GNU/Linux and Free/Libre Software Leftovers
GNU/Linux
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Applications
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Kubernetes Blog ☛ Spotlight on SIG Architecture: Enhancements
This is the fourth interview of a SIG Architecture Spotlight series that will cover the different subprojects, and we will be covering SIG Architecture: Enhancements.
In this SIG Architecture spotlight we talked with Kirsten Garrison, lead of the Enhancements subproject.
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GNU Projects
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[Older] After a long wait, GIMP 3.0 is finally here. And we've tested it... | Creative Bloq
If you don’t already know, GIMP is an open-source digital image manipulation application that runs on virtually all platforms. And while it has existed since the 1990s, it never became the household name that it should have. This is because, as many parents have been told about their children, it has long been an “under achiever”.
Case in point: The GIMP team has just released version 3.0. To be more clear, they just released its “Release Candidate”, which is essentially a late beta. This is some 8 months later than was originally promised at the start of this year. The reason: Some of the developers caught colds. Yes, seriously.
Far worse is that as v3.0 is being birthed, it is now exactly 20 years since the release of their previous 2.0 version. I literally can not think of another application that has taken that long between releases. Granted, there have been numerous interim releases in between. Some that could have easily been dubbed 3.0, so some may reasonably argue “what’s in a name?” But as we make our way through this new version, we need to ask, should this have been the first full integer release in 20 years? And will it bother the frontrunners among the best photo-editing software offerings?
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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OpenSUSE ☛ openSUSE Board Elections Update
Four candidates are running for three open seats.
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Debian Family
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DEV Community ☛ Divine Attah-Ohiemi: Progress Report: First Half of My Outreachy Internship
Hello everyone!, I’m excited to share a progress report on my Outreachy internship with the Debian community. As I reach the halfway point of this journey, I want to reflect on what I’ve accomplished so far and outline my modified goals for the second half of the internship.
In truth, there wasn’t a strict timeline for my project—migrating Debian webpage content to Hugo—because the original repository contained thousands of pages. The initial goal was to develop a proof of concept for: [...]
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Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Migrating away from bcachefs
Pretty much exactly a year ago, I posted about how I was trying out this bcachefs thing, being cautiously optimistic (but reminding you to keep backups). Now I'm going the other way; I've converted my last bcachefs filesystem to XFS, and I don't intend to look at it again in the near
What changed in the meantime? Well, the short version is: I no longer trust bcachefs' future. Going into a new filesystem is invariably filled with rough edges, and I totally accepted that (thus the backups). But you do get a hope that things will get better, and for a filesystem developed by a single person (Kent Overstreet), that means you'll need to trust that person to a fairly large degree. Having both hung out in #bcache and seen how this plays out on LKML and against Debian, I don't really have that trust anymore.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Security
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LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, ipa, and NetworkManager), Debian (389-ds-base, busybox, libreoffice, rsync, ruby2.7, tomcat10, and tryton-server), Fedora (chromium and stb), Mageia (openafs and vim), Oracle (.NET 8.0 and .NET 9.0), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, chromedriver, git, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, govulncheck-vulndb, grafana, hplip, pam_u2f, perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib, perl-IO-Compress, redis, redis7, rsync, and velociraptor), and Ubuntu (libpodofo and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).
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Wladimir Palant ☛ Malicious extensions circumvent Google’s remote code ban
As noted last week I consider it highly problematic that Surveillance Giant Google for a long time allowed extensions to run code they downloaded from some web server, an approach that Mozilla prohibited long before Surveillance Giant Google even introduced extensions to their browser. For years this has been an easy way for malicious extensions to hide their functionality. When Surveillance Giant Google finally changed their mind, it wasn’t in form of a policy but rather a technical change introduced with Manifest V3.
As with most things about Manifest V3, these changes are meant for well-behaving extensions where they in fact improve security. As readers of this blog probably know, those who want to find loopholes will find them: I’ve already written about the Honey extension bundling its own JavaScript interpreter and malicious extensions essentially creating their own programming language. This article looks into more approaches I found used by malicious extensions in Chrome Web Store. And maybe Surveillance Giant Google will decide to prohibit remote code as a policy after all.
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PCLinuxOS
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PCLOS Official ☛ PCLinuxOS Recent Updates
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Openwashing
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Silicon Angle ☛ DeepSeek open-sources its R1 reasoning model series [Ed: Openwashing of course; the data and lots more remain proprietary]
DeepSeek today released a new large language model family, the R1 series, that’s optimized for reasoning tasks. The Chinese artificial intelligence developer has made the algorithms’ source-code available on Hugging Face.
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Licensing / Legal
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Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu Blog: An Introduction to Open Source Licensing for complete beginners
Open source is one of the most exciting, but often misunderstood, innovations of our modern world. I still remember the first time I installed linux on my laptop, saw the vast array of packages I could install on it, all the utilities and libraries that make it work, all the forum threads filled with advice and debugging and troubleshooting, and I thought: [...]
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Programming/Development
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Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly News 2025.03 Cro Released
Patrick Böker has released the first community version of Cro, a set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems in the Raku Programming Language. Just under a year after the announcement of it being released to the community.
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