• Fresh Snaps from August 2018

  Another month passes and we’ve got a collection of applications which crossed our “desk” (Twitter feed) during August 2018. We have a mix of social tools, music creation and curation software, password storage systems, developer tools and some fun too. Take a look down the list, and discover something new today.

• Financial services: escaping the burning platform

  The financial services industry is standing on a burning platform, it’s time to jump to safety or suffer the consequences.

  The platform in this picture is the legacy infrastructure that dominates their IT organisations. From ageing servers and a dwindling workforce that’s even capable of running these monoliths, the pressure to change, for many, would have already forced a leap to safety.

  Unfortunately for banks, that’s not the only pressure they are under. Challengers have emerged where there were none before and changes in regulation are forcing a dramatic rethink of how infrastructure can be approached and what technologies are available for them to use. Compounded by a growing demand from customers for services that are modern, always-on, safe, and simple to use, and you’ve got a perfect storm that FS is having to navigate.

• Leading the Vanilla design system

  We currently have 47 websites from marketing to cloud applications under our suite of products here at Canonical, the Vanilla squad are working through migrating these sites to our latest release.

  We’ve completed 60% of the migration and are making good headway. Once complete, our codebase will be unified across our sites making it easier for our front-end developers to jump between projects. And from a design perspective we will have a consistent look and feel.

• Lubuntu Switching To VLC, KDE 5 LibreOffice Frontend

  Lots of changes are happening in the Lubuntu camp.

  It's been busy in the Lubuntu space recently, the Ubuntu derivative that's historically shipped with the LXDE desktop environment. Most notably, Lubuntu 18.10 switching to LXQt by default over LXDE, while the LXQt spin has been experimental up to this point.

  Lubuntu is also planning to switch to Wayland and as part of that to port Openbox to run on the Mir-Wayland code. But this work isn't happening overnight but rather is a goal to have done by Lubuntu 20.10 in 2020.

The home for innovators, Ubuntu is a place where developers can create what previously lived solely in the realms of fiction. The internet of things, the cloud, and robots are world changing technologies and they’re all running Ubuntu.

With an estimated worldwide spending figure of $103bn by 2020, according to IDC, the field of robotics is one of those transformative industries that is really gaining traction, and it’s not just the manufacturing industry that’s using them, robots are everywhere.

From collecting tennis balls, to social robots, agriculture and retail. Robots are making our lives easier and it turns out that a large amount of them are an Ubuntu robot.

Don’t just take my word for it though, below is a list of of just some of the cool and brilliant ways Ubuntu is being used in the field of robotics.

Also: Key considerations when choosing a robot’s operating system

Thursday, 13 September 2018. Today KDE launches the beta release of Plasma 5.14.

Plasma is KDE's lightweight and full featured Linux desktop. For the last three months we have been adding features and fixing bugs and now invite you to test the beta pre-release of Plasma 5.14.

A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.

Also: KDE Plasma 5.14 Desktop Environment Enters Beta with New Features, Improvements

• Khronos Talks Up The New Vulkan Memory Model

  Released this past weekend was Vulkan 1.1.84 and one of the newly introduced extensions was
  VK_KHR_vulkan_memory_model.

  This extension for the Vulkan Memory Model deals with memory synchronization and other traits when dealing with memory accesses by shaders in GLSL or SPIR-V.

• NVIDIA Rolls Out Tesla T4 GPUs, DRIVE AGX Xavier & Clara Platform

  NVIDIA used their GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Japan that's happening this week to announce a slew of new offerings and technology advancements.

• RADV Finally Picking Up Support For Conservative Rasterization

  The RADV Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver is picking up support for another extension.

  Back in January with the Vulkan 1.0.67 release one of the new extensions introduced was VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization. The Vulkan conservative rasterization mode allows for over-estimation or under-estimation in limiting the rasterization process and providing more certainty over the expected rendering behavior.

• OpenBenchmarking.org Crosses Its 34 Millionth Test/Suite Download

Sam Spilsbury who was the former Compiz lead developer at Canonical and involved in the Unity desktop shell development is creating a new library spun out of Compiz.

Since leaving Canonical six years, he's spent a good portion of that time since working for Endless Computer on their GNOME Shell driven Linux desktop environment. Initially he wrote a "libwobbly" library at Endless for implementing support for "wobbly windows" and other animation logic spun out of the former Compiz code.

Original: libanimation for everyone

• Life is Strange: Before the Storm is now officially available on Linux

  Life is Strange: Before the Storm, the three-part prequel to the original Life is Strange ported to Linux by Feral Interactive is now available. After very much enjoying the first game, I can't wait to dive into this!

  While the original was made by DONTNOD Entertainment, this time around it was developed by Deck Nine and published by Square Enix.

• Life is Strange: Before the Storm Is Out Now for Linux and macOS

  UK-based video games publisher Feral Interactive announced today the availability of the Life is Strange: Before the Storm adventure video game for the Linux and macOS platforms.

  Developed by Deck Nine and published by Square Enix, Life is Strange: Before the Storm was launched on August 31, 2017, as the second installment in the BAFTA award-winning franchise. The all-new three-part standalone story features new and beautiful artwork set three years before the events of the first Life is Strange game.

• Life Is Strange: Before The Storm Is Now Out For Linux

  Feral Interactive released today Life is Strange: Before the Storm for Linux and macOS.

  Life is Strange: Before the Storm is the latest in this episodic game series from Deck Nine and ported to macOS and Linux by Feral Interactive. Before the Storm was released for Windows in late 2017.

• Firefox Focus with GeckoView

  Firefox Focus is private browsing as an app: It automatically blocks ads and trackers, so you can surf the web in peace. When you’re done, a single tap completely erases your history, cookies, and other local data.

• WebRender newsletter #22

  The closer we get to shipping WebRender, the harder it is for me to take the time to go through commit logs and write the newsletter. But this time is special.

  Yesterday we enabled WebRender by default on Firefox Nightly for a subset of the users: Desktop Nvidia GPUs on Windows 10. This represents 17% of the nightly population. We chose to first target this very specific configuration in order to avoid getting flooded with driver bugs, and we’ll gradually add more as things stabilize.

• Mozilla Future Releases Blog: DNS over HTTPS (DoH) – Testing on Beta

  DNS is a critical part of the Internet, but unfortunately has bad security and privacy properties, as described in this excellent explainer by Lin Clark. In June, Mozilla started experimenting with DNS over HTTPS, a new protocol which uses encryption to protect DNS requests and responses. As we reported at the end of August, our experiments in the Nightly channel look very good: the slowest users show a huge improvement, anywhere up to hundreds of milliseconds, and most users see only a small performance slowdown of around 6 milliseconds, which is acceptable given the improved security.

• Google Code-in 2018 and Wikimedia: Mentors and smaller tasks wanted!

  Google Code-in will take place again soon (from October 23 to December 13). GCI is an annual contest for 13-17 year old students to start contributing to free and open projects. It is not only about coding: We also need tasks about design, documentation, outreach/research, and quality assurance. And you can mentor them!

• Give Your Ubuntu a Fresh Look Using Canta Theme and Icons

  We have seen some cool themes earlier, like Paper, Arc themes which comes with Dark and light version. However none of them having the Green as base color.

  Canta theme is a Green color based GTK theme which is available for GTK 2 and GTK 3 based desktop environments. You can install in in latest Ubuntu GNOME Shell along with all distributions which supports GTK 2 and 3.

  This theme comes with 11 variants classifying in base, light, dark, round, square and compact version for each.

• Windows 10 Tries to Push Firefox and Chrome Over the Edge

  Windows 10 now “warns” you not to install Chrome or Firefox when you download them. It’s just one of the many annoying ways Microsoft pushes Edge, which only has 4% market share despite Microsoft’s increasing desperation.

  Microsoft will probably start using this “app recommendations” feature to push other apps in the future, too. Imagine Windows warning you not to install LibreOffice because you could pay for Office 365 instead.

• Microsoft: You don't want to use Edge? Are you sure? Really sure?

  Microsoft really wants you to use Edge in the latest Windows Insider builds, and the software giant is not afraid to let you know it.

  Windows Insider Sean Hoffman took to Twitter last night to express his displeasure at a pop-up shown by Windows 10 when he attempted to install an alternative browser. When he ran the Firefox installer, a pop-up showed up suggesting perhaps he'd like to stick with Edge. It is safer and faster, after all (according to Microsoft).

  Hoffman, running build 17744.1004, the current slow ring version of the next release of Windows 10, pulled no punches in his reaction.

• Top 8 YUM ThirdParty Repositories for CentOS and RHEL

• Important Linux Commands for Absolute Beginner Programmers

  Linux is the most popular operating system for programmers. If you are a beginner who wants to get started on Linux then you should learn some basic commands first. These commands can be used on a shell (CLI on Linux) to perform the regular tasks such as creating and deleting files and folders. In this post, we will see some basic commands used in Linux OS.

• Creating Windows templates for virt-builder

• Installing OKD 3.10 on a Single Host

• Run Fedora RISC-V with X11 GUI in your browser [Ed: links to more pages]

• How to collaborate on docs stored on your WebDAV server with ONLYOFFICE

• How to Set Up System Locale on Ubuntu 16.04

• Linux objdump Command Explained for Beginners (7 Examples)

• Android Auto is now available on more than 500 car models and head units

• Android Auto is now supported on over 500 cars and head units

• Watchdog gives chase after customers get no joy from Android Enjoyed

• Android owner? Samsung and Google want to make messaging much more fun

• Apple vs Android: The best Android alternatives for those unimpressed by the iPhone XS

KDE Plasma 5.13.5 arrived a week ago, on September 4, 2018, as the last point release for the short-lived KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment series, which won't receive further updates or security fixes. It brought a total of 35 changes across various core components and apps.

"Plasma 5.13 was released in June with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience. This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important," reads the announcement.

Coming more than a month after the launch of the major LibreOffice 6.1 series, which introduced a revamped and much faster image handling feature, a new Page menu and reorganized Draw menus, a new icon theme for Windows users, new Online Help pages, and a much-improved LibreOffice Online, LibreOffice 6.1.1 adds more than 120 bug and regression fixes.

"LibreOffice 6.1.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users," said The Document Foundation. "For any enterprise class deployment, TDF maintains the more mature LibreOffice 6.0.6, which should be sourced from a company providing a Long Term Supported version of the suite."

Many of the programs I've covered in the past have have been desktop-environment-agnostic—all they required was some sort of graphical display running. This article looks at one of the programs available in the KDE desktop environment, KAlgebra.

You can use your distribution's package management system to install it, or you can use Discover, KDE's package manager. After it's installed, you can start it from the command line or the launch menu.

When you first start KAlgebra, you get a blank slate to start doing calculations.

• California Eyes Questionable Legislation In Bid To Fix The Internet Of Broken Things

  If you hadn't noticed, the much-hyped internet of things is comically broken. WiFi connected Barbies that spy on your kids, refrigerators that cough up your Gmail credentials, and "smart" televisions that watch you as often as you watch them are all now the norm. And while this has all been the focus of a lot of humor (like the Internet of shit Twitter feed), security experts have been warning for a while about how introducing millions of security flaws into millions of homes and businesses is, sooner or later, going to come back and bite us all on the ass.

  As security analysts like Bruce Schneier have pointed out, few people in this dance of dysfunction really care, so things tend to not improve. Customers often aren't even aware (or don't care) that their device has been compromised and hijacked into a DDOS attacking botnet, and hardware vendors tend to prioritize sales of new devices over securing new (and especially older) gear.

  Efforts to regulate the problem away are the option for many. That's what California lawmakers are considering with the recent passage of SB-327, which was introduced in February of last year, passed the California Senate on August 29, and now awaits signing from California Governor Jerry Brown. If signed into law, it would take effect in early 2020, and mandates that "a manufacturer of a connected device shall equip the device with a reasonable security feature or features," while also taking aim at things like default login credentials by requiring devices auto-prompt users to change their usernames and passwords.

• Labor unwilling to commit either way on encryption bill

  The Australian Labor Party appears to be hesitant about ruling out support for the government's Assistance and Access Bill, a draft of which was put up for comment on 14 August.

• Russian man pleads guilty, admits he ran notorious Kelihos botnet

  The 38-year-old Russian’s botnet, which dated back to 2010, spanned more than 10,000 machines, and was primarily used to send out spam, steal logins, distribute ransomware, and more. Federal authorities shut it down in 2017.

• 2-bit punks' weak 40-bit crypto didn't help Tesla keyless fobs one bit

Open-source software use in business has come a long way since the first LinuxWorld Conference & Expo was held in San Jose, California, in March 1999. Linux had been around as an operating system since its invention in 1991 by Finnish-American developer Linus Torvalds, but its use in business computing was just beginning to germinate by the early 2000s.

Fast-forward to 2018. Open-source software powers the internet, much of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure, thousands of companies around the globe and a wide range of technologies, including software used in motor vehicles, consumer devices, in-home systems and more. Channel partners are increasingly involved in open source today, selling services, offering advice and helping clients use open source effectively.

And despite that phenomenal growth, millions of developers continue to devote countless hours to projects. By the end of 2017, more than 24 million developers in more than 200 countries had contributed to some 67 million GitHub project repositories. Many more projects are also used by more developers on code repositories offered by GitLab, Bitbucket, SourceForge and others.

For almost every customer software need, there is likely an open-source project working on the problem.

With all of this activity around the world, some open-source trends could become even more important to partners in the future.

• Red Hat Partners IBM, Hortonworks for Hybrid Architecture

  The initiative is aimed at managing big data workloads across multi-cloud, edge architectures and hybrid on-premises to help customers take care of their data and access analytical and decision-making applications.

• IBM Cloud Private for Data preps Red Hat OpenShift certification, queryplex search tool

  IBM said its IBM Cloud Private for Data (ICP) is working to certify on Red Hat OpenShift, the container application platform and launching an edition of the service for developers as well a new search tool code named Queryplex.

  Big Blue released Cloud Private for Data in May to provide a private cloud architecture for companies who have policies that rule out public clouds. In a nutshell, IBM Cloud Private for Data is akin to a data warehouse in a box, but with support for data science and engineering.

• This Is What You Should Expect From Red Hat Stock for Q2

  The Red Hat earnings report, which is expected to be released on Sept. 19, 2018, might help RHT stock move higher if these key numbers are better than expectations. On the other hand, if they miss, RHT stock may move lower.

• Azimuth Capital Management LLC Sells 3,240 Shares of Red Hat Inc (RHT)

• Trend Review: Investors Keen on Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) as it Makes Headlines With Moves

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) Shares Bought by Mutual of America Capital Management LLC

• Forsaken Remastered adds Vulkan support to the Linux version

  For those who love testing out games with Vulkan, do take a look at Forsaken Remastered which was updated last night for Linux to add in Vulkan support. To enable it, simply load the game and go into the video options where it will now let you pick your graphics API.

• Build the aquarium you always wanted in Megaquarium, out now for Linux

  Megaquarium is like theme park for those who love fish and it's now officially available with same-day Linux support. Developed by Twice Circled, who were responsible for the rather good Big Pharma which also has a Linux version. Note: Key provided by the developer.

  As someone who is fascinated by ocean life, I often visit our local aquarium to learn a little and take it all in. This is probably why Megaquarium speaks to me on a level other such tycoon builders don't.

• Nimbatus - The Space Drone Constructor has come a long way since the Kickstarter, Early Access soon

  Nimbatus - The Space Drone Constructor, as the name might suggest, has you building drones, which you can directly control or give them some autonomous features. The closed alpha is extremely promising and a lot of fun to play with.

• Puzzle game BFF or Die is out with Linux support, interesting in both singleplayer and local co-op

  BFF or Die is an interesting puzzle game from ASA Studio that I was testing before release (key provided by the developer), one that offers a decent experience if you're alone or if you have friends around for some local co-op.

  [...]

  The design is pretty good, while the early levels are naturally as easy as breathing, the later levels certainly get a lot more interesting when many more gameplay elements start coming together. Especially tricky when you think you've mapped out the level in your brain and new enemies appear to throw a spanner in the works, even more so in single-player when you're controlling a light to see what's around independently of your movement.

• Unity 2018.3 Beta Promotes Vulkan Editor No Longer Experimental, Various Linux Fixes

  The first public beta of the Unity 2018.3 game engine is now available for testing and evaluation.

  Unity 2018.3 beta is shipping today with various workflow improvements, improvements to the Shader Graph, drops their legacy particle system, and other changes. From their overview there isn't all that much to get excited about by Linux gamers...

• Wine Announcement

  The Wine maintenance release 3.0.3 is now available.

• Wine 3.0.3 Ships With 50+ Bug Fixes

  If you are a user of the Wine stable releases rather than the bi-weekly Wine development releases or Wine-Staging (or now Proton too), Wine 3.0.3 is out today as the latest version.

• Wine's VKD3D Lands An Initial Vulkan Pipeline Cache

  The Wine project's Direct3D 12 to Vulkan API translation layer has implemented a basic Vulkan pipeline cache that may help with performance.

  Józef Kucia of CodeWeavers who has been leading much of the VKD3D development landed this initial pipeline cache. Earlier today he posted the initial patch series on the Wine mailing list and already has merged the patches laying out this inline caching implementation.

• Now We Have Patents on Rooms. Yes, Rooms!
• EPO Granted a Controversial European Patent (Under Battistelli) Which May Literally Kill a Lot of People
• Links 13/9/2018: Parrot 4.2.2, Sailfish OS Nurmonjoki, Eelo Beta