News

Lately, things have not been going too well for some Linux hardware companies (such as Mycroft), and even HP discontinued their Linux laptop; KDE and GNOME are joining together to raise 100.000 dollars to make Flathub the “Linux App Store”; and of course, both those organizations are also working on new applications and features, as we’ll see. Linux Hardware’s having issues We have some not-so-good news on the hardware front. Firstly, the HP Dev One (an ultrabook from HP that shipped with Linux out of the box) has been discontinued. The company stopped selling the device in January and has no plan to create a new model; it could be that not enough Dev Ones were sold to justify the project in HP’s eyes. It was the only computer, apart from System76 hardware, to ship with Pop!_OS. ...

The first big topic is new Linux hardware available in Purisms and Kubuntu Focus stores (a Lapdock kit and a new compact computer, respectively). Then, a blogpost by the maintainer of CoreJS where he says that the current state of Open Source has been widely discussed in Linux communities. Finally, Gnome and KDE shared their latest implemented new features and redesigns. Purisms introduces the “Lapdock Kit” One of the main features of most Linux phone OSs is “Convergency”; the idea is that, by simply plugging your phone into a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, it should become a full desktop. Given that the phone is powerful enough to support this use case, this does seem quite appealing (in fact, Android implements a very similar feature). ...

Notice: This is an older newsletter; many links were lost in the migration process. Click this link for an archive of the old newsletter site. This week saw the release of KDE Plasma 5.27 and EndlessOS 5. Aside from these two, we’ll cover the improvements that GNOME and Thunderbird are receiving, and also how Microsoft Bing could be threatening OpenStreetMap community model with its own map editor. KDE releases the last Plasma 5 version KDE has released Plasma 5.27, the last version before Plasma 6 (which should be ready later this year). New in this release: there’s a welcome application that will appear on the first boot to introduce users to how Plasma works; it also allows for some customization, e.g. turning on KUserFeedback. ...

Notice: This is an older newsletter; many links were lost in the migration process. Click this link for an archive of the old newsletter site. This last week saw major releases of various projects, featuring Elementary, LibreOffice, and the KDE Mobile Gear (which includes lots of KDE apps to be used on desktop too). Other projects, like Servo and COSMIC, published blogposts with their in-progress work and future plans. ElementaryOS 7 Released One year after release 6.1, there’s a new version of Elementary. Most of the changes focused on the experience of using the App Store, which improved significantly. There’s a better design that gives more focus to apps’ screenshots, links to resolved issues in the apps’ repository (to show whether development is active), optional support for automatic updates, and better support for sideloaded apps (e.g. flatpaks). ...

Troubles for Open Source Software at the European Commission On the 15th of September 2022, the European Commission has published the European Cyber Resilience Act. The goal is to have a common set of cybersecurity standards that would be able to avoid up to €180-290 billion annually. There’s just an issue: it might have a big impact on the Open Source world. The proposal would require software developers to guarantee the security of their products “throughout the whole life cycle”, to offer a “coherent cybersecurity framework”, to improve the transparency of digital security, and to “use products with digital elements securely”. All of this is expected to have a compliance cost for the software developers; a cost that many Open Source projects might not be able to afford. ...

A sneak peek to Unity 7.7 New proposed sidebar look for Unity 7.7 Rudra Saraswat, the maintainer of Ubuntu Unity, has published a blogpost asking for feedback on the upcoming version of the Unity desktop. He showcased many of the changes that the update will bring, starting from a new widget system called UWidgets. This will allow adding some custom information on the desktop itself, similar to what Plasma offers too. The widgets can be written in Python and will have access to some elements of the desktop itself, such as the wallpaper and dock. Finally, all of this will be available on an online store offered by Unity itself. Another significant change is the new look for the dash, which you can see in the picture. It’s supposed to be the final appearance, though they say feedback is still welcome. There will also be a new Welcome app written in Flutter (a very interesting choice!). The app will explain what the Unity project is and allow you to get started with it, though we don’t know any details yet. Finally, the panel also gets a revamp in its looks, also covering accessibility and usability improvements to the notification section of the desktop. Unity does seem very alive! ...

Welcome to the new year! News is lighter this go around. Feel free to share with your friends! I hope you all have a great start to the year. Linux market share is rising! There are more and more people using Linux daily, and we can see that in various metrics. This first one - though undoubtedly biased - is in StackOverflow’s developer survey. Since they’re done every year, we can use them to see the trend in Linux usage. In the past five years, it has always been around 25% (again, amongst developers, which is not representative of the general population). This year that number has skyrocketed to 40.23%. Even better, this doesn’t consider people using WSL or Linux VMs. ...

MAJOR investments, new hardware, huge updates, and more in this week of the TechHut Newsletter. First, in some TechHut news, this is a reminder to everyone that soon we will be shutting down our Patreon in favor for this platform. If you’re interested in supporting you can do so directly though our newsletter/website. Coming New Year we will start publishing monthly exclusive content for those members. With that onto the news! ...

Welcome to the 6th edition of the TechHut Newsletter. There is some huge news this week in tech and open source! Asahi Linux brings Hardware Acceleration to Linux on Apple Silicon Asahi has announced their first release of Apple Silicon GPU drivers. This project has been under work for years and has finally reached an alpha status, where it’s good enough to power “a smooth desktop experience and some games”. More specifically, this brings OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all M-series. ...

Welcome to the fifth edition of the TechHut Newsletter. Big thank you to all that has signed up. We are quickly approaching 300 subscribers! I’m glad you all are enjoying it and if you have any feedback feel free to email me directly at brandon@techhut.tv. Also, our first paid member newsletter will be out in a few weeks! With all that, here is what’s happing. GTK looks native in MacOS with these draft patches Paul Rouget, a former Mozilla employee, is currently working on some patches that will make GTK look amazing when used in MacOS. GTK already supports that platform, but the current look is the same that you’d find on GNOME, which won’t feel native at all to Mac users. With these patches applied, a variety of features are supported: MacOS native controls are supported (e.g. minimize, maximize, and close buttons), vibrancy’s supported (which allows for pretty translucent sidebars), the accent color is supported (meaning that it will be following the systemwide colorscheme), and the titlebar merges with the content nicely as shown in the image. Of course, dark mode is supported as well. ...