Linux Magazine August 2022

Dear Reader, A few months ago, I wrote about the strange case of the misbehaving color.js and faker.js open source libraries. These popular tools were sabotaged by their own developer, who had become disillusioned by the way large companies were using his code without contributing or providing compensation. But the larger point was about the need for an orderly transition when a developer has to step away or step back. Burnout is a serious thing for FOSS developers. And sometimes it isn’t even a matter of burnout but is simply that lives have a way of changing. People change jobs, get married, have kids … open source projects need to provide continuity when a lead developer bows out. When you call out a fiery explosion like the color.js crash, it…

Linux Mint MATE 20.3 64-bit Linux Mint 20.3, codenamed Una, is the latest long-term support release of this popular Ubuntu derivative, with support until 2025. The MATE edition, the latest development of Linux Mint’s fork of Gnome 2, offers an out-of-the-box desktop that is stable, moderately light, and easy to use. MATE shares many features in common with Cinnamon, Linux Mint’s other desktop that is developed in-house. The 20.3 release of both versions introduces Thingy, a document manager, and adds a search function and items to resize text in Sticky Notes. In addition, both offer new themes with larger, rounded titlebars and reduced accent colors, as well as a Dark Mode for some applications. Other shared features include updated printer drivers and right-to-left scroll in the PDF printer for reading…

HP has teamed up with System76 to create a developer-focused laptop, called the Dev One, which ships with System76’s own Pop!_OS Linux distribution and starts at $1,099. The original announcement came out in May 2022 and, at the time, the laptop was unavailable for pre-order. Fast forward to today and users in the US can now order one of these shiny new pieces of Linux-powered hardware. The Dev One keeps the prices slightly lower by going with an AMD CPU and shrugs off a discrete graphics card. The base model ships with an 8 Core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U processor with a 1.9-4.4GHz clock speed, an integrated AMD Radeon graphics chipset, and 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM (upgradable to 64GB). The chassis is .75" thick and has a 1TB PCIe…

NixOS is a unique take on Linux in that everything (including the kernel, applications, system packages, and configuration files) is built by the Nix package manager. And by isolating the applications from one another, the developers have achieved a distribution without using /bin, /sbin, /lib, or /usr directories. Instead, all packages are stored within /nix/store. With the release of NixOS 22.5, 9,345 new packages have been added and 10,666 have been updated. This was achieved thanks to 1,611 contributors and 46,727 commits. Impressive. This new release includes Nix 2.8, which fixes several issues, improves usability, and bolsters performance. The biggest change to Nix comes by way of the flakes experimental features, which allow you to specify code dependencies in a declarative way by listing them (in JSON format) within a…

With a foundation built on the Debian Stable Branch, Titan Linux (https://techcafe757.wixsite.com/titanlinux) takes a functional, yet a minimal, approach to KDE Plasma to create an operating system that is as functional as it is performant. Titan Linux features a minimal KDE Plasma desktop, the stable LTS kernel, a wide range of hardware support, a large independent community of supporters, and a brand new management system (called the Titan Toolbox) that makes it possible to manage the operating system with a single click. This new distribution is built with the end user in mind and eliminates the dependency on meta-packages to create a remarkably stable system. Titan Linux defaults to a global dark theme and adds just enough eye candy to make it elegant, without bogging down the system. Currently, Titan…

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has officially released the third major revision of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as a standard (https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/07/http3_rfc_9114_published/). RFC 9114 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9114) documents the new HTTP, which proponents say will lead to better “…stream multiplexing, per-stream flow control, and lowlatency connection establishment.” The biggest change with the v3 web is the QUIC protocol, which was originally developed by Google but has since been extended and adopted by Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors. Unlike previous versions of the HTTP, which relied on the slow but careful TCP protocol for establishing and verifying connections, the new version uses the faster and more agile QUIC as a transport protocol. QUIC, which stands for “Quick UDP Internet Connections,” is based on the connectionless UDP transport. Some questions remain about the…