today's leftovers

• How Ubuntu Boosts Developer Desktop Productivity | Ubuntu

  Seventeen years after its first release, Ubuntu is firmly established as the Linux developer desktop of choice around the world. From education through to enterprise, Ubuntu delivers the tools developers need to succeed across their careers. In this blog, we will cover the main aspects that contribute to this success. [...] Developers start their careers with Ubuntu, and 69% of student developers reported that they prefer Ubuntu as an OS. It’s not surprising. With Ubuntu, they gain access to the best of open source, including AI/ML frameworks, such as Pytorch and TensorFlow, ROS for robotics and LXD and multipass for virtualisation. Open source technology is now a critical part of any enterprise, and familiarity with open source is a key consideration in hiring. As a result, getting new developers onboarded and productive quickly is easier with Ubuntu. It’s a system they’re familiar with. It’s flexible and customisable. And, as an operating system, it spans both the workstation and the cloud, providing a consistent development experience across your technology stack.

• Our 12 favorite Arduino UNO projects | Arduino Blog

  The UNO wasn’t Arduino’s first board, and it won’t be its last. There have been many varieties of microcontroller and maker boards before and after the UNO, but none have been as iconic. As we cross the epic milestone of 10 million UNOs sold and the launch of the UNO Mini Limited Edition, we decided it was time to take a look back at some of our favorite UNO projects from the last 10 years. And we want to hear about yours, too. Join us over on social media to share your favorite UNO projects, whether you built them yourself or marveled at someone else’s electronic creation.

• Personal computer maker Raspberry Pi plans London listing

  The company behind Britain's best-selling personal computer is preparing the ground for a spring listing which is expected to value it at more than £370m.

  The trading arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has hired bankers from Stifel and Liberum to advise on a London float after securing a $45m (£33m) investment in September.

  The Cambridge-based foundation offloaded stakes to Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust to fund product development and marketing after seeing booming demand for its miniature personal computers during lockdown.

• Mozilla Privacy Blog: Mozilla files comments on UK Data Protection Consultation

  Mozilla recently submitted its comments to a public consultation on reforming the UK’s data protection regime launched by the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. With the public consultation, titled ‘Data: A New Direction’, the UK government set out to re-evaluate the UK’s approach to data protection after no longer being bound by the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We took this opportunity to share our thoughts on data stewardship and the role effective regulation can play in addressing the lopsided power dynamics between large data collectors and users. For Mozilla, privacy is not optional. It is an integral aspect of our Manifesto, which states that individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. This is why privacy is at the core of our product work and why we have long promoted robust data protection in our policy and advocacy work. Further, Mozilla’s Data Futures Lab is exploring alternative approaches to data governance and promoting data stewardship through original research and support to builders.

• 42 things I learned from building a production database

  In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). We hit production with a 3-person team in less than a year; and subsequently scaled the team to 30+ engineers spanning multiple sub-teams. In the four years that I led the team (until Spring 2021), we did not experience a single severe outage (nothing higher than a SEV3). The Delos design is well-documented in two academic papers (in OSDI 2020 and SOSP 2021). Delos is currently replacing all uses of ZooKeeper at Facebook.

  Here are some of the things I learned as the tech lead for Delos. My intent in publishing this is to help others in similar roles (leading teams that are building new infra at large companies); much of it may not generalize to different settings.

Audiocasts/Show: Steam Deck, Open Source Security, WP Briefing, and Linux Action News

• Chill out. The Steam Deck's immutable filesystem solves our biggest problem. - Invidious

  I've seen a lot of comments complaining about the Steam Deck's immutable filesystem on the Dev Stream Deep Dive video. We need to clear up the misconceptions.

• Open Source Security Episode 299 – Experts From A World That No Longer Exists – Open Source Security

  Josh and Kurt talk about an article about how expertise has a limited lifetime. We are all experts in something, but some of us will find our expert knowledge to be outdated eventually. We discuss what that means in the context of security and tech and disagree about how to best keep your skills up to date.

• WP Briefing: Episode 21: All Things Block Themes!

  In episode 21 of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, talks all things block themes with developers and theme specialists Maggie Cabrera and Jeff Ong.

• Linux Action News 217

  Fedora's massive endorsement this week that went unnoticed, why RISC-V mobile devices might be getting near, and the significant change coming to a critical open-source tool.

LVFS and OpenZFS

• Richard Hughes: Firmware “Best Known Configuration” in fwupd

  I’ve just deployed some new functionality to the LVFS adding support for component <tag>s. These are used by server vendors to identify a known-working (or commercially supported) set of firmware on the machine. This is currently opt-in for each vendor to avoid the UI clutter on the components view, and so if you’re a vendor reading this post and realize you want this feature, let me know and it’s two clicks on the admin panel.

• FWUPD Linux Firmware Updater Prepares "Best Known Configuration" Feature - Phoronix

  The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and FWUPD on their great upward trajectory has in recent times been expanding beyond their initial focus of desktop/laptop hardware to supporting more server platforms for firmware updating. The latest feature driven by their growing server interests is "best known configuration" handling for where there are multiple independently-versioned firmware packages for a given system and may be support recommendations or potential version conflicts between the the different firmware packages.

• OpenZFS 3.0 Introduced at Developer Summit

  The ninth annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place November 8th and 9th online with iXsystems proudly returning as a Gold sponsor. The OpenZFS community remains vibrant and is continuing to develop features at a rapid pace. This blog summarizes some of the more interesting talks.

Review: LockBox 1.0

LockBox is one of the most recent additions to the DistroWatch database. LockBox (sometimes referred to as LBX) is a Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu and elementary OS. It is especially intended for storing and managing cryptocurrencies. It includes several hardened configuration changes for security purposes, a highly restrictive firewall setup, several applications designed for data backups, a password manager, and the Brave Internet browser. LockBox is available for x86_64 machines exclusively and its install media is 3.4GB in size. In a curious case of life imitating art, the LockBox website currently describes the project using a quote from the DistroWatch information page about the distribution. One of the first things I discovered about the distribution is LockBox will not boot in Legacy BIOS mode. A boot menu will appear and begin a countdown from five seconds. When the countdown reaches zero, or when we select any of the boot options, the counter simply resets to five seconds again. The boot menu offers to let us "Try or install elementary OS" or "Check disks for defects" and both options simply reset the boot menu counter. When trying to launch the distribution in UEFI mode, only the Try/Install option is presented and choosing it boots the distribution's live environment. When the live system boots we are shown a graphical window where we can choose our preferred language from a list. We are given the choice to try the live desktop, which loads the Pantheon desktop. Alternatively we can launch the system installer. I'll talk about the Pantheon desktop later in this review.