Newsletter

Mozilla awards 100.000$ in “Responsible AI” prizes In March, Mozilla launched the “Responsible AI Channel”, a one-day in-person event to build “trustworthy AI products”. This is extremely important because AI tools currently raise privacy and copyright concerns. So, who won? The top prize, $50k, was awarded to the “Sanative AI” project. The idea here is to “watermark” images through a small amount of visual noise that will make them useless upon training (as “the AI is unable to properly minimize its loss function”). Creating this watermark, which is different for each image, requires a great number of resources, and yet Sanative offers it for free through a queue. This approach has some potential issues: already uploaded images - without this watermark - can still be used for training, and AI organizations might find a way to get around the noise. However, Sanative AI is committed to improving its tool over time to remain effective. ...

Ubuntu will offer an immutable, all snaps Desktop next year This news comes directly from the comments of OMGUbuntu: Canonical developer Oliver Grawert has said that there is already an immutable Ubuntu distro, called “Ubuntu Core”, currently aimed at embedded devices. The next LTS release of Ubuntu, though, a Desktop version of it will also be released, meaning that it will be aimed at normal users and not just IoT devices. Users won’t be able to install applications through apt (as immutable systems disallow changing the system files) but they will have to use snap for anything. ...

The Red Hat Summit is into the second to last day, KDE Plasma announces preliminary HDR support and Kubuntu will releases new Laptop. Keyboard driven browser Nyxt and GNOME settings gets updates. Fedora Budgie Onyx spin has been confirmed! Red Hat Summit 2023 is LIVE! The Red Hat Summit is taking place right now in Boston and I (Brandon Hopkins) have been super lucky to be able to attend. It has been awesome meeting like-minded lovers of open-source software. There are a bunch of booths to connect with various organizations and branches within the Red Hat company. In addition, there have been a ton of keynotes, presentations, and labs to learn and better understand RHEL, Linux, AI, automatization, and containerization. Even if you were not able to attend Red Hat has been live streaming and releasing some of the content from this summit. ...

The latest COSMIC DE update features panels, settings, and more The monthly update on the COSMIC desktop development is out, and it contains lots of user-facing improvements. The first big one is panels that can be freely customized; that is, you can move them around, change their size, have multiple panels, and even make them float. Similarly to KDE Plasma or XFCE, the panels contain applets that can be customized (by adding new ones, removing them, and moving them around). One main difference with Plasma is that each applet lives in its own process, meaning that the desktop would still work even if one of them were to crash. Furthermore, one unique feature is the ability to change the transparency of the panels directly from their settings. The blogpost contains lots of screenshots with different setups, so make sure to check it out if you’re interested. ...

KDE sprint focused on Plasma 6 During the last week, many KDE developers attended a sprint in Germany with the goal of shaping up the next Plasma release. Now that it has finished, we have many attendees publishing their work on their personal blogs, meaning we can some insight into what happened (especially since I, Niccolò, was also there). Such a week means there are a lot of new features and changes in KDE Plasma, so it’s worth looking at it in a longer section than usual: ...

Mastodon is bringing easier onboarding, quote posts, and more As you can see in the image above, Mastodon has decided to make it easier to join the Fediverse by suggesting mastodon.social as a default option (still allowing any custom server to be picked). This will make it easier for first-timers to join Mastodon, especially if it’s the first time they try a “federated” social network; there will surely still be time for them to understand that there are various different servers and switch between them, but the first step - making an account for the first time - has to be as simple as possible if we want more and more people joining. ...

GIMP has been ported to GTK3 The next major version of GIMP will be 3.0; to reach it, the team has a roadmap that tracks the changes they’d like to ship in that version. As you can guess by the version number, one of those things is switching from GTK2 to 3. The branch containing the remaining work on that front has been recently merged, completing the transition: GIMP (on the master branch) now uses GTK3, a big milestone. ...

This was a week packed with major releases of various projects. In this newsletter issue, I’ll cover the releases from Fedora, Proton by Valve, the Vivaldi browser, Deepin (though the release is 20.9 and not 23), and digiKam (KDE’s photo management application). Fedora 38 released, with new spins and packages The new default wallpaper The new version of Fedora comes with new wallpaper, a website redesign, new spins, up-to-date packages and an improved desktop, and more. Let’s go through all the changes; the new wallpaper is easy, as you can look at it just above this paragraph. The new website is of course not part of the OS itself, but it’s still a significant visual refresh aligned with the release and that required the collaboration of different design teams and the community. ...

Linux Mint introduces Styles and Color Variants A screenshot from the new Themes settings page. Up until now, in Linux Mint you could only choose your theme and that was it. In March, the developers decided to introduce a more complex (and powerful) way to customize their system, which relies on three elements: “styles”, “modes” and “variants”. Quoting from their official blog post: ...

This week there’s a lot of Linux hardware news! We start off with Pine64 providing great news for three devices: the PineNote (e-ink tablet), the PineTab 2, and the new “PineTab V” (which is the PineTab 2, but with a RISC-V board). Then, there’s System76 announcing they’re working on an in-house manufactured laptop codenamed “Virgo”. Moving to phones, Ubuntu Touch has released its first version based on the latest LTS of Ubuntu, and Plasma Mobile also improved a lot whilst working for the Plasma 6 release. ...