News

System76’s COSMIC DE almost ready! Good news: COSMIC is getting closer and closer to an alpha version. There’s even discussion within the Fedora community around creating a new Fedora SIG based on this desktop, through Fedora Atomic Desktop images; even better, this project would probably contribute to upstream COSMIC as well. While we wait for everything to be ready… what’s new? Well, the screenshot utility - pictured above - has been fully implemented. It supports taking screenshots of specific windows or certain screen areas. Floating Windows Stacks were also completed; this feature allows you to “pair tiled windows together across applications like tabs in a web browser”. Design is completed for “OSD”, those popups that appear when you e.g. change the volume, brightness, toggle airplane mode, and so on. ...

Mozilla Corporation CEO, Mitchell Baker, steps down Mitchell Baker, ex-Mozilla Corporation CEO, was one of the first employees of the Netscape legal department in 1994. She worked on both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License and became the general manager of mozilla.org. She was later fired, in 2001, but kept her manager role as a volunteer. In 2003, America Online shut down the Netscape browser division and scaled back its involvement in Mozilla. As a direct result, the Mozilla Foundation - a non-profit legally representing the community - was founded. Baker was essential to the process and she became the President of the newly-formed organization. She was also appointed to the five-person Board of Directors. ...

You can try out Plasma 6 with KaOS! KaOS is a rolling distribution that focuses on providing a great KDE Plasma experience. The team has just released a new release that replaced the good old Plasma 5 with the 6 version. If you’re a bit confused (Plasma 6 has already been published and I didn’t tell you about it?), remember that this is based on “RC2”, the second beta of the KDE MegaRelease. The stable version is still planned at the end of February. We can also look at the rest of the components in KaOS 2024.01: ...

Roblox now funds Blender development too It’s always nice to see big companies use part of their profits to donate to the open-source projects they rely on. The latest example is Roblox, who decided to become a Corporate Silver Member of the Blender Community, meaning they will be paying at least €12K/year to the project. Other Silver Corporate members are Activision and Steam; whereas Gold and Patrons include Meta, Google, AMD, AWS, Epic, Volkswagen, and Adobe. ...

GNU Project to support private and secure online payments Did you know that GNU has a microtransaction and electronic payment system? It’s called “GNU Taler”, and it’s developed by Luxembourg-based company Taler (along with the GNU community). The project provides the ability to pay anonymously, but the payees are always identified; these are the words of none other than Richard Stallman, who’s known for being skeptical about digital payments. Note that GNU Taler achieves this without making any use of cryptocurrencies or blockchain. ...

Sovereign Tech Fund invests €203,000 in GStreamer After investing €1M in GNOME, the Sovereign Tech fund also decided to finance the development of the “general multimedia processing framework” GStreamer. The goal, according to the Fund, is to “Re-implement a multimedia framework’s low-level network protocol for increased security, maintainability, and sustainability”. The Fund is quite transparent; in the webpage linked below, you can see why this project was awarded the sum. Even better, a precise list of tasks the SVT is financing is at the bottom of the page. ...

The Linux Foundation makes $262 Million The Linux Foundation has published its yearly activity report: let’s see if there are interesting insights! From a financial point of view, you might be surprised to see how the LF is not just about Linux, which only directly accounts for 2% budget. Instead, most of the expenditures are all about supporting a wide variety of projects in Cloud, Containers & Virtualization, Networking & Edge, AI, ML, Analytics, Web & Application development, … ...

Linux Marketshare at an all-time high! Graph by GamingOnLinux (see link below) I’m happy to report that the Linux market share is at an all-time high according to two reports. Firstly, we have “Statcounter”, whose results over time you can see above. The spike in December 2023 is easy to see, but - even better! - it’s part of a clear positive trend overall. ...

GNOME development is greatly benefiting from the Sovereign Tech Fund The amount of work that’s currently happening in the GNOME projects thanks to the developers hired using the Sovereign Tech Fund is impressive. Firstly, we have Alice working on adaptive bottom sheet resizing (see above video). This allows bottom sheets to stay centered in bigger applications but to move to the bottom and fill the width on smaller ones (e.g. phone apps). We also have Julian working on making the Quick Setting popup scrollable, since it might not fit in the screen of smaller devices. Georges made sure that applications requesting a screenshot of the screen/of an application will use the UI for GNOME Shell screencasting. And these are just a few UI examples: there are lots of other developers (Adrian, Joanie, Ivan, Philip, Tobias) working on more behind-the-scenes features. ...

COSMIC Development Updates: Text Editor, Multi-Monitor, and more! The latest System76 blogpost features the changes implemented in the work-in-progress COSMIC desktop during the last month of development. Let’s start with the text editor; we can see how some new features are quite basic, such as “double-click to select word” and “triple-click to select line”. That makes sense: again, System76 is trying to build a desktop from scratch and they will have to work on these types of things too. ...