Up until recently, Elementary OS was my platform of choice. It's an elegant, simple, and user-friendly solution for the desktop. One thing that the Elementary developers do that I believe is fairly wise is to not allow upgrades from one major release to another. In other words, if you use Elementary OS Loki, you can't upgrade to Juno. To get the benefits of Juno, you must do a full-blown re-install of the OS.

Why is this route wise? My latest adventures in Linux will help explain.

A few months ago, I purchased a System76 Thelio. It's a beast of a desktop, while at the same a masterful work of art. Preinstalled on that desktop machine was System76's own Pop!_OS. Based on Ubuntu, it seemed like a great way for me to dive back into the GNOME desktop. So I did. It took no time to get accustomed to the new workflow with GNOME. Once my fingers understood the new keyboard shortcuts, I was good to go.

• Google tests swipe gestures as Android Q considers removal of the back button

• LG G8 ThinQ camera review: average all around

• Screenshots 'confirm' Google working on a new Android OS for feature phones

• What is Scoped Storage in Android Q?

• LG V35 ThinQ gets the company’s first actual Android Pie update, only in Korea for now

• Google reenables Android TV casting from Google Home, but not for everyone

• How to Add User Accounts to Android

Rancher Labs has developed an operating system for its recently launched edge-specific k3s Kubernetes distribution designed for resource-constrained environments and easier management when deployed within the k3s environment.

Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs, said the conveniently named k3OS uses the same declarative syntax as other Kubernetes resources. This allows a user to install and upgrade the k3s platform and the k3OS at the same time.

Users can also use the k3OS platform to model infrastructure-as-a-code, which allows for repeatable cluster deployments and should make the k3s clusters more secure when running in isolated environments. It also has a reduced attack surface that further bolsters its security posture.

OpenBSD 6.5 was released today, about one week ahead of schedule for this security-minded BSD operating system. OpenBSD 6.5 is bringing several prominent new features including RETGUARD as its new stack protector and OpenRSYNC as its ISC-licensed in-progress replacement to rsync.

OpenBSD 6.5's new RETGUARD functionality aims to be a better stack protector on x86_64 and AArch64 with instrumenting every function return with better security properties than their traditional stack protector.

Also: OpenBSD 6.5

Intrinsyc has launched a 96Boards CE form-factor “Snapdragon 855 Mobile HDK” that runs Android 9 on a 7nm, octa-core Snapdragon 855 with GNSS, WiFi/BT, and optional touchscreens and cameras.

Intrinsyc’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Mobile Hardware Development Kit is now available for $1,149, offering a development window into Qualcomm’s powerful Snapdragon 855 SoC. The new HDK runs the latest Android 9.0 Pie release.

Scientific Linux, a distributions focused on scientists in high energy physics field, will not be developed anymore. It’s creator, Fermilab, is replacing it by CentOS in its labs.

• Announcing Akademy 2019 in Milan, Italy (September 7th - 13th)

  Akademy 2019 will be held at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy, from Saturday the 7th to Friday the 13th of September.

  The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE community to discuss and plan the future of the community and its technology. Many participants from the broad Free and Open Source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend.

  KDE e.V. is organizing Akademy 2019 with unixMiB — the Linux User Group of the University of Milano-Bicocca. unixMiB aims to spread Open Source philosophy among students.

• Checking out Crunchbang++

• Intel Iris Gallium3D Picks Up Conservative Rasterization Support

  On top of Intel's new open-source OpenGL driver seeing some hefty performance optimizations, the Iris Gallium3D driver has picked up another OpenGL extension ahead of the Mesa 19.1 branching. 

  Iris Gallium3D now supports INTEL_conservative_rasterization alongside the existing support in the i965 driver. INTEL_conservative_rasterization is the several year old Intel extension for seeing if all fragments are at least partially covered by a polygon rather than the default rasterization mode of including fragments with at least one sample covered by a polygon.

• Coreboot Finally Sees Zen/Ryzen Support In The Form Of Picasso APU Enablement

  The Coreboot open-source firmware/BIOS project has finally seen initial AMD Zen CPU support as part of Google engineers bringing up Picasso APU support in order to handle an upcoming Chromebook launch.

  The most recent AMD CPUs to be supported by Coreboot has been Stoney Ridge, the APUs with GCN graphics and two Excavator cores. That support was done by Google engineers on the Chromebook front with AMD themselves being out of the Coreboot game / open-source AGESA coverage for several years now. But coming in as bit of a surprise today was initial Zen APU / Picasso coverage.

• Ian Bicking: “Users want control” is a shoulder shrug

  Making the claim “users want control” is the same as saying you don’t know what users want, you don’t know what is good, and you don’t know what their goals are.

  I first started thinking about this during the debate over what would become the ACA. The rhetoric was filled with this idea that people want choice in their medical care: people want control.

  No! People want good health care. If they don’t trust systems to provide them good health care, if they don’t trust their providers to understand their priorities, then choice is the fallback: it’s how you work the system when the system isn’t working for you. And it sucks! Here you are, in the middle of some health issue, with treatments and symptoms and the rest of your life duties, and now you have to become a researcher on top of it? But the politicians and the pundits could not stop talking about control.

• Coming up: The Month of LibreOffice, May 2019!

  LibreOffice is made by hundreds of people around the world: volunteers working from home, certified developers who are part of our commercial ecosystem, and other supporters and users. Throughout the year, they add new features to the software, test them, and help us to make each release polished and reliable. We’re incredibly appreciative of their efforts!

• GNU dico - News: Version 2.9

  Version 2.9 of GNU dico is available from download from the GNU archive and from its main archive site.

• Final “Big Data Seminar” looks at new open-source framework for plant image analysis

  Understanding and analyzing plant data with computational tools is the topic of Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s final “Big Data” lecture coming April 25.
  Sponsored by SIU’s Chapter of Sigma XI, a scientific research honor society with more than 50 years’ history on the Carbondale campus, this fifth lecture wraps up the series focused on big data issues in a number of applied contexts. This specific talk features plant biologist and big data expert, Dr. Noah Fahlgren.

• 27 Excellent Free Books to Learn all about R

  The R language is the de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software, and is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis. R is a modern dialect of S, one of several statistical programming languages designed at Bell Laboratories.

  R is much more than a programming language. It’s an interactive suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation, and graphical display. R offers a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The ability to download and install R packages is a key factor which makes R an excellent language to learn. What else makes R awesome? Here’s a taster.

• Getting started with blockchain for Java developers

  Top technology prognosticators have listed blockchain among the top 10 emerging technologies with the potential to revolutionize our world in the next decade, which makes it well worth investing your time now to learn. If you are a developer with a Java background who wants to get up to speed on blockchain technology, this article will give you the basic information you need to get started.

• Automate user acceptance testing with your DevOps pipeline

  Acceptance testing, also called user acceptance testing (UAT), determines whether a system satisfies user needs, business requirements, and authorized entity criteria. The tests are repeated every time there's a new design when the application is developed through software development lifecycle (SDLC). In many companies, the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) automates acceptance testing by building a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline within a DevOps initiative.

• The DevOps Edge with SUSE Manager

• GStreamer buffer flow analyzer

  Gstreamer's logging system is an incredibly powerful ally when debugging but it can sometimes be a bit daunting to dig through the massive amount of generated logs. I often find myself writing small scripts processing gst logs when debugging. Their goal is generally to automatically extract some specific information or metrics from the generated logs. Such scripts are usually quickly written and quickly disposed once I'm done with my debugging but I've been wondering how I could make them easier to write and to re-use.

  gst-log-parser is an attempt to solve these two problems by providing a library parsing GStreamer logs and enabling users to easily build such tools. It's written in Rust and is shipped with a few tools that I wrote to track actual bugs in GStreamer elements and applications.

  One of those tool is a buffer flow analyzer which can be used to provide various information regarding the buffers exchanged through your pipeline. It relies on logs generated by the upstream stats tracer, so no modification in GStreamer core or in plugins is required.

• Next C++ workshop: Linked Lists / Stack Classes; PQs and Heaps, 25 April at 18:00 UTC

• Cumulus Networks' new version of NetQ provides real-time telemetry and fabric-wide analytics

• Once again, it’s 123456: the password that says ‘I give up’

  The essence of most people’s regard for cybersecurity: we’re DOOMED.

  That’s one of the key takeaways from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which released the results of its first ever UK cyber survey on Sunday, along with a list of the most craptacular passwords found most often in breached databases.

• GNU Wget Buffer Overflow Vulnerability [CVE-2019-5953]

  A vulnerability in GNU Wget could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on a targeted system.

  The vulnerability exists because the affected software performs improper bounds checks, which could result in a buffer overflow condition in the irc.c source code file. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by persuading a user to retrieve a file that submits malicious input using the wgetcommand. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition.The vendor has confirmed the vulnerability and released software updates.

• The French Govt's Hand-Rolled Encrypted Messaging Service (Briefly) Allowed Anyone To Pretend They Were A Government Official

  Not only was Robert able to get his faux account validated within two hours of downloading the app, he was also able to obtain plenty of info linked to other government account profiles. On the bright side, the team behind the app reacted quickly to notification of the security flaw and suspended account creation until it could be patched. The French government has also instituted a bug bounty program for Tchap, which will hopefully result in further flaws being addressed before they're exploited by criminals or state-sponsored hackers.

  To be fair, Tchap is still in its "beta" stage. But that's not much comfort considering it was rolled out for use in this state, exposing government employees' personal account info and allowing any outsider to take a seat at the Tchap table just by exploiting the system's less-than-robust validation process.

• How to Install InvoiceNinja on Ubuntu 18.04 Server with Apache/Nginx

• How to run systemd in a container

• How to Check Laravel Version by CLI and File

• 10 Steps to Browse Internet Anonymously and Securely

• crostini: '--enable-gpu' not the panacea

• Using Quiver with AMQ on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

If you have been hit by a bug on Linux 5.1 where your X.Org Server would no longer start or separately where when using VirtIO DRM that XWayland and GNOME Shell would break, fixes have now landed in Linux 5.1 Git.

David Airlie sent in the DRM fixes on Wednesday as a "regression special" for the Intel i915 and VirtIO DRM drivers compared to the usual DRM fixes cadence.

• Google's Filament Real-Time PBR Engine Updated With New Features

  Filament is Google's real-time physically based rendering engine that supports Android along with Linux and all other major platforms, including a target for WebAssembly+WebGL. Filament 1.2.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest step forward for this PBR rendering engine.

  Filament 1.2.0 features various tooling and engine improvements, improves render target management, squeezes better performance out of the job system, support for compressed textures from its JavaScript API, more JavaScript bindings were also added, the Vulkan rendering support now can handle RGB textures, and there are a variety of other rendering advancements.

• Google Chrome 74 Released for Windows, macOS, and Linux; Dark Mode Arrives on Windows

  Google has released Chrome 74 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android (beta). The latest release brings a number of new features apart from quite a few bug fixes. Probably the biggest highlight of Chrome 74 is support for dark mode on Windows. After arriving on the Mac last month, support for dark mode in Chrome is finally available on Windows. Google Chrome currently has over 1 billion users worldwide.

• Data Saver is now Lite mode

  Since we introduced Data Saver in Chrome, we’ve reduced users’ data usage by up to 60 percent. But now, the feature is expanding to provide more benefits in addition to data savings. Pages will now load faster, in some cases considerably faster, and use less memory. This is why starting today, we will be renaming Data Saver to Lite mode.
  Lite mode will continue to reduce data use by using Google servers to compress the pages you visit before downloading them. Using the NetworkInformation API, Lite mode tells web servers that you are interested in receiving a version of the site that uses less data if one is available.
  Lite mode also helps improve page loads. If Chrome predicts that a page will take longer than 5 seconds for the first text or image to show on screen, it will load a Lite version of the page instead. Lite pages are highly optimized to load considerably faster. A whitepaper will be published in the coming months that will explain this in more detail.

• Google Chrome 74 Released: Dark Mode For Windows, Lite Mode For Android

  Google released the Chrome version 74 today for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and Chrome OS users. The new version comes with new features and bug fixes with the main highlight being support for a Dark Mode in Windows.

  Other noteworthy changes include the replacement of Data Saver feature with Lite Mode for Chrome on Android devices. There are a few security improvements too, so read on to find out the details.

• Google confirms Android TV casting from Google Home has been re-enabled for all but a few users

• Meizu 16s hands-on: A promising all-around flagship

• How to Change Google Account on Android: Add or Remove Google ID

• How to Move Contacts to a New Android Phone or iPhone

• Wiko introduces an Android Go smartphone priced at RM269

The Linux world has always worked with a develop and deploy model where software gets written by projects such as KDE and then distro projects pick that up, polish it and give it to the user. No other computer environment works like this and it goes against the fashion of DevOps concepts where the people who code are empowered to deploy to the end user going through QA as appropriate. We changed that with KDE neon where we brought the packaging into KDE making .deb packages. That integration allows for blockages and imperfections which get identified to be solved easily through the most efficient channels. Kipi Plugins is a good example of this, KDE dropped the ball here by stopping releases. Nobody noticed until as a packager I wondered where it had gone, realised it was no longer being released and, because I work directly in the project responsible, could easily fix that in the right place. With new containerised formats Linux is changing, and projects like KDE can now package software and send it direct to the user. I’ll discuss this more in a future blog post but for now lets look at Snaps where last week, for the first time, KDE Applications was released with 50-odd apps available directly for all to enjoy direct from the Snap Store.

• Impressive real-time stealth game 'Hidden Asset' now on Kickstarter, has a Linux demo

  Hidden Asset is a game I've been following since 2011 back when it was called Hostile Takeover, it's a real-time stealth game that's very promising and it's now needing funding. It's being made by Christian Knudsen, a name some might remember from Ascii Sector.

• Godhood's Early Access release is delayed, good news for Linux as it will now see same-day support

  They've also said the full release should still be out this year, with regular development builds being released to backers up until the Early Access release. They will also still be regularly livestreaming their development on their Twitch Channel.

  Delays happen but I always prefer a late game over a rushed and poor game of course, extra time in the oven is just needed sometimes.

• Sci-fi dungeon crawer 'Xenomarine' has left Early Access, surviving the infestation is hard

  As someone who loves the film Aliens, a dark and atmospheric roguelike with a sci-fi horror theme is exactly what I need.

  After being in development for a few years, first appearing on itch way back in 2016 it impressed my instantly with the theme and it's improved massively since then of course. It's now a full and complete game, with it officially leaving Early Access today.

• The FOSS game engine Godot Engine continues advancing quickly, with a 3.1.1 release candidate out

  Heads up game developers, Godot Engine has another release that needs some testing with 3.1.1 getting a first release candidate.

  This is mainly a clean-up of issues found after the huge advancement that Godot Engine 3.1 was when released last month. Godot 3.1.1 has GLES 3 support for depth textures fixed, GLES 2 crash on older iOS devices was resolved, OS.get_unique_id() was fixed on Android, a HeightMapShape was added to the Bullet physics engine implementation, FPS snapping in the Animation player was added to the engine, AnimatedSprite can now play backwards and more.

• Transport Fever 2 announced, will release this year with Linux support

  Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment announced Transport Fever 2 today and the great news is they're continuing to support Linux.

Almost exactly four months ago I announced Cage, my Wayland compositor for a kiosk-like environment. To the uninitiated: a kiosk is designed for running a single, maximized application and preventing the user from interacting with any other part of the system. You’ve probably seen many in your life in malls, stores or even the dentist (how satisfied are you with your service?). Kiosks can also be used for much cooler things, though, such as running home automation systems.

Also: "Cage" Sees Initial Test Release For Kiosk-Like Wayland Compositor

• On Cloud Nine in Denver

  Next week, members of the open source community will descend upon Denver in hordes unseen since the gold rush that resulted in the city being formed back in the late 1800’s (probably). That’s right, it’s the very first Open Infrastructure Summit – bringing together some of the finest minds across the open source community to discuss, demo and deliberate all things OpenStack, Kubernetes, ONAP, Kata Containers, Airship, Zuul, and much, much more.
  We’re particularly excited about this summit as we’ll be unveiling SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 to the world there, having pre-announced it earlier in the month at SUSECON in Nashville. As the first company to produce an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution back in 2012, we continue to work to make OpenStack easier for companies to implement in an enterprise environment, giving a stable, production-ready base for business-critical systems and applications to run on.

• Eirini and CF Containerization: a field guide

  The recent Cloud Foundry Summit in Philadelphia featured two talks that were crucial to understanding the future of Cloud Foundry as it relates to Kubernetes.

  [...]

  But there’s another problem. In talking to people in the hallways and at the SUSE booth, we found that there was considerable confusion about what the Eirini and CF Containerization projects were responsible for. Specifically, many people thought that Eirini was the project for containerizing the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.

• SQL Server on SUSE Linux from A-Z: Data platform, High Availability and Containers [Ed: SUSE is advertising proprietary software from Microsoft]

• Top data recovery tools for linux

  Sadly sometimes we lose precious information by formatting a wrong partition or disk, due to hardware problems or transference errors. Luckily we have many free tools available to recover our lost data. This is not a tutorial but a fast review on the most popular free data recovery software available for Linux.

• QEMU 4.0 Released With CPU Support Improvements, Faster Crypto, Monitor EDID

  The big QEMU 4.0 release is now available for this critical piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

  QEMU 4.0 is a particularly big release on the Arm front with many new ARMv8 extensions being supported, AArch64 processors can now boot from a kernel placed over 4GB into RAM, and a variety of other ARM emulation improvements and fixes. QEMU 4.0 is also big for other CPU architectures with seeing MIPS I6500 and I7200 CPU support, many PowerPC improvements, continuing to bring-up RISC-V support, and the x86 MPX support has been removed following GCC and the Linux kernel doing away with that support.

• rush @ Savannah: Version 1.9

  Version 1.9 is available for download from GNU and Puszcza archives. It should soon become available in the mirrors too. 

• Metasploit installation and basic commands

• Install Linux Mint Cinnamon

• How to Install Adobe Reader on Linux Mint

• How to Install October CMS with Nginx on Fedora 29

• How to install Minecraft on Ubuntu 19.04

• Designing Continuous Build Systems