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Android Maintainer of Linux Distro AnduinOS Revealed to Be Microsoft Employee
by Peter Reutemann 09 May '25

09 May '25

'After gaining attention from Neowin and DistroWatch last week, the sole maintainer behind AnduinOS 1.3 -- a Linux distribution styled to resemble Windows 11 -- decided to reveal himself. He turns out to be Anduin Xue, a Microsoft software engineer, who has been working on the project as a personal, non-commercial endeavor built on Ubuntu. Neowin reports: As a Software Engineer 2 at Microsoft (he doesn't work on Windows), Anduin Xue says he's financially stable and sees no need to commercialize AnduinOS. Explaining the financial aspects of the project, he said: "Many have asked why I don't accept donations, how I profit, and if I plan to commercialize AnduinOS. Truthfully, I haven't thoroughly considered these issues. It's not my main job, and I don't plan to rely on it for a living. Each month, I dedicate only a few hours to maintaining it. Perhaps in the future, I might consider providing enterprise solutions based on AnduinOS, but I won't compromise its original simplicity. It has always been about providing myself with a comfortably themed Ubuntu." In our coverage of the AnduinOS 1.3 release last week, one commenter pointed out that the distro is from China. For some, this will raise issues, but Anduin Xue addressed this in his blog post, too, saying that the source code is available to the public. For this reason, he told lacing the operating system with backdoors for the Chinese government would be "irrational and easily exposed." For those worried that the distribution may be abandoned, Anduin Xue said that he intends to continue supporting it and may even maintain it full-time if sponsorship or corporate cooperation emerges.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/05/08/1912204 Cheers, Peter

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New GNOME Executive Director Named
by Peter Reutemann 08 May '25

08 May '25

'Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Last July it was announced Holly Million was stepping down as the GNOME Foundation's Exeuctive Director after less than a year at the helm. Richard Littauer took over as interim Executive Director while this week a new GNOME Foundation Executive Director was hired. GNOME's new Executive Director is Steven Deobald. Steven Deobald is a Canadian free software advocate and has been a GNOME user since 2002. As the GNOME Foundation Executive Director, Steven wants to focus on transparency and to better ensure financial stability of the GNOME Foundation. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/07/200259 Cheers, Peter

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Memory-Safe Sudo To Become the Default In Ubuntu
by Peter Reutemann 07 May '25

07 May '25

'Blog post from the Trifecta Tech Foundation, a nonprofit organization that creates secure, open source building blocks for infrastructure software. The foundation is also the developer behind Sudo-rs. From the report: Ubuntu 25.10 is set to adopt sudo-rs by default. Sudo-rs is a memory-safe reimplementation of the widely-used sudo utility, written in the Rust programming language. This move is part of a broader effort by Canonical to improve the resilience and maintainability of core system components. [...] The decision to adopt sudo-rs is in line with Canonical's commitment to Carefully But Purposefully increase the resilience of critical system software, by adopting Rust. Rust is a programming language with strong memory safety guarantees that eliminates many of the vulnerabilities that have historically plagued traditional C-based software. Sudo-rs is part of the Trifecta Tech Foundation's Privilege Boundary initiative, which aims to handle privilege escalation with memory-safe alternatives. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/213254 Cheers, Peter

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Open Document Format Turns 20
by Peter Reutemann 07 May '25

07 May '25

' The Open Document Format reached its 20th anniversary on May 1, marking two decades since OASIS approved the XML-based standard originally developed by Sun Microsystems from StarOffice code. Even as the format has seen adoption by several governments including the UK, India, and Brazil, plus organizations like NATO, Microsoft Office's proprietary formats remain the de facto standard. Microsoft countered ODF by developing Office Open XML, eventually getting it standardized through Ecma International. "ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech," said Eliane Domingos, Chair of the Document Foundation, which oversees LibreOffice -- a fork created after Oracle acquired Sun.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/0050212 Cheers, Peter

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Fedora 43 to Remove GNOME X11 Support
by Peter Reutemann 07 May '25

07 May '25

'X11 is singing its swan song. While some Linux distributions still rely on it, the major players are steadily moving toward replacing it with Wayland or even dropping X11 support entirely. Now, Fedora is also making clear moves in that direction. That said, yesterday, Neal Gompa made a new proposal to remove every GNOME X11 package from the distribution’s repositories. If the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) accepts the “Wayland-only GNOME” change for Fedora Linux 43 (scheduled for release in late October or early November), users who still log in to “GNOME on Xorg” will be transparently switched to the default GNOME Wayland session. For GNOME developers, X11 has been on extended life support for quite a while. Upstream maintainers finished addressing the last user-experience blockers with GNOME 48 and plan to disable X11 at compile time in GNOME 49, with complete removal slated for GNOME 50.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/fedora-43-to-remove-gnome-x11-support/ Cheers, Peter

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Microsoft Makes Fedora an Official Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Distribution
by Peter Reutemann 07 May '25

07 May '25

'Fedora Linux is now officially available as a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution! That's right, folks, following prior testing, you can now run Fedora 42 natively inside Windows using WSL. As someone who considers Fedora to be my favorite Linux distribution, this is a pretty exciting development. Installing it is simple enough. Just open up a terminal and type wsl --install FedoraLinux-42 to get started. After that, launch it with wsl -d FedoraLinux-42 and set your username. No password is required by default, and you'll automatically be part of the wheel group, meaning you can use sudo right out of the gate.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/1652215 Cheers, Peter

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Hundreds of E-Commerce Sites Hacked In Supply-Chain Attack
by Peter Reutemann 06 May '25

06 May '25

'Ars Technica reports: Hundreds of e-commerce sites, at least one owned by a large multinational company, were backdoored by malware that executes malicious code inside the browsers of visitors, where it can steal payment card information and other sensitive data, security researchers said Monday. The infections are the result of a supply-chain attack that compromised at least three software providers with malware that remained dormant for six years and became active only in the last few weeks. At least 500 e-commerce sites that rely on the backdoored software were infected, and it's possible that the true number is double that, researchers from security firm Sansec said. Among the compromised customers was a $40 billion multinational company, which Sansec didn't name. In an email Monday, a Sansec representative said that "global remediation [on the infected customers] remains limited." "Since the backdoor allows uploading and executing arbitrary PHP code, the attackers have full remote code execution (RCE) and can do essentially anything they want," the representative wrote. "In nearly all Adobe Commerce/Magento breaches we observe, the backdoor is then used to inject skimming software that runs in the user's browser and steals payment information (Magecart)." The three software suppliers identified by Sansec were Tigren, Magesolution (MGS), and Meetanshi. All three supply software that's based on Magento, an open source e-commerce platform used by thousands of online stores. A software version sold by a fourth provider named Weltpixel has been infected with similar code on some of its customers' stores, but Sansec so far has been unable to confirm whether it was the stores or Weltpixel that were hacked. Adobe has owned Megento since 2018.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/05/2034207/hundreds-of-e-commerce-sites… Cheers, Peter

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Happy Birthday To Steve Jobs’ Screed Against Flash
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Apr '25

30 Apr '25

It was 15 years ago to day that Apple boss Steve Jobs published a blog post railing against Adobe Flash <https://www.theverge.com/apple/657934/happy-birthday-to-steve-jobs-screed-a…>, particularly about how it impinged on Apple’s control over its own platform: If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. In hindsight, we all know now about the problems with lack of open standards, security and battery life. But as always, at the time, there were those who played down these problems and who assumed that, because Flash was so prevalent, it would remain so into the future. There’s a lesson in there, about history repeating itself ...

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Ubuntu 25.04 “Plucky Puffin” Is Now Available for Download, This Is What’s New
by Peter Reutemann 30 Apr '25

30 Apr '25

'Canonical published today the Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) release, the latest stable version of their popular GNU/Linux distribution, featuring up-to-date components and new features. Powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.14 kernel series for top-notch hardware support, Ubuntu 25.04 features the GNOME 48 desktop environment with the usual enhancements and look that Ubuntu users are used to, specifically the dynamic triple buffering feature for an extra boost on low-end systems. Some exciting changes in Ubuntu 25.04 include an official generic ARM64 (AArch64) desktop ISO targeting virtual machines, ACPI + EFI platforms, and Snapdragon-based WoA devices, as well as initial hardware enablement for the Snapdragon X Elite platform is now included in the Ubuntu Desktop ISO image. The Ubuntu Desktop installer has been updated with support for local file paths for autoinstall import, a new option to replace an existing Ubuntu installation, dual boot improvements with a focus on BitLocker-protected Windows systems, allowing users to install Ubuntu alongside existing BitLocker partitions. Ubuntu 25.04 also brings some networking enhancements as Netplan received support for wpa-psk-sha256 Wi-Fi connections, support for configuring routing policy on the NetworkManager backend, and support for a new functionality in systemd-networkd-wait-online to wait for DNS servers to be configured and reachable before considering an interface to be online. Other than that, the xdg-terminal-exec package is now installed by default for easier access to the default terminal using the Ctrl+Alt+T keyboard shortcut, Papers has been added as the default document viewer instead of Evince, and BeaconDB-powered geolocation services are now enabled by default on new installations. Among other noteworthy changes, the AppArmor package now includes many new profiles for apps to improve sandboxing and mitigate the impact of any exploit in confined apps, the JPEG XL image format is now supported by default, and NVIDIA Dynamic Boost is now enabled by default on supported laptops with NVIDIA GPUs. It also brings full support for Intel Core Ultra Xe2 integrated Intel Arc graphics and Intel Arc B580 and B570 “Battlemage” discrete GPUs, improved GPU and CPU ray tracing rendering performance in apps with Intel Embree support, full hardware accelerated video encoding of AVC, JPEG, HEVC, and AV1 on “Battlemage” devices, new CCS optimization in Intel Compute Runtime, and debugging support for Intel Xe GPUs.' -- source: https://9to5linux.com/ubuntu-25-04-plucky-puffin-is-now-available-for-downl… Cheers, Peter

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OpenBSD 7.7 Released
by Peter Reutemann 30 Apr '25

30 Apr '25

'OpenBSD quietly released the new version (7.7) of its "secure by default" operating system. This is the 58th release. Changes include improved hardware and VMM support, along with many kernel improvements. This release brings several specific improvements, including performance boosts on ARM64, Arm SVE support, AMD SEV virtualization enhancements, better low-memory handling on i386, and improved suspend/hibernate and SMP performance. It also updates graphics drivers with support for AMD Ryzen IA 300, Radeon RX 9070, and Intel Arrow Lake, along with expanded hardware support for MediaTek SoCs.' -- source: https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/25/04/29/0456227 Cheers, Peter

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