Fedora with KDE by default? XZ backdoor fallout, German state moves to Linux

hey everyone this is Nick and welcome back to your Linux and open source news video this week we've got a pretty weird proposal that has virtually no chance to happen but that would turn Fedora into a KD first distribution starting with Fedora 42 we have a German federal state moving their entire computer Fleet to Linux and lib office which is awesome and we have more repercussions of the pretty nasty XY back door that was found last week and and we also have our usual sponsor tuxedo computers if you're looking for a new pc and you want to run Linux on it stop looking at devices that come with Windows pre-installed and try to install Linux on it only to find out that some Hardware doesn't work buy from a manufacturer that actually supports Linux tuxedo does just that they have a wide range of devices that will cover every price point and every need whether you're looking for a small laptop for office work all the way up to a giant work St or gaming tower or gaming laptop they have it all all the devices are very customizable especially the laptops you can have your own custom keyboard layout you can have your own logo engraved on the lid and you can also open repair and upgrade all these laptops I only use tuxedo computers these days this whole channel is run on one of their laptops and all my gaming needs are served from one of their tuxedo cubes which is a relatively small form factor PC so if you need a new computer and you want to support a company that actually supports Linux click the link in the description and get yourself a PC from tuxedo okay so this week there was a proposal for Fedora 42 to move to KD plasma instead of gnow this is apparently not an April's Fool's joke even though it might look like one and it was submitted on April 1st it was actually proposed by Joshua strobo the lead for the budgie desktop and the justification is that plasma provides a more flexible experience for users that it is now stable enough that it supports more standards than gnome and has better whan support as a whole they also argue that KD has pushed for a lot more advancements to the Linux desktop than gnome recently with a lot of protocols being driven by KD people another argument is that plasma is used on the steam deck on the desktop mode or on Pine 64 products and on distros from Linux manufacturers like the aforementioned tuxedo meaning plasma could now be more familiar to a lot of users they thus propose to have the default spin of Fedora the official Edition use KD and to move the gnome version to a separate spin Joshua says that while he's the lead for an entirely different desktop namely budgie he thinks that having plasma as the default would make Fedora more appealing to people and seeing as Fedora is a very popular drro it would also make Linux as a whole more popular by providing a more featureful experience to more users now I will freely admit I do not think this proposal has a chance to be adopted at all as Fedora and red hat have close working relationships with gnome and they've invested a lot in that desktop now Fedora contributors pointed out that Fedora is independent on these things and they could do it but it also looks like the discussion topic has been closed as the change process used by Joshua is the purview of fedora's steering committee and this conversation around changing the default Edition should be handled by the Fedora workstation work group instead and also the conversation predictably devolved into Gom is better or KD is better and just was completely unproductive now in the discussion thread a credible alternative would be to promote the KD spin to a full workstation Edition so it could enjoy more promotion there is a process to try and do that but it apparently doesn't have a good shot of happening either according to a fedora council member Matthew Miller although he said that if every other Avenue just rejected that proposal to make the kd spin an official Edition the Fedora Council would take a really good look at it to try and see if it could be done I don't think this will happen but it would be cool to have like two additions one with gnome one with KDE it would put both desktops on par with each other for Fedora users now the repercussions of the back door in the very popular XZ Library continue as it pushed canonical to delay the beta of auntu 22404 LTS that was planned for this week on April the 4th it will now be released in a few days on the 11th as a bunto devs are trying to review and rebuild all the packages that could have been affected and that were built using XZ as a dependency all these rebuilds are in brand new environments to make sure that everything is above board and this is something other disos are doing as well like open sua Tumbleweed which was also affected by the back door or Debian 12 point six which also postponed that next release to fix the problem now technically the final stable release of 24.4 LTS should not be affected it is still planned for April 25 there will just be one less week for beta testing the dist and still on that back door problem systemd detractors will maybe start wanting more vulnerabilities out there as with the XY issue systemd decided to take a look at how they could reduce their dependencies at least those dependency used to build lip system D which is the heart of the init system the goal is to reduce the surface of attack for the very prevalent system D and thus to remove all external dependencies and limit themselves to lib C it is just a proposal for now but it seems to gain some traction and it would require a good reorganization of the library's code splitting it into multiple libraries for each API that systemd provides some of these changes were already implemented a while back with lib system D no longer mandating the use of a compression Library like XZ for example and honestly even apart from security reasons having the main systemd library lip systemd be split into multiple parts for every system or component would be much better because it would mean people could adopt certain systemd apis and functions without grabbing everything that they do not want so it would be a more modular buil and I think it would solve a lot of what people just have against systemd now as everyone is scrambling to fix those issues there's still good news to avoid this back door repeating again in the future biner was created to deal with this it is a scanner that will detect this specific back door in any file that might implement it so if the malicious contributor who added that to XZ did it somewhere else or if someone used the same technique in another project we should know pretty soon the scanner can detect that back door even with code changes to it or recompilation of libraries and packages and you can either just drop a file onto their website to analyze it or you can use their freely accessible API to scan files in bulk meaning that at least with this exact back door we should be safe for now of course this will not fix the root of the problem which is if malicious actors start embedding themselves into projects two or three years in advance by submitting good code normal code without back doors and once they gain the trust then they start submitting the back doors and the exploits it's going to be a problem because you're always going to look very hardly at a first commit from someone you have never heard about but someone who's been contributing normal solid code for 2 years you're probably not going to check for exploits or security problems and we're going to have to start doing that one of Germany's federal states schic Holstein decided to move from Windows and mic moft office to Linux and lib office this move will transition 30,000 computers to open-source software which is really nice this is obviously part of the recent European moves for more digital sovereignty having better control over the data that is being collected and where it is transferred but also simply to keep control of the software they use and to not be beholden to any company or country where this company operates the transition will also move them to things like next Cloud to Thunderbird and open exchange it will replace Microsoft active directory and a few other things we don't know which distro they will pick or if they will make their own and they also thought about training apparently to make sure employees will be able to understand and master this new software environment and not lose too much productivity during the transition period now this move to Linux is mandatory for every computer affected but they're willing to take their time and gr possible delays and exceptions to avoid certain important systems breaking and it is a great move congratulation to the federal state in question now it's not the first time that a German city or state has tried that move and usually they move back to Windows after a few years but usually it's also because they just didn't plan that transition very well they didn't include training they just didn't Grant any exception so they just realize after a few years that some stuff doesn't work at all if they take that time if they do it right I think it's a great thing to do and I do think that public funds should never be used to buy or rent software that is proprietary and only benefits one company the same funds should be used to advance open- Source software and share that knowledge freely it's your money it should be used for everyone not just for one company now we have news of Linux mins 22 the future release of the popular Dro and it looks like they're going to be making some interesting changes first the dro will move to pipe wire as its main sound server because this thing is now pretty solid compared to the Alternatives the new version will also undo aun's recent change to distribute Thunderbird as a snap and they will provide their own Deb package instead just like what they do with Firefox mint 22 will also bring two new applications one being dragonaut a new IRC client that isn't really an IRC client but more of a support tool to let users ask their questions about mint on IRC with a more userfriendly interface the other app is gnome online accounts gtk a fork of gnome onlines account that can be used by mint's own applications now that's not all though as mins 22 will start changing how they distribute kernel updates they will now automatically distribute all Hardware enablement updates to the kernel version that they ship instead of offering that as a manual update meaning every mint user will use the same kernel more or less and the dis R will remain installable on recent Hardware without the need for an edge ISO like what they started providing early this year of course if you prefer using the LTS kernel without all the extra Hardware support you will be able to do so basically it is a continuation of M's trajectory they are undoing every change that auntu makes that they don't like especially stuff related to snaps which begs the question why aren't they really moving to Linux Min Debian Edition as the default because it seems like it would be less work and they're also undoing any change from The Gnome tools that they still use to keep using them without having to Embark stuff like liit V or versions of gtk4 that they do not like now AMD is apparently going to do even more work on open source and they're going to open their stuff to the community they teased early this week that they would open source more portions of their software stack and it has now been revealed that it's the documentation and source code for their micro engine scheduler it's a microcontroller that has been added to AMD gpus a while back to control scheduling of processes and tasks on the GPU probably the equivalent of the GSP on Nvidia gpus this thing has proprietary firmware for now but AMD will release documentation for it at the end of May and the source code after that this is a great move it will make testing and debugging and improving AMD drivers on Linux a lot easier now apparently according to fonics there are other parts of AMD gpus that aren't open source yet and won't be covered by that new documentation and code but it is still a nice step forward and you have to give it to AMD for their continued support of Open Source and Linux they're really doing a good job here they're one of the best manufacturers when it comes to that not everything is open sourced yet but we're getting close we have some news from Thunderbird as well this week as they make progress on the addition of exchange support natively in the email client they have now implemented exchange Auto Discovery and oo compatibility in the account setup meaning the app should be able to autod detect your Exchange Server based on your email address and to open a web browser window for you to log in and pass that login back to Thunderbird all folders can now also be fetched and displayed in the app as well these features will be added as an optin in the next Beta release so people who want to start testing testing them can and people who aren't interested will not be polluted by a non-complete feature for nonexchange users there was also work on better handling mailing list subscriptions plus a transition to JavaScript modules to improve the state of the codebase the other areas of focus for the month are finishing the revamp of the cards view user interface for email improving the quick filters bar improving the API for add-ons and more and the Thunderbird team will also now take control of their snap package as well canonical had been maintaining that package themselves for all of its existence and since it will now be the default format used for Thunderbird in 24.4 instead of using a dep package the Thunderbird team decided they'd better make sure that thing was up to the task so they will now officially support both flatback and snap and the snap package has been added to their built infrastructure to make sure everything is always nice and up to date whenever a new version is pushed to the under bird snap GitHub repo the existing Launchpad mirror that open to setup when they started doing the snap package that mirror will grab the update and automatically build the snap and if that build is successful the new updated snap will be published to its relevant snap Channel all the bugs will have to be reported in the main bugzilla instance of the Thunderbird project not on the Thunderbird snap GitHub repo and well why not aun 22404 will force this snap package on to their users instead of the de so you might as well make sure that what they distribute is good enough now judging from the recent Community survey that I did at least in the portion of the audience that watches my content Snaps are just not a popular format like 72% of people use flat packs 84% of people do not use snaps so yeah it's not a very viable format for a lot of people but still auntu is not backing down they're pushing it and so if a lot of potential abun to users are going to be confronted with this package you might as well make sure it's as good as can be because if it's not people will assume it's Thunderbird being bad they won't assume it's a to package that is pretty trashy so they have to fix that and this will conclude this episode I hope you enjoyed listening to it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't there's always that dislike button and the comment section as well and if you really enjoy the channel I left plenty of links in the description to support it including the ones for patreon memberships and YouTube memberships if you join at any tier you will get a daily version of this show in audio format from Monday to Friday you get 5 to 10 minutes of Linux news so you don't have to wait for the end of the week so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one [Music] bye [Music]

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 60,875

Keywords: linux, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2023, opensource, linux tips, distro, linux for beginners 2023, linux vs windows, linux tutorial 2024, fedora kde edition, fedora move to kde, linux news, linux weekly news, linux open source news, linux action news, linux gaming news, xz backdoor linux, thunderbird exchange support, linux news best, tech news linux, tech news, best linux news, open source news

Id: 2fpZbH4BNsI

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024