Because there are so many different options out there for your free and open-source operating system, it can be hard to figure out what the best option is for you. Sifting between Linux distros is difficult – Debian and its derivatives, Ubuntu and its derivatives, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE, the list goes on. However, what if the best choice for you isn’t actually technically Linux? Here we review GhostBSD, a FreeBSD-based Unix OS designed for a simple desktop experience, to see if it’s the right fit for you.

[...]

The applications that are installed are all necessary. It’s exactly what you might expect to find in your typical lean open-source desktop OS configuration, with no frills and just the essential applications.

There is not much to remark on with the user experience – it is a very simple and friendly version of the MATE desktop that’s designed to be light on system resources and simple to use. Overall, I think there is no way you could go wrong.

• Thrilling Linux Gaming Predictions for 2021 - Boiling Steam

  Last week we reached out to the community at large with a simple question: What do you predict will happen in the world of Linux Gaming by the end of 2021? To make things a little more fun, we asked everyone to limit their Linux Gaming predictions to 5 items, and be as specific as possible as to what they expect to occur. We also asked everyone to work on their predictions individually to avoid any potential bias.

  Now, we are sharing with you all the predictions we received, from quite a few places across the world as you can see from the below map. The Linux Gaming Community knows no frontiers.

• Team Cherry upgrade the excellent Hollow Knight with Vulkan for Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Team Cherry have given their excellent action-platformer metroidvania Hollow Knight a bit of an upgrade, which you can test out on Steam in a fresh Beta test.

  Not played it before? You're missing out. Hollow Knight is a classically styled 2D action adventure across a vast interconnected world. Explore twisting caverns, ancient cities and deadly wastes; battle tainted creatures and befriend bizarre bugs; and solve ancient mysteries at the kingdom's heart.

• OpenLoco is a free and open source re-implementation of Chris Sawyer's Locomotion | GamingOnLinux

  Just like there's the awesome OpenTTD for fans of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, there's also OpenLoco for players who want to play through the classic Locomotion. Not a project we've covered here before it seems, so we're making that right today.

  Originally released back in 2004, it's actually a spiritual successor to Transport Tycoon but it was not as loved due to various problems with the original release. Perhaps though it can have a new life thanks to OpenLoco.

• VRWorkout is a free and open source VR fitness rhythm game

  Well, that's certainly one way to get a bit more exercise in. Whatever helps right? No judgement here, I could probably do with a little more myself…

  It's built with the free and open source game engine Godot Engine, so not only is the source code open for the game itself it's properly open for anyone to put it together from the source and will remain so. Speaking about VRWorkout to us on Twitter, the developer mentioned they actually do develop for it on Linux but they use a Quest headset not supported on Linux so they have to work with that on Windows. Perhaps though, in time, Monado might break down that barrier.

• Free and open source voxel game engine Minetest 5.4 is out, makes mods easier for users | GamingOnLinux

  Minetest, the Minecraft-like voxel game engine (and a basic game that comes with it) has a big new release out with Minetest 5.4.0 and it's worth trying again.

  As we covered before during the Release Candidate stage, one of the big features for users in this release is vastly easier modding with both small mod packs and entire games. Minetest had a way to browse and download them all directly in the game for a while, but now it will also actually download all the dependencies mods need - making it vastly easier to get what you want and then into a game. No more downloading one mod, then finding all the individual bits it needs.

As you already know, GNOME 40 will introduce a new Activities Overview design that promises better overview spatial organization, improved touchpad navigation using gestures, more engaging app browsing and launching, as well as better boot performance.

But the GNOME 40 beta release is packed with many other goodies, including the ability to switch workspaces with Super+scroll on Wayland, the implementation of a Welcome dialog after major updates, improved fingerprint login support, better handling of a large number of window previews, on-screen keyboard improvements, support for handling monitor changes during screencasts, as well as integration of the clipboard with remote desktop sessions.

Cinnamon is the default desktop environment for Linux Mint. This quick guide explains the steps to install the Cinnamon desktop environment in Arch Linux.

The first biggest change is the inclusion of the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment, which is used by default in the Kali Linux images. This change alone is so huge that you'll want to download the Kali Linux 2021.1 release right now and install it on your personal computer.

The second biggest change in Kali Linux's first 2021 release is the inclusion of new tools for ethical hacking and penetration testing, such as Airgeddon for auditing wireless networks, AltDNS for generating and resolving permutations, alterations and mutations of subdomains, as well as Arjun HTTP parameter discovery suite.

 

• Tempted But the Truth is Discovered | LINUX Unplugged 394

  After all these years, what's made us stick with Linux?

  Plus the commitment just made by the GNOME team, and some new tools that are changing our game.

  

• mintCast 355 – Deferred Update

  First up, in our Wanderings, Mike shreds a new axe, I’m more and more impressed by Proton, Joe has frozen joints, Moss is going to be rich someday, Tony Hughes gets immunities, and Josh panics with a crowbar. 

  Then, in the News, so much controversy, Linux on Mars, VLC on the moon, Mint and mintCast make the cut, and more

• Tetrate Says Its Istio Distribution Is Easier to Use Than the Upstream Version

  The startup, one of Istio's top contributors, has also launched an online community for Istio and Envoy enthusiasts to surface problems, brainstorm solutions.

 

• New service: https://debuginfod.debian.net

  Hello there,

  I would like to announce a new service that I have just configured for
  Debian: https://debuginfod.debian.net.

  debuginfod is a new-ish project whose purpose is to serve
  ELF/DWARF/source-code information over HTTP.  It is developed under the
  elfutils umbrella.  You can find more information about it here:

    https://sourceware.org/elfutils/Debuginfod.html

  In a nutshell, by using a debuginfod service you will not need to
  install debuginfo (a.k.a. dbgsym) files anymore; the symbols will be
  served to GDB (or any other debuginfo consumer that supports debuginfod)
  over the network.  Ultimately, this makes the debugging experience much
  smoother (I myself never remember the full URL of our debuginfo
  repository when I need it).

  If you would like to use the service, and if the service supports the
  Debian distribution you are using (see below), all you have to do is
  make sure that the following environment variable is set in your shell:

    DEBUGINFOD_URLS="https://debuginfod.debian.net";

  Currently, the elfutils and GDB packages in unstable and testing have
  native support for using debuginfod.  I will soon propose a change to
  the elfutils package in order to make it be configured with our
  debuginfod instance by default, so that users will be able to use the
  service transparently.

  For now, debuginfod.debian.net is serving debug information symbols for
  the following Debian distributions:

    - unstable

    - testing
    - testing-proposed-updates

    - stable
    - stable-backports
    - proposed-updates

  In the near future I intend to expand this list and include the
  debuginfo stored at snapshot.debian.org as well.

  Setting up a debuginfod service for Debian has been on my TODO list for
  some time now, and I finally got enough time & resources to do it.  I
  would like to thank a few people for their feedback and help:

    - Héctor Orón (zumbi)
    - Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)
    - Paul Wise (pabs)

  Last, but not least, you can find a wiki page about our service here:

    https://wiki.debian.org/Debuginfod

  Thanks,

• Debian Launches A Debuginfod Server For Smoother Debugging Experience

  Debian is the latest major Linux distribution deploying a Debuginfod web server so that ELF/DWARF/source-code information can be supplied via HTTP to clients on-demand when debugging. 

  Introduced last year was Debuginfod with GNU Binutils 2.34 for distributing debugging information / source code on demand. Readelf and objdump utilities can query connected Debuginfod servers for source files / data based on a build ID. Debuginfod support was later integrated into the GNU Debugger too (GDB 10.1). The effort was led by Red Hat engineers while now Debian is getting in on this practical feature too. 

 

• Introducing veb(4) - a new Virtual Ethernet Bridge

                   
  

                     

  In this commit, David Gwynne (dlg@) adds a new veb(4) driver to the tree. David's goal is to replace the old bridge(4) driver: [...]

               

 

• GNU poke 0.91 pre-released in alpha.gnu.org

  GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible editor for binary data.  Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them. 

• Null MX - We do not accept email here!

  By creating a NULL MX RECORD for a domain name which isn't meant to receive email, the domain will clearly state that it doesn't accept any email, period. Anyone attempting to send email to that domain will then immediately received a notification saying you cannot send email to that domain.

• RFC7505 Means Yes, Your Domain Can Refuse to Handle Mail. Please Leave Us a TXT If You Do.

  If you do not want a domain to receive any mail, there is a way to be at last somewhat civil about it. There's a different DNS trick for that.

• Python While Loop: Intro and Explanation - Make Tech Easier

  Coding is (of course) about building things to help others. However, creating programs and software has more to do with automating repetitive or complex tasks than anything else. Python’s while loop lets you repeat suites of code to automate many actions at once.

  In this post, we show you how to use Python’s while loop. First, let’s talk about what the while loop does and where it’s best used.

• Pattern dispatch | Playing Perl 6 b6xA Raku

  The ever helpful raiph wished for RakuAST in an answer to a question about pattern matching like it is done in Haskell. It was proposed to use MMD to solve this problem. Doing so and getting a fall-through default was unsolved. Since dispatch simply is pattern matching we just need to do some extra work. In a nutshell, the dispatcher gets a list of functions and a list with arguments. The first function that takes all arguments wins.

• Clang LTO Support Merged For Linux 5.12 Including ARM64 + x86_64

  Pop open the champagne as the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel will be able to support link-time optimizations (LTO) in conjunction with the LLVM Clang compiler on not only AArch64 (64-bit ARM) but also x86_64.

  Last week I noted that Clang LTO support had been submitted but at the time was not clear if Linus Torvalds was willing to land it given his past comments around LTO'ing the kernel. With that pull request it was also just for AArch64 with the x86_64 support not yet squared away.

  Years ago Linus Torvalds was unconvinced by GCC LTO support for the kernel and that code ultimately was never mainlined. With Clang the benefits are much the same in allowing for potentially greater performance by allowing the code compiler to apply optimization passes at link-time on the entire kernel rather than being limited on a per source file basis. LTO also has the possibility of providing greater space savings too. Plus in the case of Clang, LTO for the kernel is also needed to support Control Flow Integrity (CFI) for the kernel.

• add -ftrivial-auto-var-init and variable attribute "uninitialized" to gcc

  This is the first version of the complete patch for the new security feature for GCC:

  Initialize automatic variables with new first class option -ftrivial-auto-var-init=[uninitialized|pattern|zero]
  and a new variable attribute “uninitialized” to exclude some variables from automatical initialization to
  Control runtime overhead.

• Proposed GCC 12 Security Option Would Auto Initialize Automatic Variables - Phoronix

  An Oracle engineer has proposed introducing a new "-ftrivial-auto-var-init=" option for the GCC compiler that would allowing initializing automatic variables with either a pattern or zeroes in the name of security.

  In trying to fight security issues stemming from uninitialized memory disclosure, the suggested -ftrivial-auto-var-init==zero would initialize automatic variables with zeroes unless the new "uninitialized" variable attribute was used on a particular variable for overriding the behavior.

• An incomplete list of complaints about real code

  A couple of weeks ago, I got bored and decided to come up with a list of things that have bothered me when trying to run software to get things done. These might be reliability concerns, or development issues, or really anything else that bothered me at the time. This was actually pretty illuminating.

  I would actually recommend other people try it with their own annoyances and see how things stack up. It was interesting to look at the rows to see which choices were particularly bad because they hit so many of them, and then to look at the columns to see how often they showed up regardless of the language or environment.

• Call for testing: OpenSSH 8.5

  OpenSSH 8.5p1 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This is a bugfix release.

• Four kinds of data anomalies

  Datasets sometimes contain perfectly well-formed items that really don't belong with the other items in their field. In my data auditing work, anomalous items are typically out of range, out of place, out of match or out of date. Below are some real-world examples.

• How to make Eclipse run with a custom JDK on Mac |

  You might want to have more than one JDK on your Mac and run different programs with different JDK versions as it is with me.

  The easiest and safest way I’ve found is as follows.

• Checkout Skimmers Powered by Chip Cards

  Easily the most sophisticated skimming devices made for hacking terminals at retail self-checkout lanes are a new breed of PIN pad overlay combined with a flexible, paper-thin device that fits inside the terminal’s chip reader slot. What enables these skimmers to be so slim? They draw their power from the low-voltage current that gets triggered when a chip-based card is inserted. As a result, they do not require external batteries, and can remain in operation indefinitely.

• Why Was SolarWinds So Vulnerable to a [Crack]?

  Early in 2020, cyberspace attackers apparently working for the Russian government compromised a piece of widely used network management software made by a company called SolarWinds. The [attack] gave the attackers access to the computer networks of some 18,000 of SolarWinds’s customers, including U.S. government agencies such as the Homeland Security Department and State Department, American nuclear research labs, government contractors, IT companies and nongovernmental agencies around the world.

  It was a huge attack, with major implications for U.S. national security. The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the breach on Tuesday. Who is at fault?

• M1 Mac users are reporting excessive SSD wear and tear

  If you have a new M1 Mac, you probably think it's going to last for years and years, but some new troubling data suggests that might not be the case. More than a few users are reporting that SSDs on Apple’s M1 Macs are possibly being overused by the system, which could cause them to wear out earlier than usual.

• NurseryCam suffers data breach after security concerns raised

  NurseryCam, the remote video monitoring service for parents with young children at nurseries that was dogged with claims of troubling security issues last week, has suffered a data breach.

• Parents alerted to NurseryCam security breach

  The firm said that a "loophole" in its systems had been used to obtain data from parents' viewing accounts including: [...]

• LinkedIn is back up after an outage

  LinkedIn is back up after a worldwide outage affecting users on both mobile and desktop. The Microsoft-owned social network first started experiencing issues around 2PM ET, and LinkedIn confirmed things were back to normal at 4:21PM ET.

• Google Disbands Stadia Game Developers And Signals Potential For More Trouble Ahead

  It's no secret that in the year and a half since Google launched its video game streaming platform, Stadia, things haven't gone particularly well. Game developers were wary at the onset that Google, as it has with projects like this in the past, might simply one day shut the whole thing down if it thinks the venture is a loser. The launch of Stadia itself was mostly met with meager interest, due to scant games available on the platform. Even then, the rollout was a mix of chaos and glitch, critiques of its promise for true 4k game streaming, very low adoption rates, and some at the company appearing to want to go to war with game-streamers.

• John Deere Promised To Back Off Monopolizing Repair. It Then Ignored That Promise Completely.

  Five years or so ago, frustration at John Deere's draconian tractor DRM helped birth a grassroots tech movement dubbed "right to repair." The company's crackdown on "unauthorized repairs" turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM (and the company's EULA) prohibited the lion's share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for "authorized" repair (which for many owners involved hauling their tractors hundreds of unnecessary miles), or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.

• Spotify CEO Daniel Ek explains how the company plans to help artists (and itself) make money

  During the 90-minute event, the company rattled through a series of announcements. It detailed a slew of new podcasts, including one featuring former President Barack Obama and rockstar Bruce Springsteen as co-hosts, as well as a full universe of DC Comics programming. It debuted an expanded podcast ad marketplace, bolstered by its Megaphone acquisition and Streaming Ad Insertion technology, along with a Hi-Fi subscription tier. And it teased new tools for podcasters to engage with their audiences and make money through subscriptions. Spotify obviously intends to make podcasting a real revenue driver.

  But none of the announcements were groundbreaking for people in the industry. If anything, they demonstrated how far Spotify has yet to go. Crucially, Spotify announced that 7,500 musicians are making at least $100,000 per year through its platform, which isn’t much considering the service is available in 93 markets. Now, Spotify is trying to make the same pitch to podcasters as it did to musicians — that they’re all on the same side and share the same goals.

• Self-Host Your Videos, Take Full Advantage of HTML5 and Video Attributes
• Trying Out NoiseTorch to Reduce Background Sound/Noise in GNU/Linux
• How the Big Banks and OIN Can Whitewash Software Patents and Do Nothing Concrete About Patent Trolls
• IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, February 23, 2021
• How to Set Up a Gemini Server of Your Own, Even on a Simple Single-Board Computer
• Links 23/2/2021: Tails 4.16, Libinput 1.17, Fwupd 1.5.7, Firefox 86, NeoChat 1.1

• Realme UI 2.0 (Android 11) update tracker: These phones received so far

• Xiaomi Rolls Out Android 11 For These Devices, Redmi Note 8, Mi 10T Lite

• Learn to build apps for Android 11 with this bundle of 11 courses for just $40

• SBI to let merchants accept contactless payments on standard Android NFC phones • NFCW

• Playing HTML5 games on Chrome for Android is gonna get a lot easier

• Would you buy a Galaxy Watch running Wear OS? | Android Central

• Buying a used phone? That old version of Android might not be safe - CNET

• How to enable SD card storage for Android apps like Netflix or Plex on your Chromebook

• How to track sleep with Wear OS | Android Central

• Google announces new Android features including text scheduling, password checking, and more | The Independent

Hardly a week goes by without yet another major Windows security problem popping up, while Linux security problems, when looked at closely, usually turn out to be blunders made by incompetent system administration. But Linux can't rest on its laurels. There are real Linux security concerns that need addressing. That's where Google and the Linux Foundation come in with a new plan to underwrite two full-time maintainers for Linux kernel security development, Gustavo Silva and Nathan Chancellor.

Silva and Chancellor's exclusive focus will be to maintain and improve kernel security and associated initiatives to ensure Linux's security. There's certainly work to be done.

After recently looking at the early LLVM Clang 12 compiler performance on the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, in today's benchmarking is a look at how the GCC 11 compiler performance is looking in its near final state compared to GCC 10 under a variety of build CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS configurations on the AMD Zen 3 desktop.

This round of compiler benchmarking is focused on the GCC 10.2 versus GCC 11.0.0 (20210207 development snapshot) performance with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Both GNU Compiler Collection releases were built in the same release configuration mode. The tested CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS under each compiler included...

• The OnePlus Nord is getting an update, but it's not Android 11

• Vivo doesn't plan to release Android 11-based OriginOS outside China

• Redmi Y3 finally gets Android 10 update in India - Gizmochina

• Tips On How To Find The Best MicroSD For Your Android

• 5 best games like PUBG Mobile Lite for 4 GB RAM Android devices (2021)

• Android Auto 6.1 rolling out with fixes for Galaxy S21 series and other phones (APK Download)

• Google Assistant Actions Now Work on Locked Android Phones - Voicebot.ai

• Two Nokia smartphones receive Android Enterprise Recommendation certification - GSMArena.com news

• Qualcomm Partners With Lofelt to Improve Haptics on Android Phones via Software

• Haier K-Series 4K HDR Android TVs Launched in India, Priced Starting at Rs. 51,490 | Entertainment News

• How to Get Weather Forecast, News Updates With Alarm on Android – Gadgets To Use

I have spent some time looking at independent Linux distributions – that means those that are built from scratch and not derived from one of the larger, generally better-known distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.), such as Solus, which I wrote about earlier. This time I am going to look at KaOS Linux.

The screen shot above shows the initial display of a freshly installed KaOS system. If you are not familiar with the side-panel orientation used here, it is basically the same as the traditional bottom or top panel desktop, but with everything "standing on end". The complete desktop menu is at the top of the panel, just click on the "K" symbol (the desktop menu is open in this screen shot); the common application launchers are just below that, and the controls for things like the network, volume, bluetooth, network and such are at the bottom.

Introduced two months ago as part of KDE’s first Apps update in 2021, NeoChat is a Matrix chat client supported on both desktop and mobile and that comes with a neat set of features, including a built-in image editor, support for sending and accepting invitations, the ability to remember the last room you’ve joined, support for showing the last read message, as well as read markers.

The first major update is out now, as developer Carl Schwan reports on his blog, enhancing NeoChat with more super powers, including a new multimodal mode that lets you view and interact with multiple chat rooms simultaneously by opening them in new windows, and the ability to edit messages and also display in the chat if a message has been edited.

NoiseTorch is a real-time microphone noise suppression application for Linux that can filter out unwanted background noise like the sound of your mechanical keyboard, computer fans, trains and so on. It currently only supports PulseAudio, but PipeWire support is planned for a future release.

The application user interface is built with simplicity in mind. If you only have 1 microphone, all you have to do is launch the application, then click on "Load NoiseTorch". Once you do this, the application creates a virtual microphone called "NoiseTorch Microphone"...

Historically, the startup sequence in a Linux system was a replica of the initialization system that was introduced with System V Unix (SysV). The SysV init system adhered to the Unix philosophy. When people refer to the Unix philosophy, they usually reduce it to the well-known soundbite “Do one thing, and do it well.” And that thing was to start as the first process and then start other processes. It also culled zombies now and then.

SysV init did its job well enough, but it didn’t do it too efficiently. It started processes serially, one after the other. There was no parallelism. The design bottle-necked the throughput. This was more or less masked by the speed gains of modern hardware, and it’s not as if booting a Linux computer took an interminable age. But yes, technically, it could have been made more efficient.

As with everything else in Linux, the users had a choice. Alternatives were available. Competent users could configure their Linux computer to use a different init system, one that started processes in parallel and worked the way they liked.

Red Hat-based Linux distributions are shaping the industrial and corporate use of Linux for a long time. This project was quite popular since its initial release in 1995. Although later on, the developer company shut that down to start developing the successor named Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This commercial project is mainly for deployment in multi-processor systems and cluster computing.

RHEL is a commercial project with enterprise support from the Red Hat company. So, to utilize the power of Red Hat Linux more easily and affordably, the open-source community has come up with derivatives based on the Red Hat source. These distros provide much flexibility and customization options. They are quite reliable and stable as well to deploy on your organization.

Also: Custom policies in Red Hat 3scale API Management, Part 1: Overview - Red Hat Developer

• ZiHintPause is the first RISC-V extension ratified under the Fast Track Architecture Extension Process

  RISC-V open architecture allows designers to implement their own instructions, and some of those may become an official RISC-V extension. But the process to approve a new extension may have been suboptimal, so RISC-V International has just unveiled the Fast Track Architecture Extension Process, or Fast Track for short, that streamlines the ratification of small architecture extensions, as well as ZiHintPause, the first extension to be ratified under the new Fast Track process.

• Kiwikit Raspberry Pi Pico baseboard takes off-the-shelf modules

  While it’s possible to use Raspberry Pi Pico with a breadboard or Veroboard, we’ve seen the benefits of inserting the board into a baseboard such as Maker Pi Pico providing LEDs, a MicroSD card, audio output, and the ability to add ESP-01 WiFi module or well as up to two Grove expansion modules.

  Hammond Pearce decided to design his own Raspberry Pi Pico baseboard with Kiwikit board supporting some of the off-the-shelf modules and interfaces he commonly uses.

• Google kit uses RPi Zero and Coral Accelerator for machine learning

  Google Creative Lab’s Alto project tasks the Coral USB Accelerator and Raspberry Pi Zero SBC to implement easy-to-understand machine learning using an open-source mini robot that you build yourself.

  Google Creative Lab has unveiled a project called Alto. Alto by Google Creative Lab is a “teachable object using the Coral USB Accelerator.” “ALTO” stands for “A Little Teachable Object.” It’s designed to enable users to gain a basic handle understanding of machine learning. Alto uses the Coral USB Accelerator and Raspberry Pi to help users easily add machine learning to their hardware projects.

  Google’s Alto GitHub repository contains all of the instructions and files required to build an Alto from scratch. Best of all, Alto is completely open source —the code and template for this project are all free for access. Google notes that Alto is not an official Google product, but rather a collaborative effort between Google Creative Lab and its partners at RRD Labs.

• How to get started with FUZIX on Raspberry Pi Pico