News

Richard Stallman is battling cancer Richard Stallman has decided to share the news during the GNU Project’s 40th anniversary. He released he is undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma; he says the prognosis is good and hopes to continue to be active in the GNU community for years to come. He wore a medical mask at the event and asked the audience to wear one too, only lowering his to show that his characteristic beard was gone too. There’s not much more to say about it, Stallman is widely known in the Free Software community, and I can only hope for a full recovery. ...

GNOME 45 has been released Big week in GNOME land! The 45 release contains a lot of visual changes that had been teased at GUADEC, and some more. Firstly, we have the new activities dots indicator officially replacing the “Activities” label; this indicator represents all desktops as little dots, and the current one is a bigger pill. Clicking on them will access the usual overview. Still on the top bar, we also now have a camera indicator that pops up whenever any application is recording you (a big privacy improvement that KDE developers are rushing to introduce too). Finally, you can now open and close the quick settings through the Super+S keyboard shortcut. ...

This week we cover three big news: the latest release of Nextcloud Hub, the great increase in donations towards the open-source game engine Godot, and all the controversy surrounding Fedora’s plans to drop X11 entirely! Nextcloud announces Hub 6 with AI Assistant and healthy meeting culture Nextcloud is a great open-source alternative to tools such as the Google suite; it hosts files, has calendar and to-do applications, chat-like and social services, and so on. Even better, there’s a great community of third-party applications. So, what’s new? ...

Criticism over Unity’s new pricing, and Godot’s new development fund This is about the proprietary game engine, not the open-source desktop environment. Unity has recently announced a new pricing plan which - I think - is both a great example of why relying on proprietary platforms is a considerable risk, and an excellent occasion for open-source alternatives like Godot to become more mainstream. The new pricing plan includes a pay-per-download pricing scheme. The rates go from 20 cents per install (Unity Personal / Unity Plus) to 1 cent per install (Unity Enterprise). Even if this sounds reasonable to you, there’s a big, big issue. ...

Microsoft is having issues following European regulations …and it’s pretty funny to watch. The first issue is pushing users into Edge; currently, Windows 11 opens its own browser if you click the Windows Widgets panel or any search result, completely ignoring the default browser selection. This violates some EU regulations, as the test builds in the development channel will now use the preferred browser to open those links… as long as you like in the European Economic Area. It’s likely that this happened due to the EU Digital Markets Act, which will come into effect in March 2024. You can read more about this here: ...

KDE releases Apps update, with new Merkuro app suite KDE has released the KDE Gear 23.08, which contains updates to most KDE applications. One highlight of this release is the introduction of the “Merkuro” application suite, which will - soon - have Calendar, To-Dos, Contacts, and E-Mails covered. Merkuro is actually the re-branding of the Kalendar application, which developed so quickly that it had to split into multiple applications. Of course, there’s more. Skanpage, KDE’s scanning utility, now lets you change the order of scanned pages through simple drag-and-drop and allows you to quickly change brightness, contrast, gamma, and color balance. NeoChat, KDE’s Matrix client, now has a map that allows you to see all users currently broadcasting their position (“great to see where your friends are!”). Tokodon, KDE’s Mastodon client, has received many visual improvements (such as support for trending tags) and now allows instance owners to moderate directly from the application itself. ...

StarLabs announces 12.5" Linux Surface-Like device Surface-like devices are quite unique in the Linux world. There are a few out there; a couple of examples are the very low-end PineTab, and the now-dead JingPad. It’s a form factor that not everybody likes and would use daily, but - speaking as a 2-in-1 fan - I’m really happy to see this new Linux-native option. This StarLite features a Intel Alder Lake N200 processor, a 2880x1920 & 300cd/m² touch display (great for content consumption!), and 16GB of memory. It has WiFi and Bluetooth (obviously) but also: Micro HDMI, 2x USB C, Micro SD, and a headphone jack. The keyboard is detachable and acts as a stand for the tablet (a more Surface-like stand would’ve been more practical, but we can’t have everything). ...

System76 shares the plan for COSMIC customization System76 is currently working to create a new desktop environment from scratch, called COSMIC. We are receiving monthly updates on the work-in-progress, and the latest news goes in-depth about the customization options; in fact, it states that theming was a main focus for COSMIC. We are getting an “Appearance” page in System Settings. This will allow switching between light and dark themes, and the system can also select the theme automatically depending on the time of day. We do also get the ability to pick an accent color (either from a selected list, or a color picker). ...

Valve is now selling Certified Refurbished Steam Decks Valve has started selling refurbished Steam Decks at a significantly cheaper price: $319 instead of $399 for the base version, $419 instead of $529 for the 256GB model, and $519 instead of $649 for the 512GB model. On top of that, refurbished Steam Decks will also start appearing in Game Stops, though those will be refurbished by the Game Stops themselves and will only be available to Game Stop Pro subscribers. Refurbished supplies are limited, so Valve expects them to go out of stock frequently. ...

Linux overtakes MacOS among Steam users The above image shows the market share of Linux among Steam users, as reported by the latest Valve survey. If we temporarily stop looking at the Y-axis scale the graph seems promising: a clear, accelerating, constant growth; and this latest month saw a big spike. Of course, we do have to keep in mind that even the spike is just below 2%, which is even lower than what StatCounter reports as being the Linux market share in the general population (3%). And, as I always say, this game of playing with small percentages is rarely useful. ...