Neon's Muddy Clarity, New Ubuntu Phone, Linus at TED

The top story today must be the new Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu phone as the announcement was picked up by almost everyone. Running a close second is the news that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can now be run on Microsoft's Azure. In other news, Linus Torvalds gave a talk at TED and Bryan Lunduke suffered the backlash of an angry Neon crowd after last week's opinion of the project. Finally, Jamie Watson tested recently released Korora 23.

Last week new openSUSE board member Bryan Lunduke said he wasn't sure Neon was an appropriate KDE sanctioned project as it might jeopardize development for other distributions not based on Ubuntu. Neon was initially described as "a project to make daily packages for KDE." Later it was stated that it would be a distribution based on Ubuntu because it is "the best technology." Today Bryan Lunduke said the FAQ has been updated a bit to make clear Neon is NOT a distribution. Although, Lunduke quoted the email from the board stating:

The voting is over and the membership was clear in that KDE can have a distribution and that the KDE Neon team is well-suited to do this task. The board is committed to help the project move forward and put everything at hand to make it happen.

David Edmundson referred to it as a distribution as well. But Neon is not installable and will only feature KDE applications under a KDE environment, but it's (to be) bootable and usable. Is it a distribution? For now, it's clear as mud.

One of the more disturbing aspects of this story is the reactions that Lunduke described as "a bit tense." He said "people were angry." This included folks from KDE as well as the community. Riddell and others stated several times Neon is not a distro although all the initial announcements called it that. Lunduke responded to one of Riddell's comments saying:

You aren't making a Linux distribution at all. It is simply, according to you, based on Kubuntu. Which is, clearly, not a Linux distro. And you'll be using Ubuntu as the base going forward... but Ubuntu is clearly not a Linux distro either. And (according to the website) you'll "soon" be able to download live .iso's of KDE Neon.

Another commenter suggested that Neon is Kubuntu without having to deal with Canonical. Whatever you call it everyone agrees Neon is a KDE project that will be used to showcase and allow users/developers to check out the latest KDE Plasma and Applications. "A rose by any other name..." When asked for an interview, Riddell told Lunduke to [go] "away and boil your head you twinkle," according to a commented translation.

Canonical today announced their latest phone by Meizo, the Meizu PRO 5. It's billed as the highest spec phone for Ubuntu to date. Canonical is also prould that it will be available for all major markets the same day. It sports new features as well such as the Exynos 7420 Octa-core processor, 5.7-inch 1920×1080 Gorilla® glass screen, 21.16 megapixel rear camera (5 megapixel front), 32GB storage, 3GB RAM, and two SIM slots. In related news, Swapnil Bhartita gets the skinny from the Ubuntu team themselves.

Linus Torvalds gave a talk TED2016 conference in Canada today and Emily McManus blogged some highlights. TED curator Chris Anderson spoke to Torvalds about his Linux work, specifically, if stubbornness is essential. Torvalds replied no, but sometimes he gets caught up in the work and forgets folks' feelings. He said sometimes developers don't like each other and that shouldn't matter. "Code either works or it doesn't," he said. "I'm actually not a people person. I don't really love other people, but I do love other people who get involved in my project." Another quote McManus mentioned was, "If I was stranded on an island and the only way to get off the island was to make a pretty UI, I'd die there." The full video should become available soon at the TED2016 Website. Re/code's Ina Fried spoke to Torvalds briefly afterwards who said he liked working in his bathrobe and would never start his own business.

In other interesting news today:

* Korora 23 (Coral): Hands-on with all five desktop versions

* Plasma in all colors you like

* Penguinistas can now run RHEL instances on Microsoft's Azure cloud