50.0
- Qbs 1.17 assembly tool release
Special software
Release of Magma 1.2.0, platform for rapid deployment of LTE networks
Banners
- digiKam 7.1.0. Program for working with photos. What's new
- Audio Effects LSP Plugins 1.1.26 released
- Release of Simplest Studio 2020 SE for FLAC and WAV optimization
- Release of BlendNet 0.3, add-ons for organizing distributed rendering
Games
Battle for Wesnoth 1.14.14 – Battle for Wesnoth
Custom software
- Release of GNOME 3.38 user environment [→ , , , , ]
- KDE Plasma 5.20 beta available
- Geary 3.38 Email Client Release
That's all, until next Sunday!
I express my gratitude to the editors , many news items and announcements about new releases are taken from their website.
If anyone is interested in compiling digests and has the time and opportunity to help, I will be glad, write to the contacts listed in my profile, or in private messages.
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Source: habr.com