The Ubuntu in the wild blog post ropes in the latest highlights about Ubuntu and Canonical around the world on a bi-weekly basis. It is a summary of all the things that made us feel proud to be part of this journey. What do you think of it?

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Jeroen Ploemen (jcfp)
Mark Hindley (leepen)
Scarlett Moore (sgmoore)
Baptiste Beauplat (lyknode)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Gunnar Ingemar Hjalmarsson
Stephan Lachnit

Congratulations!

Data protection is essential, especially as you move from development to production. Technologies fail, people make mistakes, disasters happen, and malicious actors disrupt. Implementing effective data protection with the right tools is critical but can be a challenge in today’s hybrid- and multi-cloud IT landscapes.

A startup bringing personal workspaces in the cloud for students, workers, coders, and creators along with a Linux project for developers, system administrators and users are teaming up to extend the use of a secure desktop from any device, anywhere.

Shells and openSUSE Project have entered into a partnership to expand the use of Shells with the availability of openSUSE distributions on Shells’ private virtual desktop environment powered by cloud computing.

[...]

A key member of the Shells tech team involved with the collaboration is Debian developer and former Purism Chief Technical Officer Zlatan Todoric.

“The Shells and openSUSE collaboration is one of those that we all enjoy in the FLOSS community,” Todoric said, who is currently serving at Shells’ Vice President of Technology. “Sharing knowledge, ideas, and helping each other to benefit the entire community is obviously what it is all about. openSUSE is a well known integrator and has vast experience in desktop and cloud environments, and having them as an option for our Shells cloud computers is a win-win solution for everyone. The collaboration will continue to expand even further as time goes on and I can already tell you that the openSUSE experience on Shells is going to be loved.”

This new ISO contains some vital fixes, like dhcpcd not starting properly, Software Station random crashes, a fix to start VirtualBox properly on the live session, and some software updates.

As we trundle along and northern hemisphere spring interrupts my coding with activities like “you have rhubarb, bake something”, the KDE-on-FreeBSD team keeps chasing rainbows and software updates.

Today we've seen the first official gameplay of the upcoming Total War: WARHAMMER III from Creative Assembly, SEGA and porting studio Feral Interactive.

Before it gets into the gameplay though, it also shows off the Trial By Fire trailer that was released by itself yesterday which gets you in the mood for some action. This is the final game in the Total War Warhammer trilogy, and it's pleasing to see that we will have all three officially on Linux.

In addition to the initial batch of AMDGPU changes for Linux 5.14 that were mailed in on Thursday to DRM-Next, the initial DRM-Misc-Next pull also was sent off on its way to DRM-Next ahead of this next kernel cycle.

Years ago Phoronix readers may recall the SimpleDRM driver that was proposed as a very simple DRM/KMS driver for frame-buffer drivers. Coming with Linux 5.14 is now a new "SimpleDRM" driver that is a new take on the solution. The driver finally being mainlined is a Direct Rendering Manager / Kernel Mode-Setting driver for simple frame-buffer platform devices.

The Adreno 660 is the GPU found within the Snapdragon 888 SoC as a significantly improved graphics processor compared to the Adreno 650. Support for the Adreno 660 is now on the way to the open-source MSM DRM driver for the Linux kernel.

Jonathan Marek is again the one tackling this support. Enabling the Adreno 660 within the open-source MSM DRM driver though isn't too great of a burden over the existing Adreno 650 support. For this kernel driver it's just a little over one hundred lines of new kernel code involved.

Recently Signal had an Amazing idea for a marketing campaign on Instagram, rather than just running boring Instagram ads they instead decided to show put the sort of data that was being used to target that user to show the importance of privacy.

Migrating from one platform to another is always a challenge, and when it comes to Linux, there are some ways you can make the process easier. In this video, I go over ten tips that can help make your transition to Linux smoother.

A decade ago, I said the Chromebooks would be Windows PC killers. I got that wrong. But I wasn't as wrong as you might think. Today, Microsoft is hard at work turning Windows from a standalone PC operating system into a cloud-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) with its Cloud PC model. Who had that idea first? Who proved that users would accept a cloud-based desktop? That would be Google with the Chrome OS.

Last year Google introduced support for “back-forward cache” on Android, which enables instantaneous page loading when users navigate using backward or forward button. As per a new document spotted by us, Google Chrome 92 update will also enable default support for back-forward cache on desktop platforms, such as Windows, Linux and macOS.

It’s the most FUD-iest time of the year, these days leading up to the tax filing deadline.
FUD is a sales and marketing acronym for “fear, uncertainty and doubt,” sensations that can motivate customers to spend money and act rashly in order to alleviate their anxieties.
And no industry is better at turning FUD into gold than online tax preparation services. These companies offer to take wary and confused filers by the digital hand with such programs as TurboTax and lead them through the forms and schedules that must be accurately filled out and postmarked this year by midnight this coming Monday.

[...]

But lobbyists have successfully beaten back every effort to get the IRS into the tax-prep business, generally by throwing up a lot of FUD about big government, conflicts of interest and even creeping socialism.
ProPublica noted that when Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2007 he pledged to implement a simple return system at the IRS: “No more worry,” he said. “No more waste of time, no more extra expense for a tax preparer.”
No way, said the lobbyists.
No way, echoed the invertebrate U.S. Congress.
Objections to the idea don’t pass the smell test.

Back in 2005, an ebullient Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs announced the integration of podcasting into Version 4.9 of its desktop iTunes software, calling podcasting “TiVo for radio.”

Sixteen years later, during its April 20, 2021, “Spring Loaded” event, Apple has once again signaled a long-term corporate commitment to podcasting. But this time, instead of introducing listeners to the medium, Apple is creating the technical infrastructure for paid subscriptions through its Apple Podcasts service.

Creators will now have the option to require a payment for audiences to access their content on Apple’s platform, with Apple taking a 30% cut of the revenue.