The theme "Homeworld" by Juliette Taka has been selected as default theme for Debian 11 'bullseye'. Juliette says that this theme has been inspired by the Bauhaus movement, an art style born in Germany in the 20th century.

After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of eighteen choices have been submitted. The desktop artwork poll was open to the public, and we received 5,613 responses ranking the different choices, of which Homeworld has been ranked as the winner among them.

This is the third time that a submission by Juliette has won. Juliette is also the author of the lines theme that was used in Debian 8 and the softWaves theme that was used in Debian 9.

• jmtd → log → Borg, confidence in backups, GtkPod and software preservation

  Luckily, other fine folks have worked out reversing all these steps and implemented it in software such as libgpod and its frontend, GtkPod, which is still currently available as a Debian package. It mostly worked, and I got back 95% of the tracks. (It would have been nice if GtkPod had reported the tracks it hadn't recovered, it was aware they existed based on the errors it did print. But you can't have everything.)

  GtkPod is a quirky, erratic piece of software, that is only useful for old Apple equipment that is long out of production, prior to the introduction of the encryption. The upstream homepage is dead, and I suspect it is unmaintained. The Debian package is orphaned. It's been removed from testing, because it won't build with GCC 10. On the other hand, my experience shows that it worked, and was useful for a real problem that someone had today.

  I'm in two minds about GtkPod's fate. On the one hand, I think Debian has far too many packages, with a corresponding burden of maintenance responsibility (for the whole project, not just the individual package maintainers), and there's a quality problem: once upon a time, if software had been packaged in a distribution like Debian, that was a mark of quality, a vote of confidence, and you could have some hope that the software would work and integrate well with the rest of the system. That is no longer true, and hasn't been in my experience for many years. If we were more discerning about what software we included in the distribution, and what we kept, perhaps we could be a leaner distribution, faster to adapt to the changing needs in the world, and of a higher quality.

  On the other hand, this story about GtkPod is just one of many similar stories. Real problems have been solved in open source software, and computing historians, vintage computer enthusiasts, researchers etc. can still benefit from that software long into the future. Throwing out all this stuff in the name of "progress", could be misguided. I'm especially sad when I see the glee which people have expressed when ditching libraries like Qt4 from the archive. Some software will not be ported on to Qt5 (or Gtk3, Qt6, Gtk4, Qt7, etc., in perpetuity). Such software might be all of: unmaintained, "finished", and useful for some purpose (however niche), all at the same time.

• st, xft and ubuntu 20.04.1

  Some time ago I switched to AwesomeWM and with that came another change, my default terminal emulator. Having used GNOME terminal for years, I soon switched to Terminator back in the day. Leaving GNOME behind, in search for a more lean desktop with less frills and more keyboard centric features, I also had to ditch that terminal emulator (it has too many dependencies for my use case). Eventually I stumbled upon st, which fit the bill.

  st still seems almost perfect for me and I'm sticking with it, for now. There is one annoying bug though, which came to light when I started receiving e-mails with emoticons. Those emoticons crashed my 'st' instance!

  This is actually caused by an upstream Xft bug. When emoticons are displayed, they crash st. I had to resort to using xterm sometimes, which is, well, not a great experience nowadays. I set out on a journey to fix my desktop.

• Design and Web team summary – 10th November 2020 | Ubuntu

  Hi, my name is Long. I’ve recently joined Canonical on the Web and Design team as a Lead Visual Designer. Joining Canonical during this weird time that we’re all going through has been a strange experience.

  I’m generally a sociable person who likes those impromptu conversations and chance meets in the office, but having to work remotely I haven’t had the opportunity to meet any of them in person. That being said; all the guys have made me feel extremely welcome and everybody’s passion and enthusiasm is infectious.

  My previous experience expands a wide range of sectors, which include Banking, Insurance, Retail, Sports and Media, Healthcare and lots of other fun projects along the way. I’ve been doing design in some form or another for the past 20 years and it never gets old. I’m always awed and fascinated by the design community who are always pushing the boundaries of design.

  Although very cliche, my hobbies include keeping up with design trends, Fashion, Architecture, Product Design and everything else in-between that catches my eye.

  If I’m not scouring the net for inspiration, I’ll be reading stuff about tech or chilling out with a good book (Fantasy, Sci-Fi).

• Open Operators Training Day hosted by Canonical: a co-located KubeCon event

  KubeCon NA is just around the corner and, as always, we aim to give back to the community in any way we can. That’s why, in the context of the upcoming KubeCon, we’re hosting a full-day training on operators, led by Canonical’s engineers.

Allwinner RISC-V processor will run the Debian Linux operating system (Tina OS), and the $12.5 price tag for Sipeed SBC makes it the cheapest RISC-V Linux board with MMU by far. You can already run Linux on RISC-V using Kendryte K210 boards, but those are not really practical due to the lack of MMU and low-memory, or on HiFive Unmatched offered for $665 and allows you to build a complete RISC-V PC.

The upcoming Allwinner powered RISC-V board from Sipeed does not come with a 3D GPU, and memory is limited so based on the information currently available, it may end being comparable to a Raspberry Pi Model A+ minus the ability to run any application relying on 3D graphics.

Debian developers are two months out from the transition and essentials freeze for Debian 11 "Bullseye" that in turn should debut as stable later in 2021.

Starting on 12 January 2021 is the transition and essentials freeze for the Debian 11 "Bullseye" release. After that Debian maintainers should avoid large/disruptive changes. The soft freeze should then begin on 12 February and the hard freeze on 12 March. The full freeze and actual release of Debian 11.0 have yet to be determined.