We have some very interesting news this week. We've got a brand new release of the LXQt desktop environment. There's a strange but potentially good twist in the ongoing saga of NVIDIA and open source drivers. Red Hat drops some hardware and AlmaLinux catches it. Plus, there's a new Linux tablet trying to get kickstarted. All of this and so much more on This Week in Linux, Your Source for Linux GNews. This episode of TWIL is sponsored by Kolide. More on them later. The LXQt team have announced a brand new release of their lightweight desktop environment with LXQt 2.0. LXQt 2.0 is a major update bringing in a lot of features and changes. And easily the biggest highlight of this release is that LXQt 2.0 is now fully ported to the latest version of the Qt application framework, which is Qt 6, or Qt as some people know it as. This will provide users with more modern UIs, but it doesn't replace the Qt 5 apps because there are still some applications that are shipping as Qt 5, most of which have already been moved over to Qt 6, but there are still some applications out there that do it. So if a distro chooses, they can ship LXQt with support for both Qt 6 and Qt 5 apps to work simultaneously if they want to, which is a cool idea. Also, LXQt 2.0 introduces a new default application menu for the LXQt panel, which is being called the very fancy name of Fancy Menu. This menu offers a much more modern experience, and I'm very happy to see it because LXQt typically had the old LXDE style menu, which was like 1995, 1998 style. So I'm happy to see that there's a new modern UI, modern menu for this version of LXQt. They add new features like the favorite section, all applications category that shows you all applications in one list, as well as an improved search functionality and more. Also, LXQt has been working on their Wayland support for quite some time, and LXQt 2.0 brings Wayland support to a lot more components, such as the file manager, which is PCMan-fm-Qt, also the LXQt runner, and LXQt desktop notifications. Now, LXQt 2.0 is not fully Wayland just yet, but they plan to have it fully Wayland compatible for the next release of 2.1. We don't know when that will be, but that's the plan. LXQ also said that many LXQt packages are compatible with the Wayland compositors using layer shell protocol, which means quite a few of them. So if they want to, they can add these LXQt packages into their compositor projects, which is a really cool idea. If you'd like to learn more about the latest desktop from LXQt team, you'll find links in the show notes. NVIDIA is back in the news this week, and this time regarding the Nouveau project. For those unfamiliar, the Nouveau project is who develops the ever-important open-source drivers that make it possible to use NVIDIA GPUs on Linux. Now, of course, a lot of people install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers anyway, but Nouveau is a very important project because, you know, those drivers are what make it possible to actually display anything at all on the NVIDIA machines when you don't have the proprietary driver installed yet. So, it's pretty important. important the big news this week is that ben skeggs is now working for nvidia and somehow still contributing code to the open source Nouveau drivers that part we'll get to in a second but for those who don't know ben used to be the lead developer of the Nouveau project while working at red hat and after more than a decade working on the Nouveau project he resigned from Nouveau development in September of last year since then ben has not been heard of much from you know basically at all in regards to the Nouveau project, that is. But that changed this week when he submitted 156 patches. That's right, 156 patches. This massive patch series is a follow-up to the Nouveau GSP firmware and implement work, and it also cleans up the code. The focus on the series is replacing the IOCTL-like interface between the NVKM and the Nouveau DRM driver to now leverage more direct calls for reducing the driver overhead and call chain complexity, which is rather funny considering the complexity of that sentence. Now, this is great to see Ben back involved in such an important project, but it's also very interesting to see him working for NVIDIA, especially with NVIDIA's history with Linux and the Nouveau project. There is the perspective of changing something from the inside, so maybe that's the reason why Ben is working there. And the reason this got on my radar, though, is that he is submitting this code while working at NVIDIA and doing so from his NVIDIA email address. Now, these kinds of companies usually don't let people continue to work on open source projects once they are hired, much less in an official capacity like this. It's even more interesting when you consider some companies literally have stuff in their contracts that basically forbid employees from ever working on something open source related to their job, even if they leave the company because they know company secrets. So for this to be done while he is at NVIDIA and using an official NVIDIA email, this could mean that maybe NVIDIA is finally warming up to the idea of working on the Nouveau project, which would ultimately benefit them. Not, well, also the Linux ecosystem, but it would benefit them just as much. So at least I hope that's what's going on here, but we'll have to wait and see. But this is really good news and welcome back ben to the nouveau project. Sort of. The Alma Linux team have announced the beta release of Alma Linux 9.4. And I've been following the enterprise Linux space for many years now since the announcement from Red Hat that shocked the enterprise world in 2020. And the whole time Alma Linux has been proving they are doing things the right way. From the effort they put in to provide a solid distro for their users to the structure of the Alma Linux OS foundation. But I was on the fence whether or not to cover this beta release for this particular episode. But then I was contacted by Benny Vasquez, the current chair of the board of AlmaLinux OS Foundation, and that pretty much settled it. So let's talk about AlmaLinux 9.4 beta. As you may or may not know, AlmaLinux is no longer trying to be a one-to-one compatible distribution with RHEL, the RHEL upstream. And this change makes it possible for AlmaLinux users to have support for hardware that Red Hat deprecated upstream. stream. In fact, that's exactly what's happening with AlmaLinux 9.4 beta, because it comes with added support for the following device drivers that were basically deprecated by Red Hat. So these are just a small sum of Dell PERC-2, Adaptic Advanced RAID products, HP Smart Array Controller, Broadcom Mega RAID, SAS, and more, many, many more. In fact, this version of AlmaLinux supports more than 140 specific devices that had been deprecated by the upstream. The initial work for this was done as part of a hackathon at CloudFest and had been requested by a large portion of the AlmaLinux user community, so I am sure a lot of people are going to be happy about this news. Benny also told me that they are looking for feedback on the stuff that they re-added, so if this affects you, then let them know on the forum thread that I will have linked in the show notes. AlmaLinux is also affecting upstream Red Hat in positive ways on many levels, from code submissions to helping to ensure security patches are pushed through. Over the past couple of weeks, I have seen reports of Red Hat not doing some security patches. Meanwhile, AlmaLinux did deploy these patches, and this got me curious. It turns out that that did happen at first, but a friend of the show, Jonathan Wright of AlmaLinux, wrote a blog post about this topic, and it seems Red Hat has changed their minds about the severity of the bug thanks to that blog post. And now we're seeing that Red Hat is going to ship these patches in the next release of RHEL, which is RHEL 9.4. This is really good news because one of the biggest reasons for Red Hat making the change for CentOS that they made the enterprise world turn upside down about was that they wanted to make it easier for people to contribute to RHEL. Previously, that was basically impossible to do when it was just RHEL and CentOS Linux. So whether or not you like this change of the overall change of CentOS, this part of the plan does seem to be working because contributions are for sure impacting not just the derivatives, but also RHEL itself. So I'll take that part as a win. So well done to the Alma Linux team. And for anyone who wants to learn more about the latest beta version, you will find links in the show notes. It probably goes without saying the beta releases shouldn't be used in production, but just Just in case. There you go. Let's talk about endpoint security. When you go through the airport, for example, there's a security line to check your ID and then another line to scan your bags. The same thing happens in enterprise security, but instead of passengers and luggage, it's end users and their devices. And these days, most companies are pretty good at the first part of that equation where they check the user identity. But user devices can roll right through authentication without getting inspected at all in some cases. In fact, 47% of companies allow unmanaged, untrusted devices to access their data. That means an employee can log in from a laptop that has a firewall turned off and hasn't been updated in six months. Or worse, that laptop could belong to a bad actor using employee credentials. Kolide solves this problem, this device trust problem. Kolide ensures that no device can log into your Okta-protected apps unless it passes your security checks. Plus, you can use Kolide on your devices without MDM, like your Linux fleet, contractor devices, and every BYOD or bring-your-own-device phone and laptop in your company. So visit Visit thisweekinlinux.com/kolide to watch a demo and see how it works. That's thisweekinlinux.com/kolide. Mozilla has announced a new version of the Firefox web browser. Firefox is a great browser with a lot of cool and unique features. This latest release is not all that flashy though. But there are a couple of things that I wanted to highlight. Firefox 125 adds a handy new feature for pasting URLs. So if you have copied a URL to your clipboard, Firefox will be able to detect that. So when you click on the navigation / address bar, it will prompt you to go to the URL from the clipboard. This might not be the most mind blowing feature, but I suspect this will save a few seconds here and there. And when you add it up, it's a nice addition. The other thing I wanted to highlight is the adding support for the AV1 video codec within encrypted media extensions. So EME is what is used to play back encrypted media from streaming services, and the AV1 codec is a royalty-free and open video coding format initially designed for streaming video. So this is a very cool thing to be added because AV1 is expected to be very widely adopted. Also, Firefox 125 makes it possible to add highlights to PDFs directly in the browser, which is nice. That's pretty much it for this release. But Firefox 126 does seem to have some cool stuff coming and even more in the future because they've been beta testing many things, including vertical tabs, as well as many more. And overall, Firefox is a great web browser. In fact, it's my favorite browser. And I made a video on why it's my favorite browser. So if you'd like to learn more about that and see how awesome Firefox truly is, then check out that video. Vola, the company behind the VolaPhone smartphones, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a Vola tablet on Kickstarter. This Vola tablet comes with VolaOS, which is based on Android, but it also is coming with official support for Ubuntu Touch Mobile OS, which is really cool. And also, Ubuntu Touch has a lot of stuff to do with Vola because the Vola phones are working basically flawlessly with Ubuntu Touch, and so it's really cool to see that there's a tablet coming. Now, this tablet is looking pretty slick and it is coming with some solid specs. Though, keep in mind, I'm not a hardware guy, so specs that I think are solid might not be. Because what do I know? Anyway, the Vola tablet will have a 12.3-inch Quad HD display, a MediaTek Gaming G99 processor, 12 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of internal storage, 10,000 milliamp hour battery, and a cellular network support. Though that one is only up to 4G, which is kind of a bummer, but also understandable. Now, the Vola tablet is expected to begin shipping to backers in October of this year, which is about six months away. And just a quick note for the company Purism, who've also done crowdfunding. See, this is how you do it. You get the products to the customers in six months, not six years. Now you know. Now you know. So the Vala tablet has already reached its intended goal of 50,000 euros with just over 100 backers. And there's also more than 20 days left. So if you want to get one for yourself, you can get one at a discount right now through the Kickstarter. And I'll have a link to that in the show notes. Bazzite 2.5 has been released. Now, Bazzite is a very cool Linux gaming distro made by the Universal Blue team. For those unfamiliar, the Universal Blue project builds various distro images based on Fedora Atomic's approach to immutability. They have provided a collection of container images using Fedora support for OCI / Docker containers. and Bazzite is one of those container images. Now, Bazzite comes with Steam and Lutris pre-installed, HDR support for AMD GPUs, System76 scheduler to ensure your currently focused game or application has your CPU's priority, and numerous community-developed tools to provide a solid gaming experience with the base of Fedora Atomic. Now, Bazzite can be used as a standard distro with KDE Plasma or GNOME, and it can also be used as a Steam Deck-like experience with their Steam Gaming mode. Now let's talk about what's new in Bazzite 2.5. Well, Bazzite 2.5 is based on Fedora 39. The next version will be based on Fedora 40, but this one has some improvements to the first initial setup. The interim RAMFS setup is now part of the base image, making it much faster to get started with Bazzite. They also improved the getting started part by improving the Flatpak experience because they were able to pre-install some Flatpak applications that used to install on the first boot. And all of these are great improvements to the out-of-the-box experience. I also met some Bazzite developers at this year's Scale in Pasadena, California, back in March. That was a lot of fun to hang out with them for a bit and talk tech. And I'm looking forward to trying out this latest version of Bazzite. Fedora has announced on the Fedora Magazine website that we are now all clear on the XZ backdoor, at least when it comes to Fedora Linux. I mean, they're talking about their distro specifically, But also, I found an article from Jack Wallen on Linux Magazine, who wrote that the is confirming that all the main distributions are reporting an all clear for the XZ backdoor. So this is really good news. And I think that's a good place to end the show this week. Thanks for watching this episode of This Week in Linux. If you like what I do here on this show and want to be kept up to date with what's going on in the Linux and open source world, then be sure to subscribe. And of course, remember to like that smash button. If you'd like to support the show and the TuxDigital Network, consider becoming a patron by going to tuxdigital.com/membership where you can get a bunch of cool perks like access to the patron only sections of our Discord server and much more. Also, you can support the show by ordering the Linux delivery t-shirt or the This Week in Linux shirt that I'm wearing right now at tuxdigital.com/store Plus, while you're there, check out all the other cool stuff we have like hats, hoodies, mugs, and much more at tuxdigital.com/store I'll see you next time for another episode of Your Source for Linux Gnews. Thanks again for watching. I'm Michael Tunnell. I hope you're doing swell. Be sure to ring that notification bell, and until next time, I bid you farewell.
