Microsoft Privacy Violations, Fedora: Season's Pick
Topping today's Linux news is the wrist slapping of Microsoft by French Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés for excessive spying. Back in Linuxland, openSUSE 42.2 Alpha 3 and Mint 18 Xfce Beta were released for early testers. Bruce Byfield compares Linux and Windows users and Dedoimedo found another distribution he likes. VarGuy Christopher Tozzi ran down five Open Source projects that didn't work out and Sam Varghese scolds Linux users for expecting Final quality out of Alpha releases.
Microsoft's Windows 10 has been found to collect and send back to the US too much data on French and EU customers. They have been given three months to propose fixes or risk hefty fines. The Register summed the commission's notice, "The operating system collects excessive amounts of personal data, ships that information illegally out of the EU, and has lousy security." Microsoft claims to be abiding by the old Safe Harbor guidelines, but the CNIL considers the Windows 10 behavior intrusive and unnecessary. Microsoft said they have every intention of complying, but they know how to play the game.
openSUSE 42.2 Alpha 3 was announced today by Ludwig Nussel for eager testers. This release includes all the updates from SLE 12 SP2 as well as "completing the GNOME update, the integration of KDE Plasma 5.7 and TeX Live 2015" since Alpha 2. Testers can find the areas of concern for this release in the announcement. Beta 1 is scheduled for August 25, Beta 2 September 21, followed by two release candidates in October. The Final is planned for the first week in November.
In other openSUSE news, Douglas DeMaio posted of the latest from Tumbleweed. He said, "There is a lot of excitement around the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots because of new KDE features and the newest stable Linux Kernel, which is expected in the next snapshot." Recent merges include KDE Plasma 5.7.0, Linux 4.6.4, and updates to Bash, GCC, and Glibc.
Christopher Tozzi began his list of Open Source failures with Corel Linux. Corel Linux was born to showcase WordPerfect, but both fizzled out mainly due to OpenOffice. Tozzi said Corel Linux was discontinued in 2000. Other examples include Diaspora and GNU Hurd. GNU Hurd 0.8 was released May 18, 2016. Check out the other "lessons" on TheVarGuy.com.
In other news:
* Dedoimedo Likes Fedora 24, Ultimate Fedora T-shirt
* 7 Differences Between Linux and Windows: User Expectations
* Feral Linux users should learn when to shut up