RoboLinux is a unique distro that focuses on incorporating Windows versions XP through 10 within a fully functional Linux operating system. You might never need the Stealth VM features that let you easily install and run Microsoft Windows within most any Linux distro. Still, RoboLinux is a topnotch general purpose Linux computing platform that comes with a choice of leading desktop environments. RoboLinux creates a cloned Drive C from a Windows partition and installs your favorite Windows version with all of your costly Windows software running in a virtual machine.

Next year's GCC 9 compiler release will be eliminating support for older ARM versions.

Fortunately, ARMv7 and newer is still in great shape given they are still common and even ARMv6 support is also still supported by the GNU Compiler Collection. But as of Friday they dropped support for ARMv3 and older followed by dropping ARMv5 and ARMv5E.

The dropping of ARMv3 and older even includes finally eliminating the support for ARM2. The ARM2 target in GCC is finally no more.

This doesn't come as too much of a surprise though with pre-ARMv4T support being deprecated since GCC 6 and the ARMv5 support being deprecated since GCC 7 last year.

Also: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.5.0 beta 3

• Android users receive creepy 'Superuser' Facebook request for full access to their devices

• Facebook Android app caught seeking 'superuser' clearance

• There's still no easy way to simultaneously charge and listen on Android phones without headphone jacks

• The Best Android Tablets

• The best travel apps for a smart, stress-free holiday

• Android P is full of new features

• Nvidia GeForce Now For Shield Android TV Is Now Free

• Android Circuit: Samsung Cancels Galaxy Features, Stunning OnePlus 6 Reviewed, Radical Pixel 3 Leak

• Google kills the Assistant's 'Your stuff' tab on Android, simplifying Explore

• Fuchsia Friday: So is Android imitating Fuchsia's features?

• North Korea-Linked Hackers Targeting Defectors With Android Malware

• How to stream the royal wedding live on Chromecast, Android, Chrome OS, and Android TV

Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS has been released and announced by Ubuntu MATE project. As part of official ubuntu flavor, this release features the latest MATE Desktop 1.20.1 as default desktop environment. Also introduces numerous improvements and new features, including better support for HiDPI displays, new desktop layouts, as well as support for indicators in all layouts by default.

Familiar is new default layout of desktop Ubuntu MATE 18.04. it based on the traditional layout with the menu-bar (Applications, Places, System) replaced by Brisk Menu. Use MATE tweak if you want try out the various desktop layouts.

Brisk Menu applications menu is now enabled by default in Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS, which ships with the Head-Up Display (HUD) feature of the Unity 7 desktop environmentand .MATE Tweak, which now lets you toggle the HiDPI mode more easily and a revamped Ubuntu MATE Welcome screen that now includes browser selection support and system telemetry if you want to help the Ubuntu MATE team improve future releases.

Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS also received several improvements. Among these, we can mention the Caja file manager, which can now encrypt your most precious files, advenced bulk rename, hash checking and advanced ACl properties. Marco window manager, which got hardware acceleration. MATE Dock Applet, which now features icon scrolling and matching

Also: What To Do After Installing Kubuntu 18.04

If Tom Clancy had been a technophile of the software kind, he'd have used this title instead of the familiar one for one of his iconic blockbuster thrillers. The thing is, Linux accounts for a tiny percentage of the overall desktop market share. The perennial 1% has been around roughly since 2005, and even if the actual share is higher than that, it's still a small and largely insignificant fraction. And yet, there are hundreds of Linux distributions populating this narrow, crowded arena. Why? Well, ego, of course.

One might say: open source. Ah, well, the open-source nature of Linux has been the chief excuse to the colorful abundance of replication and duplication of the Linux desktop world, while at the same time serving as the main catalyst to the expansion of Linux in the commercial space, which makes for a dubious cause. I believe the reason is different. Let me tell you what it is.

As part of the recent effort into forming a new copyright policy for Gentoo, a research into the historical status has been conducted. We've tried to establish all the key events regarding the topic, as well as the reasoning behind the existing policy. I would like to shortly note the history based on the evidence discovered by Robin H. Johnson, Ulrich Müller and myself.

• Is systemd on Linux Evil – For The Record

  Is systemd on Linux Evil? How does it compare to alternatives like runit? I discuss some considerations with systemd and below are the links I reference in the video.

• Linux Apps On Chromebooks – Unleaded Hangouts

  Linux Apps On Chromebooks. Does this present a compelling reason to buy a Chromebook or instead, is this too little too late for Google? We discuss.

• A Remote KMS Linux Backend Is Being Worked On That Could Work With VNC

  Thomas Hellstrom of VMware who has worked on Mesa going back to the Tungsten Graphics days is developing a remote KMS back-end that could be transmitted over VNC or similar protocols.

  In essence this kernel mode-setting (KMS) kernel back-end would allow the display to be transmitted remotely over VNC or similar remote desktop sharing technologies. The current intention is on open-source VNC server support.

• A Closer Look At The GCC 8 Compiler Performance On Intel Skylake

  In continuing with our recent benchmarks of the brand new GCC 8.1 compiler, here are more tests while using an Intel Skylake CPU and testing with -O2, -O3, and -O3 -march=native optimization levels while comparing the resulting binary performance of GCC 8.1 and GCC 7.3.

• Vim 8.1 Adds Support For Running A Terminal In The Vim Window

  Vim 8.1 is out today as the latest stable feature update to this advanced cross-platform text editor.

• Vim 8.1 released

• Caprine Is A Privacy-Focused Facebook Messenger Desktop App

  Caprine is an Electron Facebook Messenger application that's focused on privacy. I know that Facebook and privacy shouldn't really be used in the same sentence unless they are accompanied by 'lack of', but Caprine tries to improve this, by preventing Facebook from tracking the links that you click.

  The application also ships with options to hide the last seen / typing indicator, and a way to quickly disable receiving desktop notifications.

• Lubuntu 18.10 Officially Switching From LXDE To LXQt

  After working on Lubuntu-Next for a while in transitioning from the GTK-based LXDE desktop environment to the modern and maintained LXQt desktop environment that is powered by Qt5, the Lubuntu 18.10 will be the release that officially moves over to the LXQt desktop and pushes out LXDE.

  Walter Lapchynski of the Lubuntu project has confirmed that for the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" cycle they are switching to LXQt for good.

• Mozilla Firefox 60.0.1 Released with Many Improvements, Disables WebVR on macOS

  Mozilla released on Wednesday the first point release to the Firefox 60.0 web browser, version 60.0.1, which brings several improvements and fixes some annoyances reported by users lately.

  One of the annoyances that Mozilla resolved in the Firefox 60.0.1 release, which started rolling out to Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms, is the displaying of "Sponsored content" on the New Tab page. Mozilla says that it will now immediately disappear when the user disables the "Sponsored Stories" option in Preferences.

  With the Firefox 60.0.1 release, the web browser now avoids overly long cycle collector pauses with certain add-ons, improves momentum scrolling on non-zoomable pages for touchscreen devices, and restores language translations of the Preferences panels when using a language pack.

• fridge 0.1

  Imagine something really cool, like a fridge connected to a powerwall, powered entirely by solar panels. What could be cooler than that?

  How about a fridge powered entirely by solar panels without the powerwall? Zero battery use, and yet it still preserves your food.

• OpenShift Common Briefing: OpenShift on OpenStack with Ramon Acedo Rodriguez (Red Hat)

  In this briefing, Red Hat’s Ramon Acedo Rodriguez presents the strategy, vision and current state of affairs for containers within Red Hat OpenStack Platform. In this session you will learn what role containers play in OpenStack, what we as Red Hat are focusing on, what we already have brought to our customers and what you can be expecting in the future in infrastructure as well as tenant layers.

• News Bits: QNAP, Veritas, Dell EMC, ClearSky Data, Cohesity, Quest, Red Hat, NVIDIA, & More

• Emergent, LLC Exclusively Awarded Small Business DoD Enterprise Software Initiative Contract To Provide Red Hat Solutions

• Red Hat Summit: An Eventful Tour from Enterprise Integration to Serverless

• Boxes now supports RDP connections

  Boxes has been the go-to option for easy virtual machine setups in GNOME for quite some time, but some people don’t know that our beloved application can also act as a remote viewer.

  The “Enter URL” option in the new machine assistant is how you get a new remote machine added to your collection. It supports addresses of Spice and VNC servers and oVirt and Libvirt brokers. You can also paste the URL of an operating system image (iso, img, qcow, etc…) and Boxes will download and boot it for you.

• Dual Monitor: Fix Mouse Getting Stuck On Second Monitor In Gnome Shell With Ubuntu Dock Or Dash To Dock

  On my dual monitor setup, if I made any application fullscreen on the primary monitor (left-hand side screen - monitor "1" in the image above), the mouse cursor would get stuck on the secondary monitor (right-hand side screen) and I could only move it back to the primary monitor if I moved between monitors through the top part of the screen.

• Dash to Panel Update Adds Intellihide, New Configuration Options

  Dash to Panel merges the GNOME Dash (aka Dock) and top bar into a unified, single panel that you can place on any edge of the screen:

  In the latest update, Dash to Panel v14, the task bar picks up a bunch of welcome improvements, including support for “intellihide” (aka auto-hide).

  This option (off by default) makes the panel slide out of view when an application window is maximised and/or touching it, and gracefully restored when there’s space for it.

  Although hidden you can access the panel at any time just by moving your mouse to the screen edge it’s hiding under.

• Greeting

  Hello all! This is my first time writing about my work progress in a blog, so some things are still awnkward for me. And it is also my first time participating in GSoC and there are many things new to me. I’m cooperating with KDE organisation or rather with one of their projects, named Krita.

• Calamares 3.2.0 released

  The Calamares team is happy to announce the availability of Calamares 3.2.0, the first iteration of the new features-and-functionality series of Calamares 3.2.x releases. This is the new series of Calamares releases following on from the stable 3.1 series.

  Calamares is a distribution-independent system installer, with an advanced partitioning feature for both manual and automated partitioning operations. Calamares is designed to be customizable by distribution maintainers without need for cumbersome patching, thanks to third party branding and external modules support.

• Calamares 3.2 Linux Installer Framework Released

  Version 3.2 of the Calamares universal Linux distribution installer framework is now available as their latest big feature release that has been in development the past number of months.

  Calamares 3.2 features new localization capabilities, improved logging, enhanced GeoIP detection, improved KDE Plasma integration, optional user-tracking, upgraded KPMCore usage, and various module improvements.

• Qt 5.11.0 RC2 out

  We have released Qt 5.11.0 RC2 today. Delta to RC(1) release can be found as an attachment. We are still targeting to release Qt 5.11.0 Tue 22nd May as planned

• Qt 5.11 RC2 Released With The Final Expected Next Week

  The Qt Company is hoping to be able to release the Qt 5.11 tool-kit in just a few days.

  Developers working on Qt 5.11 are striving still to release this half-year tool-kit update ahead of schedule on Tuesday, 22 May, rather than the following week as originally was planned.

• Get Started with Qt 3D Studio 2.0 beta 1

  Now that the beta 1 release of Qt 3D Studio 2.0 is out, let’s go through the steps involved in trying it out for real.

• Fractal hackfest in Strasbourg

  Apart from the technical side of things, I also tried to act as a city guide and hope my guests liked the places I took them. I for sure had lots of fun hanging out with all those people!

• FOSS-North 2018 – OSS community at its finest

  On April 22nd and 23rd, we attended a growing OSS event called FOSS North in Gothenburg – Sweden. According to foss-north.se, “FOSS-North is a free / open source conference covering both software and hardware from the technical perspective. Hosted in Gothenburg between Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm with an international airport, we provide a meeting place for the Nordic foss communities and will bring together great speakers with a great audience.” and that alone sounds like a lot of fun for us nerds!

  [...]

  FOSS-North hosted a bevy of different speeches during the 2-day period with 25 speakers, 2 of them from Jolla! We held our speech about the history of Jolla and the Sailfish community, continued by a piece of our roadmap for Sailfish X, Sailfish 3, and what is planned for the future. We ended the talk by a rather long Q&A from the audience. You can watch the whole talk below, and also access our slides that we used during the talk here.

• Mastering CI/CD at OpenDev

  After launching in 2017, the OpenDev Conference is now an annual event. At the inaugural event last September, the conference focus was on edge computing. This year's event, taking place May 22-23, will be focused on Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and will be co-located with the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver.

• Goodbye Octopress, hello Pelican

  I’ve spent some time during this DebCamp to migrate to Pelican, which is written in Python, packaged in Debian, and its dependencies are quite straighforward to install. I had to install (and write) a few plugins to make the migration easier, and port my custom Octopress Bootstrap theme to Pelican.

• Join us in Hamburg for the Hamburg Mini-DebConf!

  Thanks to Debian, I have the chance to be able to attend the Hamburg Mini-DebConf, taking place in Hamburg from May 16th to May 20th. We are hosted by Dock Europe in the amazing Viktoria Kaserne building.

• MiniDebConf Hamburg - Thursday

  I missed my flight on Wednesday, and for a moment I thought I would have to cancel my attendance, but luckily I was able to buy a ticket for Thursday for a good price.

  I arrived at the venue just in time for a "stand-up" meeting, where people introduced themselves and shared what are they working on / planning to work on. That gave me a great feeling, having an idea of what other people are doing, and gave me motivation to work on my projects.

  The venue seems to be some kind of cooperative, with office space for different associations, there is also a small guest house (where I am sleeping), and a "kantina". The building seems very pretty, but is going through some renovations, so the scaffolding does not let you see it much. It also has a big outdoors area, which is always welcomed.

• Ubuntu 18.10 will bring power improvements, new default theme, and more

  With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out the door, the folks at Canonical are starting to talk about plans for the next version of the popular GNU/Linux distribution. Actually, the next two.

  Ubuntu 18.04.1 is expected to roll out in July, bringing bug fixes and a few new features including easier access to Thunderbolt settings and support for unlocking a PC with your fingerprint.

• Download Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support from the Microsoft Store

• Benchmarking Ubuntu 18.04 On Windows Subsystem for Linux: WSL Leading Bare Linux In More Tests

  Canonical and Microsoft have rolled out Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the Microsoft Store for running with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on Windows 10 WSL with the April 2018 Update compared to the Bionic Beaver installed bare-metal and then also the older Ubuntu 16.04 WSL setup.

• How to enable remote desktop connections in Ubuntu 18.04

• How to enable an automatic purge of temp files in Ubuntu 18.04

• Docker, cron, environment variables, and Kubernetes

• How to resize Java heap memory size of Tomcat S2I image in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

• Building a Serverless Microblog in Ruby with OpenFaaS – Part 1

• What is Captcha? | Why Do Use Captcha Codes On Websites?

• How to manage MySQL databases and users from the command line

• How To Download And Set Up Firefox Quantum On Debian Stretch

• How to Fix Broken Packages on Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 9

• How to install Jekyll on CentOS 7

• 15 Porting and tuning tools for Linux on Power

• How To Install and Use Rancher to Manage your Docker Applications on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04

• How to reset lost root password on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

• Useful Linux Command Line Bash Shortcuts You Should Know

• Build a Simple Android Photo App with Jasonette

• How To Install Ncurses Library In Linux

• How to Install a Kubernetes Docker Cluster on CentOS 7

• Get started with Apache Cassandra on Fedora

• Starting user software in X

• What's a hero without a villain? How to add one to your Python game

• Getting started with regular expressions

• inline 0.3.15

• Proof reuse in Coq using existential variables

• Running systemd in the Gitlab docker runner CI

• What is a blockchain?

• How to Manage Fonts in Linux

• How to Setup MySecureShell SFTP Server on Ubuntu 18.04

• How to Get Started With Usenet, the Best Alternative to Torrents

• Ansible Tutorial: Introduction to simple Ansible commands

• Blockchain Consolidation Phase Is Imminent, Hyperledger Chief Says

  Brian Behlendorf, a driving force behind the Apache web server and longtime supporter of open source software, now spends his time developing blockchain technology for the enterprise.

  As the executive director of the Hyperledger project, an open source blockchain initiative hosted by the Linux Foundation, Mr. Behlendorf is working to create enterprise-ready distributed ledger technologies and develop a community of corporate blockchain developers that will outlast a fevered investment climate.

  Blockchain is still nascent in the enterprise, but the conversation has evolved beyond basic technology questions to more involved discussions about scale, interoperability and governance, Mr. Behlendorf said.

• 6 key data strategy considerations for your cloud-native transformation

  Many organizations are making the move to cloud-native platforms as their strategy for digital transformation. cloud-native allows companies to deliver fast-responding, user-friendly applications with greater agility. However, the architecture of the data in support of cloud-native transformation is often ignored in the hope that it will take care of itself. With data becoming the information currency of every organization, how do you avoid the data mistakes commonly made during this cloud transformation journey? What data questions should you ask when building cloud-native applications? How can you gain valuable insight from your data?

  The ensuing presentation includes six key considerations companies must have when they make this transition to cloud-native.

• Making Kubernetes Easier with Cloud Foundry Platform

  Kubernetes is one of the biggest technology disruptors to hit the IT industry in a long time — maybe since Amazon EC2, now more than a decade old. It has helped turn containers from a convenient packaging method into the building blocks of modern application architectures, and has shifted the discussion in many circles from cloud computing to cloud-native computing.

  If that seems like a form of technological hair-splitting, it isn’t. Cloud-native technologies and architectures are the means by which more traditional businesses — like insurance, financial services or even heavy machinery — can transition from simply consuming cloud resources into operating like the cloud providers themselves. This is shifting the way they run their businesses, making them more agile, distributed and ready to tackle via software, whatever their businesses demand. As with most new technologies, however, it’s important to look at Kubernetes with some perspective.

• Virtualized lab demonstration using a tweaked Labtainers running in a container

  Labtainers is quite interesting as it allows isolating a lab in several containers running in their own dedicated virtual network, which helps distributing a lab without needing to install anything locally.

  My tweak allows to run what I called the “master” container which contains the labtainers scripts, instead of having to install labtainers on a Linux host. This should help installation and distribution of labtainers, as well as deploying it on cloud platforms, some day soon. In the meantime Labtainer containers of the labs run with privileges so it’s advised to be careful, and running the whole of these containers in a VM may be safer. Maybe Labtainers will evolve in the future to integrate a containerization of its scripts. My patches are pending, but the upstream authors are currently focused on some other priorities.

The first was the kernel. I ended up hand-crafting a kernel, removing anything I thought was unlikely we'd need, then restarting several times when I discovered that the system wouldn't boot because the things I thought I understood were more … esoteric than I'd realised. I'm not a kernel developer, and this was a salutary lesson in how skilled those folks are. At least, at the time I was doing it, there were less code and fewer options than there are today. On the other hand, I was having to hack back to a required state, and now there are more cut-down kernels and systems to start with than there were back then.

The other piece I left for last was pruning the installed operating system applications and associated utilities. Again, there are cut-down options that are easier to use now than then, but I also had some odd requirements—I believe that we needed Java, for instance, which has, or had …. well let's say a lot of dependencies. Most modern Linux distributions start off by installing lots of pieces so you can get started quickly without having to worry about trying to work out dependencies for every piece of external software you want to run.

• Antigraviator, a seriously slick looking anti-grav racer really could see Linux support

  I know we often write about games that might see Linux support, but this one seems rather promising. Antigraviator [Official Site] is a very slick and polished looking anti-grav racer.

• 0 A.D. Alpha 23 Released As One Of The Leading Open-Source Games

  One of the best and most long-standing open-source Linux games is 0 A.D. and in time for the weekend they have a new release.

  This open-source ancient warfare game is out with its twenty-third alpha release ahead of the weekend. This RTS game in its latest alpha release features a new civilization, new models, improved AI behavior, a mod downloader, new random maps, and other changes to enhance the game-play for this game that's been open-source for nearly a decade.

• New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 23 Ken Wood

  Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of 0 A.D. Alpha 23 “Ken Wood”, the twenty-third alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source real-time strategy game of ancient warfare.

• virtual-keyboard: Add new virtual keyboard protocol

• Purism Is Proposing A Virtual Keyboard Protocol For Wayland

  Purism's Dorota Czaplejewicz has been active within the Wayland community recently as they work on their Librem 5 phone Wayland compositor and Phosh shell for this software stack and iMX8 hardware they hope to begin shipping next year.

  On behalf of Purism, Dorota's latest Wayland work is proposing a new virtual keyboard protocol for Wayland. This allows for the emulation of keyboards by applications and complements the existing input-method protocol. The new virtual-keyboard protocol is based upon the Wayland keyboard specification but with support for seat bindings and dropping serials.

• Introducing Calls

  Arguably the most critical functionality in a phone is the ability to make and receive calls through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), that is normal cellular calls using phone numbers. While at Purism we are eager to implement communication systems that enable much greater privacy and security than one can expect from PSTN calls, the PSTN is still the most ubiquitous network and for the time being we can’t very well go around selling a phone that isn’t able to make PSTN calls.⁰

  My task has been to develop a dialer and call handler for PSTN calls. Like all of our work on the Librem 5, this is intended to make use of existing code wherever possible and also target the GNOME platform which our PureOS defaults to. There is currently no GNOME PSTN dialer so we intend to contribute our program to the GNOME project.

• Purism Introduces Its Telepathy-Using GTK3-Based Phone Dialer Plans

  Purism has formally introduced "Calls", its GTK3-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) phone dialing application that it hopes will be accepted into the upstream GNOME project. Purism plans to develop this phone dialer using GNOME's Telepathy framework but for now is using a simple oFono back-end.

  Calls is the new program Purism is developing to make and receive conventional telephone calls for supporting their default GNOME-based software stack being developed for the Purism 5 smartphone.

  While Telepathy is controversial among even GNOME developers, they are pursuing this framework for their phone call application as it will also support SIP calls and other features provided by the GNOME framework.

• Open-Source NVIDIA Volta GV100 Support Queued For Linux 4.18

  Initial open-source driver support for the NVIDIA GV100 "Volta" GPUs will be introduced with the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel cycle.

  Earlier this month I wrote about the initial open-source GV100 Volta patches coming out for the Nouveau Direct Rendering Manager while now that work has been queued into the DRM-Next tree ahead of the Linux 4.18 merge window opening in June.

• The Open-Source ARM Mali "Panfrost" Driver Now Supports Textures & More

  The in-development Panfrost reverse-engineered, open-source driver for supporting ARM Mali T700 series graphics is now much more capable thanks to work carried out on their "half-way" Gallium3D driver in recent weeks.

  Alyssa Rosenzweig has provided an update on the Panfrost driver progress and their very early stage Gallium3D driver. Their recent code is quite a bit of progress considering where they were one month ago with just being able to render a cube.

• CUDA 9.2 Released With GEMM Improvements

  We knew it was coming while today NVIDIA has rolled out the CUDA 9.2 stable release update.

  The CUDA 9.2 release includes speed-ups for launching CUDA kernels as well as faster performance for GEMM computational performance for half-precision and small N matrices. CUDA 9.2 also fixes a number of issues, including incorrect results with some GEMM calls on V100 Tensor Core GPUs and other BLAS problems.

• Mesa 18.1 Released With Intel Shader Cache Default, OpenGL 3.1 ARB_compatibility

  First time Mesa release manager Dylan Baker has managed to release Mesa 18.1 on time as the Q2'2018 quarterly update to this OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack.

  While it feels like Mesa 18.0 was just recently released, it's already been a month and a half, which had arrived significantly late due to release delays. Fortunately, Mesa 18.1 is now available and hopefully allowing for a normal Mesa 18.2 release cycle for next quarter.

  Mesa 18.1 ships with the Intel OpenGL shader cache now being enabled by default, OpenGL 3.1 with ARB_compatibility context support for the prominent Gallium3D drivers, ARB_bindless_texture support for Nouveau NVC0 that is important for some newer Linux game ports like Dawn of War 3, EXT_semaphore support for RadeonSI, various other new OpenGL and Vulkan extensions being supported by Radeon and Intel, and other enhancements. See our Mesa 18.1 feature overview for a more thorough look at all of the changes that made it into this release.

• Git Has A New Wire Protocol Yielding Much Greater Performance

  The Git Protocol Version 2 was announced today by Google as a major update to the distributed revision control system's wire protocol. Git protocol version 2 is much more efficient and yields significant performance benefits.

  The new Git wire protocol offers server-side filtering for references, easy extensibility for new features, and simplified client handling of the HTTP transport.

• Introducing Git protocol version 2

  Today we announce Git protocol version 2, a major update of Git's wire protocol (how clones, fetches and pushes are communicated between clients and servers). This update removes one of the most inefficient parts of the Git protocol and fixes an extensibility bottleneck, unblocking the path to more wire protocol improvements in the future.

  The protocol version 2 spec can be found here.

  [...]

  We recently rolled out support for protocol version 2 at Google and have seen a performance improvement of 3x for no-op fetches of a single branch on repositories containing 500k references. Protocol v2 has also enabled a reduction of 8x of the overhead bytes (non-packfile) sent from googlesource.com servers. A majority of this improvement is due to filtering references advertised by the server to the refs the client has expressed interest in.

• Push Notifications Considered Harmful

The Lubuntu development team promised to finally switch from LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) to the more modern and actively maintained LXQt (Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment), and the switch is now official.

Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley approached us earlier today to inform that the latest Lubuntu 18.10 daily build is quite usable as he and his team did a lot of work in the past week to accommodate the LXQt desktop environment by default instead of the LXDE desktop environment.

The main difference between LXDE and LXQt is that the former is written with the GTK+ 2 technologies, which will eventually be phased out in favor of the more advanced GTK+ 3, and the latter is built using the Qt framework. However, it doesn't look like there are any plans for LXDE to move to GTK+ 3.