Screenshot from the latest statistics
Summary: The media hardly mentions such things (what’s left of the media gets paid by Microsoft to hail Windows and create ‘buzz’ for Vista 11), but the common carrier known as Windows is going nowhere fast
Series parts:
SaM Solutions’ main delivery centre is still located at 15 Filimonova in Minsk.
Summary: SaM Solutions, which handles parts of the EPO‘s work, is seemingly backing Lukashenko’s regime (whilst amassing EPO funds thanks to the dictatorship of Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos)
AS explained in the preceding parts, the political turmoil which engulfed Belarus in the 2020 did not leave the IT sector untouched. On the contrary, it is clear that these events signalled the end of a long era of “peaceful coexistence” between the IT sector and the country’s autocratic regime.
“As the political opposition was gradually silenced, many IT companies did in fact proceed to relocate some or all of their operations to other neighbouring countries such as the Baltic states and Poland.”When the authorities resorted to brute force to crush the protests, some 300 CEOs of IT companies based in Belarus threatened to move their business abroad if the government did not put a stop to the violent repression and permit a new election to be held.
As the political opposition was gradually silenced, many IT companies did in fact proceed to relocate some or all of their operations to other neighbouring countries such as the Baltic states and Poland.
Ironically, many IT specialists from Belarus chose to move to the Ukraine which – with the assistance and support of the Lukashenko regime – has recently become the victim of Russian military aggression.
In July 2021, the chief executive of a company that had abandoned Belarus was quoted as follows:
“Pretty much everyone is doing it [i.e. moving operations out of Belarus]. Most Belarusian founders with a brain and a heart don’t support the movement into an absolute dictatorship and what’s happening in Belarus, the terror. Because every week, there’s another atrocity, another move toward, like, North Korea.”
However, amidst the many media reports about these matters it seem impossible to find any mention of one particular company, namely SaM Solutions, the EPO’s preferred outsourcing partner for “Software from Minsk”.
The company’s website lists two relatively new delivery centres located in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius and in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (currently under attack by the Russians). However, SaM’s main delivery centre is still located at 15 Filimonova in Minsk.
In the absence of any reports to the contrary, it seems fair to conclude that the management of SaM Solutions is not overly concerned about the political situation in Belarus and has no plans to relocate its operations despite what others perceive as “the movement into an absolute dictatorship … like North Korea.”
Andrej Bakhirev, co-founder of SaM Solutions and chairman of the board, is reputed to hold German citizenship and he resides in Latvia.
Back in 2011, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Andrej Bakhirev didn’t have any inhibitions when it came to speaking to the German media about the political situation in his home country.
In an article which appeared in the current affairs weekly, Wirtschaftswoche under the title “Apps aus der Diktatur” (“Apps from the dictatorship”), it was reported that many young Belarusians – including employees of SaM Solutions – were involved in anti-government demonstrations coordinated via social media platforms such as Facebook. On that occasion, Bakhirev noted that “as a private company, we have an advantage. We don’t have to fire our employees if they demonstrate.”
“Nevertheless, during the autumn and winter of discontent of 2020 in Belarus, Bakhirev remained silent about the events which were rocking his home country.”But those were different times and, in the wake of the events of 2020, Bakhirev seems to have become more reticent and publicity-shy. In particular, he has not shown any inclination to share his thoughts about the wave of protests which engulfed the country or the violent backlash by the Lukashenko regime.
It’s worth noting that students at Bakhirev’s alma mater, the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics (BSUIR), were among those who played a prominent role in the anti-Lukashenko protests of 2020. Bakhirev is a founder and member of the Board of Trustees of the International Association of BSUIR Alumni.
Protest rally outside the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics in August 2020 with students holding white-red-white banners of the anti-Lukashenko opposition movement.
Nevertheless, during the autumn and winter of discontent of 2020 in Belarus, Bakhirev remained silent about the events which were rocking his home country. This is despite the fact that his personal situation would appear to afford him a considerable margin freedom to express criticism of the Lukashenko regime if he felt so inclined.
In this regard, it is worth noting that Bakhirev holds German citizenship and resides in Jūrmala, a fashionable seaside resort close to the Latvian capital of Riga which is popular with wealthy Belarusian expatriates.
Following his retirement from operational management in 2015, Bakhirev has resided in the picturesque seaside resort of Jūrmala close to the Latvian capital Riga.
According to the Latvian edition of the “luxury lifestyle magazine” VIP Lounge, Bakhirev is one of the top 50 wealthiest investors in Latvia. In 2017 he was ranked as no. 23 and in 2018 he managed to reach no. 17. In 2019 he dropped back to no. 30 with an estimated income of € 2.01 million – based on his 69.3% stake in the Latvian subsidiary of SaM Solutions which reported a profit of € 2.91 million.
The VIP Lounge blurb for 2019 reads as follows in translation:
30. ANDREI BAKHIREV – 2.01 Million Euro
A well-known representative of the IT business in Belarus, associate professor at the University of Kassel (Germany), who moved to Jūrmala with his family in 2015 and retired from operational management. In Latvia, he owns 69.3% of the limited liability holding company SaM Solutions, which earned 2.91 million Euros consolidated profit. He also fully owns Crocus Hall LLC, which ended the year with a loss of 7 thousand Euros.Bakhirev, together with partners, has been developing IT outsourcing on an international scale since 1993. Among the clients of his international company SaM Solutions, which even entered the top 100 largest representatives of the world’s IT outsourcing, are Siemens, Kaspersky Lab, FUJITSU and others. Regional offices of SaM Solutions are located in the USA. Germany, Netherlands, Belarus and Ukraine.
According to VIP Lounge, Bakhirev is one of the top 50 wealthiest investors in Latvia, with an estimated annual income of over € 2 million based on his shareholding in the Latvian subsidiary of SaM Solutions.
From the company records of SaM Solutions in Germany, Bakhirev is also known to have had an address in Türkenfeld in Bavaria, close to Munich. However, it is not known whether he still maintains a residence in Germany.
Bakhirev previously had an address in the Bavarian town of Türkenfeld near Munich but it is not known whether he still maintains a residence in Germany.
Bakhirev’s caution about expressing his views on the political situation in Belarus is perhaps understandable. After all, Lukashenko showed what he was capable of in the case of the émigré activist and journalist Roman Pratasevich who was arrested by Belarus security services in May 2021 after his flight had been diverted and forced to land in Minsk in an act of “state-sponsored piracy”.
“On the other hand, the unwillingness of SaM’s management to take a clear and unambiguous stance on the situation in Belarus, makes it impossible to determine how closely aligned with the regime the company’s bosses might be.”In Bakhirev’s case, his reticence is probably motivated by pragmatic business-related considerations rather than by concerns for his personal safety. Due to his German citizenship, he is unlikely to be at risk of being targeted in person. However, if he were seen to criticise the regime in public it could have “undesirable consequences” for the operations of SaM’s primary “delivery centre” in Belarus .
On the other hand, the unwillingness of SaM’s management to take a clear and unambiguous stance on the situation in Belarus, makes it impossible to determine how closely aligned with the regime the company’s bosses might be.
So far there does not appear to be enough information in the public domain to answer this question fully.
“So far there does not appear to be enough information in the public domain to answer this question fully.”However, local media reports about an internal dispute which flared up at SaM in October 2020 indicate that at least one senior member of the company’s management used his private Facebook page to make pro-regime statements and to post disparaging comments about those involved in the post-election protests.
We will look at this incident in more detail in the upcoming parts. █

This has been a great week with lots of Linux news and releases, starting with Arch Linux’s brand-new menu-based installer, System76’s Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS distribution based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, as well as KDE’s Plasma Mobile Gear 22.04 software suite for Linux phone and tablet users.On top of that, I tell you all about the upcoming Linux Lite 6.0, Ubuntu 22.10, Unity 7.6, and GNOME 43 releases, and all about the new Xfce apps released in April 2021. You can enjoy this and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for May 1st, 2022, below!

If you’ve run any operating system for any length of time, you will probably have encountered strange phenomena. When it comes to computers, strange is usually unwelcome. The longer you run any given OS installation without a reinstall, the more likely you are to see at least a few quirks. This can be anything from programs freezing, to your cooling fan suddenly revving up, to all manner of oddities.For the commercial desktop OSes with massive install bases, it’s easy to find support in the form of official manufacturer (OEM) or OS developer troubleshooting and documentation pages. However, for Linux such resources aren’t always available. Even when they are, they don’t always issue consistent guidance from distribution to distribution and aren’t guaranteed to account for the user’s specific hardware.

The best Linux online courses and providers make learning how to operate with the typical operating system straightforward. This is crucial because Linux training and Linux distributions are becoming essential OS to be familiar with if you want to become a successful businessman. One of the reasons is that most websites run on several open source Linux platforms. One cannot forget that there are reasons why Linux is more secure than Windows and what makes it so strong.Whether it’s FreeBSD, RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, or CentOS, it’s wise to familiarize yourself with primary operations.Linux knowledge can help you understand IT reports, examine operations directly from your Windows computer, and safety concerns. For Linux administrations, it’s helpful to have an excellent comprehension of Linux and good experience.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be giving you our take on the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and which flavors we liked the most. Then we’re going to discuss some impressive KDE Plasma mobile enhancements. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Saving abandonded IoT devices with FOSS, watching directories for changes, monitoring disk usage, window managers vs desktop environments, further thoughts on work-supplied hardware, and more.
In this video, we are looking at hKaOS 2022.04.
GIMP is an amazing application but there are a bunch of features that I wish it had that in my opinion would make it instantly a better application
What? Today’s video isn’t about the Steam Deck? That’s right. Today we’re taking a trip down memory lane to explore one of Microsoft’s worst technologies and the spirit of the WMV format still hangs around and makes Microsoft money.
Richard Hughes announces the fwupd 1.8.0 release and notes that the associated Linux Vendor Firmware Service has now shipped a minimum of 50 million firmware updates.
I’m thrilled to be joining Intel to work on the performance of everything, apps to metal, with a focus on cloud computing. It’s an exciting time to be joining: The geeks are back with Pat Gelsinger and Greg Lavender as the CEO and CTO; new products are launching including the Sapphire Rapids processor; there are more competitors, which will drive innovation and move the whole industry forward more quickly; and Intel are building new fabs on US soil. It’s a critical time to join, and an honour to do so as an Intel fellow, based in Australia.
My dream is to turn computer performance analysis into a science, one where we can completely understand the performance of everything: of applications, libraries, kernels, hypervisors, firmware, and hardware. These were the opening words of my 2019 AWS re:Invent talk, which I followed by demonstrating rapid on-the-fly dynamic instrumentation of the Intel wireless driver. With the growing complexities of our industry, both hardware and software offerings, it has become increasingly challenging to find the root causes for system performance problems. I dream of solving this: to be able to observe everything and to provide complete answers to any performance question, for any workload, any operating system, and any hardware type.

Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.
Notepad++ is a popular source code editor and a solid Notepad alternative for Windows users.
It is a powerful utility that provides the best possible performance without taking a lot of storage space.
Unfortunately, it is not available for Linux users. An unofficial Snap package is available to install, but it may not be satisfactory considering it depends on an embedded version of Wine under the hood.
While we do have some options for Notepad++ alternatives, I came across something that tries to re-implement what Notepad++ offers for Linux users. And, with a similar user interface.
A new version of open source music app Rhythmbox has been released.
Rhythmbox 3.4.5 includes major improvements to its podcast downloading, playback, and management capabilities.
For instance, devs rewrote the podcast downloader to offer better resume and retry; episode order is preserve if/when multiple podcasts episodes share the same publication date; and podcast episode GUIDs (globally unique identifier) are now used to handle episode URL changes.
Adding a podcast feeds with no episode no longer throws an ‘unhelpful’ error message; cancelling a podcast download is more reliable; and various fixes ensure podcast album art and feed descriptions shows up as intended.
Enjoying the Gnome desktop, including the default Gnome Adwaita theme? Just wish the font on the Gnome panel was just a tad smaller? Then you came to the right place. This article explains how you change just the font of the Gnome top bar. It involves creating your own minimal Gnome shell theme, as we’ll cover step-by-step.
Today we are looking at how to install Funkin’ Big Brother mod on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Secure Shell (SSH) is one of those tools every Linux user will probably work with at some point. With SSH you can easily (and securely) log into remote servers and desktops to administer, develop, and check up on those machines.
Sorry, I should have posted this weeks ago to save others some time.
If you are running openconnect-sso to connect to a Cisco anyconnect VPN, then when you upgrade to Ubuntu Jammy, openssl 3.0 may stop openconnect from working.
PC gamers have been ardently waiting to play Apex Legends on Linux and now they finally have the opportunity to do so. Even if it has not been officially revealed by the developers, many players have already tried it out and are happy with the results.
Moreover, the battle royale game comes equipped with Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) on Linux, which is all the more reason to get excited. The news is yet to be published by EA, Valve, or Respawn Entertainment.
Two years ago I wrote a blog post about using gst-build inside of WebKit SDK flatpak. Well, all that has changed. That’s the true upstream spirit.
Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) is a free and open-source web analytics application developed in PHP to be the ultimate alternative to Google Analytics. Matomo can be used to track online visits to one or more websites and displays reports on these visits for analysis.
Want to set a certain size of your desktop icons and/or change the spacing between them? Here’s how to do the job in Ubuntu 22.04.
Ubuntu 22.04 defaults to GNOME desktop 42 and uses an extension called “Desktop Icons NG” (DING in short) to handle shortcut icons on desktop.
It provides 4 icon sizes (“Tiny”, “Small”, “Normal”, and “Large”) in ‘Appearance‘ settings for choose from.
Using the terminal shell is powerful in Linux machines when checking and monitoring the system’s health and status. The terminal shell executes commands with the connection to the Linux kernel. As a result, it can provide you the real-time results. There are tools and commands for Linux that help you monitor the CPU load, Hard disk space, disk bad sectors, RAM status, etc. Ubuntu and other distribution users use the terminal shell over the GUI method to check the hard disk size because the command-line method to monitor the hard disk details and specifications is hassle-free and gives us real-time output with fewer errors.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS.
The gzip data compression tool was written in the early 1990s, and it’s still found in every Linux distribution. There are other compression tools available, but no matter which Linux computer you find yourself needing to work on, you’ll find gzip on it. So if you know how to use gzip, you’re good to go without the need to install anything.
gzip is an implementation of the DEFLATE algorithm which was invented—and patented—by Phil Katz of PKZIP fame. The DEFLATE algorithm improved on earlier compression algorithms which all operated on variations of a theme. The data to be compressed is scanned, and unique strings are identified and added to a binary tree.
The unique strings are allocated a unique ID token by virtue of their position in the tree. The tokens are used to replace the strings in the data and, because the tokens are smaller than the data they replaced, the file is compressed. Substituting the tokens for the original strings re-inflates the data back to its uncompressed state.
Being a sysadmin is a complex task due to the large amount of information we have to handle. However, thanks to applications like Elasticsearch, we can find feasible solutions to huge problems. So, today, you will learn how to install Elasticsearch on Alma Linux 8.
Start compressing your file by installing 7-Zip on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal or GUI interface.
7-Zip is a popular free and open-source ZIP program that allows you to create and unzip archive files, also the RAR format is supported. It helps us to compress files and documents as well as unpack compressed folders. 7-Zip supports 7z, ZIP, RAR, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB, and NSIS formats. However, it achieves the highest compression rate with the in-house 7z format. With the 7z format, you can even create self-extracting archives. In addition to the graphical interface, 7-Zip has a powerful command-line version.
When Ubuntu migrated from the traditional method of managing network controllers, it sent users and admins into a tizzy to quickly learn the new method. That method was (and is) netplan. It’s actually quite an elegant solution for a fairly complex problem. Not only is everything handled in one convenient file, everything is laid out in JSON format—which most admins know quite well.
As you may remember, a few weeks ago we had an article describing how most people using ProtonDB have moved away from using Ubuntu in the past few years (based on ProtonDB reports), mostly in favor of Arch-based distros (Arch and Manjaro taking the lead). Hence the fall of Ubuntu. The article did very well, audience-wise, but I must admit that the graph takes a few minutes to understand properly. So for the past week or so, I have been working to produce an animation instead, that would hopefully make it more tangible and also more fun to watch.
Another huge acquisition for the games industry today as Embracer Group have agreed to purchase Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montréal amongst others.
HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed came to Linux recently as a Native title and it is Steam Deck Verified but it wasn’t without issues, which Digital Cybercherries have now fixed up. The latest update isn’t just bug fixing though, it also overhauls and adds in quite a lot of the game too.
Ever since smartphones have made an entry into our lives they have had a lot of influence on our socio-cultural movements. As a user of Linux who is able to run phone apps right in your system means a lot to many. Android, which is the de-facto mobile OS, used by many people around the world also leverages its eco-system to achieve all objectives. This list has the 5 best Android emulators for Linux that are free to download Oh, and they are open-source too.
Basics first…
Now, if you do not know what an emulator is then don’t need to worry at all, these are pieces of computer apps that let users run their favorite apps or even games directly from their Linux system. follow through to know about the best ones that can be used to run Playstore apps.
Going Rogue: A Festival of Persistence is a new week-long event on Steam, celebrating how diverse and confusing the whole roguelike thing is.
Love city builders like the classic Sim City? You may want to keep a close eye on Cytopia, a free and open source retro pixel-art sim. It’s still somewhat early on in development right now so it’s not exactly fully playable but still worth a shout-out, I’ll be keeping a close eye on it to follow along for you.
Kapital: Sparks of Revolution is a city-builder that brings in some social society management, so prepare for some fierce class riots and more. Quite an interesting turn for a city-builder, since most tend to focus on pure economy simulation.
Looks like developer Crows Crows Crows has managed to make a hit into another hit, with The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe shifting 100,000 copies in the first 24 hours the developer announced on Twitter.
Dorfromantik is a masterful blending of genres to create something you don’t often see. Bringing together elements of tile matching with a city-builder, it sure is a peaceful way to game. Note: key provided by the developer.
Hinterland has confirmed now that the future of the The Long Dark will have the Story and Survival modes completely separate, along with paid expansions for the Survival mode. This news shouldn’t be a shock to regular players, or our readers, since we covered their initial thoughts on it in a previous article where they announced the plans.
Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) brings the latest application updates, bug fixes, and enhancements to its release Trinity R14.0.12.

The Kdenlive team is happy to announce the release of version 22.04. This development cycle comes with more than 300 commits, mostly focused on stability and polishing, ranging from packaging all the way up to user interface enhancements.Besides the improvements to the Windows and macOS versions, Kdenlive is now runs on Apple’s M1 architecture and includes initial support for full range 10-bit color on all platforms — although note that 10-bit color does not work with effects yet. Kdenlive also automatically offers to transcode variable frame-rate videos to an editing-friendly format, and some filters, like Blur, Lift/Gama/Gain, Vignette and Mirror, are now slice threaded, which improves rendering speeds.
Encouraging support among users is one of our priorities and that’s why Kdenlive introduces Effect Templates in version 22.04. Effect Templates are custom effects that can be shared with other community members through the KDE Store and can be downloaded directly into Kdenlive. The store is already open and you can contribute your effects too!
The dahliaOS is a unique distribution and a “fork” of the Google Fuchsia operating system that runs on mainline Linux Kernel and Zircon Kernel. The Zircon kernel is a newly designed kernel developed by Google for its own set of projects and devices.
The parent OS Fuchsia is designed to work on any hardware, including car dashboards to PCs. That said, the dahliaOS is a new promising operating system (or should I say a new Linux Distribution?) which brings a new era of desktop computing experience to traditional Linux distributions.

The Docs team is experiencing a new burst of energy. As part of this, we have several big improvements to the Fedora Docs site that we want to share.For years, readers have asked for search. We have a lot of documentation on the site, but you sometimes struggle to find what you’re looking for. With the new search feature, you can search the entire Fedora Documentation content.
Lunr.js powers the search. This means your browser downloads the index and does the search locally. The advantage is that there are no external dependencies: searches send nothing to a remote server and there is no external Javascript required. The downside is that the index has to be downloaded before search is available. Although we compress the index, if you’re on a slower connection, you may experience delays.
Networking is a fundamental sysadmin skill, but it is often overlooked. Many sysadmins find networking topics challenging, and it can be difficult to progress from core network skills to advanced troubleshooting capabilities without regular practice. This may be why networking is a popular topic on Enable Sysadmin.
Kubernetes and its associated extensions, such as service meshes, introduce additional network complexity that an administrator must be prepared to tackle. Basic network tools, such as ping and traceroute, can be helpful during the initial troubleshooting stage. However, I’ve consistently found that viewing the packets traversing the wire is the best way to troubleshoot and understand complex protocol and application-level issues.
Giving recognition to someone for a job well done is one of my favorite duties as a community manager. Not only do I get to thank someone, but I also have a chance to highlight a role model for the rest of the community. Recognition also provides an opportunity to celebrate an achievement, like someone helping new community members with onboarding, reducing technical debt, or contributing an exciting new feature.
For the 16th year, the Red Hat Innovation Awards are recognizing the technological achievements of Red Hat customers around the world who demonstrate creative problem-solving to make a positive impact on the business world and on society. This year’s winners are the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), the Center of Computing and Information Systems, Telefónica Colombia, the Department for Work and Pensions, and Washington Health Benefit Exchange.
A community-wide, online voting process will determine which customer is distinguished as the 2022 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Voting is now open and will close at 9 a.m. ET on May 5. The winner will be announced on May 11, 2022, during Red Hat Summit. To vote for the 2022 Red Hat Innovator of the Year, visit www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/innovation-awards.
Earlier today, we announced the winners of the 2022 Red Hat Innovation Awards, recognizing our customers’ achievements with open source technology. Each year, we have many strong entries that showcase what innovative thinking, open culture, and transformative uses of Red Hat technology can do for business and society.
We’re excited to highlight an additional group of customers using open source technology to make waves in their respective industries – Grupo Logístico Andreani, the Department of Transport, Driver and Vehicle Computer Services Division Ireland, Secretaría de Innovación Argentina, and Tata Motors Limited.
Red Hat Summit is right around the corner, with live events on Tuesday, May 10, and Wednesday, May 11.
Of course, if you haven’t yet, you can get started by registering for the event now, and then keep reading for tips on how to make the most of this two-day virtual experience.
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Extending open hybrid cloud to the edge of the network
Cloud services
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
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The most well-known and arguably most widely used Linux system, Ubuntu, has a flavour called Ubuntu Cinnamon, which has been updated to 22.04 to match the latest Ubuntu release. This new version brings 5 years of support with it.
At some point, System76 will release a version of Pop!_OS that is a thing of its own, wholly separate from the desktop it was based on … GNOME. Although Pop!_OS 22.04 isn’t that release, you can see the underpinnings of what’s to come with even more subtle shifts away from that which makes GNOME, well, GNOME.

Before you get too excited, you should know that Canonical is not coming back to maintain Unity desktop.Thanks to the developer of the Ubuntu Unity distribution (Rudra Saraswat), we get to see an update to the Unity desktop environment after six long years.
In case you did not know, Ubuntu Unity is a community project that utilizes the Unity interface instead of GNOME. So, yes, if you wanted to use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Unity desktop, Ubuntu Unity is your friend.
The Register noted this week that two “unofficial” Ubuntu remixes “came out on the same day as the official flavors.”
- Ubuntu Cinnamon (Linux Mint’s flagship desktop environment)
- Ubuntu Unity, a revival of what used to be the official Ubuntu desktop by Ubuntu team member Rudra B. Saraswat (described the Register as “a 12-year-old wunderkind”)
Unity 7.6 will be the first major version of Unity in six years, with the previous release in May 2016.
Unity Desktop Environment is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment designed and maintained by Canonical for Ubuntu operating systems. It was later abandoned by Canonical and taken over by other maintainers.
Over time, since its 17.10 release, Ubuntu has reverted to using GNOME as the default desktop environment. So the last official update from Canonical for Unity was the minor 7.4.5 version dated back in March 2019.
More to the point, one issue was that every 6 months it was time for a new upgrade. And although Ubuntu is one of the most reliable operating systems for upgrades (I’ve rarely had an Ubuntu upgrade go south), it’s nevertheless a time-consuming process that can put a damper on your productivity during the process. And even though it only happened twice a year, if you wanted to stay on top of updates, it was a necessary evil.
That’s one of the reasons why rolling release distributions exist. A rolling release Linux distribution receives continuous package updates, so there’s no major update (for instance, you don’t go from 21.10 to 22.04). A rolling release distribution ensures you always have the latest version of installed software as soon as it’s made available. That is not to say you’re using bleeding edge, beta applications on your desktop. Rolling release distributions do leverage stable software, so you don’t have to worry that you’re going to lose precious work due to unstable, beta software.
Now that you have at least a cursory understanding of what a rolling release is, let me introduce you to a distribution that turns Ubuntu Desktop into a rolling release. That distribution is called Rolling Rhino and the developers have taken great pains to create a solid, dependable user desktop that adheres to the rolling release philosophy, by way of the user-friendly Ubuntu Desktop.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 733 for the week of April 24 – 30, 2022.
Azure’s confidential VMs deliver confidentiality between different cloud customers and also between customers and Azure operators. Hardware-level encrypted guest isolation, combined with measured boot and TPM-backed full-disk encryption in Ubuntu and Azure Managed HSM, customer code and data are encrypted in use, in transit, and at rest using encryption keys that are protected and can be controlled by the customer. Canonical has been an important partner in this effort, working closely with us to bring confidential computing innovations to our customers.
– Vikas Bhatia, Head of Product for Azure Confidential Computing

Another day, another Rockchip RK3566-based device with an unnamed mini PC / thin client running Ubuntu 20.04, equipped with 2 to 4GB RAM, 16GB to 32GB eMMC flash, HDMI and VGA video outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, an optional wireless module, and more…If the screenshot above is legit, the motherboard is named “Jieyun Zhilian T50 board”. I could not find anything about the T50 board, but Shenzhen Jieyun Zhilian Technology company specialized in thin clients, and the J50 thin client has exactly the same enclosure and ports assignment as the mini PC described above, except it comes with a quad-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 2.0 GHz.
Anbernic launched a handheld gaming console built around the Rockchip RK3566 Arm processor. The device has a Samsung 4.95” OLED screen. The RG503 was shown as out of stock shortly after its initial release, however they seem back in stock for $150.
The RG503 features the versatile Rockchip RK3566 quad-core 64-bit Cortex A55 processor (up to 1.8GHz) and the Arm Mali-G52 GPU. The specs listed by Anbernic show 1GB of RAM and 16GB GB of internal storage. To compensate, the device features 2x TF slots (up to 512GB) as seen below.
Virtual reality technology is advancing quickly and today’s headsets provide a very immersive visual and auditory experience. But they neglect the other senses. Haptic feedback, via vibration motors in controllers, is the only common technique for imparting a sense of touch. While haptic vests and other experimental devices exist, consumers continue to show that they have little interest in wearing bulky equipment. To enhance feedback in VR, a team from Carnegie Mellon’s Future Interfaces Group built an ultrasonic array that stimulates the user’s mouth.
LilyGO T-PicoC3 is a small development board combining Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core microcontroller with ESP32-C3 RISC-V MCU to add WiFi and Bluetooth LE connectivity and adds a 1.14-inch color display to the mix, plus several I/Os.
We had previously other designs merging ESP32 and RP2040 with UDOO KEY. Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, or the Pico Wireless Pack among others, but as far as I know, the T-PicoC3 board is the first to use Raspberry Pi RP2040 and ESP32-C3 RISC-V processor.
Farewell, April –we’re wrapping up the month with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community’s activities…
Greetings to the “We miss FOSDEM and drink lots of beer”-Crew. I will drink one on you
Since GUADEC is hard to get to from Europe and some of us don’t do air travel, we’re going to do another edition of Berlin Mini GUADEC this year!
We have a pretty solid local community in Berlin these days, and there are a lot of other contributors living reasonably close by in and around central Europe. Last year’s edition was very fun and productive with minimal organizational effort, and this year will be even better!
Firefox 100 is now available for download. You can download the latest version of Firefox from this link. Previously, Mozilla issued a warning about the upcoming version 100 as it might crash some websites.
Firefox 100 has some interesting new features since it’s version 100 and all that. For Linux users, it enables GTK overlay scrollbars by default, which means that you’ll now see sleek and thin scrollbars on web pages when scrolling instead of those old and thick scrollbars, which will still appear on mouseover.
WordPress 6.0 Beta 4 is now available for testing!
Beta 4 was not part of the originally published development cycle. It is aimed at providing an opportunity for testing some specific issues that were resolved since Beta 3. WordPress will continue with the regularly scheduled release milestones on May 3rd, 2022, with the RC1 release.
This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on a production or mission-critical website. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 4 on a test server and site.
WordPress has undergone several significant modifications in the recent year, thanks to the efforts of developers. WordPress 6.0, which will be released soon, will take the same approach, delivering numerous useful additions and significant enhancements to the WordPress core.
WordPress 6.0 will be available on May 24. They have already released three beta versions of the next release, giving us a good idea of what will be new in WordPress 6.0.
In the thirtieth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy and special guest Channing Ritter give listeners a sneak peek into the WordPress 6.0 release ahead of the Release Candidate 1 (RC1).
Defending your right to modify and repair the software on your electronics has been a cornerstone of Software Freedom Conservancy since its inception. We defend these rights in a variety of ways: petitioning the Copyright Office to return our repair and modification rights, investigating reports people send us where companies are using our member projects’ code but aren’t providing the source or repair and modification information that the project’s license requires, contacting those companies to remind them of the license requirements, and (eventually, in rare cases after companies ignore our gentle reminders for many months) filing lawsuits against intransigent companies who refuse to give you the complete source and instructions you deserve (and that they are required to provide by the licenses of the software they freely choose to use).
In the rare cases where Software Freedom Conservancy has been forced to move its enforcement actions from gentle reminders to filing lawsuits, we have used a variety of approaches. Our lawsuit filed in 2007 against several manufacturers, used copyright law (specifically copyrights in the BusyBox project) to compel those manufacturers to comply with the GPL (such as Westinghouse). The lawsuit we filed last year against Vizio takes an approach more appropriate for widely marketed and available consumer devices. Namely, the claim in Vizio is a contract claim for third-party beneficiary rights under the GPL, which will allow us (and all other customers who bought Vizio TV’s) to receive the repair and modification instructions to the software more directly.
Today, Software Freedom Conservancy — a nonprofit organization centered around ethical technology, ensuring the right to repair, improve and reinstall software — announced that it now accepts copyright assignment from any copyright holders in any copylefted software. The self-service system enables developers to entrust their copyrights to Software Freedom Conservancy, which will enforce copyleft licenses according to its Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement.
This initiative comes in response to developers’ decades-long complaints that while they would like to work with a charity to handle copyrights of copylefted software for the good of the community and the general public, the burdensome nature of paperwork remained a barrier. Under this system, developers can — within a few minutes on a straightforward online form — entrust their copyrights to a nonprofit dedicated to the software freedom and rights of users all over the world.
Graphics processors are becoming a must-have in computing, so Nvidia is stepping up its work with standards and open-source communities to downstream technologies once largely exclusive to the company’s development tools.
A lot of work is being done specifically around programming languages like C++ and Fortran, which are deemed to lag on native implementation to execute code across highly parallel systems.
My DevOps journey kicked off when I started developing Datree, an open source command that aims to help DevOps engineers to prevent Kubernetes misconfigurations from reaching production. One year later, seeking best practices and more ways to prevent misconfigurations became my way of life.
This is why when I first learned about Argo CD, the thought of using Argo without knowing its pitfalls and complications simply didn’t make sense to me. After all, it’s probable that configuring it incorrectly can easily cause the next production outage.
In this article, I’ll explore some of the best practices of Argo that I’ve found, and show you how to validate custom resources against these best practices.
Until Qt 6.2, QDateTime’s ability to take time-zone adjustments – both seasonal daylight-saving time and occasional changes (on the whims of politicians) to a zone’s standard offset from UTC – into account was limited to the years 1970 through 2037, with some kludges in place to extrapolate beyond 2037. As the default assignee for time-related bugs, I’d long wanted to fix this, to use such information as we do have available. So – finally, once Qt 6 had been released – I made that change and discovered what it broke.
Oleksandr Kyriukhin announced a new Comma Complete / Community release. Check out the new features and bug fixes: with Apple M1 support, support for fez and REA ecosystems, and support for lexically scoped grammars, to name but a few. In case you didn’t know, Comma is the IDE for the Raku Programming Language.
Over the last few weeks, GStreamer’s RTP stack got a couple of new and quite useful features. As it is difficult to configure, mostly because there being so many different possible configurations, I decided to write about this a bit with some example code.
The features are RFC 6051-style rapid synchronization of RTP streams, which can be used for inter-stream (e.g. audio/video) synchronization as well as inter-device (i.e. network) synchronization, and the ability to easily retrieve absolute sender clock times per packet on the receiver side.
Note that each of this was already possible before with GStreamer via different mechanisms with different trade-offs. Obviously, not being able to have working audio/video synchronization would be simply not acceptable and I previously talked about how to do inter-device synchronization with GStreamer before, for example at the GStreamer Conference 2015 in Düsseldorf.
The example code below will make use of the GStreamer RTSP Server library but can be applied to any kind of RTP workflow, including WebRTC, and are written in Rust but the same can also be achieved in any other language. The full code can be found in this repository.
The first mention of QUIC on this blog was back when I posted about the HTTP workshop of July 2015. Today, this blog is readable over the protocol QUIC subsequently would turn into. (Strictly speaking, it turned into QUIC + HTTP/3 but let’s not be too literal now.)
Announced almost 4 years ago, Nimbus Data set out to produce and sell a Solid State Drive (SSD) that was 100 Terabytes (TB) in size. It is called the ExaDrive.
[...]
The question I have is: is it cost effective?
No, at least not according my calculations. If I were to buy Seagate SAS 15 TB 12Gb Nytro drives at about $4,500 per drive, then I would need 7 of those drives to get a capacity of at least 100 TB with a total cost of $31,500. If we were to evenly distribute the same amount of data workload evenly across all of these drives, we should in theory get the same endurance.
Here’s a missed one from Friday, Microsoft has joined the Open 3D Foundation, who oversee the Open 3D Engine that’s a free and open source updated version of Amazon Lumberyard that was contributed by Amazon. Only caught this as they boosted their post on Twitter. It seems no press email was sent out to us when it happened.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, ghostscript, libarchive, and tinyxml), Fedora (CuraEngine, epiphany, gzip, usd, vim, xen, and xz), Oracle (maven-shared-utils and qemu), Red Hat (gzip, python27-python and python27-python-pip, rh-maven36-maven-shared-utils, rh-python38-python, rh-python38-python-lxml, and rh-python38-python-pip, and zlib), Slackware (pidgin), SUSE (jasper, java-11-openjdk, libcaca, libslirp, mariadb, mutt, nodejs12, opera, and python-Twisted), and Ubuntu (libinput).
We are seeing a censorship wave from the right the likes we have never seen. Shredding common core math books, “Don’t Say Gay”, Maus book banning, burning the muṣḥaf, denouncing reality as “fake news”. Do we hear one peep about that? Nope. But try to block direct harassment and it’s a deadly sin apparently.
In some countries they put you in prison for saying anti-government things, but not in the US, where you can clearly do that. Ainent is a “free speech absolutist” which I suppose means believing that it’s ok to shout “fire” in the proverbial crowded theatre. I think that most people would diagree.
I’m never gonna sign off on “Blank is great! Because I can come up with a way to phrase it such that blank counts as speech, and Free Speech Is Axiomatically Good because we should outsource all our thinking to James Madison, a 1780’s slave owner who had never seen an image board, a modem, or even a daily newspaper.”
[...]
For example, I support photographing or documenting police misconduct. Not because “it’s speech”, but because it’s good. That’s right! Feels over reals as is my wont ♥
Vodafone UK has taken it on themselves to make the world better by marking this website (daniel.haxx.se) “adult content”. I suppose in order to protect the children.
This morning I’m working on something I’ve been wanting to do for a long, long time: I’m refactoring Antenna to enable direct ingestion of feeds. When this is done feeds will no longer be submitted to a queue to be ingested every five minutes. Instead Antenna will attempt to ingest them at once and give feedback via return codes!
A preliminary solution is now working well, but there is some more refactoring and testing to be done. Very exciting none the less! It’s the first time I do something big with Antenna in a long time.
Summary: EPO staff is astounded to see how much self-harm Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos do to ‘their own’ institution, which has been reduced to a rubber-stamping operation (this includes European software patents, which are slowly being challenged)
Video download link | md5sum 74fec68bb53d244d3eb65e26f0526511
The War on the Scientists
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: As the EPO’s war on workers and retirees escalates (breaking promises to scientists who work or worked as examiners) we find some similarities in Belarus, where some of the EPO’s work has been outsourced to (Belarus is neither a member of the EU nor a member of the EPO)
IN Part 10 we saw how dictators in positions of power lead to a severe case of brain drain, just like in the EPO under the reign of narcissists like Benoît Battistelli and António ‘F.’ Campinos.
“Tomorrow we’ll see how the EPO’s strong partner in Minsk is doing.”In the video above I express some of my personal views about Lukashenko’s equivalent of ‘North Korea in Europe’ — akin to some degree to what Campinos (and Battistelli before him) turned EPOnia into. Not even retirees can live in peace; they can leave, sure, unlike North Koreans… but their pension is being eroded retroactively and António ‘F.’ Campinos is cursing at staff for merely talking about such issues.
Tomorrow we’ll see how the EPO’s strong partner in Minsk is doing. █
Windows is the blue curve (as a function of time
Summary: Today, taking a new month’s snapshot/check at StatCounter, Windows seems to be down even further as Android climbs to nearly half of all Web requests. As we enter the month of May it becomes more apparent that Windows isn’t recovering and Vista 11 was just a waste of billions of dollars in false marketing.
Update: If one counts the desktop alone, Windows is down from around 80% to almost 70% since the pandemic broke out.
Will EPO survive another decade? Place your bets now.
Summary: Belarus Battistelli (shown above) has gambled with the very survival (and money) of the EPO, which nowadays seems to rely on breaking the law, replacing legitimate patent judges with kangaroo courts that approve European Patents granted in clear violation of the EPC
Autocracy normalised
Summary: The godfather of Belarus has taken greater control of the “science park” in Minsk; this did not alarm EPO President António Campinos, the ‘other’ Orange Friend of Team Putin, who is “cool” with it (SaM is also “cool” with it)
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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