Newsletter

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 This graph is taken from GamingOnLinux counter (see link below) 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. ...

This newsletter will only cover three stories, but each of them is quite interesting and took some time to research. Firstly, today is the first day of GUADEC, which is similar to last week’s Akademy but for GNOME. Then, we have an API proposal to Chromium that might be quite risky for the future of the internet. Finally, we get back to the Cyber Resilience Act, which has been approved by an EU Committee. Let’s get started! ...

SUSE forks RHEL with $10M, and Oracle heavily criticizes Red Hat too Let’s start with the former: SUSE, the company behind SUSE Linux Enterprise, has invested $10 million to create a fork of RHEL that avoids any lock-in and continues being fully open source. The plan is to contribute the project to an open-source foundation that will preserve free access over time. This is quite big news, especially given the big money commitment from SUSE; it shows that the last move from Red Hat has significantly weakened what RHEL was. ...

Rocky Linux searches for RHEL loophole As covered last week, Red Hat has decided to stop publicly sharing RHEL source code, only leaving CentOS Stream. The source code can still be obtained, but only through a contract that disallows re-use. Rocky Linux, based on RHEL, thus has to search for another place to get the sources from. The first option they have is to use UBI container images that are based on RHEL and available online; using those, it should be easy to reconstruct the source code. ...

RHEL source code isn’t freely available anymore This is pretty big news, and it deserves some explanation. I will do my best to provide some context about this change and explain it truthfully, though there are currently contradicting sources of information. A bit of history: RHEL is Red Hat’s Linux distribution aimed at enterprises; its binaries are available to Red Hat’s customers; some of these are paying for it, though free developer accounts also exist. When signing up for it, you have the right - guaranteed by the GPL license - to see the source code, but Red Hat disallows any form of re-sharing of that code in the agreement. This has never been important, as RHEL’s code has always been open source and publicly available to everyone (customers and non-customers). ...

The Reddit protest goes on, with hacker stories and more Even though the 48-hours mark the protest initially asked for has long passed, ~3000 subreddit are still private or restricted to protest against API changes. This has led Reddit to respond, in some very weird ways. Steve “spez” Huffman (Reddit’s CEO) doubled down on the changes, saying that Reddit API was never designed for third party applications; then, he openly praised Elon Musk management of Twitter as a reference for him. He also said that the blackout “will pass”. However, since it didn’t, Reddit has started threatening the moderators of the communities who won’t re-open. ...

Debian 12, codenamed “Bookworm”, released Image from omgubuntu After two years of development, we have a new release of Debian. The most noticeable changes compared to the previous version are updates to all the packages; Debian 12 uses GNOME 43, the Linux kernel 6.1 (the current LTS), LibreOffice 7.4, Python 3.11, and so on. In fact, Debian 12 even includes roughly ~10k new packages, for a total of ~60k; so, not only have they been updated, but there are also many more. ...