Newsletter

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. ...

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. ...