News

Nextcloud announces Hub 7 Just a couple of days ago, the Nextcloud project announced a new major version of the project; amongst the new features, we see global search, new AI models to choose from, and more. I have to say: this “global search” seems to be very well implemented. It performs, you guessed it, a global search throughout all Nextcloud (supported) apps, and you can filter by date and people. Even cooler, though, is the fact that you can select which application to search in, and these include integrations such as GitLab, GitHub, OpenStreetMap, PeerTube, Reddit, and so on; this means you can search through all of those projects as well, all in a single search bar. ...

PeerTube v6 announced with Storyboards and Chapters Peertube is a decentralized video platform; its ambitious goal is to be an alternative to closed-source for-profit websites such as YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo, and so on. The latest version includes many quality-of-life improvements, some of which are not available on competing platforms. ...

COSMIC’s Window Arrangement And More We have a new update from the most exciting development saga of Linux! This month, the team has put together various smaller features or details that are required for a full-fledged desktop environment. Let’s start with window arrangement. If tiling is turned off, there’s now a logic that establishes where new windows will open: always near the center of the screen, offset by 48px (or multiples) from the previous window, while also keeping the top-right corner of the window header visible. You can see an example in the screenshot above. Similarly to other desktops, shortcuts to tile windows to the left/right halves of the screen should be implemented as well. ...

Earthquake within OpenAI It’s not easy to explain what has happened in OpenAI in the last few days. When the previous newsletter issue was published, Sam Altman was the CEO; now he isn’t, but the company just said he’ll be right back. On Friday, Sam Altman was removed from the role of CEO by OpenAI’s board. No detailed explanation was given, and the move felt hurried; the CTO, Mira Murati, temporarily took his place. One of the board members, Greg Brockman, resigned in protest. It’s important to point out that, since OpenAI was originally non-profit, the board does not have the goal of maximizing revenue - their goal is to guide the company safely toward its AI future. ...

GNOME gets €1M Funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund The Sovereign Tech Fund is an organization run by two project managers of open-source projects (Adriana Groh and Fiona Krakenbürger) and is financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. They have a budget of ~€11.5M in 2023 to finance the development, improvement, and maintenance of “critical open digital infrastructure”. Selected projects so far include curl, Fortran, OpenSSH, WireGuard, and - now - GNOME. ...

Today is KDE 6 MegaRelease Day Plasma 6 artwork. KDE has decided to release today an alpha of Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and KDE Gear. Usually, these are different products with different release dates but (given how interdependent KDE 6 development is) the team has decided to release an alpha of everything on the same day (thus the name: MegaRelease). ...

UW Will Host the “SeaGL” Free Software Conference The “SeaGL” (Seattle GNU/Linux Conference) is a yearly event that takes place in Seattle and has the goal of “spreading awareness and knowledge about free/libre/open source software, hardware, and culture”. It will be hosted on the 3rd and 4rd of November, and all the talks will also be available online if you’d like to follow along. Skimreading the titles I see talks about programming an OS distribution, git code review, homleabs, organizing Hackatons, Blender for Beginners, and much more! ...

COSMIC shows off some COOL Login & Lock Screens! I have to give it to them, the design is somewhat original. Nonetheless, all the basic elements are there: date, time, wifi and battery statuses, keyboard input language, switch user button, and software session selected. You know all of that. However, Jeremy (COSMIC dev) made sure that the floating dialog is customizable in its colors and theme, giving life to some quite cool setups: ...

Ubuntu 23.10 (And Derivatives) Released! Ubuntu 23.10 is finally here! The new release comes with some interesting changes, such as a completely new Flutter-based installer. On top of that, a completely new Flutter app store was also introduced. This is yet another (big!) step in Ubuntu’s recently announced plan to shift its application ecosystem to Flutter, and it will be interesting to see whether it will work out or not. ...

GNOME wants to drop x11, chaos ensues I recently covered the proposals by Fedora to stop providing an x11 session, something that generated quite a lot of discussion. Even more controversial, GNOME just proposed to (1) stop providing a x11 session and (2) remove all x11-related code. Proposal (1) would effectively hide the “x11” button in the log-in screen; you can still get it back by manually adding a desktop file. This is just a first step that tries to be relatively uncontroversial since it’s still quite easy to get the session back; nonetheless, users have pointed out some of the missing features of Wayland and asked for more time. ...