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The Tor network is either under attack by or very popular in Iran
The traffic-analysis resistant anonymizing Tor network's "user-base" Iran exploded the last two weeks bringing the amount of supposed users up from barely measurable to about 800.000 "people". There's roughly 83 million people in that country which would mean that one in a hundred people in Iran decided to use Tor all their web browsing the last two weeks.
Linux Kernel 5.2-rc3 released
Linus Torvalds has released a third release-candidate for the upcoming v5.2 of the Linux kernel. Very little has changed since RC2 and all the bigger patches applied have been license comment cleanups.
Gbrainy v2.4.1 released
Jordi Mas is proud to announce a new version of the brain teaser game Gbrainy. There's not much new in this version, a mono dependency as well as some unused code has been removed and there's a small change to a metadata file.
Xfce is now the most popular desktop (among new Manjaro Linux users)
The Arch Linux based distribution Manjaro has released download numbers for it's various editions in May and Xfce was the most popular Linux desktop choice - by a rather slim margin.
Linux market share on Steam grew by a whopping 0.02% in May
The numbers are out and the percentage of Steam gamers running Linux grew by just 0.02% in May, bringing the total number of Linux users to 0.84%. 0.27% were using Ubuntu, 0.08% weren't specifying their distribution and 0.07% were using Manjaro Linux.
IEEE freezes out Huawi and affiliated individuals Ending it's function as a Global Standards Body
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) defined the POSIX standard named by Honorary doctorate Richard Stallman. This makes this global coordinating standards-body's decisions important to free software users. The IEEE is based in the US and as a US corporation it is subject to US laws. Sections deployed as a strategy in the US trade-war against China have now made the IEEE cut Huawei and affiliates off from participation in the IEEE.
New Kernels released and You Must Upgrade NOW
Greg Kroah-Hartman and the kernel team released new versions of all the stable kernel branches, specifically 5.1.6, 5.0.20, 5.14.123, 4.19.47 and 4.9.180, on May 31th 2019. The Greg attached statements like "All users of the 5.1 kernel series must upgrade" to ALL these releases.
KStars v3.2.3 is released with configurable The Sky Map Cursor
KDE's Kstars team have released another minor update to the Kstars 3.2.x series. This version fixes some minor bugs and a race condition and adds the ability to use change the default X cursor in the Sky Map view to either an arrow or a circle.
The Web is back to One Standard.. sort of
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) wrote the original HTML and DOM standards and has been setting web standards ever since. A group unhappy with the W3C branced of to become the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) in 2004. The two groups have kind-of been fighting for web standard dominance ever since. They've finally come to terms with each other.
Fourth release candidate for Mesa 19.1.0 released and the Blockers Remain Open
There's been two blocker bugs in all the release candidates for the upcoming version 19.1.0 of the Linux graphics stack and they aren't fixed in the fourth and, hopefully, last one either. There were two fixes for radeonsi and two for vulkan in rc4, at least that's something.
The fight for contant blockers in Chrome (and Chromium) is far from over
Google appeared to back down from removing the webRequest API which is used by the most efficient advertising and annoyance fixing extensions who make the modern web usable from Chromium and Chrome. It only appear that way and a new update to their Manifest v3 doc shows that their plans to force you to view advertisements when you browse web are very much on track.
Tracklist for WJSN's upcoming album "For The Summer" revealed
WJSN's new mini-album will be released on the 4th of June. The title track will be named "Boogie Up" and it is composed by "Wonderkid". It is followed by "눈부셔", "My Type", "우리끼리" and Sugar Pop. Only the fourth track "My Type" is composed by one of their regularly used composers so this album could be a bit unique compared to most of WJSNs previous albums.
Krita 4.2.0 released with over 1000+ bugfixes and many new functions
The new major version of the popular graphics editing and painting program Krita is out and it's a big update. Better brush performance and a Python animation API are among the high-lights for Linux users.
WebKitGTK 2.25.1 released!
A new development release of the WebKit GTK port used by the popular light-weight web browser Midori for Linux and Android is now available. Sub-process sandboxing and better handling of dark GTK themes are among this milestone towards a stable 2.26-series.
Linux Kernel 5.2-rc2 released
This kernel includes the fix for TRIM commands writing beyond the allowed range when discarding blocks on device-mapped volumes on SSDs. There's also fixes for kvm, the Intel i915 GPU driver, the vmwgfx virtual GPU driver for VMware, nvme devices and the btrfs filesystem.
New WJSN album "For The Summer" coming in 7 days
Poplar pop-group WJSN (우주소녀) will be releasing a new album named "For The Summer" just a week from now. We can hardly wait.
GNOME 3.33.2 released
A second release-candidate for what will eventually become the stable 3.34 release is out. Gnome-Contacts, Gnome-Calendar and Gnnome-Maps were disabled after changes in evolution-data-server broke those applications.
Linux 5.1.5 released with IMPORTANT Fix for Users of Encrypted LVM volumes on SSDs
It could appear that Linux 5.1 got a bit too eager when it comes to file-system trimming after a simplification of the code which decides what to discard. This could lead to data-loss on certain setups. Linux 5.1.5 has a patch which makes fstrim obey max_io_len_target_boundary again.
Intel's back on top
Intel's far from being bankrupt and finished after the parade of security issues with their CPUs. They were the worlds biggest chip-maker in Q1 of 2019 and they held that position throughout Q2. Samsung was #1 in 2018. Intel's expected to be #1 for 2019 as a whole.
BlackArch Linux 2019.06.01 brought Back From the Future is Now Available
Version 2019.06.01 of the Arch Linux based Live ISO penetration testing distribution is now available with 150 new security tools, kernel version 5.1.4 and updated packages across the board.
GNOME Developers have Made Their Moves against Themes
The GNOME community has been debating removing theme support to secure a "consistent GNOME experience" for quite some time. A hand-full of developers of some GNOME apps have now published an "open letter" to "the community" asking distributions to not include custom themes.
KDE's Kate text editor has too many bugs, developers call for help
There's currently over 200 open bugs in Kate and the KTextEditor code used to implement it and other KDE editors like KWrite and KDevelop.
Microsoft GitHub launches "Sponsors" feature allowing users to Pay Open Source Developers
Microsoft has added a "Sponsors" function to GitHub which will make it possible to fund free software developers either once or monthly the same way services like Patreon work online Entertainers.
K-Pop group Pristin has disbanded
Pledis Entertainment has ended their contracts with the individual members of Pristin after just two years. It's over, there will be no more Wee Woo from Pristin.
Will Huawei laptop improvements get accepted into the Linux kernel?
The US trade-war against China is currently raging in the technology sector with a US ban of Chinese telecoms gigant Huawei. Companies ranging from Google to Microsoft to ARM are cutting ties with Huawei. How this affects the Linux kernel and open source projects in general will be telling as to how much influence the US empire has over free software projects.
Total War: THREE KINGDOMS from Feral Interactive now available
The game publisher Feral Interactive continued it's recently started tradition of releasing new games on Linux, macOS and Windows at the same time. It can be yours from their website or Steam for $60 or 60€ depending on where you are.
Indian state reportedly Saved 430 Million USD by using to their own Ubuntu-based Linux distribution in Schools
The Indian state of Kerala, with a population of 33 million, is using Linux on about 200,000 computers in schools and the cost-savings are adding up. And the advantages of using entirely free software their education system don't stop there.
GNU Parallel Akihito released
The GNU project is proud to announce a new version of the command-line utility Parallel which is now nearly 10 years old. The new version supports grouping jobs and there is quite a few bug fixes.
Version 0.4.0 of the KDE-focused Music Player Elisa Released
A new version of the potentially really nice and user-friendly music player Elisa is released. The use of libvlc as a back-end and a context view is new to this release. There are glaring usability-problems and oversights in v0.4.0 and all earlier versions of this player released and we do not recommend that anyone waste time trying to use it as of now. It does have great potential.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 released
A new version of the "Community" editon of the Swedish-owned German Linux distribution SUSE Linux Enterprise is now available with back-ports of newer graphics drivers and improved network management in their custom YaST configuration tool.