Fedora 30 Workstation review - Smarter, faster and buggier

Fedora 30 is definitely one of the more interesting releases of this family in a long-time. It brings significant changes, including solid improvements in the desktop performance and responsiveness. Over the years, Fedora went from no proprietary stuff whatsoever to slowly acknowledging the modern needs of computing, so now it gives you MP3 codecs and you can install graphics drivers and such. Reasonable looks, plus good functionality across the board. However, there were tons of issues, too. Printing to Samba, video screenshot bug, installer cropped-image slides, package management complications, mouse cursor lag, oopses, average battery life, and inadequate usability out of the box. You need to change the defaults to have a desktop that can be used in a quick, efficient way without remembering a dozen nerdy keyboard shortcuts. All in all, I like the freshness. In general, it would seem the Linux desktop is seeing a cautious revival, and Fedora's definitely a happy player. But there are too many rough edges. Well, we got performance tweaks after so many years, and codecs, we might get window buttons and desktop icons one day back, too. Something like 6/10, and definitely worth exploring. I am happy enough to do two more tests. I will run an in-vivo upgrade on the F29 instance on this same box, and then also test the distro on an old Nvidia-powered laptop, which will showcase both the support for proprietary graphics (didn't work the last time) and performance improvements, if they scale for old hardware, too. That's all for now.

Events: Automotive at LF, Linux Clusters Institute, Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC)

• Automotive Linux Summit and Open Source Summit Japan Keynote Speakers and Schedule Announced

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source has announced the speaker line up for Open Source Summit Japan and Automotive Linux Summit. One registration provides access to all content at both events, which will be held July 17-19 at the Toranomon Hills Forum in Tokyo. Open Source Summit Japan (OSSJ) and Automotive Linux Summit (ALS) will bring together top talent from companies on the leading edge of innovation including Toyota Motor Corporation, Uber, Intel, Sony, Google, Microsoft and more. Talks will cover a range of topics, with ALS talks on everything from infrastructure and hardware to compliance and security; and OSSJ sessions on AI, Linux systems, cloud infrastructure, cloud native applications, open networking, edge computing, safety and security and open source best practices.

• Register Now for the 2019 Introductory Linux Clusters Institute Workshop

  Registration is now open for the 2019 Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) Introductory Workshop,which will be held August 19-23, 2019 at the Rutgers University Inn & Conference Center in New Brunswick, NJ. This workshop will cover the fundamentals of setting up and administering a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster and will be led by leading HPC experts.

• Additional early bird slots available for LPC 2019

  The Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) registration web site has been showing “sold out” recently because the cap on early bird registrations was reached. We are happy to report that we have reviewed the registration numbers for this year’s conference and were able to open more early bird registration slots. Beyond that, regular registration will open July 1st. Please note that speakers and microconference runners get free passes to LPC, as do some microconference presenters, so that may be another way to attend the conference. Time is running out for new refereed-track and microconference proposals, so visit the CFP page soon. Topics for accepted microconferences are welcome as well.

Security Leftovers

• Security updates for Wednesday

• Illumos-Powered OmniOS Gets Updated Against MDS / ZombieLoad Vulnerabilities

  While it was just earlier this month that the OpenSolaris/Illumos-based OmniOS saw a big LTS release, it's already been succeeded by a new release given the recent Intel MDS / Zombieload CPU vulnerabilities coming to light. There are new spins of OmniOS for all supported releases. These new OmniOS Community Edition releases mitigate against the Multiarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities and also bundle in the updated Intel CPU microcode.

• Hackers Hack A Forum For Hacked Accounts: Here’s How

  A group of hackers failed to deploy security mechanisms to secure the storage where they store hacked accounts and another hacker group hacked it. The story is indeed funny and real. Infamous forum named OGUSERS which is popular amongst hackers for obtaining “OG” Instagram, Twitter usernames, hacked accounts of Domino’s Pizza, Steam, PlayStation Network, and other online accounts was hacked by a hacker group and its data was published in another hacker forum.

• Security Announcement: Disabling SMT by default on affected Intel processors

  This is an important announcement with an upcoming change in the next Core Update of IPFire. Because of the recent vulnerabilities in Intel processors, the IPFire team has decided, that - to keep systems as secure as possible - Simultaneous Multi-Processing (SMT) is automatically disabled if the processor is vulnerable to one of the attacks. SMT is also called Intel(R) Hyper-Threading Technology and simulates more virtual cores than the system has. This allows to perform faster processing when applications benefit from it. Unfortunately with networking, we benefit from that. Therefore the effect of disabling SMT will be a very signifiant performance impact of around 30% or more. Applications that will be affected in IPFire are the firewall throughput itself as well as other CPU and memory-bound tasks like the web proxy and the Intrusion Prevention System. On systems that are not vulnerable for this attack, SMT is being left enabled. If you still want to disable it, please do so in the BIOS of your firewall.

Android Leftovers

• Huawei Mate 20 Pro quietly removed from Google’s Android Q Beta page

• What a permanent split between Huawei and Android could mean for SA users

• Huawei’s Android ban could benefit alternative OS like Sailfish: Jolla CEO

• Android Q features you'll love: Games will be better on weaker hardware

• Possible new Galaxy Xcover 5 spotted on Wi-Fi Alliance with Android Pie

• OnePlus 3/3T get stable Android Pie with OxygenOS 9.0.2

• Best/ top data transfer apps from iPhone to Android

• 10 really good hidden gem apps for Android!

• How to wipe your Android phone before selling or trading it in

• How to Remap the Buttons on Your Android Device to Do Nearly Anything You Want

• Android at I/O 2019: The Project Mainline update system and other highlights

• The Dish AirTV Mini is an upcoming 4K Android TV streaming stick

• Android and iOS devices impacted by new sensor calibration attack