KDE 5.8 LTS, Fedora PSA, Magic Security Dust
The top story today was the release of KDE Plasma 5.8 which was covered by all the top sites. This release brings some new features and long term support. It's already in KDE neon as well. Elsewhere, The Inquirer began a new series on the legends of Linux and Fedora's Adam Williamson posted a public service announcement for version 24. A bit of drama emerged from Andrew Ayer's systemd post and Martin Owens ruminated on Free Software Faith.
The release of Plasma 5.8 scored headlines all over the Web today and for good reason. This release is supposed to be a stable everyday desktop whose users will enjoy long term support. Jonathan Riddell announced the release saying, "This marks the point where the developers and designers are happy to recommend Plasma for the widest possible audience be they enterprise or non-techy home users." This release brought a "unified boot to shutdown artwork," right-to-left language support, improved applets, improved multi-screen support, new default font, and improved Wayland support. Several Linux distributions feature live images, including KDE neon, for those wishing a test drive.
Adam Williamson today warned Fedora 24 users with multiple graphic adapters not to update their systems with DNF from the desktop. Seems systemd will crash your system and the update will not complete leaving users with broken systems. He suggests using the "offline update system via pkcon" or from a commandline outside of X. Again, this only seems to effect users with two or more graphic chips. Single card machines should be fine. Williamson said updates are "currently being prepared" but remember to update using one of the safe methods described by Williamson.
Speaking of systemd, Andrew Ayer stirred up a bit of a hornets' nest when he posted of issues with systemd. He's the one who discovered that systemd could get "hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system." He went into great detail explaining several security and usability issues with systemd which prompted developer David Strauss to respond. He defended systemd saying Ayer's "calling for a complete replacement of systemd" is basically a "temper tantrum." Ayer replied defending his position and offering further examples.
In other news:
* Legends of Linux Part 1: Linus Torvalds