10 Things to do After Installing Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo

Ubuntu 21.04 is released a while back, and I am sure you are enjoying your time with Hippo! So, here's a list of 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 21.04.

T2 21.4 "Fully Automated"

Today the T2 Project released version 21.4, with the largest amount of pre- and cross-compiled set of architectures so far! A total of 15 architectures: x86-64, x86, arm64, arm, riscv64, riscv, ppc64le, ppc64-32, ppc sparc64, mips64, mipsel, hppa, m68k, alpha and ia64! As usually most packages are up-to-date, with 1294 change-sets, 1179 updates, and 120 fixes, including Linux 5.11.16, GCC 10.3, LLVM/Clang 12, as well as the latest version of Rust, X.org, Mesa, KDE and GNOME 40! Also: T2 SDE 21.4 Released With This Linux Distribution Supporting 15 CPU Architectures

Getting Fractal up to speed

Fractal is a popular Matrix chat client for the GNOME desktop which has been in development since 2017. Fractal was designed to work well for collaboration in large groups, such as free software projects. However, there are still two main areas where it would benefit from improvements: its performance and maintainability are limited, and it lacks some important features such as end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Adding E2EE will increase the confidence that users have in the privacy of their conversations, making it nearly impossible for their conversations to be accessed by others. Because E2EE aims to prevent the service provider from being able to decrypt the messages, because the encryption keys are stored only on the end-user’s device. The direct consequence of this is that some work is delegated to the client. Some of this functionality is the same for each and every Matrix client, and includes technical components that could easily be implemented in the wrong way (especially the various encryption and security features). Most security researchers agree that redoing this work is a bad idea as it can lead to vulnerabilities. More generally, reimplementing the same functionality for each client doesn’t make much sense. On the other hand, sharing it with others allows projects that use it to contribute their expertise and polish it together instead of competing on a multitude of implementations. That shared work is called an SDK and could be considered the future “engine” of Fractal. When Fractal was created, there was no existing code that we could rely on. We had to implement ourselves bits of the Matrix protocol in Fractal, at a low level. In the meantime, the Matrix Foundation has kickstarted matrix-rust-sdk, a library to channel the Matrix community efforts into a common, efficient library. This library, still in development for now, will allow us to drop a lot of our own code.