"Linux fans rejoice!" writes Hot Hardware. " Pine64's newest smartphone is officially available for pre-order." PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition pre-orders opened up Tuesday. Devices that are pre-ordered before January 18th will be shipped from Pine64's Hong Kong warehouse by January 24th and should arrive by early February.... According to Pine64, the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition is the "fastest mainline Linux smartphone on the market." It uses a Rockchip RK3399S SoC that is composed of two ARM A72 cores (1.5GHz) and four A53 efficiency cores (1.5GHz)....

Consumers will also likely be pleased with the price of the device. The PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition currently rings in at $399 USD. The production run is purportedly "large" and interested consumers should therefore be able to easily purchase the device at this price.
Liliputing adds: While the PinePhone Pro has better hardware than the original PinePhone, Pine64 plans to continue selling both phones indefinitely. The first-gen phone will continue to sell for $150 to $200, offering an entry-level option for folks that want to experiment with mobile Linux, while the higher-priced PinePhone Pro should offer a hardware experience closer to what folks would expect from a modern mid-range phone....

In addition to the PinePhone Keyboard, the recently launched PinePhone wireless charging case, fingerprint reader case, and LoRa cases should all work with either phone.

But the new phone has a faster processor, more memory and storage, higher-resolution cameras, a higher-speed USB-C port and support for WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 4.1. And those features should make it a little more viable as a replacement for an iPhone or Android device... if you're comfortable running work-in-progress software.
They also add that "Thanks to the recent launch of the $50 PinePhone Keyboard, you can also think of the PinePhone Pro as a $400 phone that can be used as a $449 mini-laptop...."

And the Pine64 site's January update also points out that "Pico 8 Raspberry Pi port works on the PinePhone," adding "yes, it does run DOOM."

Earlier this year TechRepublic argued that while 2021 wasn't the year of the Linux desktop, "there was no denying the continued dominance of Linux in the enterprise space and the very slow (and subtle) growth of Linux on the desktop. And in just about every space (minus the smartphone arena), Linux made some serious gains."

So would 2022 be the year of the Linux desktop? "Probably not."

But developer Tim Wells honestly believes we're getting closer: The idea of the year of the Linux desktop is that there would come a year that the free and open source operating system would reach a stage that the average user could install and use it on their pc without running into problems. Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips recently did an experiment where he installed Linux on his home PC for one month to see if he could use it not only for everyday tasks, but for gaming and also streaming. Ultimately he concluded (in a video just released) that this year will not be the year of the Linux desktop and that while doing everyday stuff was reasonably okay, the state of gaming on Linux (despite Valve's lofty goals) is to put it simply, a shit-show. (That's my word, not his)... The experiment done by Linus seems to show that while some games do indeed run well using [Valve's Windows compatibility layer] Proton, there are just as many that run with issues. Some of those issues can be game breaking. Such as the game running, but its multiplayer functionality not working at all. Some games just plain don't work at all due to dependencies on services such as Easy Anti Cheat...

In his video Linus mentions that the main problem preventing the "year of the Linux desktop" is the fragmentation. By fragmentation, he means the range of available distributions and the fact that each distribution has (potentially) different versions of libraries and drivers and software that makes the behind the scenes operate.... Flatpak and Snap as well as AppImage are making progress towards fixing this fragmentation issue, but those are not yet perfect either. Flatpak works by ensuring that the expected versions of libraries required for that software are installed along side it and independent of the existing library the distro may provide...

Valve have said that the Steamdeck will also use an immutable core operating system for the same reasons.

So while Linus is sure that 2022 isn't yet the year of the Linux desktop and that fragmentation is the biggest problem. I think maybe, just maybe, we're closer to solving those problems and closer perhaps to the year of the Linux desktop that some might realise.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Humble, the bundle-centric games retailer that launched with expansive Mac and Linux support in 2010, will soon shift a major component of its business to Windows-only gaming. The retailer's monthly subscription service, Humble Choice, previously offered a number of price tiers; the more you paid, the more new games you could claim in a given month. Starting February 1, Humble Choice will include less choice, as it will only offer a single $12/month tier, complete with a few new game giveaways per month and ongoing access to two collections of games: Humble's existing "Trove" collection of classic games, and a brand-new "Humble Games Collection" of more modern titles.

But this shift in subscription strategy comes with a new, unfortunate requirement: an entirely new launcher app, which must be used to access and download Humble Trove and Humble Games Collection games going forward. Worse, this app will be Windows-only. Current subscribers have been given an abrupt countdown warning (as spotted by NeoWin). Those subscribers have until January 31 to use the existing website interface to download DRM-free copies of any games' Mac or Linux versions. Starting February 1, subscription-specific downloads will be taken off the site, and Mac and Linux versions in particular will disappear altogether. Interestingly, the current Trove library consists of 79 games, but Humble says that the Trove collection will include "50+ games" starting February 1. This week's warning to Humble's Mac and Linux subscribers notes that "many" of the current Trove games will appear on the Humble Launcher, which is likely a nice way of saying that some of the existing games will not -- perhaps around 20 or so, based on the aforementioned numbers. Despite these changes, Trove's selection of games will remain DRM-free. FAQs about the Humble Launcher suggest that subscribers can download Trove files and continue accessing them in DRM-free fashion, no Humble Launcher or ongoing subscription required. The same promise has not been made for the more modern game collection found in the new Humble Games Collection.

Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: The developers of the Ubuntu-based operating system have agreed to accept an undisclosed amount of money from Mozilla in exchange for making significant changes to Linux Mint. This includes removal of modifications to Firefox and a big change for search. The devs share the upcoming changes to Firefox in Linux Mint 19 and higher.
The default start page no longer points to https://www.linuxmint.com/start/
The default search engines no longer include Linux Mint search partners (Yahoo, DuckDuckGo...) but Mozilla search partners (Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ebay...)
The default configuration switches from Mint defaults to Mozilla defaults.
Firefox no longer includes code changes or patches from Linux Mint, Debian or Ubuntu.

Another 12 months gone by, and with it nearly 8,000 new Slashdot headlines — so which ones drew the most views?

Click here for lists of Slashdot's top 10 most-visited and most-commented stories of the year — and also the all-time top 10 lists since Slashdot's creation in 1997.

Here's some of 2021's highlights:

• Two of this year's most-visited stories involved Linus Torvalds. (Although one just reported Torvalds "Tells Anti-Vaxxer To Shut Up On Linux Mailing List.") Another story in April found Torvalds saying Rust was at least closer to use in Linux kernel development — while also calling C++ "a crap language."

• One of the biggest stories of the year was Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation. The third most-visited story of the year covered the pushback against his return from the EFF, the Tor Project, Mozilla, and the creator of Rust.

• Remember that big electrical outage that left millions of Texans without power in the middle of a winter storm? As the crisis was still raging, CNN asked the million-dollar question: who's actually to blame? This became Slashdot's 9th most-visited story of the year — and also the 7th most-commented.

• Two of the 10 most-visited stories of the year were "Ask Slashdot" technical questions: In April RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) asked whether a software RAID is better than a hardware RAID? And in January of 2020 Slashdot reader lsllll asked for suggestions on a a battery-powered wi-fi security camera supporting FTP/SMB
  
  Interestingly, one of the year's most-commented poll topics had asked whether bitcoin would break $100,000 before the end of 2021. 4,951 voters — a full 25% — had said "Yes" — and were off by more than half, with bitcoin actually tumbling 8% in the last week of 2021 to wind up somewhere near $46,371 as of late Friday afternoon.
  
  At the time of the poll — October 8th — the price of Bitcoin was already up to $53,963. One month later it had reached it's highest price of 2021 — $67,582 — before dropping 31.7% over the next 53 days.
  
  In the October poll asking whether bitcoin would reach $100,000 in the final 84 days of 2021 — another 14,687 Slashdot readers voted "No."

Phoronix reports: The Linux 5.17 kernel when it kicks off next month is slated to introduce a new driver "x86-android-tablets" just for dealing with all the quirky/buggy x86 tablets out there.

Longtime Linux developer Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been responsible for numerous x86 laptop/tablet improvements in recent years along with other desktop-related improvements at Red Hat. He has now queued up into the x86 platform drivers tree the x86-android-tablets driver he wrote for dealing with the mess of x86 (mostly Android) tablets that don't behave properly out-of-the-box with Linux.

As part of the ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table), many x86 tablets have simply invalid entries and other problems that cause issue when trying to run mainline Linux on said hardware. Hans explains as part of the commit currently in the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch....

"This driver, which loads only on affected models based on DMI matching, adds DMI based instantiating of kernel devices for devices which are missing from the DSDT, fixing e.g. battery monitoring, touchpads and/or accelerometers not working."

This new x86-android-tablets driver will basically be a catch-all solution for overrides based on device matching. Hans ended the patch message with, "This is the least ugly option to get these devices to fully work and to do so without adding any extra code to the main kernel image (vmlinuz) when built as a module."

71-year-old Jon "maddog" Hall has been involved with Linux from the very beginning, and for Christmas shared two of the earliest recordings ever made of young Linus Torvalds speaking about Linux — recordings long thought to be lost.

Hall shares the story at Archive.org. In February of 1994 the chair of a user group for the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society "started sending emails (and copying me for some reason) about wanting to bring this person I had never heard about from Finland (of all places) to talk about a project that did not even run on Ultrix or DEC/OSF1.... After many emails and no luck in raising money for this trip I took mercy...and asked my management to fund the trip. I sat down to use it, and was amazed. It was good. It was very, very good."

24-year-old Torvalds was giving his first talks ever at a major conference — this one attended by 19,000 people — and he was nervous. In the end only 40 people showed up for "An Introduction to Linux" and "Implementation Issues in Linux", but Hall remembers that "there was great applause." Unfortunately the talks that Linus gave were lost.

Until now.

As I was cleaning my office I found some audio tapes made of Linus' talk, and which I purchased with my own money. Now, to make your present, I had to buy a good audio tape playback machine and capture the audio in Audacity, then produce a digital copy of those tapes, which are listed here...

Here is your Christmas present, from close to three decades ago. Happy Linuxing" to all, no matter what your religion or creed.

75% of the top 1,000 games run on Linux now, and the figure is even higher, at 80%, for the top 100 games. gHacks reports: Valve Software, the company behind the popular Steam gaming platform and smash hits such as Dota 2, Half-Life and Team Fortress, announced plans in 2018 to improve Windows game support for Linux. [...] The independent database protondb keeps track of compatibility using user reports. Compatibility has improved significantly in recent years. The site highlights compatibility for the top 10, top 100 and top 1000 games on Steam.

75% of the top 1000 games run on Linux now, and the figure is even higher, at 80%, for the top 100 games. Only the top 10 games are not well represented, as only 40% of them run on Linux without major issues according to the database. Users have submitted more than 150,000 reports for over 21,000 games to the site. Of these 21,000 games, more than 17,600 are working according to the site. Games on the database are ranked using a medal system. Platinum and Gold rated games run perfectly, and silver games may have minor issues. Bronze games may crash or have serious issues. Borked games won't work at all or are unplayable, and native Linux games are just the opposite of that.

Protondb has a search feature that Linux gamers may use to find out if games that they are interested in work well on Linux. All games that match the search term are returned, which means that you can search for entire series of games, e.g. King's Bounty, Final Fantasy or Civilization, and get all reported games and their compatibility rating returned. Compatibility is improving, and while there are still games that won't run on Linux, it is clear that compatibility has improved significantly in the past couple of years.

Open source is no place for secrets. From a report: This is a critical time for the Good Chip Intel. After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance, Captain Pat parachuted into the bridge to grab the helm and bark "Full steam ahead!" Its first berth at Alder Lake is generally seen as a return to competitive form, but that design started well before Gelsinger's return and there's still zero room for navigational errors in the expeditions ahead. At least one of the course corrections looks a bit rum. Intel has long realised the importance of supporting open source to keep its chips dancing with Linux. Unlike the halcyon days of Wintel dominance, though, this means being somewhat more open about the down-and-dirty details of exactly how its chips do their thing. You can't sign an NDA with the Linux kernel.

Chipmakers are notoriously paranoid: Silicon Valley was born in intrigue and suspicion. Despite Intel's iconic CEO Andy Grove making paranoia a corporate mantra, Intel became relatively relaxed. Qualcomm and Apple would throw you into their piranha pools merely for asking questions if they could, while Intel has learned to give as well as take. But it may be going back to bad habits. One of the new things not open to discussion is something called Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), about which Intel has nothing to say. Which is odd because it has just submitted supporting code for it to the Linux kernel. The code itself doesn't say anything about SDSi, instead adding a mechanism to control whatever it is via some authorised secure token. It basically unlocks hardware features when the right licence is applied. That's not new. Higher performance or extra features in electronic test equipment often comes present but disabled on the base models, and the punter can pay to play later. But what might it mean in SDSi and the Intel architecture?

It is expensive for Intel and OEMs alike to have multiple physical variants of anything; much better if you make one thing that does everything and charge for unlocking it. It's a variant of a trick discovered by hackish school kids in the late 1970s, where cheaper Casio scientific calculators used exactly the same hardware as the more expensive model. Casio just didn't print all the functions on the keyboards of the pleb kit. Future Intel chips will doubtless have cores and cache disabled until magic numbers appear, and with the SoC future beckoning that can extend to all manner of IO, acceleration, and co-processing features. It might even be there already. From engineering, marketing, and revenue perspectives, this is great. Intel could make an M1-like SoC that can be configured on the fly for different platforms, getting the design, performance, and fab efficiencies that Apple enjoys while making sense for multiple OEMs. There could be further revenue from software upgrades, or even subscription models.

"In 2022 we will very likely see the experimental Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel mainlined," writes Phoronix, citing patches sent out Monday "introducing the initial support and infrastructure around handling of Rust within the kernel."

This summer saw the earlier patch series posted for review and discussion around introducing Rust programming language support in the Linux kernel to complement its longstanding C focus. In the months since there has been more progress on enabling Rust for the Linux kernel development, Linus Torvalds is not opposed to it, and others getting onboard with the effort. Rust for the Linux kernel remains of increasing interest to developers over security concerns with Rust affording more memory safety protections, potentially lowering the barrier to contributing to the kernel, and other related benefits....

Miguel Ojeda sent out the "v2" patches for Rust support in the kernel. With these updated packages, the Rust code is now relying on stable Rust releases rather than the beta compiler state previously, new modularization options added, stricter code enforcements, extra Rust compiler diagnostics enabled, new abstractions for in-kernel use, and other low-level code improvements.

Red Hat is also now joining Arm, Google, and Microsoft in voicing their support for Rust code within the Linux kernel.
ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols also expects the first Rust code in Linux's kernel sometime in 2022: As Ryan Levick, a Microsoft principal cloud developer advocate, explained, "Rust is completely memory safe." Since roughly two-thirds of security issues can be traced back to handling memory badly, this is a major improvement. In addition, "Rust prevents those issues usually without adding any runtime overhead," Levick said.

ZDNet reports: By and large, the public cloud runs on Linux. Most users, even Microsoft Azure customers, run Linux on the cloud. In the case of market giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud provider will let you run many Linux distros or their own homebrew Linux, Amazon Linux. Now, AWS has released an early version of its next distro, Amazon Linux 3, which is based on Red Hat's community Linux, Fedora.

AWS has long tried to incorporate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compatibility into Amazon Linux, but this latest release takes that to new heights. By using Fedora as its upstream, the new Amazon distro, also called AL2022, is a stable distribution. It's gone through extensive testing to offer package stability, and it also includes all available security updates....
TechRadar adds some more details: The distro has had two major releases till now; the first in 2010, and the second in 2017. However, with the third AL2022 release the service is committing to a two year release cycle, with each release supported for a period of five years... AWS argues that the two year major release cycle, with updates shipped quarterly via minor releases, will help keep the software current, while the five year support commitment for each major release will give customers the stability they need to manage long project lifecycles.

Years after its failed Steam Machines, Valve is slowly but surely improving the state of Linux gaming. From a report: The company's upcoming Steam Deck handheld runs atop Linux, and its Proton compatibility layer lets it -- and other computers -- play Windows games as well. Now, Valve has officially added support for Nvidia's DLSS machine learning temporal upscaling technique to Proton, potentially bringing big FPS boosts and less flicker in games that support the technology.

Proton 6.3-8 is the first stable release to include support for DLSS, after the feature previously hit experimental builds in October, though it appears you'll still need to set PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 and dxgi.nvapiHack = False to turn it on. DLSS won't come to the AMD-powered Steam Deck, of course, since it requires proprietary Nvidia machine learning silicon, but we recently learned the Steam Deck will support AMDâ(TM)s arguably much less capable FSR.

The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software..." reports Mike Saunders from LibreOffice.

"By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux."

The tech site Foss Force writes: This seems to be a done deal, as the steps for the transition from proprietary to open have already been codified by the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament, and explained in plain language in an interview with Jan Philipp Albrecht, the state's digital minister, that was published in c't, a German language computer magazine (Google Translate version here). In the interview, Albrecht said that part of the transition to open source is already in the works, and pointed out that 90% of state administration conferencing is conducted using the open source video conferencing platform Jitsi.

"We have been testing LibreOffice in our IT department for two years, and our experience is clear: it works," he said. "This also applies, for example, when editing Microsoft Word documents with comments... No Linux distribution has been chosen yet to use as a standard, although Albrecht said they're currently looking at five distributions that suit their purposes.

shoor writes: As much as 38 percent of the Internet's domain name lookup servers are vulnerable to a new attack that allows hackers to send victims to maliciously spoofed addresses masquerading as legitimate domains, like bankofamerica.com or gmail.com. The exploit, unveiled in research presented today, revives the DNS cache-poisoning attack that researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed in 2008. He showed that, by masquerading as an authoritative DNS server and using it to flood a DNS resolver with fake lookup results for a trusted domain, an attacker could poison the resolver cache with the spoofed IP address. From then on, anyone relying on the same resolver would be diverted to the same imposter site.

The sleight of hand worked because DNS at the time relied on a transaction ID to prove the IP number returned came from an authoritative server rather than an imposter server attempting to send people to a malicious site. The transaction number had only 16 bits, which meant that there were only 65,536 possible transaction IDs. Kaminsky realized that hackers could exploit the lack of entropy by bombarding a DNS resolver with off-path responses that included each possible ID. Once the resolver received a response with the correct ID, the server would accept the malicious IP and store the result in cache so that everyone else using the same resolver -- which typically belongs to a corporation, organization, or ISP -- would also be sent to the same malicious server.

"[N]ow, after SCO went bankrupt; court after court dismissing SCO's crazy copyright claims; and closing in on 20-years into the saga, the U.S. District Court of Utah has finally put a period to the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit," writes ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. From the report: According to the Court, since: "All claims and counterclaims in this matter, whether alleged or not alleged, pleaded or not pleaded, have been settled, compromised, and resolved in full, and for good cause appearing, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the parties' Motion is GRANTED. All claims and counterclaims in this action, whether alleged or not alleged, pleaded or not pleaded, have been settled, compromised, and resolved in full, and are DISMISSED with prejudice and on the merits. The parties shall bear their own respective costs and expenses, including attorneys' fees. The Clerk is directed to close the action." Finally!

Earlier, the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, which has been overseeing SCO's bankruptcy had announced that the TSG Group, which represents SCO's debtors, has settled with IBM and resolved all the remaining claims between TSG and IBM: "Under the Settlement Agreement, the Parties have agreed to resolve all disputes between them for a payment to the Trustee [TLD], on behalf of the Estates [IBM], of $14,250,000." In return, TLD gives up all rights and interests in all litigation claims pending or that may be asserted in the future against IBM and Red Hat, and any allegations that Linux violates SCO's Unix intellectual property. "While we're one step closer, the SCO lawsuits still live on just like one of those Halloween monsters that just won't die," concludes Vaughan-Nichols, noting the lawsuit Xinuos filed against IBM and Red Hat in March for allegedly copying their software code for its server operating systems. "But, in this go-around, there aren't many people in the audience."

Phoronix reports: System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution already has their own "COSMIC" desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing desktop environment.

Stemming from a Reddit discussion over the possibility of seeing a KDE flavor of Pop!_OS, it was brought up by one of their own engineers they are working on their "own desktop". System76 engineer and Pop!_OS maintainer Michael Murphy "mmstick" commented that System76 will be its own desktop. When further poked about that whether that means a fork from GNOME, the response was "No it is its own thing written in Rust."

Word of System76 making their "own" desktop not based on GNOME does follow some recent friction between Pop!_OS and GNOME developers over their approach to theming and customizations.
Or, as Murphy wrote (in response to a later comment): What are you expecting us to do? We have a desktop environment that is a collection of GNOME Shell extensions which break every GNOME Shell release. Either we move towards maintaining tens of thousands of lines of monkey patches, or we do it the right way and make the next step a fully fledged desktop environment equal to GNOME Shell.
In other comments Murphy clarified that essentially the gist of it would be an independent/distro-agnostic desktop environment, and that they'd be "using tooling that already exists (mutter, kwin, wlroots), but implementing the surrounding shell in Rust from scratch..." And he added later that "We already do our best to follow freedesktop specifications with our software. So there's no reason to think we'd do otherwise."

One of the most interesting exchanges happened when one long-time Reddit user questioned the need for another desktop. That user had posted, "Linux is great, choices are great, but our biggest problem is that in the pursuit of choices for the sake of choices we have a ton of projects that are 95% of the way to prime time readiness, but none that are fully there, because instead of fixing problems, everyone decides they just want to start over."

Murphy responded: "You have it backwards. Choice is the best part about open source. None of us would be here today if people weren't brave enough to take the next step with a new solution to an existing problem..."

"Intel is gearing up to go to a war with Nvidia," writes Slashdot reader labloke11. "They have their OneAPI and their GPU. It will be interesting... For me, I like competition." Phoronix reports: While Intel Alder Lake is dominating today's news cycle, Intel and Microsoft also announced today that they have brought oneAPI Level Zero and Intel OpenCL support to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) while employing Intel graphics hardware acceleration. Similar to NVIDIA bringing CUDA and their accelerated GPU support to WSL2 as well as similar efforts by AMD on the Radeon side, Intel and Microsoft are now having Intel graphics compute working within the Linux confines on Windows 11 or Windows 10 21'H2. Hardware-accelerated oneAPI Level Zero, OpenVINO, and OpenCL on Intel graphics hardware can now be enjoyed within the WSL2 environment when using the latest updates and drivers. Like with the rest of the WSL2 stack and capabilities from other GPU vendors, this is at a near-native level of performance. More information can be found via the Microsoft Command Line blog and Intel blog.

Next year, IBM's Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort aimed largely at controlling costs. The Register reports: An internal email sent on Wednesday by Timothy Cramer, SVP of software engineering, to Red Hat managers directs hiring requisitions to be made at a lower level of seniority than usual. "All new plan reqs should be opened at a level below senior (e.g., Associate Software Engineer or Software Engineer)," the message says. "While this change allows us to use our budget more effectively, it also helps us balance the organization as we have many engineers with senior titles. We recognize that this will mean we need to plan for training and mentoring, promotions, and internal mobility as well, and we are here to support you in that."

The hiring budget update also says that current requisitions and backfills -- positions vacated that need to be filled -- should be offered at a reduced level. "All current reqs and future backfills will be down-leveled by one level by default (e.g., Senior Software Engineer to Software Engineer)," the memo explained. [...] Our source expressed concern that this decision, which applies to new hires, will harm the company. If Red Hat is unable to offer competitive pay or hire senior people, our source suggested, that's likely to limit the company's access to talent and to make it more difficult to retain existing skilled employees. "The best talent wants to work with other like-minded and skilled people," our source said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: LFX supports projects and empowers open source teams by enabling them to write better, more secure code, drive engagement, and grow sustainable software ecosystems," the Linux Foundation says. Now, to address the growing threat of software supply chain attacks, the foundation is upgrading its LFX Security module to deal with these attacks. Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's executive director, announced this new tooling today at the Linux Foundation Membership Summit.

Enhanced and free to use, LFX Security makes it easier for open source projects to secure their code. Specifically, the LFX Security module now includes automatic scanning for secrets-in-code and non-inclusive language, adding to its existing automated vulnerability detection capabilities. Software security firm BluBracket is contributing this functionality to the LFX as part of its mission to make software safer and more secure. This functionality builds on contributions from open source developer security company Snyk, helping make LFX the leading vulnerability detection platform for the open source community. [...] LFX Security will be further scaled out in 2022, helping to solve challenges for hundreds of thousands of critical open source projects under the Open Source Security Foundation. LFX Security is free and available now.

A year after releasing the first preview build of its Chromium-based Edge browser for Linux, Microsoft is announcing its general availability. From a report: The new release supports a variety of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE. Microsoft announced Linux on Edge's availability milestone during the first day of its Ignite IT Pro conference. As of the release of Edge for Linux to the "stable" (mainstream user) channel, Edge is now available on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux. As it did when introducing the new Edge on macOS, Microsoft has been positioning Edge on Linux as more of an offering for IT pros and developers who want to test web sites than as a browser for "normal" users on those platforms. However, any user on any supported platform can use the new Edge.