Fedora PSA, Ubuntu EOL, Positive Mint Review

Today in Linux news Adam Williamson issued a public service announcement concerning Fedora and Skyland systems. Elsewhere, Bruce Byfield said that graphical installers began the influx of the regular Linux user and Ubuntu 15.10 is approaching its end of support. My Linux Rig spoke to System76's James Blaede and The Hectic Geek said Linux Mint 18 is how a distro should be done.

If you have a computer with a Skylake processor and run Fedora 24, you'll want to skip the kernel upgrade. It seems Skylake systems will fail to boot after a kernel upgrade. Adam Williamson explained, "The bug seems to be that on some system firmwares, the microcode load fails and hangs the system." The bug, not limited to just Fedora, is being addressed but a workaround has been posted. For now if you've already borked your system the workaround is to boot an older kernel, downgrade microcode_ctl, and rebuild initramfs. Williamson explained just how the bug is triggered in his latest blog post.

The Ubuntu Fridge today announced that Ubuntu 15.10 will soon reach its end of supported life cycle. "Ubuntu 15.10 will reach end of life on Thursday, July 28th. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 15.10." Users are urged to upgrade to version 16.04 before the end of the month. Ubuntu 16.04 will receive security and bug fixes through April 2021 whereas Ubuntu 16.10, due in October, will be supported until February 2017.

Last night things were looking a bit discouraging for the Mint project with three bad reviews landing in close succession. However, The Hectic Geek broke the trend today by saying, They did it again!" Not that his experience was perfect, but almost. He said:

Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon is still lean on memory usage, boots relatively fast (compared to many other distributions), power efficient, extremely responsive, ran on the hardware very well (except for the touch-pad related issue which is not exactly Linux Mint's fault), very stable and shutdown time was also quite good. My verdict is simple: "This is how it should be done!"

In other news:

* How graphical installers introduced the user

* The Linux Setup - Cassidy James Blaede, elementary OS/System76