Purism posted an announcement Thursday about their privacy-focused "Librem 5 USA" smartphones. "New orders placed today will ship within our standard 10-business-day window." The Librem 5 USA now joins the Librem Mini and Librem 14 as a post-Just In Time product, one where instead of relying on Just In Time supply chains to manufacture a product just as we need it, we have invested in maintaining much larger inventories so that we can better absorb future supply chain issues that may come our way.

For anyone who is new to the product, the Librem 5 USA is our premium phone that shares the same hardware design and features as our mass-produced Librem 5, but with electronics we make in the USA using a separate electronics supply chain that sources from US suppliers whenever possible. This results in a tighter, more secure supply chain for the Librem 5 USA.

The Librem 5 USA uses the same PureOS as our other computers and so it runs the same desktop Linux applications you might be used to, just on a small screen.

PureOS on the Librem 5 USA demonstrates real convergence, where the device becomes more than just a phone, it becomes a full-featured pocket-sized computer that can act like a desktop when connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, or even a laptop (or tablet!) when connected to a laptop docking station. All of your files and all of your software remains the same and follows you where you go. Applications just morph from the smaller screen to the larger screen when docked, just like connecting a external monitor to a laptop.

Everyone who has backed the Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA projects hasn't just supported the production of the hardware itself, they have also supported a massive, multi-year software development effort to bring the traditional Linux desktop to a phone form-factor. Projects such as Phosh (the GUI), Phoc (the Compositor), Squeekboard (the Keyboard), Calls (for calling), Chats (for texting and messaging), and libhandy/libadwaita (libraries to make GTK applications adaptive) all required massive investment and many of these projects have already been moved to the GNOME infrastructure to better share our effort with a larger community.

We are delighted to see that many other mobile projects have recognized the quality of our efforts and adopted our software into their own projects....

The Librem 5 USA was designed for longevity and because we support right to repair, we also offer a number of spare parts in our shop, including replacement modems so you can make sure you support all the cellular bands in a particular continent, replacement batteries for when you ultimately wear out your existing battery, and plenty of other spare parts that haven't had sufficient demand to post formally on our shop (yet). If you need a spare part that isn't yet on the shop, just ask.

ZDNet's Stephanie Condon spoke with Red Hat's new CEO, Matt Hicks, a veteran of the company that's been working there for over 14 years. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from their discussion: Matt Hicks, Red Hat's new CEO, doesn't have the background of your typical chief executive. He studied computer hardware engineering in college. He began his career as an IT consultant at IBM. His on-the-ground experience, however, is one of his core assets as the company's new leader, Hicks says. "The markets are changing really quickly," he tells ZDNet. "And just having that intuition -- of where hardware is going, having spent time in the field with what enterprise IT shops struggle with and what they do well, and then having a lot of years in Red Hat engineering -- I know that's intuition that I'll lean on... Around that, there's a really good team at Red Hat, and I get to lean on their expertise of how to best deliver, but that I love having that core intuition."

Hicks believes his core knowledge helps him to guide the company's strategic bets. While his experience is an asset, Hicks says it's not a given that a good developer will make a good leader. You also need to know how to communicate your ideas persuasively. "You can't just be the best coder in the room," he says. "Especially in STEM and engineering, the softer skills of learning how to present, learning how to influence a group and show up really well in a leadership presentation or at a conference -- they really start to define people's careers."

Hicks says that focus on influence is an important part of his role now that he didn't relish earlier in his career. "I think a lot of people don't love that," he says. "And yet, you can be the best engineer on the planet and work hard, but if you can't be heard, if you can't influence, it's harder to deliver on those opportunities." Hicks embraced the art of persuasion to advance his career. And as an open-source developer, he learned to embrace enterprise products to advance Red Hat's mission. He joined Red Hat just a few years after Paul Cormier -- then Red Hat's VP of engineering, and later Hicks' predecessor as CEO -- moved the company from its early distribution, Red Hat Linux, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a move that not everyone liked. [...] "As he settles into his new role as CEO, the main challenge ahead of Hicks will be picking the right industries and partners to pursue at the edge," writes Condon. "Red Hat is already working at the edge, in a range of different industries. It's working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM's end-to-end software platform, and it's partnering with ABB, one of the world's leading manufacturing automation companies. It's also working with Verizon on hybrid mobile edge computing. Even so, the opportunity is vast. Red Hat expects to see around $250 billion in spending at the edge by 2025."

"There'll be a tremendous growth of applications that are written to be able to deliver to that," Hicks says. "And so our goals in the short term are to pick the industries and build impactful partnerships in those industries -- because it's newer, and it's evolving."

Microsoft software engineer Stephen Hemminger has proposed removing the DECnet protocol handling code from the Linux kernel. The Register reports: The timing is ironic, as this comes just two weeks after VMS Software Inc announced that OpenVMS 9.2 was really ready this time... That announcement, of course, came some months after the first time it announced [PDF] version 9.2 [...]. The last maintainer of the DECnet code was Red Hat's Christine Caulfield, who flagged the code as orphaned in 2010. The change is unlikely to vastly inconvenience many people: VMS is the last even slightly mainstream OS that used DECnet, and VMS has supported TCP/IP for a long time. Indeed, for decades, the oldest email in this reporter's "sent" folder was a 1993 enquiry about the freeware CMUIP stack for VMS.

One of the easier ways to bootstrap VMS on an elderly VAX these days is to install it on the SimH VAX hardware simulator, and then net-boot the real VAX from the simulated one. Anyone keen enough to do that will be competent to run an older version of Linux just for the purpose. Although their existence is rapidly being forgotten today, TCP/IP is not the only network protocol around, and as late as the mid-1990s it wasn't even the dominant one. The Linux kernel used to support multiple network protocols, but they are disappearing fast. [...] For a long time, DECnet was a significant network protocol. DEC supplied a client stack called PathWorks to let DOS, Windows and Mac clients connect to VAX servers, not only for file and print, but also terminal connections and X.11. Whole worldwide WANs ran over DECnet, and as a teenage student, your correspondent enjoyed exploring them.

"Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19 as stable for the newest version of the Linux kernel..." reports Phoronix.

But they also note that on the Linux kernel mailing list, "Torvalds went on to write about his Arm-based MacBook [running an AArch64 Apple M1 SoC]... now under Linux thanks to the work of the Asahi Linux project."

Torvalds wrote: [T]he most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now.

It's the third time I'm using Apple hardware for Linux development — I did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform.

Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too.

Today saw the release of Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" Cinnamon Edition, a long term support release (supported until 2027).

Release notes at LinuxMint.com promise that it comes with "refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable." Among the highlights: its Bluetooth manager is now Blueman (instead of Blueberry). Blueberry depended on gnome-bluetooth, which was developed exclusively for GNOME. In contrast, Blueman relies on the standard Bluez stack which works everywhere and can even be used or queried from the command line. The Blueman manager and tray icon provide many features that weren't available in Blueberry and a lot more information which can be used to monitor your connection or troubleshoot Bluetooth issues.

Out of the box Blueman features better connectivity, especially when it comes to headsets and audio profiles. In preparation for Linux Mint 21 the Blueman user interface was improved and received support for symbolic icons. Upstream, Blueman and Bluez are actively developed and used in many environments.

The lack of thumbnails for some common file types was identified as a usability issue. To address it a new Xapp project called xapp-thumbnailers was started and is now featured in Linux Mint 21. The project brings support for the following mimetypes:

- AppImage
- ePub
- MP3 (album cover)
- RAW pictures (most formats)
- Webp

Automated tasks are great to keep your computer safe but they can sometimes affect the system's performance while you're working on it. A little process monitor was added to Linux Mint to detect automated updates and automated system snapshots running in the background. Whenever an automated task is running the monitor places an icon in your system tray. Your computer might still become slow momentarily during an update or a snapshot, but with a quick look on the tray you'll immediately know what's going on....

Linux Mint 21 uses IPP, also known as Driverless Printing and Scanning (i.e. a standard protocol which communicates with printers/scanners without using drivers). For most printers and scanners no drivers are needed, and the device is detected automatically.
And there's also a fabulous collection of new backgrounds.

"For more than a decade, Google has been baking and eating its own homemade Linux desktop distribution," writes Computerworld.

Long-time Slashdot reader waspleg shared their report: The first version was Goobuntu. (As you'd guess from the name, it was based on Ubuntu.) In 2018, Google moved its in-house Linux desktop from the Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the Debian-based gLinux. Why? Because, as Google explained, Ubuntu's Long Term Support (LTS) two-year release "meant that we had to upgrade every machine in our fleet of over 100,000 devices before the end-of-life date of the OS."

That was a pain. Add in the time-consuming need to fully customize engineers' PCs, and Google decided that it cost too much. Besides, the "effort to upgrade our Goobuntu fleet usually took the better part of a year. With a two-year support window, there was only one year left until we had to go through the same process all over again for the next LTS. This entire process was a huge stress factor for our team, as we got hundreds of bugs with requests for help for corner cases."

So, when Google had enough of that, it moved to Debian Linux (though not just vanilla Debian). The company created a rolling Debian distribution: GLinux Rolling Debian Testing (Rodete). The idea is that users and developers are best served by giving them the latest updates and patches as they're created and deemed ready for production.
Google's using what appears to be an automated build system (along with virtualized test suites, and eventually "incremental canarying"), the article points out. The end result?

"The entire gLinux development team consists of a single on-duty release engineer position that rotates among team members."

waspleg writes: Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved" license. In order to support the wide re-use of copyrighted content in new works, CC0 provides authors "a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." The license arose in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyright by 20 years at the expense of the public domain. But CC0 explicitly says the licensor does not waive patent rights, which for free and open source software (FOSS) is a potential problem. That means, for instance as described here, if you use CC0-licensed code in your project, and the author of that code later claims your project is infringing a patent they own regarding that code, your defense will be limited. Avoiding the use of CC0-licensed code is one way to steer clear of these so-called submarine patents that could years later torpedo you.

In a message to The Fedora Project's mailing list for legal issues, Richard Fontana, a technology lawyer for Red Hat (which sponsors Fedora), explained that while CC0 is cited as a "good license," it won't be for much longer. "We plan to classify CC0 as allowed-content only, so that CC0 would no longer be allowed for code," said Fontana. "This is a fairly unusual change and may have an impact on a nontrivial number of Fedora packages (that is not clear to me right now), and we may grant a carveout for existing packages that include CC0-covered code." Fontana said there's a growing consensus in the FOSS community that licenses without any form of patent licensing or forbearance aren't suitable. CC0, he said, like other Creative Commons licenses, includes a clause that explicitly states no patent rights are waived by the licensor.

"T2 SDE is not just a regular Linux distribution," reads the announcement. "It is a flexible Open Source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit (others might even name it Meta Distribution). T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation."

Slashdot reader ReneR writes: The T2 project released a major milestone update, shipping full support for 25 CPU architectures, variants, and C libraries. Support for cross compiling was further improved to also cover Rust, Ada, ObjC, Fortran, and Go!

This is also the first major release where an AI powered package update bot named 'data' contributed more changes than human contributors combined! [Data: 164, humans: 141]

T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support as well as supporting nearly all existing CPU architectures: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, spare, sparc64, superh x86, x86-64 and x32 for a wide use in Embedded systems. The project also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi Octane and Sun workstations as well as state of the art ARM64, RISCV64 as well as AMD64 for regular cloud, server, or simply enthusiast workstation use.

IBM saw its hybrid-cloud revenue jump 18% to $5.9 billion in the last three months, reports ZDNet — while also experiencing "its highest sales growth in a decade.

"Much of that is due to its stand-alone Red Hat division." True, Red Hat sales increased by "only" 12%, which is low by Red Hat standards but darn good by any other standard. So what will Red Hat do now that it has a new CEO, Matt Hicks, and chairman, Paul Cormier?

The answer: Stay the course.

In an interview, Hicks, who's been with Red Hat since 2006, said, "[We'll keep using] the same core fundamentals that we built 20-plus years ago." Why? Because the combination of Linux, open-source software, and top support, "continues to play in new markets, whether that's the shift to cloud and cloud services or to edge computing. In the next couple of quarters. we'll just focus on executing. There's great momentum right now around the open hybrid cloud."

It's not just the cloud, though. Hicks continued, "We have a lot of opportunities. We're also working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM's end-to-end software platform, and two days ago, we announced a partnership with ABB, one of the world's leading manufacturing automation companies. It's pretty cool to see Linux and open source technologies being pulled into these totally new markets in the industry. So my job is not to change anything but keep us executing and capturing the opportunities ahead...."

Moving to the technical side, I asked about Red Hat and CentOS. Hicks replied, "I think it was a necessary shift and change. I'm a big believer in what makes open source work is the contribution cycle, and that wasn't happening with CentOS."
Cormier adds that going forward Linux's biggest contribution to the world may be innovation (and not accessbility), "and that needs contributions. Without it driving open source and Linux, the cloud wouldn't be here."

The Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition with Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) will arrive on August 23rd. "This means, of course, Canonical and Dell officially have been certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "So if you already have a current XPS 13 Plus, you can install Ubuntu 22.04 and automatically receive the same hardware-optimized experience that will ship with the new Developer Edition." From the report: What this certification means is that all of XPS's components have been tested to deliver the best possible experience out of the box. Ubuntu-certified devices are based on Long Term Support (LTS) releases and therefore receive updates for up to 10 years. So if you actually still have an XPS 13 that came with Ubuntu back in the day, it's still supported today. [...] Dell and Canonical have been at this for years. Today's Dell's Developer Editions are the official continuation of Project Sputnik. This initiative began 10 years ago to create high-end Dell systems with Ubuntu preinstalled. These were, and are, designed with programmer input and built for developers.

As Jaewook Woo, Dell's product manager, Linux, explained: "XPS is an innovation portal for Dell -- from its application of cutting-edge technology to experimentation of new user interfaces and experiential design. By bringing the enhanced performance and power management features of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to our most advanced premium laptop, Dell and Canonical reinforce our joint commitment to continue delivering the best computing experience for developers using Ubuntu."

The forthcoming Dell XPS Plus Developer Edition's specifications are impressive. The base configuration is powered by a 12th-generation Intel i5 1240P processor that runs up to 4.4GHz. For graphics, it uses Intel Iris Xe Graphics. This backs up the 13.4-inch 1920x1200 60Hz display. For storage, it uses a 512GB SSD. The list price is $1,389.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Unlike Intel Macs, Apple silicon Macs were designed to run only Apple's software. But the developers on the Asahi Linux team have been working to change that, painstakingly reverse-engineering support for Apple's processors and other Mac hardware and releasing it as a work-in-progress distro that can actually boot up and run on bare metal, no virtualization required. The Asahi Linux team put out a new release today with plenty of additions and improvements. Most notably, the distro now supports the M1 Ultra and the Mac Studio and has added preliminary support for the M2 MacBook Pro (which has been tested firsthand by the team) and the M2 MacBook Air (which hasn't been tested but ought to work). Preliminary Bluetooth support for all Apple silicon Macs has also been added, though the team notes that it works poorly when connected to a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network because "Wi-Fi/Bluetooth coexistence isn't properly configured yet."

There are still many other things that aren't working properly, including the USB-A ports on the Studio, faster-than-USB-2.0 speeds from any Type-C/Thunderbolt ports, and GPU acceleration, but progress is being made on all of those fronts. GPU work in particular is coming along, with a "prototype driver" that is "good enough to run real graphics applications and benchmarks" already up and running, though it's not included in this release. The Asahi team has said in the past that it expects support for new chips to be relatively easy to add to Asahi since Apple's chip designers frequently reuse things and don't make extensive hardware changes unless there's a good reason for it. Adding basic support for the M2 to Asahi happened over the course of a single 12-hour development session, and just "a few days" of additional effort were needed to get the rest of the hardware working as well as it does with M1-based Macs.

In April ZDNet called its beta "the cutest Linux distro you'll ever use," praising the polished "incredible elegance" of Debian-based Cutefish OS, with its uncluttered, MacOS-like "Cutefish DE" desktop.

But now CutefishOS.com times out, with at least one Reddit user complaining "their email is not responding" and seeking contributors for a fork.

But meanwhile, the technology site DebugPoint.com shares another update: It looks like the OpenMandriva project is already continuing with the development of the Cutefish DE (not the OS) for its own OS. For more details, visit the Matrix discussion page.

Besides, it's worth mentioning that Arch Linux already have the Cutefish desktop packages in the community repo. You can even install it as a standalone desktop environment in Arch Linux with easy steps. As you can see, it is easier to maintain the desktop environment to continue its development because the structure is already out there.

I have tested and reviewed hundreds of distros for years, and Cutefish OS is the promising one with its stunning desktop environment. It was written from the ground up with QML and C++ and took advantage of KWin. It would have been an attractive desktop as a separate component and could have been another great option besides KDE Plasma or GNOME.

Many open-source projects are born and die every year, and it's unfortunate to see the situation of Cutefish OS. I hope an official fork comes up soon, and we all can contribute to it.

Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO. ZDNet reports: It had been rumored at May 2022's Red Hat Summit that Cormier, who had been with Red Hat for over 14 years, might retire soon. That rumor wasn't true, but he is moving to a "somewhat" less demanding position. That said, as Stephanie Wonderlick, Red Hat's VP of Brand Experience + Communication, said, "I don't think Red Hat would have become Red Hat without Paul Cormier." [...]

As for Hicks, he's a popular figure in the company. He's known as a hands-on leader. Hicks joined Red Hat in 2006 as a developer working on porting Perl applications to Java. That is not the start one thinks of for a future CEO! Hicks knows it. He said in a note to Red Hat employees that he'd "never imagined that my career would lead me to this moment. If I had followed my initial path, not raised my hand for certain projects, or shied away from contributing ideas and asking questions, I might not be here. That is what I love about Red Hat, and it's something that differentiates us from other companies: nothing is predetermined; we're only limited by our passion and drive to contribute and make an impact." So it was that he quickly rose to leadership positions. In particular, thanks to his work with Red Hat OpenShift, he saw Red Hat move from being primarily a Linux powerhouse to a hybrid cloud technology leader as well.

Hicks, now in charge, said in a statement, "When I first joined Red Hat, I was passionate about open source and our mission, and I wanted to be a part of that. I am humbled and energized to be stepping into this role at this moment. There has never been a more exciting time to be in our industry, and the opportunity in front of Red Hat is vast. I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and prove that open-source technology truly can unlock the world's potential." He also said, Together, [IBM and Red Hat] can really lead a new era of hybrid computing. Red Hat has the technology expertise and open-source model -- IBM has the reach."

Cormier's new role will focus on "moving forward to help customers drive innovation forward with a hybrid cloud platform built on open-source technology. Open-source technology has won the innovation debates, and whatever the future looks like, it's going to be built on open-source technology, and Red Hat will be there. Moving ahead, Cormier will continue to work alongside IBM chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna. Both Cormier and Hicks will report to Krishna. As for day-to-day work, Hicks said, "I'm here to do the work with you. Let's roll up our sleeves together, embrace these values and earn the opportunity ahead of us."

In the last two weeks, six new Linux laptops have hit the market (or were announced). "The Linux hardware scene is getting better by the day," writes the site FOSS Weekly:

• Star Labs teases its new StarFighter Linux Laptop with a 4K (10-bit IPS) display.

• MNT Research introduces a "more affordable" 7-inch mini Linux laptop, the MNT Pocket Reform.

• KDE's Slimbook 4 is here with AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor and a better battery, starting from $1,000. "Buying from Slimbook supports KDE development too," notes Gaming on Linux, adding that there's a choice of 14 or 15.6 inch displays.

• TUXEDO's Pulse 15 — Gen2 (also with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor) has a 15-inch HiDPI WQHD 165Hz display, along with eight cores and 16 threads. (And the Register notes its twin cooling fans, "allowing them to overclock the chip and run it at 35W," and a choice of distros.)

• Pre-orders have opened for the Roma — the first RISC-V Laptop (which may ship in September). Ars Technica reports they're offering "free Silicon upgrades" — that is free system-on-a-chip and system-on-module upgrades for its quad-core RISC-V CPU. And there's also a companion NPU/GPU, notes a blog post at RISCV.org, "for the fastest, seamless RISC-V native software development available." (As well as "early access to next-generation laptop and accessory upgrades at generous discounts or for free.") The blog post calls it a "Web3-friendly platform with NFT creation and publication plus integrated MetaMask-style wallet."

• System 76's "Lemur" Alder Lake- and coreboot-powered laptop arrives with 14 hours of battery life.

System76, the Colorado-based Linux laptop, desktop, and server specialist, has announced a new highly portable laptop with an Intel Alder Lake processor inside. Tom's Hardware reports: The new Lemur Pro(opens in new tab) is a "lighter than Air" 14-inch form factor laptop with excellent battery life and attractions such as open firmware (powered by Coreboot) and a 180-degree hinge. In addition, buyers can choose to go with Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS pre-installed. The new Lemur Pro has many attractive modern features you might see advertised in many rival mainstream thin and light designs. However, the special sauce here is the "System76 Open Firmware with Coreboot." Coreboot, known initially as LinuxBIOS, is significant as it is an open-source BIOS implementation embraced by Linux users. It is lightweight, flexible, and feature-rich. [...]

System76 has designed the Lemur Pro with monitor-based docking in mind. It envisions users connecting to a big screen using the USB-C connection to benefit from the more expansive workspace and laptop charging. Like Windows, Linux had to have some serious tinkering under the hood to prepare for the mix of Performance and Efficiency cores in Alder Lake chips. However, rest assured, efficient hybrid scheduling is taken care of with the two OS options that can be pre-installed on the Lemur Pro.

System76 allows customers to configure and buy Lemur Pro laptops right now. There are many RAM and storage configurations to pick through, and you can add external keyboards and monitors to the bundle. The entry price with an Intel Core i5-1235U, 8GB RAM, 240GB of storage, and no extras is $1,149. However, the Core i7-1255U model is a bit of a stretch, adding $200 to the base price for the faster CPU clocks.

Yesterday, Phoronix reported that the lead developer of systemd, Lennart Poettering, left Red Hat. "It turns out he had joined Microsoft and [is] continuing his work on systemd," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel in a new report. He continues: While some may not always align with his views or approaches to handling some things, there is no overstating his enormous contributions to the Linux/open-source world and his dedication to advancing the ecosystem over the years. This may take many by surprise but let's not forget Microsoft has over time employed a number of Linux developers and other prominent open-source developers... Microsoft currently employs Python creator Guido van Rossum, GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza had been employed by Microsoft from 2016 when they acquired Xamarin to earlier this year when he left, Nat Friedman as part of Xamarin-Microsoft served as GitHub CEO following Microsoft's acquisition, Gentoo Linux founder Daniel Robbins was previously employed by Microsoft, Steve French as the Linux CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 maintainer and Samba team member works for Microsoft, and Microsoft employs/previously-employed a large number of upstream Linux developers like Matteo Croce, Matthew Wilcox, Shyam Prasad N, Michael Kelley, and many others beyond just the usual immediately recognizable names to Linux enthusiasts/developers. It was also just earlier this year that Christian Brauner as another longtime Linux kernel developer joined Microsoft. Christian Brauner is Berlin-based like Lennart and moved on to Microsoft after the past half-decade at Canonical working on the Linux kernel, LXC, systemd, and more.

As noted by a Reddit user and confirmed by Ars Technica, Microsoft's xCloud game streaming looks noticeable worse when running on Linux than Windows. From the report: With the Linux User-Agent, edges are generally less sharp and colors are a little more washed out. The difference is even more apparent if you zoom in on the Forza logo and menu text, which shows a significant reduction in clarity. Interestingly, the dip in quality seems to go away if you enable "Clarity Boost, an Edge-exclusive feature that "provid[es] the optimal look and feel while playing Xbox games from the cloud," according to Microsoft. That's great for Linux users who switched over to Microsoft Edge when it launched on Linux last November. But Linux users who stick with Firefox, Chrome, or other browsers are currently stuck with apparently reduced streaming quality.

That Linux quality dip has led some to speculate that Microsoft is trying to reserve the best xCloud streaming performance for Windows machines in an attempt to attract more users to its own operating system. But using a Macintosh User-Agent string provides streaming performance similar to that on Windows, which would seem to be a big omission if that theory were true. Microsoft also hasn't published any kind of "best on Windows"-style marketing in promoting xCloud streaming, which would seemingly be a key component of trying to attract new Windows users. (The quality difference could be a roundabout attempt to get Linux users to switch to the Edge browser, where Clarity Boost offers the best possible quality. But that still wouldn't fully explain why Windows users on other browsers, without Clarity Boost, also get better streaming quality than their Linux brethren.)

Others have suggested that the downgrade could simply be a bug caused by Microsoft's naive parsing of the User-Agent strings. That's because the User-Agent strings for Android browsers generally identify themselves as some version of Linux ("Linux; Android 11; HD1905," for example). Microsoft's xCloud code might simply see the "Linux" in that string, assume the user is running Android, then automatically throttle the streaming quality to account for the (presumably) reduced screen size of an Android phone or tablet.

To much surprise, the lead developer of systemd Lennart Poettering who also led the creation of PulseAudio, Avahi, and has been a prolific free software contributor has reportedly left Red Hat. Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: So far no public announcement appears to have been made, but according to a source has been reportedly removed from Red Hat's internal employee database. Yesterday Lennart did comment on the public Fedora devel mailing list to having now created a personal Red Hat Bugzilla account for his Fedora contributions after it was raised in bug reports and brought up on the mailing list that Lennart's Red Hat account is disabled. Emailing his Red Hat address this morning indeed yields an auto-response that it's no longer in use.

He's still active in systemd world with new commits made as of today, so it will be interesting to see where he ends up or his next moves with his vast Linux ecosystem expertise and pivotal role in spearheading systemd's direction.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix, written by Michael Larabel: RISC-V International has relayed word to us that in China the DeepComputing and Xcalibyte organizations have announced pre-orders on the first RISC-V laptop intended for developers. The "ROMA" development platform features a quad-core RISC-V processor, up to 16GB of RAM, up to 256GB of storage, and should work with most RISC-V Linux distributions. [...] DeepComputing and Xcalibyte say this laptop uses an "unannounced" quad-core RISC-V processor so is very light on the details. But frankly if it wasn't a RISC-V International PR contact relaying this to me, it sounds more like a satire announcement. The ROMA press release today goes on to note, "A Web3-friendly platform with NFT creation and publication plus integrated MetaMask-style wallet, ROMA will create an even more integrated experience with future AR glasses and AI speakers operating entirely on RISC-V software and powered by RISC-V hardware."

Quantities are also said to be limited for this ROMA laptop, which likely will put a pricing premium on it. Their cringe-worthy press release filled with buzzwords and scant technical details goes on to note, "The first 100 customers to pre-order ROMA will receive a unique NFT to mark the birth of the world's first native RISC-V development platform laptop. And you can have your ROMA personally engraved with your name or company name." [...] So right now this announcement just raises a lot more questions than answers, but we are certainly looking forward to hearing more about RISC-V laptops... Further reading: Pine64 Is Working On a RISC-V Single-Board Computer

This week, BMW confirmed that some of its future models would run on a next-gen version of its in-house operating system built on top of Android Automotive. Android Polic reports: It's a big change from previous Linux-based versions, though the company says some of its cars will stay on its legacy build. So far, the automaker has yet to confirm which of its models will get Automotive support, though work on supporting it won't begin until March of 2023.

Automotive's biggest selling point for car manufacturers is its flexibility and customization options. Outside of some built-in Google apps -- Assistant, Maps, the Play Store -- don't expect to notice these BMW cars running Android immediately. Instead, the company will almost certainly rely on a skin to make the experience feel more in line with previous vehicles, as well as that Linux-based OS the company plans to keep developing.