Linux Magazine March 2023

Dear Reader, The elite gathering known as Davos is not an ordinary business convention. The annual conference of the World Economic Forum is an uber-exclusive event, not a meeting of governments but rather a gathering of representatives from around 1,000 member companies – the biggest companies in the world – along with a smattering of political leaders and academics. At this year’s Davos event, Microsoft hosted a party for 50 guests and invited the rock star Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, otherwise known as Sting, to provide the entertainment for the party. Estimates vary for how much it costs for Sting to show up and play at your party, but the remuneration is thought to be well in the six-figure range. The news of this musical mixer might easily have escaped…

MX Linux 21.3 64-bit Codenamed Wildflower, MX Linux 21.3 (MX-21.3) is the latest joint effort between the antiX and MX Linux communities. Based on Debian 11.6, Wildflower is available with the latest releases of the Xfce, KDE Plasma, and Fluxbox desktop environments. Changes to Fluxbox include MX Rofi Manager, a tool for configuring the look and feel, while KDE now includes the 6.0 Advanced Hardware Support (AHS) kernel with advanced hardware configuration. All editions include a new deb-installer, menu editor, and updated firmware packages, as well as the latest antiX tool for creating live images and system snapshots. As with all MX releases, the result is a distribution with extreme user-friendliness, suitable for all levels of users. Puppy Linux FossaPup 9.5 64-bit While Puppy Linux is usually listed as a…

The Nobara Project’s aim is to bring users a better gaming, streaming, and content-creation solution out of the box. This new Linux distribution (which is not a Fedora Spin) is a completely independent project. This Linux operating system includes NVIDIA drivers, Wine dependencies, OBS Studio, third-party codecs, and a collection of package fixes that are geared toward making it easy for users to immediately be productive, without having to tweak, install, or patch anything. Pre-installed packages include Blender, DaVinci Resolve, OBS Studio, Wine, Proton, Discord, Flatpak, Steam, Lutris, OnlyOffice, VapourSynth, and much more. You’ll also find the RPM Fusion repository that includes both free and non-free software. Unlike Fedora, Nobara uses AppArmor because it claims AppArmor is more user-friendly, less intrusive, and easier to manage. Nobara ships with the same…

Although it’s a bit premature to talk about what features will be found in the 44th iteration of the Gnome desktop, it’s safe to say that the Epiphany web browser will most likely get the GTK4 port we’ve been waiting for as well as WebExtensions support that will be enabled out of the box. There also may be wider libadwaita support in more apps. The big question on my mind is will Gnome 44 finally feature the new terminal app, Console, or will it continue on with the current default Gnome terminal? According to 9To5Linux (https://9to5linux.com/gnome-44-release-date), Gedit is making a comeback, although there is no indication it will return as the default text editor. My guess is that the new default will remain the same with the newly-updated Gedit available…

Nitrux 2.6 is available and there are some serious changes to the distribution. First and foremost, dpkg, apt, and PackageKit package managers have been removed in favor of AppImage or Flatpack. In the release, FlatHub has been enabled by default, and there are plenty of applications that can be installed with that system. Users of the Live version of Nitrux will notice that the standard package managers are still available, but once the operating system has been installed, those package managers are no longer enabled. Other changes include PipeWire as the default sound server, and Wayland has been added but not enabled by default. The default desktop environment is KDE Plasma, and Nitrux 2.6 ships with version 5.26.4, KDE Frameworks 5.101, and KDE Gear 22.12. Of version 2.6, Uri Herrera…

A brand-new Linux distribution is now available with a unique feature you won’t find in many operating systems. This distribution is called Vanilla OS and offers a stock Gnome experience (using Gnome 43), and is based on Ubuntu 22.10. The key features of Vanilla OS include its own installer (written in GTK4 and libad-waita), a handy first-setup application to guide users through the first steps, an OS Control Center to help you install drivers and run things such as critical updates, and on-demand immutability. It’s the on-demand immutability that should excite many users. With this feature, core bits of the system are locked to prevent unwanted changes. This is achieved using ABRoot, which works in conjunction with the apt replacement, apx. Apx installs packages inside a managed container without modifying…