Linux Magazine December 2021

Dear Reader, If you stay in this job long enough, you get to see the progression of technologies as they move from mere ideas, to prototypes, to real-world products ready to challenge the world and ascend the ladder to that mystical measure of success that the venture capitalists call “disruption.” Eight years ago – in the July 2013 issue, to be exact – I wrote about a quirky little story in the news that fell on one of those eternal fault lines of American culture. Some gun advocates had published plans for a 3D-printed gun, which they called the “Liberator.” At that time, 3D gun printing was little more than a concept – something for the opposing sides of the gun control debate to face off around. The Liberator, which…

Tails 4.22 64-bit Tails 4.22 (the Amnesic Incognito Live System) is the latest release of one of the most popular security-oriented distributions. Based on Debian, Tails runs from an exterior device, either making all incoming and outgoing connections anonymous or blocking non-anonymous ones. It is especially well known for its Tor Browser, which provides an easy way to browse anonymously, control JavaScript, and remove ads. Other tools in Tails include Pidgin for encrypted instant messaging, OnionShare for anonymous file sharing, Thunderbird configured for encrypted email, and Electrum for bitcoin transactions. A basic part of security and privacy is updates with the latest patches. In keeping with this criterion, Tails 4.22 consists largely of application updates. Other changes from earlier releases include reducing the time out when reconnecting from 60 seconds…

It seems like only yesterday that a small group of developers began work on porting Linux to the new Apple M1 chipset. The journey was a struggle from day one, given how much proprietary hardware Apple uses. But the work has paid off and Asahi Linux, a community-based project centered around porting a distribution to the Apple M1 chipset, has finally succeeded in getting a usable Linux desktop on the hardware. The engineers have merged various drivers and bindings for the 5.16 Linux kernel and even managed to work out the pinctrl driver, I2C driver, device power management, NVMe + SART, and DCP. Thanks to those new drivers, M1 Macs are now a viable option for the Linux operating system. Before you jump on this, understand it’s not perfect. Apple…

MX Linux (https://mxlinux.org/) is a midweight Linux distribution that aims to be simple and stable. The distribution is available in three different flavors: Xfce, KDE Plasma, and Fluxbox. MX Linux 21 RC is based on Debian 11 (bullseye), which includes all of the latest components and security patches. All three editions include a new mx-comfort theme, and the developers have worked diligently to clear away as many bugs as possible for the release candidate. The MX Linux 21 Xfce edition includes the Thunar Shares Plugin for the Thunar file manager (for Samba access) and a default user password for admin tasks. The Fluxbox edition panel now offers preconfigured setups, and the KDE Plasma edition comes with an updated Dolphin file manager (which includes a fix for the “Save desktop changes”…

While Fedora 35 might not include the same level of game-changing, workflow-enhancing features found in Fedora 34 (thanks to Gnome 40), there’s plenty to be excited about in this new Fedora iteration. One of the more notable changes comes by way of improvements to the NVidia proprietary driver. Red Hat has been working diligently to help improve the NVidia/Wayland stack support, and the changes in Fedora 35 should go a long way to improve desktop performance across the board. Fedora 35 also brings high-resolution mouse wheel support that will provide a much smoother wheel-scrolling experience. This change comes by way of the work done on libinput. The distribution also recently shifted from PulseAudio to PipeWire, and the system will see much maturation in this upcoming release. Gnome will also add…

Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 are Long Term Support (LTS) versions, both of which have already hit End of Life (14.04 in 2019 and 16.04 in 2021). The problem is, however, a large number of enterprise businesses are still making use of those versions of the open source platform. While you can upgrade to the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, that’s not always an option for some use cases. Because of this, Canonical (https://canonical.com/) has extended their support for both versions of Ubuntu to bring those releases in line with the new 10-year support period that was given to both 18.04 and 20.04 (both of which are also LTS releases). Of course, there’s a caveat: The additional support for 14.04 and 16.04 comes by way of Extended Support Maintenance, which requires…