I woke up early this morning, and those of you live above 45 parallel north or so are used to the “I'm wide awake but it's still dark as night” feeling in the winter. I usually don't turn on the lights, wander into my office, and just bring my computer out of hibernate; that takes a bit as my 100% Free-Software-only computer is old and slow, so I usually go to make coffee while that happens.

As I came back in my office this morning I was a bit struck by both displays with the huge Debian screen lock image, and it got me thinking of how Debian has been my companion for so many years. I spoke about this at DebConf 15 a bit, and wrote about a similar concept years before. I realize that it's been almost nine years that I've been thinking rather deeply about my personal relationship with Debian and why it matters.

• Montreal Bug Squashing Party - Jan 19th & 20th 2019

  We are organising a BSP in Montréal in January! Unlike the one we organised for the Stretch release, this one will be over a whole weekend so hopefully folks from other provinces in Canada and from the USA can come.

• Debian Cloud Sprint 2018

  Recently we have made progress supporting cloud usage cases; grub and kernel optimised for cloud images help with reducing boot time and required memory footprint. There is also growing interest in non-x86 images, and FAI can now build such images.

  Discussion of support for LTS images, which started at the sprint, has now moved to the debian-cloud mailing list). We also discussed providing many image variants, which requires a more advanced and automated workflow, especially regarding testing. Further discussion touched upon providing newer kernels and software like cloud-init from backports. As interest in using secure boot is increasing, we might cooperate with other team and use work on UEFI to provide images signed boot loader and kernel.

• Third Point Release of Univention Corporate Server 4.3-3

  With UCS 4.3-3 the third point release for Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.3 is now available, which includes a number of important updates and various new features.

• Canonical Launches MicroK8s

  Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, has announced MicroK8s, a snap package of Kubernetes that supports more than 42 flavors of Linux.

  MicroK8s further simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes with its small disk and memory footprint. Users can deploy Kubernetes in a few seconds. It can run on the desktop, the server, an edge cloud, or an IoT device.

  Snap is a self-contained app package solution created by Canonical that competes with Flatpak, which is backed by Red Hat and Fedora. Snap offers macOS and Windows-like packages with all dependencies bundled with it. A snap package of Kubernetes means any Linux distribution that supports Snap can benefit from MicroK8s

• Compiz: Ubuntu Desktop's little known best friend

Deepin 15.8, released last month, is loaded with more efficient layout tweaks that give the distribution greater functionality and maturity.

Deepin, based in China, shed its Ubuntu base when with the 2015 release of version 15, which favored Debian Linux. That brought numerous subtle changes in the code base and software roots. Ubuntu Linux itself is based on Debian.

The chief distinguishing factor that accounts for Deepin's growing popularity is its homegrown Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE). One of the more modern desktop environments, it is one of the first Linux distros to take advantage of HTML 5 technology.

Coinciding with the base affiliation change, the developers, Deepin Technology, slightly changed the distro's name. What was "Deepin Linux" is now "deepin." That subtle rebranding is an attempt to differentiate previous releases named "Deepin," "Linux Deepin" and "Hiweed GNU/Linux."

Regardless of whether the name is rendered as "deepin" or "Deepin Linux," this distro offers users an eloquent, modern-themed Linux OS. It is easy to use and comes with high-quality software developed in-house.

• Chris Lamb: Free software activities in November 2018

• Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2018

• Socorro: November 2018 happenings

  Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro. Socorro saves the crash report, processes it, and provides an interface for aggregating, searching, and looking at crash reports.