Linux Weekly Roundup: Kernel 5.10.10, Plasma 5.21 Beta and More

Here's this week's (ending Jan 24, 2021) roundup series, curated for you from the Linux and the open-source world on application updates, new releases, distribution updates, major news, and upcoming highlights. Have a look.

More Videos/Audiocasts/Shows: Linux Action News, GNU World Order, Open Source Security and More

• Linux Action News 173

  Why we don't think Red Hat's expanded developer program is enough, our reaction to Ubuntu sticking with an older Gnome release, and a tiny delightful surprise.

• GNU World Order 390

  **vbetool** , **Vim** , plus **vorbis-tools** , including **ogg123** , **oggdec** and **oggenc** , **ogginfo** , **vcut** , and **vorbiscomment**.

• Episode 255 – What if security wasn’t joyless? – Open Source Security

  Josh and Kurt talk about what we can stop doing. We take a position of asking “does it spark joy” for tools and infrastructure. Everyone is doing something they should stop.

• Attention Arch Users! Replace 'Yay' With 'Paru'. - YouTube

  Are you an Arch Linux user? Do you install packages from the AUR? Do you use the Yay AUR helper? If so, know this--yay isn't really maintained anymore. Instead, it is recommended that you install paru as a replacement for yay.

Review: Mabox Linux 20.10

For me, running Mabox was a curious experience. The reason being that the distribution never seemed to do anything objectively wrong or buggy. Everything worked properly, the system was fast, stable, and often offered multiple approaches to accomplishing tasks. Mabox inherits Arch Linux's large repositories of software and the cutting-edge packages which make its grandparent famous. The lightweight Openbox window manager is flexible and fast. Plus I like that Mabox doesn't ship a lot of applications, just some good basics, and gives us multiple tools to add more items we might want. However, Mabox never felt like a good fit for me. It's hard to put my finger on why exactly this was because the distribution, objectively, does a lot of things well. However, the style of the distribution isn't at all to my taste. The Openbox session is very busy and I like quiet interfaces. Mabox is a cutting-edge rolling release and I like static and boring. Mabox has a tonne of status panels, shortcuts, and an elegant welcome screen. I want my operating system to stay out of the way and not distract me. Mabox has many configuration tools and they all seem to work, but the number of them (and the lack of a central organization for them) can make it harder to find the options I want to adjust. I guess what made the experience feel odd is Mabox uses a really minimal window manager, but with all the bells and whistles enabled. It ships with very few desktop applications, yet the menu is crowded with options. The system looks really sleek and modern, but a lot of options require we tweak text-based configuration files by hand. It makes for an odd series of juxtapositions. Objectively, I think Mabox is quite good. The only real bug I ran into was Firefox and the desktop panel using the same shortcut, but otherwise the system was fast, smooth, and capable. It just has an unusual approach to several aspects of it. Which makes me feel the distribution is objectively good, but subjectively not to my taste.

Linux 5.11-rc5

So this rc looked fairly calm and small, all the way up until today.

In fact, over 40% of the non-merge commits came in today, as people
unloaded their work for the week on me. The end result is a slightly
larger than usual rc5 (but both 5.10 and 5.8 were bigger, so not some
kind of odd outlier).

Nothing particularly stands out. We had a couple of splice()
regressions that came in during the previous release as part of the
"get rid of set_fs()" development, but they were for odd cases that
most people would never notice. I think it's just that 5.10 is now
getting more widely deployed so people see the fallout from that
rather fundamental change in the last release.  And the only reason I
even reacted to those is just because I ended up being involved with
some of the tty patches during the early calm period of the past week.
There's a few more still pending.

But the bulk of it all is all the usual miscellaneous fixes all over
the place, and a lot of it is truly trivial one- or few-liners. Just
under half the patch is for drivers, with the rest being the usual mix
of tooling, arch updates, filesystem and core (mm, scheduling,
networking).

Nothing here makes me go "Uhhuh" in other words.

            Linus