NEWS

SUSE Goes for the Fork After Red Hat's RHEL Announcement

SUSE, the company behind Rancher and SUSE Enterprise Linux, has announced it will invest $10 million to fork publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and develop a RHEL-compatible distribution.

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, says, "For decades, collaboration and shared success have been the building blocks of our open source community. We have a responsibility to defend these values."

He then speaks to the investment SUSE has committed to this effort by saying, "This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today."

This all started when Red Hat declared that CentOS Stream would be the sole repository for public RHEL source code. However, with CentOS Stream being a rolling release distribution, it's not exactly suitable for business needs.

Gregory Kurtzer, the original creator of CentOS and the man behind the RHEL clone, Rocky Linux, had this to say, "SUSE has embodied the core principles and spirit of open source; CIQ is thrilled to collaborate with SUSE on advancing an open enterprise Linux standard."

There has been no mention of a release date for this fork, as it will take considerable time and effort to pull off.

It might take a few years to see the fruits of SUSE's labor, but with a 10 million dollar investment, you can be sure this is happening.

Solus 4.4 Now Ready for Prime Time

Solus 4.4, aka Harmony, is here and it has plenty to offer users. There are four different versions to choose from (Budgie, Gnome, MATE, and KDE Plasma). Each version includes all the updates that come along with the more recent versions of the desktops (Budgie 10.7.2, Gnome 43.5, MATE 1.27, and KDE Plasma 5.27.5). Although not bleeding edge releases, each of these desktops is stable and filled with new features to enjoy.

One welcome change is that, with KDE Plasma, the Wayland session now works out of the box. However, for MATE users, let it be known that the Solus development team plan on sunsetting this version (because the MATE desktop isn't keeping up with Wayland development). In fact, version 4.4 will be the last to include the MATE option.

As far as software, you'll find Firefox 114.0.1, LibreOffice 7.5.3.2, Thunderbird 102.12.0, Mesa 23.0.3, and Linux kernel 6.3.8 (which supplies an even wider range of hardware support). With the new kernel, there's new and/or improved support for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc, and zram is enabled out of the box for much-improved performance.

You can read more about the Harmony iteration of Solus in the official release notes (https://getsol.us/2023/07/08/solus-4-4-released/) and download an ISO for installation from the official Solus download page (https://getsol.us/download/).

Ubuntu Will Show APT News in the Software Updater App

If you use Ubuntu version 18.04 LTS or newer, you'll soon be seeing APT News in the Software Updater GUI.

If you've not experienced APT News, the idea behind it (according to Canonical) is to give users as much information as possible about recent updates, so they can decide if those updates should be applied or not. Essentially, APT News is an unobtrusive feature that presents timely news, related to installed packages.

The APT News portion of the Software Updater will be presented near the top of the GUI window and can be expanded to read; otherwise, it will default to unexpanded.

The information presented will include things like significant security updates, features, and/or services. This news section also will inform you when regular support has ended for a release, which should be considered a very handy bit of information to know to help users understand it's time to upgrade to a supported release.

For those who would rather not see this news, Canonical has made it possible to disable with the command pro config set apt-news=false. Otherwise, APT News will be presented in both the terminal and the Software Updater GUI.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you'll get more information if you sign up for Ubuntu Pro, which is free for personal use.

At this time, there is no definitive date when the APT News feature will land in the Software Updater, but I'd expect it sooner, rather than later.

This story was originally reported on OMG! Ubuntu! (https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/ubuntu-now-shows-apt-news-in-software-updater).