Linux is a free and open source operating system. Linux is hidden away inside billions of consumer devices — everything from Android phones to smart toasters — and most servers run it, but it’s also a desktop operating system you can use for any kind of computer task. We cover the big news about major distros like Ubuntu and Mint, computers that run Linux out of the box, hacker boards like Raspberry Pi, and the latest moves by Microsoft to integrate Ubuntu into Windows 10.
Nathan is jumping to Linux, pushed to the brink by AI agents and Copilot, tempted by the promise of better gaming through Bazzite. This is it, guys.
captobie:
...,2010,2011,2012,2013,2014,2015,2016,2017,2018,2019,2020,2021,2022,2023,2024, 2025 will be the year of Linux!
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I don’t like where Windows is going. Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable. Time to give it a shot.
Bazzite can get you so close to the dream of PC gaming everywhere.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, have surprisingly never met before. That all changed at a recent dinner hosted by Sysinternals creator Mark Russinovich.
The worlds of Linux and Windows finally came together in real life, and Dave Cutler, Microsoft technical fellow and Windows NT lead developer, was also there to witness the moment and meet Torvalds for the first time. “No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.
Someone posted a Hacker News link to a demo of HNTerm, a command line tool that lets you browse that site using the MacOS or Linux Terminal. Here’s the GitHub link.
There are other similar tools, as this comment points out, but it’s a fun reminder that Terminal can do more than things like tweaking how long notifications stick around or adjusting your Mac’s power schedule.
[hnterm.ggerganov.com]
The long-term plan to gain access, and the backdoor’s careful design have experts agreeing that “Jia Tan” was probably not a lone wolf. Security researcher Costin Raiu tells Wired the XZ Utils attack is far more “cunning” than anything he’d seen previously.
Others have looked into when Tan submitted their code. Most uploads were linked to China’s time zone, while several were (perhaps accidentally) in the Middle East or Eastern Europe, and they continued working on notable Chinese holidays.
Red Hat urgently warned this week that recent beta versions of Fedora operating systems contained malicious code for backdoor access. Debian issued a similar warning.
A blog post from security firm Deepfactor points out that Microsoft developer Andres Freund notified the Linux security Openwall Project after stumbling on the exploit. On Mastodon, Freund said discovering it “really required a lot of coincidences,” starting with him probing curiously high CPU usage by an SSH process.
Update March 7th, 11PM ET: We have more details on the XZ Utils backdoor attempt right here.
According to the CMA:
Ubisoft will also be able, for a fee, to require Microsoft to adapt Activision’s titles to operating systems other than Windows, such as Linux, if it decides to use or license out the cloud streaming rights to Activision’s titles to a cloud gaming service that runs a non-Windows operating system.
This would have been a bigger deal when the Linux-based Google Stadia still existed and Ubisoft wanted it to succeed. Still, could be relevant someday!
Moolenaar’s family announced his August 3rd passing from a quickly-progressing medical condition in a Google Groups post.
In 1991, Moolenaar created Vim, an open-source code editor. It was based on Bill Joy’s vi editor, and quickly became popular with Linux users. Moolenaar actively contributed to Vim until just a few weeks ago, according to Ars Technica.
Today I learned about Ventoy, which makes an entire USB drive bootable — then, you just drag and drop ISOs to it!
I now have Win 11, Win 10, Arch Linux and HoloISO on a single stick, which shows up as a single drive with plenty of space for regular files, too. I might never use the dependable Rufus again.
The University of Minnesota’s path to banishment was long, turbulent, and full of emotion
