News

Looks cool, doesn’t it? The Alpha release is approaching. We don’t have an exact release date yet, we only know it will be in late July. Still, a completely new desktop environment requires a new brand, and we now have it! The “O” represents Open Source and should resemble a display. The orange-red blip underneath instead represents a keyboard. The fact that the keyboard is orange-red should communicate a keyboard with customized LEDs, “representing what’s possible with COSMIC”. ...

I have covered the proposed Chat Control legislation many times here. The end goal is to scan for child abuse messages in all messaging applications, even before the messages are encrypted. Though the proposal claims to preserve end-to-end encryption, many - such as Signal president Meredith Whittaker - have instead claimed that the proposal “fundamentally undermines encryption”. The EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Mozilla have signed a joint statement with similar claims. The legislation had failed to pass last year, but there have been recent attempts ...

On the 18th of June KDE released Plasma 6.1; it features a completely redesigned Edit Mode, easier remote desktop access, persistent apps on Wayland, and the wrong wallpaper. You heard me right: if you update to 6.1, you will not get “Reef”, the wallpaper you can see in the screenshot above. Instead, you’ll see the same wallpaper that 6.0 had, and it’s my fault. Let me explain that. Lately, I’ve been the person who mostly handled anything related to KDE wallpapers: organizing competitions, updating the images in the repositories, and more. This time around we decided to ask the previous artist to produce a new wallpaper. This took a bit of time, and the Visual Design group had feedback on that, multiple versions were made, and all of that took time. We only agreed on the final version the week before release. Due to personal reasons, I was not able to run the scripts until a few days later; by then, it was simply too late. I missed the packaging deadline for Plasma 6.1. Luckily, you can still download the wallpaper here if you like it! ...

OpenAI released GPT-4o: it’s like GPT-4, but so much better The “o” stands for “omni”, by the way. One of the biggest deals around this new model is that it takes a significant step towards “more natural human-computer interaction”. As in, you can both talk to your phone and have your video feed on - as if you were in a video call - and the model will talk back to you with minimal latency using the video as additional information. Words don’t do this justice, so I would recommend watching the videos on the below-linked webpage. ...

The Nix Governance Crisis Nix is a declarative package manager, builds packages in isolation from each other, and strongly focuses on reliability (as in, “one package cannot break other packages”). The project is currently undergoing a governance crisis that resulted in the resignation of the head of the NixOS Foundation (Eelco Dolstra) and even a fork supported by some of the biggest Nix contributors. ...

Fedora Workstation 40 has been released I’m always in an awkward spot when talking about new versions of distributions; usually, the user-exciting part is done in the desktop environment, and as a result, the changelog looks like a “let’s remind everyone what the new GNOME version includes”. Fedora 40 does have GNOME 46 out of the box, which brought: notification grouping by application, shortcuts for opening new app instances from the dashboard, Tap to Click enabled out of the box, and Remote Login options. All the core applications have also been upgraded to the latest version. ...

We Were Extremely Close to a Linux Disaster Imagine if all Linux desktops and servers based on Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora were compromised and thus remotely accessible by an organized malicious developer group, most likely linked to a foreign intelligence. Scary. Well, it almost happened! A backdoor was recently added to the xz project, used by the vast majority of Linux distributions to compress/decompress files. The malign code managed to get through all reviews and even got to the unstable versions of Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch; it was mostly due to “unreasonable luck” that Microsoft developer Andres Freund discovered it. He reposted on Mastodon the following words by Damien Miller: ...

GNOME 46 Released! This version is codenamed “Kathmandu”, the Capital city of Nepal. What’s new? Firstly, there’s a new global search function within the Files applications. You enter a query and see all matches from the “configured search locations”, meaning that the exact folders to search in will be customizable. This will also search within the file contents and allow filtering based on file type and modification date. Even better, you will be able to search within the Files preferences to find specific settings. ...

COSMIC’s getting close to Alpha! Yes, I said that last month too, but it’s gradual work that will take some time! The release is currently planned around late May, following a delay due to the decision to include some core applications in the alpha too. Meanwhile, we have some new goodies to talk about! First of all, the team has finished hybrid graphics support. The Battery applet will tell you when the GPU is being used, and which applications are using it so that you can close them to save battery life. You can also now minimize and restore windows (take than, GNOME!). ...

KDE MegaRelease 6 Is Out! The KDE MegaRelease 6 includes releases of Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6, and multiple KDE applications ported to Qt6. It’s the biggest release of KDE software we’ve seen in multiple years, and it has been ongoing work since 2019. On a personal note, I’ve been working on this for years too, and I’m extremely excited to share the new features with you. Qt6 and Wayland by default KDE Plasma 6 now uses Wayland by default, thanks to the work of the Wayland team who managed to fix all blockers and many of the existing issues with that session. Of course, KDE 6 software is also based on Qt6, which brings performance improvements, extra stability, and bugfixes. ...