Those of us who are deep in the tech world remember about 6 weeks ago when all our social media and news feeds were talking about the XZ Utils backdoor. ( Here’s a great writeup from my favorite tech site, Ars Technica)

Really quick, bulleted recap:

• XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
• SSH uses XZ Utils
• Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
• Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
• they used that to put some backdoors
• Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
• LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories

I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!

Red Hat released version 9.4 today. Lots of jargon (including a mention of AI), but one of the big deals considering how long Red Hat support contracts go is the addition of ARM64 as a supported architecture. 9to5Linux also had a summary of the new features.

I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there would always be a long lag time from RHEL releases until CentOS. That’s why I was so surprised to learn that Alma Linux 9.4 is also available today. What I found neatest about Alma is the way they’re distinguishing their distro. Why just go for another RHEL clone? Well, in this case Alma Linux is decided to support hardware that had been deprecated by Red Hat. So now they get to position their disto as a useful alternative, not just a free offering - more important now that you can have up to 16 free RHEL licenses.

Back in 2013 when I started using Fedora Core 1, I had no idea I’d still be on Fedora when it reached its 40th release 11 years later. Congrats to the team and here’s the official announcement.

I can’t believe I’ve been using Linux for 20 years already! I started off with Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow) 20 years ago. It was in this book:

Red Hat Linux and Fedora Unleashed Cover

Boy has the technology come a long way in those 20 years!

One of my earliest desktop screenshots from back then:

Gnome - 20151002

Now one of my more recent desktops:

Now that we’ve had a few months to consider Red Hat’s new course code policy, I wanted to share my thoughts since I’ve been a user of Red Hat’s Fedora since it started back in 2003. I’ve also made heavy use of CentOS and am currently running a server using one of the free RHEL licences that came about from the CentOS Stream controversy. I want to start off with my thoughts and then how I think we may end up in a better place anyway.

If you’ve been following my blog long enough, you know that the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 transition was a mess, but somewhere around Oct 2010 (2-3 years after the 4.0 release), it really started to get stable and become my daily runner. By Feb 2011, I was loving the fact that KDE Plasma 4 had implemented the idea of activities. After user experience disaster, the KDE developers were a lot more careful with the transition to Plasma 5. Recently I read the blog post Plasma 6: Better defaults and I’m excited that the KDE developers are taking so much time to think about sane user defaults.

KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month. Multi-monitor support is way better now. (And this is without the new update that supposedly makes it even more so solid). Scrolling is still a little screwy in Firefox, but it works perfectly in Vivaldi (my daily driver for quite a few months now).

This morning I updated my Fedora 36 computer and suddenly it could no longer find any sound devices. Thanks to a Fedora user who commented on this reddit thread, I found that the solution was to downgrade my Pipewire packages. Specifically, at this point in time:

sudo dnf install pipewire-pulseaudio-0.3.49-1.fc36

A reboot didn’t make it work on its own. So I had to do the following afterwards:

After using Plasma with KWayland for about a week, I had to go back to X11 because it’s not yet ready for me. There are 3 main issues I’m having:

1. Occasionally, when I come back to my computer after locking the screen it would say that the screen locker had crashed. I would need to go to antoher TTY and type in a command to unlock it. After I did that, coming back to the TTY that has the GUI just remains black with a mouse cursor. So I would need to reboot the machine.
2. Context menus would appear in the wrong place and I actually filed a bug about this one.
3. I cannot drag and drop video files to upload to YouTube with Firefox. I have to click the button on YT and then navigate to the folder that has the video file. (Not sure if there are other things that can’t be dragged in - photo upload to Flickr, for example)

I’ll keep looking to see if they improve things. But for now I’m staying on X11.