"If you're plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations..." writes KDE developer Nate Graham on his personal blog. But "We know that the fraction of people who subscribe to these channels is small, so there's a huge number of people who may not even know they can donate to KDE, let alone that donations are critically important to its continued existence..." From 6.2 onwards, Plasma itself will show a system notification asking for a donation once per year, in December. The idea here is to get the message that KDE really does need your financial help in front of more eyeballs — especially eyeballs not currently looking at KDE's public-facing promotion efforts... [W]e tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It's small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it'll go away until next year. It's implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like. You can also disable just the popup on System Settings' Notifications page, accessible from the configure button in the notification's header.

Ultimately the decision to do this came down to the following factors:

— We looked at FOSS peers like Thunderbird and Wikipedia which have similar things (and in Wikipedia's case, the message is vastly more intrusive and naggy). In both cases, it didn't drive everyone away and instead instead resulted in a massive increase in donations that the projects have been able to use to employ lots of people.

- KDE really needs something like this to help our finances grow sustainably in line with our userbase and adoption by vendors and distributors.
The blog post also answers the question: what are you going to do with all that money? This is a question the KDE e.V. board of directors as a whole would need to answer, and any decision on it will be made collectively. But as one of the five members on that board, I can tell you my personal answer and the one that as your representative, I'd advocate for. It's basically the platform I ran on two years ago: extend an offer of full-time employment to our current people, and hire even more! I want us to end up with paid QA people and distro developers, and even more software engineers. I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it. I want us to to extend our promotional activities and outreach to other major distros and vendors and pitch our software to them directly. I want to see Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ship Plasma by default. I want us to use this money to take over the world — with freedom, empowerment, and kindness.

These have been dreams for a long time, and throughout KDE we've been slowly moving towards them over the years. With a lot more money, we can turbocharge the pace! If that stuff sounds good, you can start with a donation today.
A reaction from GamingOnLinux: I think it is fair for KDE to expose that they need funding and asking that from inside the UI would not hurt for a software that delivered so much for free (as in freedom and as in "gratis").
Linux magazine points out that other new features for 6.2 "include the ability to block apps from inhibiting sleep mode, a new 'fill' mode for wallpaper, an overhauled System Settings Accessibility page, and the usual slew of bug fixes."

The Register reports that Google "recently rewrote the firmware for protected virtual machines in its Android Virtualization Framework using the Rust programming language." And they add that Google "wants you to do the same, assuming you deal with firmware."

A post on Google's security blog by Android engineers Ivan Lozano and Dominik Maier promises to show "how to gradually introduce Rust into your existing firmware," adding "You'll see how easy it is to boost security with drop-in Rust replacements, and we'll even demonstrate how the Rust toolchain can handle specialized bare-metal targets."

This prompts the Register to quip that easy "is not a term commonly heard with regard to a programming language known for its steep learning curve." Citing the lack of high-level security mechanisms in firmware, which is often written in memory-unsafe languages such as C or C++, Lozano and Maier argue that Rust provides a way to avoid the memory safety bugs like buffer overflows and use-after-free that account for the majority of significant vulnerabilities in large codebases. "Rust provides a memory-safe alternative to C and C++ with comparable performance and code size," they note. "Additionally it supports interoperability with C with no overhead."
At one point the blog post explains that "You can replace existing C functionality by writing a thin Rust shim that translates between an existing Rust API and the C API the codebase expects." But their ultimate motivation is greater security. "Android's use of safe-by-design principles drives our adoption of memory-safe languages like Rust, making exploitation of the OS increasingly difficult with every release."

And the Register also got this quote from Lars Bergstrom, Google's director of engineering for Android Programming Languages (and chair of the Rust Foundation's board of directors). "At Google, we're increasing Rust's use across Android, Chromium, and more to reduce memory safety vulnerabilities. We're dedicated to collaborating with the Rust ecosystem to drive its adoption and provide developers with the resources and training they need to succeed.

"This work on bringing Rust to embedded and firmware addresses another critical part of the stack."

Google's Android Earthquake Alerts System, initially launched in 2020, is now available in all 50 U.S. states and 6 territories. Droid Life reports: For users in California, Oregon and Washington, users will continue to have their alerts powered by the ShakeAlert system, utilizing traditional seismometers to detect earthquakes. For all out states and supported territories, "this expansion uses the built-in accelerometers in Android phones to bring another layer of preparedness and potentially life-saving information to people across every state," the company explained in a blog post.

Using the accelerometer to sense vibrations and an apparent earthquake, the system quickly analyzes the crowdsourced data to determine if an earthquake is occurring. Google says it has been working with many experts to continue the system's improvement. Depending on the severity of the earthquake, you'll get two types of notifications. A little pop up on your screen if it's pretty weak with light shaking or a complete screen takeover for moderate to extreme shaking. These are called Take Action alerts, complete with the classic drop, cover, and hold instructions.

Google has released Android 15 for developers, with support for Pixel phones expected in the coming weeks. The update will roll out to compatible devices from Samsung, Motorola, OnePlus, and other manufacturers in the following months.

Key features of Android 15 include single-tap passkeys, theft detection, improved multitasking for large-screen devices, and app access limitations. The update also enhances TalkBack, Android's screen reader, with Gemini AI integration for audio descriptions of images. Google is expanding its Circle to Search feature with song identification capabilities and extending earthquake alerts to all U.S. states and six territories. The alerts use data from Android devices' accelerometers to detect potential seismic activity, complementing traditional seismometer readings in states with access to the USGS ShakeAlert system.

Microsoft's Windows 11 operating system has surpassed Windows 10 usage for Steam users for the first time since its launch in 2021. From a report: Windows 10 has been holding strong in recent years, despite Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows 10 in October 2025. There are now signs that Windows 11 adoption is finally heading in the right direction for Microsoft. Steam hardware survey data for August puts Windows 11 usage at 49 percent, an increase of more than 3 percent over the previous figure in July of nearly 46 percent. Windows 10 usage has dipped by around 3 percent to 47 percent, while macOS and Linux Steam usage has largely remained the same during August.

Samsung Electronics said it will provide Tizen OS updates for its newer TVs for at least seven years, starting with models released in March this year and some 2023 models. Business Korea reports: [Yoon Seok-woo, President of Samsung Electronics' Visual Display Business Division] emphasized that the seven-year free upgrade for Tizen applied to AI TVs would help Samsung widen the market share gap with Chinese competitors. Tizen, an in-house developed OS, has been applied to over 270 million Samsung smart TVs as of last year, making it the world's largest smart TV platform and a key player in leading the Internet of Things (IoT) era. "AI TV will act as the hub of the AI home, connecting other AI appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners," Yoon explained. "We will expand the AI home era by enabling users to monitor and control peripheral devices through the TV even when it is off or when the user is away." This connectivity is a key differentiator from Chinese competitors, according to Yoon.

In the first half of this year, Samsung Electronics maintained the top spot in the global TV market with a 28.8% market share by revenue. However, the combined market share of Chinese companies TCL and Hisense has reached 22.1%, indicating fierce competition.

Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman reports: Security vulnerabilities are lurking in most of the apps you use on a day-to-day basis; there's just no way for most companies to preemptively fix every possible security issue because of human error, deadlines, lack of resources, and a multitude of other factors. That's why many organizations run bug bounty programs to get external help with fixing these issues. The Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) is an example of a bug bounty program that paid security researchers to find vulnerabilities in popular Android apps, but it's being shut down later this month. Google announced the Google Play Security Reward Program back in October 2017 as a way to incentivize security searchers to find and, most importantly, responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in popular Android apps distributed through the Google Play Store. [...]

The purpose of the Google Play Security Reward Program was simple: Google wanted to make the Play Store a more secure destination for Android apps. According to the company, vulnerability data they collected from the program was used to help create automated checks that scanned all apps available in Google Play for similar vulnerabilities. In 2019, Google said these automated checks helped more than 300,000 developers fix more than 1,000,000 apps on Google Play. Thus, the downstream effect of the GPSRP is that fewer vulnerable apps are distributed to Android users.

However, Google has now decided to wind down the Google Play Security Reward Program. In an email to participating developers, such as Sean Pesce, the company announced that the GPSRP will end on August 31st. The reason Google gave is that the program has seen a decrease in the number of actionable vulnerabilities reported. The company credits this success to the "overall increase in the Android OS security posture and feature hardening efforts."

Phoronix's Michael Larabel benchmarked AMD's latest Ryzen 9 9950X in several different Linux distros and found that the Zen 5 chip performs up to 16% faster with the Intel-optimized Clear Linux distro. Here's an excerpt from the report: The Linux distributions for this round of testing on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X included Arch Linux, CachyOS, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 40, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and a recent daily snapshot of Ubuntu 24.10 in its current development form. Intel's Clear Linux is the one most interesting for looking at on the new AMD Zen 5 hardware. While there hasn't been so much Clear Linux news in recent times, it remains the most well optimized x86_64 Linux distribution out of the box. Clear Linux makes use of compiler function multi versioning, performance-minded defaults, aggressive compiler CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS defaults, optional AVX-512 usage for more libraries, and many other patches and optimizations in the name of delivering the greatest x86_64 Linux performance. And while not Intel's focus, it works typically on AMD hardware too. [...]

Using the same Ryzen 9 9950X system, all of these Linux distributions were tested in their default / out-of-the-box state. [...] When taking the geometric mean of 59 benchmarks run across all of the Linux distributions on this AMD Ryzen 9 9950X system, Intel's Clear Linux easily took the crown. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS -- which was used for all of the Ryzen 9000 series Linux testing so far on Phoronix -- was the slowest. Tapping Intel's Clear Linux netted a 16% improvement on top of the performance offered by Ubuntu 24.04 LTS! Ubuntu 24.04 with the Ryzen 9000 series was already looking great generationally, but as shown today the performance can be even better with further software optimizations.

The Arch Linux powered CachyOS that is tuned out-of-the-box with a similar aim to Clear Linux also performed great. CachyOS was 7% faster than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based on the geo mean and 3% faster than upstream Arch Linux itself. For different workloads though the CachyOS advantage over Arch Linux varied from a minimal difference to quite significant advantages. From the performance of PHP and Python scripts atop Clear Linux to compiling various server and HPC minded software, Intel's Clear Linux -- and a commendable second place for CachyOS -- were showing that even greater performance can be achieved on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. Even for devoted Ubuntu Linux users, these results did show some nice advantages of the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release over Ubuntu 24.04 LTS thanks to the GCC 14 compiler. Ubuntu 24.10 performance is also still subject to change since the current daily ISOs haven't yet moved past the Linux 6.8 kernel while Ubuntu 24.10 in October will be shipping with Linux 6.11.

Ars Technica's Dan Goodwin writes: Last Tuesday, loads of Linux users -- many running packages released as early as this year -- started reporting their devices were failing to boot. Instead, they received a cryptic error message that included the phrase: "Something has gone seriously wrong." The cause: an update Microsoft issued as part of its monthly patch release. It was intended to close a 2-year-old vulnerability in GRUB, an open source boot loader used to start up many Linux devices. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10, made it possible for hackers to bypass secure boot, the industry standard for ensuring that devices running Windows or other operating systems don't load malicious firmware or software during the bootup process. CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday. [...]

With Microsoft maintaining radio silence, those affected by the glitch have been forced to find their own remedies. One option is to access their EFI panel and turn off secure boot. Depending on the security needs of the user, that option may not be acceptable. A better short-term option is to delete the SBAT Microsoft pushed out last Tuesday. This means users will still receive some of the benefits of Secure Boot even if they remain vulnerable to attacks that exploit CVE-2022-2601. The steps for this remedy are outlined here (thanks to manutheeng for the reference).

TV manufacturers are shifting their focus from hardware sales to viewer data and advertising revenue. This trend is driven by declining profit margins on TV sets and the growing potential of smart TV operating systems to generate recurring income. Companies like LG, Samsung, and Roku are increasingly prioritizing ad sales and user tracking capabilities in their TVs, ArsTechnica reports. Automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, which analyzes viewing habits, is becoming a key feature for advertisers. TV makers are partnering with data firms to enhance targeting capabilities, with LG recently sharing data with Nielsen and Samsung updating its ACR tech to track streaming ad exposure. This shift raises concerns about privacy and user experience, as TVs become more commercialized and data-driven. Industry experts predict a rise in "shoppable ads" and increased integration between TV viewing and e-commerce platforms. The report adds: With TV sales declining and many shoppers prioritizing pricing, smart TV players will continue developing ads that are harder to avoid and better at targeting. Interestingly, Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at analyst Omdia, told Ars that smart TV advertising revenue exceeding smart TV hardware revenue (as well as ad sale margins surpassing those of hardware) is a US-only trend, albeit one that shows no signs of abating. OLED has become a mainstay in the TV marketplace, and until the next big display technology becomes readily available, OEMs are scrambling to make money in a saturated TV market filled with budget options. Selling ads is an obvious way to bridge the gap between today and The Next Big Thing in TVs.

Indeed, with companies like Samsung and LG making big deals with analytics firms and other brands building their businesses around ads, the industry's obsession with ads will only intensify. As we've seen before with TV commercials, which have gotten more frequent over time, once the ad genie is out of the bottle, it tends to grow, not go back inside. One side effect we're already seeing, Horner notes, is "a proliferation of more TV operating systems." While choice is often a good thing for consumers, it's important to consider if new options from companies like Amazon, Comcast, and TiVo actually do anything to notably improve the smart TV experience for owners.

And OS operators' financial success is tied to the number of hours users spend viewing something on the OS. Roku's senior director of ad innovation, Peter Hamilton, told Digiday in May that his team works closely with Roku's consumer team, "whose goal is to drive total viewing hours." Many smart TV OS operators are therefore focused on making it easier for users to navigate content via AI.

Raspberry Pi, the British computer manufacturer, unveiled a new 2GB variant of its flagship Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer on Monday, priced at $50. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton said the company aims to "bring high-performance general-purpose computing to the widest possible audience" with the new offering. The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 utilizes a cost-optimized D0 stepping of the BCM2712 application processor, which removes non-essential functionality to reduce manufacturing costs.

Upton stated the chip is "functionally identical" to users compared to higher-memory variants. While the reduced RAM may limit multitasking capabilities, Raspberry Pi's optimized OS allows for efficient resource usage. The company expects the 2GB model to suffice for many users' needs, while power users may opt for 4GB or 8GB versions priced at $60 and $80 respectively. The Raspberry Pi 5, launched in October 2023, features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU running at 2.4GHz, dual 4K display output, and support for PCIe SSDs. Upton noted the latest model is "about 150 times as powerful" as the original Raspberry Pi from 2012.

Slashdot reader yeokm1 is the Singapore-based embedded security researcher whose side projects include installing Linux on a 1993 PC and building a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS.

Today he writes: When one thinks of modern technologies like Thunderbolt, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and modern CPUs, one would associate them with modern operating systems. How about DOS?

It might seem impossible, however I did an experiment on a relatively modern 2020 Thinkpad and found that it can still run MS-DOS 6.22. MS-DOS 6.22 is the last standalone version of DOS released by Microsoft in June 1994. This makes it 30 years old today.

I'll share the steps and challenges in locating a modern laptop capable of doing so — and the challenge of making the 30-year-old OS work on it with audio and networking functions. This is likely among the final generation of laptops able to run DOS natively.

Valve designer Lawrence Yang confirmed to The Verge that the company plans to support SteamOS on the rival Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld. From the report: A few days ago, some spotted an intriguing line in Valve's latest SteamOS release notes: "Added support for extra ROG Ally keys." We didn't know Valve was supporting any ROG Ally keys at all, let alone extras! Maybe Valve was just supporting those keys in the Steam desktop client on a Windows, where it offers a Steam Deck-like Big Picture Mode interface for any PC, and the line mistakenly made it into these patch notes? I asked to be safe. But no: this is indeed about Valve eventually supporting the ROG Ally and other rival handhelds!

"The note about ROG Ally keys is related to third-party device support for SteamOS. The team is continuing to work on adding support for additional handhelds on SteamOS," Yang tells me. That doesn't mean Asus will officially bless Valve's installer or sell the Ally with SteamOS, of course. (Asus has told me there are many reasons why it ships with Windows; a big one is that Microsoft has dedicated validation teams that ensure its operating system works across many different hardware configurations and chips.) And it's not like Valve is suggesting it'll offer SteamOS for rival handhelds anytime soon, either. Valve is "making steady progress," Yang tells me, but it "isn't ready to run out of the box yet." Valve has announced plans for a general release of SteamOS 3 that can be installed on non-handheld PCs; however, Yang says it's not quite ready yet. As for turning Steam Decks into dual-booting Windows machines, here's what Yang said: "As for Windows, we're preparing to make the remaining Windows drivers for Steam Deck OLED available (you might have seen that we are prepping firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There's no update on the timing for dual boot support -- it's still a priority, but we haven't been able to get to it just yet."

Google unveiled its latest Pixel smartphone series on Tuesday, introducing four new models with enhanced AI capabilities and updated designs. The Pixel 9 lineup includes the standard Pixel 9, two Pro models, and a foldable device. The new Pixel phones feature flat sides and an elongated camera module on the rear, departing from the curved edges of previous generations. Screen sizes range from 6.3 inches on the standard Pixel 9 to 6.8 inches on the Pixel 9 Pro XL.

All models are powered by Google's new Tensor G4 processor and come with increased RAM, with Pro models boasting 16GB. The devices run on Android 14 and will receive seven years of OS updates and security patches. Google has significantly expanded the AI capabilities of the new Pixels. An updated on-device Gemini Nano model can now analyze images and speech in addition to text. New features include automatic screenshot cataloging and retrieval, and an AI-powered illustration generator called Pixel Studio. Camera improvements are a key focus, with all models receiving upgraded ultrawide lenses and the Pro versions featuring a new 42-megapixel selfie camera with autofocus. Google has introduced "Magic Editor," allowing users to transform parts of an image using text prompts and generative AI.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Google's second-generation foldable device, is thinner than its predecessor at 5.1mm when unfolded. It features a larger 8-inch inner display with increased brightness, reaching up to 2,700 nits in peak mode. Pricing for the new Pixel lineup starts at $799 for the standard Pixel 9, representing a $100 increase from last year's model. The Pixel 9 Pro and Pro XL are priced at $999 and $1,099 respectively, while the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will retail for $1,799. The devices will be released in stages, with the Pixel 9 and 9 Pro XL available from August 22, followed by the 9 Pro in September and the Pro Fold on September 4.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Intel Linux engineer Colin Ian King discovered that if aligning the slab in the ACPI code via the "SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN" flag will offer a measurable improvement in memory performance and reducing the kernel boot time.

Colin explained with this one line kernel patch: "Enabling SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN for the ACPI object caches improves boot speed in the ACPICA core for object allocation and free'ing especially in the AML parsing and execution phases in boot. Testing with 100 boots shows an average boot saving in acpi_init of ~35000 usecs compared to the unaligned version. Most of the ACPI objects being allocated and free'd are of very short life times in the critical paths for parsing and execution, so the extra memory used for alignment isn't too onerous."

Security researchers from SafeBreach have found what they say is a Windows downgrade attack that's invisible, persistent, irreversible and maybe even more dangerous than last year's BlackLotus UEFI bootkit. From a report: After seeing the damage that UEFI bootkit could do by bypassing secure boot processes in Windows, SafeBreach's Alon Leviev became curious whether there were any other fundamental Windows components that could be abused in a similar manner. He hit the jackpot in one of the most unlikely places: The Windows update process.

"I found a way to take over Windows updates to update the system, but with control over all of the actual update contents," Leviev told us in an interview ahead of his Black Hat USA conference presentation today detailing his findings. Using his technique, having compromised a machine so that he could get in as a normal user, Leviev was able to control which files get updated, which registry keys are changed, which installers get used, and the like. And he was able to do all of it while side-stepping every single integrity verification implemented in the Windows update process. After that, "I was able to downgrade the OS kernel, DLLs, drivers ... basically everything that I wanted." To make matters worse, Leviev said that poking and prodding around the vulnerabilities he found enabled him to attack the entire Windows virtualization stack, including virtualization-based security (VBS) features that are supposed to isolate the kernel and make attacker access less valuable.

With Windows 10's end-of-life update coming next October, it appears that users are finally making the jump to its successor. As spotted by Neowin, Windows 11 crossed the 30% market share mark for the first time since its release. From the report: According to Statcounter's latest findings, last month, Windows 11 reached a new all-time high of 30.83%, gaining 1.08 points in just one month or 7.17 points year-over-year (it was at 23.66% in July 2023). Just as Windows 11 climbs, Windows 10 loses its market share. It is now below 65%, or 64.99%, to be precise, or -1.06 points in one month. Year-over-year change is 11.15 points (it was at 71.14% in July 2023). [...]

Other Windows versions, which are now long unsupported, still have a fair share of customers who refuse to jump-ship. Windows 7, for one, is the third most popular Windows with a 3.04% market share (+0.08 points). Windows 8.1 is fourth with 0.42% (+0.02 points), and Windows XP is fifth with 0.38% (-0.01 points).

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Phoronix: The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July...

Notable new software work includes getting the Simple HTTP Server running as the first web (HTTP) server for the platform. Simple HTTP Server itself is written in Rust as well. There is also an ongoing effort to bring the Apache HTTP server to Redox OS too.

Another app milestone is the wget program now working on Redox OS. There's also been more work on getting the COSMIC desktop apps working on Redox OS, build system improvements, and other changes.

According to Statcounter, Linux use hit another all-time high in July. For July 2024, the statistics website is showing Linux at 4.45%, climbing almost a half a percentage point from June's 4.05% high.

Is 2024 truly the year of Linux on the desktop?

Azure used to be a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. Now, it's the most widely used operating system on Microsoft Azure. The New Stack's Joab Jackson writes: These days, Microsoft expends considerable effort that Linux runs as smoothly as possible on Azure, according to a talk given earlier this year at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit given by two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul, and Krum Kashan. "Linux is the #1 operating system in Azure today," Aboutoul said. And all must be supported in a way that Microsoft users have come to expects. Hence, the need for the Microsoft's Linux Platforms Group, which provides support Linux to both the internal customers and to Azure customers. These days, the duo of engineers explained, Microsoft knows about as much as anyone about how to operate Linux at hyperscale. [...]

As of today, there are hundreds of Azure and Azure-based services running on Linux, including the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and many of the other database services. "A lot of the infrastructure powering everything else is running on Linux," Aboutoul said. "They're different flavors of Linux running all over the place," Aboutoul said. To run these services, Microsoft maintains its own kernel, Azure Linux, and in 2023 the company released its own version of Linux, Azure Linux. But Azure Linux is just a small portion of all the other flavors of Linux running on Azure, all of which Microsoft must work with to support.

Overall, there are about 20,000 third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) packages in the Azure marketplace that rely on some Linux distribution. And when things go wrong, it is the Azure service engineers who get the help tickets. The company keeps a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Red Hat). [...] Overall, the company gets about 1,000 images a month from these endorsed partners alone. Many of the distributions have multiple images (Suse has a regular one, and another one for high-performance computing, for instance).