• Subtitler 1.5.5

  Subtitler is a free Desktop application to search and download right subtitle blazingly fast. Now available in the software repository.

• Catalyst Web Browser 3.1.0

  Catalyst browser is an amazing and elegant Electron/Chromium based web browser. Now available in the software repository.

• Fifo Web Browser 1.1.0

  Fifo browser is a privacy orientated browser based on modern frameworks. Experience a modern browser based on new frameworks. Easily integrate your day with Fifo. Since Fifo is so modern, you don’t need to worry about change, you can just enjoy the experience.

• OpenMandriva New LXQt ISOs for Rock & Rolling

  For Rock and Rolling users OpenMandriva Community has made ISOs using the LXQt desktop.

• [PCLinuxOS] Screenshot Showcase

• [PCLinuxOS] From The Chief Editor's Desk...

• Do You Trust Technology?

  Mike Wacker, a former Google engineer, has repeatedly claimed that Google engages in manual manipulation of search results. Not only that, Mike Wacker called out CEO Sundar Pichai for lying to Congress about the matter.

  This was in addition to then-anonymous claims that he himself had been advised to reorder search results. Google has been repeatedly criticized for manipulating search results, especially by burying and censoring conservative content while raising positive results for left-wing content.

  In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2018, CEO Sundar Pichai was asked directly by Representative Zoe Lofgren (Democrats-CA) if "there wasn't a little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we [Google] are going to show the user."

  Sundar Pichai said, "We don't manually intervene in any particular search result."

  Mike Wacker explained in a post on Medium that he was able to find where Google had actually altered search results regarding abortion. Google had a special file regarding blacklisted topics, and if searches were performed regarding these topics, an alternative algorithm would trigger alternative search results.

  Another former Google engineer, Zack Voorhies in a recent interview with The Epoch Times, said that Google tweaked its algorithm to ensure that the negative stories in the mainstream media about former President Trump were what people saw when they used its search engine, the world's most popular search engine. Zach Vorhies said that the tech giant specifically changed its news algorithm to harm the former president.

  "As a Google whistleblower, Vorhies turned over 950 pages of internal Google documents to the Justice Department's antitrust division detailing Google's extensive censorship project. This project is called "Machine Learning Fairness," which has already corrupted Google Search, YouTube, and News products. This, along with various blacklists and secret page rankings, is being used by Google to manipulate public opinion according to a hidden agenda."

  [...]

  Developer Jamie Kyle wrote (in a removed post, but still on the wayback machine), "I think it's time to publicly share how Microsoft stole my code and then spit on it."

  Kyle - whose formidable open source pedigree includes contributing to Babel, Flow, Yarn, and serving on the TC39 steering committee - created Lernajs, a lightweight tool for organizing and managing JavaScript packages across projects. The result is that a team at Microsoft apparently mirrored the Lernajs codebase and renamed it Rushjs. They didn't fork it, which would be a totally legal open source thing to do. Instead, it appears - according to Kyle's very convincing and publicly documented timeline of events on GitHub - that Microsoft employees essentially copy/pasted Lernajs.

  As an adult, Kyle tried to find out what happened, approach the other party, and collaborate on a resolution to the problem. Basically, Kyle just wanted public recognition of Rushjs' origins. "So I reached out to the people I knew at Microsoft. This was probably a year ago. They were shocked and apologized. But since then, nothing has happened," Kyle wrote. "Oh wait, yes, something did happen. Rushjs history was messed with and a lot of the code was moved, functions renamed, rewritten.... Instead of just updating a license or even adding a footnote, they went through all this work, to not give credit to the real author of the program."

  This is just one of the cases where Microsoft has appropriated other people's code without giving anything in return, not even credit to the original author. Let's not forget Keivan Beigi, who created AppGet, a software that copies the features of the Linux model of apt-get software installation and maintenance. At that time, the product manager of Microsoft's Applications Division expressed interest in the AppGet project with Keivan, and on the premise of inviting him to join the Microsoft team, they had many in-depth exchanges about the design ideas of the AppGet project, with a 5-moon time frame. But in the end, Microsoft suddenly lost touch with Keivan and launched the WinGet project whose design ideas and code structure were highly similar to AppGet after half a year.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the April 2022 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community.

• CentOS Dojo is over, hello FOSDEM! :: Pensées de Michel — Personal thoughts and musings

  The first CentOS Dojo of the year is, as usual, held as a FOSDEM Fringe event. It’s virtual - again - which is a blessing and a curse. It would be fun to travel and meet people in person again once the situation permits, then again, given my family situation that would have meant I would have to skip for the next year or two anyway.

  That being said, it was held on Hopin, which has a decent hallway track experience. Nothing much is changing on the platform front - linux.conf.au was on Venueless again, and FOSDEM is again using a bleeding edge Element web client at chat.fosdem.org. I like the Hopin and Element experience, though I admit to a bias - Element because I like decentralized platforms, and Hopin because I know more people among the attendees of events held there. And Hopin is still unpredictably buggy on Firefox!

• As Kubernetes Matures, The Edge Needs Containment [Ed: Paid-for IBM puff piece; many self-described "journalists" are just lousy, reckless marketing people]

  In a relatively few short years, Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform for managing software containers, besting a lineup that included such contenders as Docker Swarm and Mesosphere. Since spinning out of Google eight years ago, Kubernetes has developed at a rapid pace, with new releases coming out as often as four times a year.

  Kubernetes also has spawned a range of platforms from the likes of Red Hat (with OpenShift, a key driver of IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2019, VMware (Tanzu), and SUSE (Rancher) and its now being offered as a service via top public cloud companies Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as others.

  That said, there are continuing signs of maturation and stabilization in Kubernetes, which is under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). For one, the torrid pace of the release cycle is beginning to ease, from four releases a year to about three. And now, there is talk among those within the Kubernetes project about possibly rolling out longer-term support releases, according to Brian Gracely, senior director of product strategy for OpenShift at Red Hat.

• Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2022

  This month I accepted 342 and rejected 57 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 366.

  Lately I was asked: Is it ftpmaster’s opinion and policy that there is no difference in NEW queue review process between bin and src?

• StarlingX R6.0 is here!

  One of the core components of the platform is the Linux kernel. In light of the earlier CentOS announcements, the community decided to move over to Debian in an incremental process. In the 6.0 release, this means to upgrade to the 5.10 version of the kernel.

• Introduction & Testimonial From rlcopple

  Though I currently live in the Denver metro area, I'm originally from Texas. The longest that I've ever lived in a city was Marble Falls, TX for 18 years. (Growing up, we moved a lot!) At any rate, my "computer history" starts in the mid to late 70s, my Mom had an old Kaypro computer, with an old "distro" called "CP/M". Anyone remember that one? I immediately became interested in it.

  My Mom must have noticed, because in the early 80s, she gave me a TI-994a console. It had cartridges that you could insert to play various games, mostly. If I'm recalling correctly, it boasted a 4KHz processor, along with a hefty 16K of memory. I used my TV as the monitor. I learned "Basic" programming on that computer. One of the first programs I ever wrote on it was a game: Yahtzee. I had a general idea of how to do it, and the crazy thing is, it actually worked! Though it did stress out the processor to go through the 5-nested loop to verify that it actually was a long straight, before awarding the points. Usually it took around 5 minutes -- time enough to get a cup of coffee and go to the bathroom.

  From there I had my first IT experience at a gas measurement company, working on a Digital RS11 (if I remember that correctly) that had about 6-7 VT100 terminals connected to it. Though, as in most jobs I've had, that wasn't my only duty, often, not even my primary one. (I was a bookkeeper from 1996 - 2011, mostly.) That's despite the fact that all that I know comes from experience, not classes or any degree (my college degree was in Religion).

  Obviously, since I was a bookkeeper during those years, I was locked away into the Windows systems, since everyone I worked for used QuickBooks and that program could only run on Windows (as well as Macs, but I never used those much). That said, I did fiddle with Linux during those days. In 2001 or 2, I "attempted" an install of Debian from a stack of CDs I had ordered (that was back in the modem days, it would have taken a couple of days back then, tying up the phone lines, to even think of downloading 1 Gig, much less the 2-3+ of most ISOs now days). I failed to get it up and running, however, mainly because I was looking for starting up the X server, which I did. However, no graphical menu popped up! (Shows you how much I knew about Linux). Indeed, I did get it to boot up into the X environment, but I couldn't do anything in it. Then, around 2006, I successfully installed Ubuntu onto my old laptop, played around with it for a while, but it was only a passing interest at that time. Around 2011, when my last client who used QuickBooks ended their professional relationship with me, I was free to think more about actually moving to Linux. I discovered dual-boot, so I did, installing Lubuntu alongside Windows. It took me around 2-3 months to figure out how to configure it to my liking, from shortcut keys to replacement programs. The hardest was a replacement for inventory as in Quickbooks. I never did find one, so I created a spreadsheet for it, which I'm in the middle of updating. That was also the time I first met Peter Patterson Mint Spider who I know resides on this forum. {waves} Hi Peter!

  At any rate, I've used several different distros since then, and reviewed several on my YouTube channel which I started in August of 2018. Then I came across BDLL, and the community there, and they have gratefully sucked me into their collective. Obviously, that is where I met Alie, or Aris. I mixed those two up as I didn't realize they weren't the same person until just yesterday. Hi! But if my memory serves me well (and frequently, it doesn't) I believe it is Alie. Well, my introduction to PCLinuxOS was on that channel, where we recently, like 3 or 4 weeks ago, reviewed PCLinuxOS. Which has led me here, to this community.

  I currently have 8 computers (two of them my sons, and one of them the original computer I first installed Lubuntu on.) My "daily driver" computer is a fairly new Framework computer. I've installed PCLinuxOS BigDaddyTrinity on my son's Lenovo Legion Gaming Desktop, out in our living room. More about that in Testimonials.

  So, I hope to be able to contribute here some, as well as learn some more about this distro. Thanks for inviting me to come here and post my questions, Peter.

• [PCLinuxOS] Screenshot Showcase

• iXsystems Outperforms in 2021 with 70% Year-over-Year Growth of TrueNAS Open Storage Deployments

• New tools to simplify wrapping your head around Kubernetes • The Register

  Engineer Nelson Elhage offers several reasons Kubernetes is so complex but this does at least mean that multiple companies offer tools to try to help you master it.

  The Google-backed container-management system is famously difficult, even to spell or pronounce. (It's often called "k8s" for short: since "kubernetes" is 10 letters long, "k8s" signifies "k" + eight letters + "s", and is pronounced "kates".) The Mountain View mammoth even commissioned a comic to explain what it is. (It's long, but quite good.)

  K8s is a set of tools for managing clusters – but not everyone has a spare cluster lying around that they can play with.

• Repo Review: Xtreme Download Manager

  Xtreme Download Manager is an advanced and feature-full download manager that's designed to accelerate your download speeds by using a dynamic file segmentation system. It provides integration for most popular web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, etc) through the installation of an addon. Xtreme Download Manager also supports downloading videos from YouTube and other streaming sites.

  Xtreme Download Manager's interface has a very modern look, and is fairly easy and straightforward to use. On the left side are several categories to help you sort your downloads into their different file types. From the top-right corner, you can set the filters to show only complete, incomplete, or all downloads. From down in the lower-right corner, you can use a switch to enable and disable the web browser integration.