Do you waddle the waddle?
Norwegian-based Tenko has released an open-hardware development board based on STMicroelectronics’ STM32C5 microcontroller family. The compact board follows the familiar Blue Pill form factor while adding USB-C power, onboard USB-to-UART connectivity, and an alternative firmware environment based on Oberon-2.
Apollo Automation has launched the ESPHome Starter Kit, a modular smart-home development platform built around an ESP32-C6 board and designed to let users create ESPHome devices without soldering, breadboards, or writing code. The kit operates locally and can be used independently or integrated with Home Assistant.
When we launched the Safer Internet Initiative earlier this year, our message was clear: connectivity is essential, but it is not enough. Everyone needs to feel safe, protected, and empowered when they go online.
The monthly KDE Frameworks releases continue, and KDE Frameworks 6.29 is here to add an icon for Android app bundle files in the Breeze icon theme, improve the fancy Kirigami tab bars in QML-based apps to switch the active tab when scrolling over them or using a tab-switching keyboard shortcut, and improve the visual fidelity of small icons in Kirigami-based apps.
Coming almost two months after Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.10, the Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.11 release introduces support for newer multi-frame compressed images, the ability to lock the drive exclusively on Linux and Windows while writing so nothing else can interfere, and a proper “Erase/Format” command.
Since the KDE Project dropped LTS support for the KDE Plasma desktop environment despite some demand from people, they teamed up with Linux hardware vendor Kubuntu Focus and Techpaladin Software to provide three years of bug and security fixes for the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop environment series through Kubuntu 26.04 LTS.
Mali, a French-influenced former colony more than twice the size of France, is showing some interesting data this month, as GNU/Linux is measured to have grown past 5%. There's little reporting going on there (in French, let alone English), so explaining operating system trends there may best be deferred to groups like Emmabuntüs Collective. █
Image source: Mali (orthographic projection)
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