September 2nd, 2020
Genius marketing, or a one-way ticket to Clown World? The community finally wakes up to Fedora's big change. Plus Amazon's Bottlerocket Linux goes GA, a new funding initiative for Tor, the Linux Foundation looks to go green to make green, and much more.
Show Transcript and Links
Fedora 33 is still a few weeks away from release, but it looks as though the major change it's bringing has finally hit home. Last week a blogpost from the project confirming the switch to Btrfs as the default filesystem for new desktop installs saw a lot of social media pickup. And now that the dust has settled, it's well worth having a read through what the distro's users had to say. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Back in the day, you knew where you stood with Fedora. Many releases started as a hot mess, but we all accepted this was simply the way things had to be to help new technologies mature before they were pushed up to the Red Hat mothership. Then the pace of innovation slowed, and eventually Fedora started landing updates that were actually pretty solid, if a little dull. Which brings us back to the current day, and the upcoming release featuring Btrfs for the desktop. Oddly, some users seem to think this is happening to pave the way for Btrfs to appear in RHEL, but it already has, until it was dumped a few cycles ago. And Red Hat hasn't shown any interest in revisiting that decision, but continues to focus on its Stratis storage management technology as a way forward. Although today's Btrfs isn't exactly the same filesystem that happily chomped its way through users' data in the past, bad memories persist and bad reputations stick. So while Fedora devs continue to gush about the supposed benefits that the change will bring, comments from actual users paint a far more mixed picture. How it will all work out when the new version finally launches is anybody's guess. But at least nobody is going to accuse Fedora of being boring any more, which you can't help thinking might be the whole point of the exercise.
• Btrfs Coming to Fedora 33
• [Old] why redhat abandon btrfs where SUSE makes it default.? [sic]
• Hacker News: Btrfs Coming to Fedora 33
AMD quietly slipped out a budget graphics card for the rest of us ahead of yesterday's big unveil of its new GPU technology. The entry-level Radeon RX 5300 is optimized for 1080p gaming, and is claimed to easily outperform NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1650. While the unit is expected to be priced at around $130, the only question is whether it will become available on the retail market, or be kept solely for use by OEM customers.
• AMD Sneaks Out The Radeon RX 5300 For Casual 1080p Gaming
The Linux Foundation has announced that it intends to found a new body to help banks, insurers, and others profit from fears about global climate change. The organization is building a platform that will draw together climate data and economic models along with analytic tools, to help its users maximize their green investment opportunities. If you're wondering what on earth any of this has to do with championing open source software, then you're certainly not alone.
• New LF Climate Finance Foundation to Host Open Source Initiative to Address Climate Risk and Opportunity in Financial Sector
Back in the real world, the first version of Thunderbird that enables its newly integrated OpenPGP support by default has been released. Sadly there's still no automatic upgrade path for users of version 68 of the app, but one is being promised for a future release. Meanwhile the Blender project has also pushed out a new version, which as usual is bursting with too many features to list here. So check out the shownotes for more details.
• Thunderbird Release Notes, Version 78.2.1
• Thunderbird:OpenPGP:2020
• Blender 2.9
The latest monthly update from the Linux Mint project brought a couple of surprises. The team announced that its Warpinator network transfer tool has now been packaged as a Flatpak, and is available for use on other Linux distributions. Mint is also in the process of following the path pioneered by Peppermint OS and later Ubuntu, and is working on adding support to allow websites to be launched and managed like desktop applications.
• Linux Mint: Monthly News – August 2020
And finally today, the next community edition of the PinePhone will be shipping with Manjaro. When orders open in September you'll be able to pick up the base model for a hundred and fifty bucks, while another fifty will secure an upgraded handset, along with the company's dongle that features USB, Ethernet, and HDMI ports. And as usual, Pine will be donating $10 from every sale back upstream, in this case to the Manjaro project.
• PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition
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