Arrested for using Linux, Windows 11 loses users, Better FOSS Firmware - Linux & Open Source News

hey everyone this is Nick and welcome to your Weekly News recap of what happened in the Linux and open source world so in this one we have a concerning situation in France where it looks like that just using encryption and privacy respecting tool and Linux can lead you to be arrested we have Windows actually losing users and market share and we have some nice updates to core Boot and firmware courtesy of system 76 so let's dive in right after this refreshing plunge into this Segway to our sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and if you want to build your own website but you don't really know where to start and you don't have the technical skills to do it all yourself then Squarespace is your best option it's basically your all-in-one platform to start your website you can design it with their huge template libraries you can tailor it to your needs thanks to all the customization options the color others the various blocks you can place however you want and you can make it as 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Droid store and all of this was judged suspicious by the dgsi and this seems to be the only known grounds on which these people have been arrested they've been asked over and over what they did that necessitated search protections and encryption and if that was to hide illicit activities the instruction judge even seems to think that this is bad since they use terms like they admitted to using tails and Tor and they categorize these applications and tools as allowing access to illicit websites even though it hasn't been proven in any capacity that these seven people did access illicit websites they also seemed to assume that these people were sort of hackers because they were skilled enough to turn on full disk encryption which as we all know is a one-click operation on any Linux distro install it's hardly a mark of being highly skilled they've also been judged suspicious for trying to teach their family how to use the same tools and protections and the judge and authorities continue to demonstrate a complete lack of technical knowledge mistaking Tor for Tales thinking you need public Wi-Fi to you store or thinking tails is an encryption tool now until the trial goes through we won't know if they actually did anything specific but the prosecution admitted that for now they failed to come up with any sort of specific harmful activity that these people could have done so their only crime right now is having used privacy respecting software which what the hell France now Windows 11 is not very popular the latest data shows it's actually losing users dropping from 22.95 of Windows users to 21.11 almost a full two percent drop as people seem to move back to Windows 10 which still holds almost 72 percent of the windows market share almost two years after Windows 11 was released and Windows 7 and 8 combined amount to 4.7 percent and when your latest and greatest version isn't used by even half of your total users you need to worry especially since Microsoft announced that Windows 10 won't be getting any new features so you would expect people to start moving to the latest version but since Windows 11 is basically spyware as demonstrated in my dedicated video on data collection and since it doesn't respect user preferences for web browsers that updates our wacky he and regularly cause problems that a Microsoft account is being forced down your throat and that the start menu actually regressed it's not super surprising that people are not motivated to move to it and then there's also the very strict Hardware requirements which can be bypassed but that might not last for too long either so yeah people don't want to use Windows 11 apparently and of course a sizable portion of the people still on Windows 10 are probably companies that always take a long while to actually move to a newer version but Windows 11 should not be losing users at best or worst it should be stagnating and this is a very good opportunity for Linux because if people don't want to move to Windows 11 and at some point they won't be able to stay on Windows 10 then maybe they'll move to Linux system 76 announced some interesting changes to their open source firmware that they use on their Linux devices first they re-disabled the Intel management engine which is a microcontroller that runs its own proprietary micro OS to handle some security features since the code of that micro OS isn't open source system 76 chose to disable it after it had to be re-enabled earlier due to a bug in core boot they also added a new firmware setup menu to let you enable or disable secure boot which is needed to install Windows 11 and dual boot on your computer for now it's only for 12th gen Intel CPUs but they will add it to previous gens as well they're also working on pop OS to enable the use of custom secure boot keys and support for tpm2 the firmware also now allows 13th gen Intel CPUs to draw as much as 55 watts of power when it was previously limited to 28 Watts this means powerful CPUs should run drastically better and give you way more performance but it shouldn't affect battery life too much unless your use case is super CPU taxing like gaming or video editing their firmware also now supports Nvidia Dynamic boost to share power between the CPU and an Nvidia GPU providing 25 watts of additional power to the system that needs it the most so you can expect better performance when gaming for example and that's pretty great stuff because with just a software update you get better performance more features improved reliability and of course system 76 tried to Upstream as much of that work as possible into core boot which is nice Debian 12 was released today or will be in a few hours I'm recording this on Saturday morning so maybe they moved it but technically it should release today Debian 12 is the latest stable release of this venerable distro and of course I already made a dedicated video about it to show how in the current Linux landscape it makes perfect sense as a desktop the highlights include an update from gnome 3.38 to gnome 43 from KD 5.20 to 5.27 plus 11 000 new packages the LTS kernel version 6.1 and 67 of all packages in the repos being updated if you prefer cinnamon matte tape lxd lxq or xfce they also have the latest releases available to install now they also added non-free firmware by default it's not officially part of Debian so this row remains completely fast but if the installer detects that you need this firmware for your peripherals to work it will automatically enable the non-free firmware repo and install everything it needs unless you tell it not to now I thought Debian 12 was pretty cool and although it's still a bit too old for my own personal needs I think it's definitely the best choice if you want the most stable and well-tested distro you can get your hands on and with flat pack snaps or app images you can actually get the latest versions of all the apps you need without compromising the stability of the system so check out my dedicated video in the link in the description below if you want to know more about Debian 12. now I talked about vanilla OS recently which is an immutable distro that uses containers to give you access to virtually your hundred percent of all the available software on Linux and in the same space we now have blend OS 3 at least it's beta and boy does it go further in the immutable distro world first all system updates now rely on the installation isos when a new ISO would be available for you to make a fresh install your already installed system will detect it and use that ISO to perform the update instead of applying package updates to the system Itself by downloading packages from a repo or by using two partitions one for the update and one for the current system like what vanilla OS and if that sounds like it would download a lot of useless data know that they also use z-sync to only download what has changed so it should be fine on top of that blend os3 now lets you overlay packages on top of the immutable base but they install them to a specific layer that can be completely dropped all packages installed can be completely removed with just one command line thanks to a new tool called akshara that can also handle drivers apparently blend OS can install packages from a lot of distributions including Arch Alma Linux Crystal Linux Debian Fedora Kali Linux or Ubuntu and more and they even wrote a new tool called assemble that lets you build packages and images of blend OS if you want to build a remix of that distro without having to handle your own repository so blando S3 looks super interesting with a similar approach to vanilla OS but with a very different execution so I'll definitely take a look at it once blender S3 is completely out okay now here is a collection of a few smaller news items so first canonical introduced the ability to Stage the release of a snap update as in you can deploy that update slowly to a small group of users first that you then slowly expand to cover all your users it basically lets you test how well an update works and if after a few days you're not seeing a ton of bug reports you can expand the group of users that have access to that update it's a very interesting feature and pretty important for deploying software to hundreds or thousands of tens of thousands of users and I wish flat Hub started working on that as well now still on Ubuntu 23.10 will add support for quarter screen window tiling on top of the current styling features that they get from gnome they already had planned to add the tiling assistant extension to Ubuntu 223.04 but it just didn't make the cut and now it looks like it's confirmed for 23.10 Ubuntu developers also said that they would like to work with Upstream ground to add this in the desktop environment itself in the future now I personally do not have a use case for quarter tiling it makes windows too small for me to actually be usable but I know a lot of people like that so yeah if they can implement it it won't hurt me but it will help a lot of other people and for Gnome extension developers can now add a donate button to their extensions for now only on the extensions.gnome.org website but I would be surprised if this wasn't added in other apps like extension manager soon the supported options include buy me a coffee Kofi patreon GitHub and PayPal and it's always a nice thing to have a way to reward a developer for something you like especially with gnome extensions which can make or break your workflow and the first beta for the Supernova release of Thunderbird is now out with a bunch of new features design changes and Improvement I don't think everything they announced for the final Supernova release is baked in just yet like the new folder pane in the email view wasn't there for me or not enabled by default at least but it's a good way to start giving a shot to the new UI if you've been following what they've been working on I'll spend a little bit more time with that beta to see where they went what's still left to fix and if I like it and let's finish this with the gaming news there's a new update to proton experimental which is the default version of protons team users for all non-officially supported steam play titles and this new version now finally supports the latest Masterpiece no not Diablo 4 the Lord of the Rings Golem of course now it also fixes issues in Call of Duty 2 Secret of Mana and Ubisoft connect and it also fixes the menus in halo the Master Chief collection and also it's not a hundred percent Linux related but Apple announced at their latest keynote that they were working on a game porting toolkit for developers to bring games to the mac and it looks like it's using wine and vkd3d plus molten VK which translates Vulcan instructions into metal instructions metal being the only graphics API Apple wants to support for some reason now it's apparently not as mature as proton for Linux since it requires per game bug fixes in molten VK and performance will probably be a lot worse since it has to run an x86 binary translated for arm which then sends DirectX instructions that are translated into Vulcan instructions which are then translated into metal instructions and of course with so many translation steps it's bound to have a lot more bugs there are so many more points of failure than with proton on Linux but it's still kind of fun to see that wine which started as a small project 30 years ago to try and run Windows programs on Linux is now actively being used in a very successful commercial product the steam deck but also by Apple a company who traditionally never gave a crap about gaming now what you should give a crap about is the Segway to our sponsor if you were wondering what is the best PC or laptop to run Linux on stop wondering just click the link in the description below and head over to tuxedo's website they make laptops and desktops that run Linux out of the box all the 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Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 36,909

Keywords: linux, open source, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2023, linux tips, linux for beginners 2023, linux vs windows, system76 open firmware, system76 firmware update, debian 12 bookworm, debian 12 review, linux news rss, linux news youtube, linux gaming news, linux kernel news, linux mint news, linux news 2023, linux news today, windows 11 market share, windows 11 sucks, windows 11 is bad for gaming, windows 11 is bad 2023, is windows 11 still bad

Id: cyFL7KJGcC0

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023