Issue #211 / Jun 2018

Every day, things seem to happen that I never thought I'd see, but one recent announcement was particularly striking if you've been around the FOSS community anytime in the last 20 years: Microsoft just proclaimed they are creating their own custom version of the Linux kernel.

Linux Mint 18.3 “Mate” and Arch Linux

Solomon Hykes Leaves Daily Operations at Docker; Red Hat Celebrates 25th Anniversary with a New Code Portal; Gnome 3.28 Released; Install Firefox in a Snap on Linux; Arduino Adds Rasp Pi and BeagleBone to the Arduino Create Platform; and IBM Launches a New Data Science Platform.

Improving Netfilter Efficiency; Protecting Memory from Malicious Modification; and Speeding Up Workarounds for Intel Security Flaws.

Two leaders of the KDE project report on priorities and celebrate a funding victory.

Voice-activated assistants like Mycroft bring online, hands-free help to users, but with more transparency and less spying.

If you are looking for a lean but modern Linux with a solid foundation and seamless cloud connection, take a look at Peppermint OS.

Using scanners to digitize documents in Linux was once a perilous business, but Linux scanner technology has improved in recent years. We study the state of the art with some leading scanners from various manufacturers.

At a party with 23 guests, having two guests with the same birthday in more than 50 percent of cases may sound fairly unlikely to amateur mathematicians. Armed with statistical methods, party animal Mike Schilli sets out to prove this claim.

The blatant security holes known as Meltdown and Spectre, which are built into the computer hardware, are likely to keep us busy for the next few years. How is the Linux community addressing this unexpected challenge?