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Free open-source software updates and Linux news

Go programming language announced the new 1.24 release on 11 February, 2025! Here’s the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu & other Linux.

What’s New in Go 1.24:

  • Fully supports generic type aliases, allows to create a new name for an existing type (support type parameters) without creating a new type.
  • New -tool flag for go get, allowing to add a tool directive to the current module for named packages.
  • New tests analyzer for go vet to report common mistakes in test packages.
  • New set of mechanisms to facilitate FIPS 140-3 compliance.
  • Faster and less error-prone testing.B.Loop method to perform benchmark iterations.
  • New os.Root type provides the ability to perform filesystem operations within a specific directory.
  • New runtime.AddCleanup finalization mechanism that is more flexible, more efficient, and less error-prone.
  • New weak package provides weak pointers.
  • New crypto/mlkem package implements ML-KEM-768 and ML-KEM-1024.
  • New crypto/hkdf, crypto/pbkdf2, and crypto/sha3 packages.
  • New experimental testing/synctest package provides support for testing concurrent code.

See the announcement for more changes in Go 1.24.

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Deepin, the popular Linux Distribution from China, announced the last Beta of version 23 this Friday!

Deepin is a Linux Distro so far based on Debian ‘Stable’ branch, features Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) that is built on Qt toolkit. It’s a free open-source system that has a very attractive desktop appearance.

Start in version 23, which is still in development, Deepin is going to be independent Linux Distribution. In the beta, it’s no longer depends on Debian or any other Linux, but still uses .deb and apt for installing and managing software packages.

The installer for Deepin 23 Beta3 is improved to be adaptive for different screen resolutions, including 768P, 1080P, 2K, and 4K. It added drivers support for certain i386 devices support, though without 32-bit download at the moment, due to human and resource limit.

The release introduced UOS AI plugin, available in system tray. User can communicate with it using text or voice. And, it can answer user questions and generate images based on user description.

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OnlyOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, announced new 8.0 release this Friday.

The release introduced one of the most awaited features, RTL support. It now supports bidirectional text in documents and presentations. But, RTL input is partially available with some limitations, since it’s still in Beta. In the settings page, user can enabled RTL interface with a checkbox, then restart the app to apply.

The new 8.0 release also added local interface themes support. Besides the built-in light, classic light, dark, and contrast dark, there’s now a “Add local theme” option to apply a custom interface using local JSON file.

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LibreOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, announced a new major release this Wednesday.

It’s LibreOffice 24.2.0, the first release introduced the new calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M). Meaning it’s release in February, 2024.

The release added better support for Qt-based UI variants. It automatically switches to dark app color and dark icon theme for KDE Plasma when the desktop is set to dark style.

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Budgie desktop announced the new 10.9 release this Monday! See what’s new in the free open-source desktop environment.

Budgie is a popular desktop environment that default in Ubuntu budgie, and optional in Debian, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro Linux, etc.

The most recent version 10.9 was released few days ago. It features initial port to Wayland, which is already default in Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux (such as Debian 12) with recent GNOME desktop.

It adopts XFCE’s libxfce4windowing library to make the transition from X11 to Wayland. And, in the release the Show Desktop applet, Alt+Tab window switcher, and Workspace applet have been ported to the new library.

Budgie 10.9 also takes into use the  budgie-session. It’s a softish fork from GNOME session 44.x.

As you may know, GNOME is going to drop X11 session. The developer, Jordan Petridis, has submit the request in project page. To retain the X11 session until switch Budgie to being Wayland-only, the budgie-session is being in use to take place.

Another change in the release is the redesigned bluetooth applet. Instead of using an older version of gnome-bluetooth, the applet now directly communicates to BlueZ and UPower over D-Bus.

And, the applet now provides direct connect/disconnect functionality for paired devices, battery life indicators, as well as functionality for sending files to Bluetooth devices.

Image from https://buddiesofbudgie.org/

How to Get Budgie Desktop 10.9

For more changes about the new desktop release, see the official release note.

To get the new desktop release, it’s better to wait your Distribution to package the updates. And, Arch Linux has already done the job.

For Ubuntu users, just keep an eye on the Ubuntu Budgie Team PPA.

Ubuntu 23.04 is Reaching End of Life Today

Last updated: January 25, 2024 — Leave a comment

Ubuntu 23.04, code-name ‘Lunar Lobster’, will be soon no longer supported!

Ubuntu 23.04 was released on April 20, 2023 with 9-month support circle. And, today January 25, 2024 is the last day it’s officially supported according to the announcement.

Meaning that Ubuntu developer team will no longer publish any security and package updates for users of Ubuntu 23.04. Also, third-party repositories and Ubuntu PPAs will mostly stop updating packages for 23.04.

There are security risks of using end-of-life system, so it’s better to either upgrade to Ubuntu 23.10, which is supported until July 2024, then upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 (with 5 years support) a few months later.

Or, re-install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that is supported until 2027, plus 5 years of expanded security maintenance.

To download the latest Ubuntu images, go to ubuntu.com/download.

To upgrade Ubuntu 23.04 to Ubuntu 23.10, either see the official guide or this step by step guide. It’s IMPORTANT to make backup, since upgrade might fail due to various reasons!

Mozilla announced new 122.0 release for its free open-source Firefox web browser this Tuesday!

This is a new monthly release that include minor new features. For Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and their based systems, Firefox now provides official .deb packages through an apt repository.

Meaning now, there are 5 official ways to install Firefox in Ubuntu Linux:

  • Snap package (pre-installed in Ubuntu 22.04+)
  • New apt repository (maintained by Mozilla)
  • MozillaTeam PPA (maintained by Ubuntu Team members)
  • Portable Linux tarball (maintained by Mozilla)
  • Flatpak package (verified by Mozilla)

Besides providing .deb package for the Stable release, the apt repository also includes the packages for Beta, Nightly, and Dev versions of the popular web browser.
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Guvcview, the free open-source tool for capturing image/video and dynamically controlling UVC camera and webcam devices, released version 2.1.0.

It’s a GTK3 and Qt5 application that provides both graphical interface and command line options to control your webcam or camera.

With it, you can change the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, white balance (gamma), sharpness, backlight compensation, etc settings for your webcam.

Besides the dynamic control of UVC (USB Video Class) camera/webcam, it also allows to capture video with control of frame rate, filters such as mirror, invert, pieces, blur, etc. Also, capture audio with sample rate, latency, and filters including echo, reverb, fuzz, wahwah, and ducky.

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Wine, the popular software for running Windows applications on Linux, macOS, & BSD, announced new stable 9.0 release few days ago on Tuesday.

Wine 9.0 features WoW 6.0 (Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit), which was experimentally supported in last 8.0 release. It allows to run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation, instead of inside a 32-bit Unix process. However, the features is NOT enabled by default.

The release also includes experimental Wayland graphics driver. Which is also not enabled by default, but already implements many features, such as basic window management, multiple monitors, high-DPI scaling, relative motion events, and Vulkan support.

The 9.0 release added initial support for building Wine for the ARM64EC architecture, for running Windows apps on ARM64 powered devices with native speed.

Other changes in Wine 9.0 include:

  • WinRT theming supports a dark theme option
  • Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.3.272 of the Vulkan spec.
  • Implement Windows Media Video (WMV) decoder DirectX Media Object (DMO)
  • Mono engine is updated to version 8.1.0
  • DLS1 and DLS2 sound font loading
  • The default Windows version for new prefixes is set to Windows 10.
  • MIDI playback in dmsynth
  • Indeo IV50 Video for Windows decoder
  • And much more! See release note for details.


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Oracle Virtualbox announced a new point release for the 7.0 series this Tuesday.

It’s VirtualBox 7.0.14, which add initial host and guest support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, though it’s still in development stage. As well, there’s a kernel panic fix for RHEL 8.9 running as guest OS.

For Solaris Linux, the guest additions can be installed into an alternate root path, and it no longer requires to reboot after uninstalling guest additions.

For macOS as host, the release added support for newer USB storage devices, and fixed memory Leak in the VBoxIntNetSwitch process when VM was configured to use ‘Internal Networking’.

The release also include OVF import/export improvements. They include import & export virtual machines containing NVMe storage controllers, and, export a VM which contains a medium inserted into a virtual CD/DVD drive which is attached to a Virtio-SCSI controller.

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