Brief items

Security quote of the week

And if your employer insists on employees using their own hardware, those employees should ask what happens in the event of a security breach. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that hardware is kept up to date? Is there an expectation that security can insist on the hardware being handed over for investigation? What information about the employee's use of their own hardware is going to be logged, who has access to those logs, and how long are those logs going to be kept for? If those questions can't be answered in a reasonable way, it's a huge red flag. You shouldn't have to give up your privacy and (potentially) your hardware for a job.

Using technical mechanisms to ensure that employees only use employer-provided hardware is understandably icky, but it's something that allows employers to impose appropriate security policies without violating employee privacy.

— Matthew Garrett

Comments (25 posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.0-rc6, released on September 18. Linus said:

So this is an artificially small -rc release, because this past week we had the Maintainers' Summit in Dublin (along with OSS EU and LPC 2022), so we've had a lot of maintainers traveling.

Or - putting my ridiculously optimistic hat on - maybe things are just so nice and stable that there just weren't all that many fixes?

Stable updates: 5.19.9, 5.15.68, 5.10.143, 5.4.213, 4.19.258, 4.14.293, and 4.9.328 were released on September 15, followed by 5.19.10, 5.15.69, 5.10.144, 5.4.214, 4.19.259, 4.14.294, and 4.9.329 on September 20.

The 5.19.11, 5.15.70, and 5.10.145 updates are in the review process; they are due on September 23.

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Rendered linux-next documentation on kernel.org

Konstantin Ryabitsev has announced the availability of rendered documentation from linux-next on kernel.org. This will be useful for anybody wanting to see what the documentation for the next kernel release will look like.

Comments (8 posted)

Debian's firmware vote

The Debian project has begun voting on changes to its approach to firmware needed to install a working distribution. The original ballot options described in this article are still there, but this is Debian so there are several others as well. Some of the additions include changes to the Debian Social Contract that explicitly allow the shipping of firmware needed to use Debian on hardware requiring that firmware.

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Distributions quote of the week

Free software projects are uniquely vulnerable to people who attempt to manipulate you by making you feel like a failure for not having addressed their specific problem. Avoiding that emotional trap is an important part of healthy boundary setting and sustainability.

Debian is something we build together, voluntarily and consensually. When someone needs a break, other people carry the load, or sometimes we put the whole thing down and rest for a bit. We don't berate each other for not working harder.

— Russ Allbery

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GNOME 43 released

Version 43 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released; see the release notes for details.

This latest GNOME release comes with improvements across the board, ranging from a new quick settings menu, a redesigned Files app, and hardware security integration. GNOME 43 continues the trend of GNOME apps migrating from GTK 3 to GTK 4, and includes many other smaller enhancements.

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An X11 Apologist Tries Wayland (artemis.sh)

The artemis.sh blog has a detailed review of the state of Wayland compared to X.org.

It feels fantastic. It even made my software cursor not feel so softwarey, which I’ve never experienced with a software cursor before. I have a pretty bad GPU, but on a higher end card you’d get a huge benefit to this in games. If your card can render the game many times faster than your monitor refresh rate, you can unlock your FPS in the game, tune your max_render_time to the absolute minimum, and get EXTREMELY low latency while still having absolutely no screen tearing whatsoever.

And like, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the vsync setting in a game actually sync the game up with the vblank interval in a way that matters. It works for games in wine. It’s amazing. I have never experienced gaming on Linux that looked this smooth in my life.

Comments (111 posted)

Development quotes of the week

In Open Source, sustainability often requires catering to deep-pocketed patrons.

— Andrew 'bunnie' Huang

Despite being known for having a welcoming and friendly community, Rust's diversity numbers are terrible. They are even terrible compared to the tech industry, which is terrible to begin with. Though we probably do better at being an inclusive project (our numbers for making people feel welcome/unwelcome are encouraging), the fact that so many contributors have felt they have to leave the project for negative reasons suggest we should be doing much better (yes, avoiding burnout is part of inclusivity too).

An important aspect of inclusivity is being able to accommodate a diversity of opinions. If we can only get along when everyone agrees, then we cannot be diverse or inclusive. While our preference for consensus has served us well in some areas, it has also caused problems. Our culture of avoiding conflict rather than resolving it is unhealthy and has led to dysfunctional governance.

— Nick Cameron

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