• Samsung's new 'Ingenius' commercials poke fun at the iPhone X

• Snapchat's payment feature is shutting down August 30

• PUBG Mobile servers DOWN: New Tencent update news for iOS and Android

• Nokia 3.1 will release in August, becoming Australia's cheapest Android One phone

• The phone maker that introduced Android to India is fading away

At a time when tech giants are ploughing millions of dollars in quantum computing and are striving ahead with breakthroughs, Google, Microsoft and IBM seem to be locked in an intense battle of quantum supremacy. Mountain View search giant announced Cirq — an open-source framework for NISQ computers. Cirq is an open-source initiative that allows developers to create algorithms that can run on a number of machines without having a full background in quantum physics.

The Google blog notes that once installed — Cirq enables researchers to write quantum algorithms for specific quantum processors. “Cirq gives users fine-tuned control over quantum circuits, specifying gate behaviour using native gates, placing these gates appropriately on the device, and scheduling the timing of these gates within the constraints of the quantum hardware,” the blog notes. Cirq supports running these algorithms locally on a simulator and is designed to easily integrate with future quantum hardware or larger simulators via the cloud.

NetBSD has a new major release in its 25th year. NetBSD 8.0 release brings several new features and improvements.

• 10 Best Free Open Source Software For Mac OSX Users

• The Data Transfer Project’s big-name support won’t matter without the biggest one: Apple

• Google's Open Source Data Transfer Project Promises Portability

• ​Google Data Transfer Project will help you move your data between services [Ed: This is 1) thwarting regulators 2) giving illusion of choice (between NSA PRISM giants)
  3) not stopping the spying 4) openwashing 5) merely duplicating one's personal data, does not delete 'behind']

While I have to admit that I am not the target audience for a distribution focused on web-based applications, I found Peppermint 9 to be a solid distribution. Despite pulling components from multiple desktop environments, Peppermint 9's desktop is well integrated and easy to use. It was also easy to add both web-based and traditional applications to the system, so the distribution can be adjusted for users who prefer either.

Peppermint 9 is not for everyone, but users who do most their work in Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online should give Peppermint a try. However, users accustomed to using traditional desktop applications might want to stick to one of the many alternatives out there. Yes, Peppermint 9 can be easily adjusted to use traditional desktop applications, but many of the other distribution options out there come with those kinds of applications pre-installed.

Your favourite GNOME applications will soon have dramatically different icons.

GNOME devs are redesigning the default icons for all GNOME core apps as part a wider overhaul of GNOME design guidelines.

The move hope to make it easier (and less effort) for app developers to provide high-quality and useful icons for their software on the GNOME desktop.

Not that this redesign is much a surprise, as the Adwaita folder icons we highlighted a few weeks back suggested a new tack was being taken on design.

With the GNOME desktop environment shipping on the Purism Librem 5 smartphone, the timing of this revamp couldn’t be better.

• Linux 4.17.9

• Linux 4.14.57

• Linux 4.9.114

• Linux 4.4.143

• Linux 3.18.116

Recently there have been several Linux distribution benchmark comparisons on Phoronix to test the latest Linux OS releases, including several comparing to the current Microsoft Windows 10 performance. Those recent tests have all be done with various Intel CPUs, but for those curious about the AMD Windows vs. Linux performance, here are some fresh benchmarks as we approach the end of July.

• Patents Roundup: Patent Litigation is Down and Seems to Have Shifted Away From Software Patents
• Half a Year Later the Patent Microcosm is Still ‘Pulling a Berkheimer’ in Vain
• The World Has Moved on and Beyond Software Patents, But Buzzwords and Hype Provide Workarounds
• ‘Efficiency’ in Action: António Campinos is Sending Jobs Abroad, Then Gagging Critics
• Links 23/7/2018: Linux 4.18 RC6, Plans for Next KDE

• NXP i.MX8 SoC Support Hasn't Yet Worked Its Way Into The Mainline Linux Kernel

  While early in the year was talk of introducing NXP i.MX8 SoC support in the Linux 4.17 kernel, that didn't happen. Support for that latest-generation i.MX SoC also didn't make it for Linux 4.18 and it also looks like it will not make it for Linux 4.19.

  There have been patches for the i.MX8 Linux SoC support since January thanks to Pengutronix with GPIO, clock, net, and the core patches being written by the German firm. But unfortunately they haven't yet made it to mainline. For the i.MX8 in the mainline kernel tree as of today with Linux 4.18 there is just the i.MX8QM AHCI SATA support, FEC network driver carried over from earlier Freescale SoCs, and some bits for the the Etnaviv DRM driver with the Vivante GC7000L graphics from the i.MX8M.

• Microsoft Surface Dial & Dell Totem Support Heading To Linux 4.19

  Back in May we covered the big rewrite of the Linux kernel's HID multi-touch code and in the process supporting the Microsoft Surface Dial and Dell Canvas 27's Totem input device. That work will be landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel.

• Distributed Services Fabric for Container-Based Applications Powered by Avi Network

  Avi Vantage constantly monitors several metrics that represent load on application instances. Operators can configure an autoscaling policy to automatically scale up or scale down application instances based on load. In addition, Avi Vantage also learns application access patterns and can perform intelligent, predictive autoscaling based on learnt access patterns.

  In our next blog post we will focus on the intelligence and security features that Avi Networks and OpenShift provide for container-based applications.

• Fedora Needs Some Help If Continuing To Support The LXQt Desktop

  Fedora's LXQt desktop is at risk of being dropped if new packagers do not step up to maintain this lightweight Qt desktop environment's support.

  LXQt for Fedora right now is already outdated and in need of some adjustments for better integration into the Fedora ecosystem. But the core Fedora LXQt packager has since left and another Fedora packager who had stepped up to maintain the LXQt bits is needing to move on due to his university work.

• GSoC Status Report for Fedora App: Abhishek Sharma

• MIUI Hidden Settings For Xiaomi Fans | Remove Bloatware From Your Mi Device

• GNU Parallel 20180722 ('Crimson Hexagon') released [alpha]

  GNU Parallel 20180722 ('Crimson Hexagon') [alpha] has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/parallel/

  This release has significant changes and is considered alpha quality.

• PR: With Blockchain for the Open Source Hardware – ENVIENTA

  The Hungarian rooted ENVIENTA project started its preliminary token issue on 1st July (ICO private token sale).

  The aim of the project is to help to spread the open source philosophy becoming more and more common in hardware development industry and to support the life cycle of the products, made this way, from the idea to the realization. The idea of the open source hardware is not new, however, there has been no attempt to gather all the participants in this field on a common platform in order to support cooperations.

• Wine-Staging 3.13 Released With Extra Patches

  Following Friday's release of Wine 3.13 is now the adjoining Wine-Staging 3.13 version debut that incorporates various extra/testing patches atop this code-base for running Windows programs/games primarily on Linux and macOS systems.

• Bomber Crew, the action-filled bomber sim, has gotten quite a few new features recently

  Liam covered Bomber Crew when it first came out and found that bombing the enemy from high wasn’t as easy at he thought it’d be. I’ve since played a little of the game as well and have found it to be an engaging and often wild ride, where even with a competent crew and plenty of good equipment it can be a challenge to make it home. It can be a little overwhelming during it’s action-filled missions but once you get into the groove of the game it’s a rewarding experience.

• Card-based strategy game Faeria gets massive “2.0” update, moves away from a F2P model

  The rather engaging card battling game has recently gotten a massive new update that changes up the game significantly. Most importantly, the title is no longer free-to-play with new players having to buy into the experience.

• Easy Guide to Install Apache Tomcat 9 on Ubuntu 18.04 / 16.04 LTS Server

• Upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS in 4 Easy Steps

• How To Create A Bootable USB Media Using Rufus For Installing Linux/Windows

• Tuple Performance Optimisations in CPython and Lichen

• Where are the passwords of the users located in Linux?

• Slow performance issues of OpenBSD or FreeBSD KVM guest on Linux

• How to see PCI devices info on CentOS 7 and RedHat Enterprise Linux 7

• How to install PHP 7.2 on CentOS 7/RHEL 7

• How to Install and Use MariaDB on Ubuntu 18.04

• WebGL, Fragment Shader, GHCJS and reflex-dom

• How to configure encrypted unbound DNS over TLS on CentOS Linux

• KDE Team Announces Major Improvements in Upcoming KDE 18.08 Release

  The developers of Linux’s KDE suite have announced a major slew of updates set to be included in the upcoming KDE 18.08, set for an August 2018 release. Details for these updates revolve around a range of new features and overall polish for the core KDE apps including Gwenview, Spectacle, Konsole, and Dolphin, as well as focusing on the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.14 update due in October.

  Due to KDE’s open-source nature, the devs also have a site up for people interested in getting involved, whether its simple bug reporting or actually being hands-on with the development using C++, Qt, and CMake. You can read more about their community program at KDE – Get Involved.

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 28

  Here’s another big week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative. We’re getting ready for the release of KDE Applications 18.08–the second of our three yearly Applications releases. As the numbers in the version suggest, it will be released in August of 2018, about a month from now. As such, there’s been a lot of focus on new features and polish for core KDE apps such as Dolphin, Gwenview, Konsole, and Spectacle. We’re also ramping up our work for KDE Plasma 5.14, which is scheduled for release in October.

• I’ve built a box

  This is not the typical post I use to write (which is usually about what I do at work, often related to GNOME, so if you’re not interested, just skip it…). But a couple of months ago I did something different that I still want to write about. That thing was a wooden box (sorry if you were expecting a Gavin Box) that I was asked to carve by my brother for his wedding, to be used for carrying the wedding rings.

  The wedding had a Game of Thrones’s theme (there was not blood in it though, if you’re wondering), so naturally my brother wanted some of that in the box. Thus, my initial idea was to just buy a box and carve something to do with GoT and include their names. Something like this, as my brother sent me for inspiration.

• Bastian Ilsø Hougaard: GUADEC18 Developer Center BoF Part 3: Challenges

  Currently, the Developer Center infrastructure and documentation suffers from low to non-existing maintenance. It’s a sign we need to take serious. Do we need lower the barrier to contributing to the developer documentation? What can we do to make the infrastructure easier to maintain? The underlying issue here likely also ties into why we now see new GNOME documentation hosted on other websites by different maintainers powered by different underlying technologies. I think this challenge needs both thinking from a technical point of view (how we might support editing multi-language documentation and auto-generated documentation) and an organizational point of view (assigning maintainership, reviewing our docs, aligning visions).

• Persepolis Download Manager: Impressive Python frontend for aria2

  Persepolis Download Manager is a handy open source download manager written in Python and PyQt. It’s a graphical frontend for aria2 aiming to make downloads both easier and faster.

  This software project commenced development in 2015 with the first release in July 2016. While it was initially only a simple graphical user interface, the software has seen some pretty hefty development since then with a whole raft of additional functionality added, improvements to the user interface, and cross-platform support.

• Microsoft Visual Studio Code replumbed for better Python taming [Ed: Embrace and extend. Microsoft is trying to push developers of FOSS over to their proprietary IDE that puts spying inside compiled code.]

• What’s new in Apache Subversion 1.10.2?

  I couldn’t believe if you are unaware of the Apache Subversion. It is an Enterprise-class centralized version control founded in 2000 by CollabNet Inc. One of the most successful opensource project in past many years. Mostly all the opensource projects and enterprise source code are on subversion. It has the rich community of developers and users who are continuously improving subversion.

• SPAKE2 In Golang: Journey to Cryptoland begins

  Before I can go to detail I should tell why/how I came to implementing SPAKE2 in Golang. Story starts a couple of month back when I started contributing to *magic-wormhole.rs*, a Rust port of original Python project of magic-wormhole. You can read this LWN article to understand more about what magic-wormhole is.

  During contribution my friend Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan said to me that I should try to port the magic-wormhole to Golang. I was not a expert Go programmer but had understanding of language basics and thought why not use it to improve my language understanding. And this is where it all started.

• AMD AOCC 1.2.1 Compiler Flings Flang Fixes

  AMD released a minor update to their AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler.

  AOCC is the company's downstream of LLVM/Clang with optimizations for their Zen CPU microarchitecture with compiler optimizations/improvements before they work their way into upstream LLVM. AOCC is the replacement for AMD's Open64 compiler used years ago with earlier micro-architectures.

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Pivotal APJ head of platform architecture Lawrence Crowther and discuss the importance of Open-source and cloud.

Firstly, can you tell me a bit more about Pivotal and its cloud platform?

Pivotal’s original mission was to transform the way the world builds software. Now our mission is to transform the way the world runs software, too, through a combination of methodology and technology. Whether we are helping clients change their culture towards product development or managing platforms, we use the same agile principles in both cases, such as Extreme Programming and the Lean Startup approach. This is often a radical shift for companies to embrace so we partner with them for a “learn by doing” approach.

We believe that in order to support a fast development team who are iterating quickly and updating constantly, you need a different kind of platform. One that removes all barriers and lets you go from “concept to cash” quickly in a reliable, secure and safe way. You can build software as fast as you want but if it is not ending up in the hands of users it doesn't matter. Once Pivotal Cloud Foundry is up and running the cost of deploying applications and iterating on them becomes almost zero. This is because it takes away the details of infrastructure, middleware, dependencies, integrations, monitoring and more from the development team so they can focus on delivering value to the business over and over again.

• Linux 4.18-rc6

  So this was the week when the other shoe dropped ... The reason the
  two previous rc releases were so nice and small was that David hadn't
  sent me much networking fixes, and they came in this week.

  That said, it's not really a huge rc this week either, so it's all
  good. But the networking pull this week does mean that almost exactly
  half of the diff is core networking, network drivers, or networking
  documentation updates.

  The rest is other drivers (mostly gpu, but also scsi, nvma, pci,
  pinctrl..), some arch updates (arc, x86, nds32, powerpc), and "misc"
  (tooling, header files, some vm and fs noise).

  The small but nasty VM bug we had earlier did indeed get fixed last
  rc, but there was some 32-bit fallout from the fix, so rc5 still had
  issues. But I'm hopeful that rc6 _really_ fixed all the cases.

  Shortlog appended for people who want to just get an overview of the details,

  Linus

• Linux 4.18-rc6 Kernel Released With Many Networking Fixes, Other Regressions Resolved

  The sixth weekly test release of the Linux 4.18 kernel is now available for evaluation.

  Linux 4.18-rc6 is prior than the two previous weekly release candidates since those versions hadn't incorporated any big batch of networking fixes, which hit this week. So about half of the changes are networking changes in Linux 4.18-rc6 while the other half is a mix of driver and architecture updates along with other noise.

Eric Hameleers has unofficially contributed to Slackware for what feels like forever. He not only runs his blog Alien Pastures dedicated to Slackware and offers a huge selection of packages pre-compiled on his vanilla systems, readily available for our perusal. He also offers the Ktown repository with updated packages of KDE4 and the next generation Plasma desktop for both the stable and testing branches of Slackware. He also started the Slackware Live project based on his own LiveSlak scripts to give people an opportunity to run Slackware current without
committing to an install and to get an idea what the next version will be like.

On 25th June the latest line of images was released, one for each desktop. Live ISOs are offered in 32 and 64bit, although only the Xfce and KDE4 images are available for both architectures. The other two images with MATE or a Plasma 5 preview substituted for KDE4 are 64bit only. This 1.2.0 release mirrors Slackware current as of 23/06/2018. Initially there was also a version with the Cinnamon desktop but this seems to have fallen behind.

Apart from the desktop chosen there are some differences in the size of the images. The Xfce spin is just under 700MB, the standard desktop version with KDE which is just named slackware-live-current is 3.1/3.0 GB respectively, the MATE version 2.1GB and the Plasma 5 edition a hefty 4.3GB, also due to extra software onboard. Read more about how the project came about and an overview with tips on Eric's blog.

• Android Circuit: Exciting Galaxy S10 Leak, Nokia Notches Arrive, Google's Massive Pixel 2 Mistake

• Google's iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary

• Shh! Android replacement in the works

• How to personalize your home screen on Android

• This week in Android: AA Podcast revival, OnePlus 6 camera shootout, and more

• The Pixel 2 XL's still got it, which bodes well for the Pixel 3

• Google reportedly offered Android changes to EU in 2017

Earlier this month I posted some results when looking at the Windows 10 versus Linux power consumption using a Kabylake-R Dell XPS 13 laptop and testing Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.04, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux. For some additional numbers, I took three other distinctly different laptops and tested them on a few Linux distributions to see how their battery life and power efficiency compare as additional metrics to complement this earlier data.

• Cherry-Picking Dissenting Opinions on Patent Cases the Last/Latest Resort for Patent Maximalists
• Can Trade Secrets Litigation Replace (in Part) Patent Litigation?
• Links 22/7/2018: Neptune 5.4, NetBSD 8.0