today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 07, 2025

• GNU/Linux

  • Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME ☛ Steven Deobald: 2025-08-01 GNOME Foundation Update

        This will perhaps be the least-fun Foundation Update of the year. July 27th was supposed to be the “Board Hack Day” (yay?… policy hackfest? everyone’s favourite?), but it ended up consumed with more immediately pressing issues. Somewhat unfortunate, really, as I think we were all looking forward to removing the executive tasks from the Board project wall and boiling their work down to more strategic and policy work. I suppose we’ll just have to do that throughout the year.

        Many people are on vacation right now, so the Foundation feels somewhat quiet in its post-GUADEC moment. Budget planning is happening. Doozers are doozering. The forest gnomes are probably taking a nap. There’s a lot of annoying paperwork being shuffled around.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • LWN ☛ Smaller Fedora quality team proposes cuts

      Fedora's quality team is looking to reduce the scope of test coverage and change the project's release criteria to drop some features from the list of release blockers. This is, in part, an exercise in getting rid of criteria, such as booting from optical media, that are less relevant. It is also a necessity, since the Red Hat team focusing on Fedora quality assurance (QA) is only half the size it was a year ago.

      The team is responsible for a host of activities which include testing of software, running test days, maintaining tools for test automation, and coordinating the Fedora release process with the release engineering team. The quality team is composed of Red Hat employees and Fedora community contributors, but it is fair to say that the bulk of the team's work is done by those employed to by Red Hat.

      Unfortunately, according to an announcement by Kamil Páral, a member of the team, there is a somewhat urgent need to reduce its workload. Six out of ten Red Hat employees who had been working on the team have chosen to move to other teams within Red Hat over the past nine months, or have left Red Hat altogether. Only one new person has joined the team. Páral pointed out in the announcement that this was not the result of a layoff or intentional reduction of the quality team; he said that the moves were ""truly decisions of our colleagues"", some of whom opted to move to AI-focused roles or other jobs within Red Hat.

• Security

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ NVIDIA say no to adding backdoors and killswitches in their GPUs

    NVIDIA have released a blog post from chief security officer, fighting back against attempts from pundits and policymakers in governments wanting backdoors.