jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.19, the popular free and open-source desktop environment. "In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience," reads the announcement. For a complete list of what's new, you can visit the Plasma 5.19 changelog.

Tom's Hardware "put five of the most popular desktop environments up against each other in a no-holds-barred, seven-round face-off. We've rated GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Awesome and Regolith on a 10-point scale based on Installation, Applications, User Experience, User Documentation, Performance, Extensions and Configurability."

It's a good read, with a detailed and thoughtful 3,700-word analysis, especially about memory performance: When you use the standard desktops, Gnome and KDE, you will likely notice that you are using a lot of memory... If you haven't noticed yet, try running htop in a separate window while you try out your choices. You should see a substantial difference with Awesome, i3 and, if you are elite, dwm. The difference in memory footprint is staggering when you start measuring. GNOME starts with somewhere in the region of 3GB at boot. This can be trimmed down by serious tweaking, but not very much. In comparison, the Awesome window manager weighs in at around 600MB... You can put a lot of eye candy and daemons before you weigh down your system as much as the others...

Getting the advantage comes at a cost, though: you need to learn a few new habits to use Awesome desktop environment.
Among GNOME, KDE, and Cinnamon, the article ultimately calls KDE "the most polished... decorative and versatile of the bunch. This comes at a cost, though." Cinnamon has the best balance between extensions and ease of use, while it is also fast and responsive. At the same time, it is not that heavy on resources. You can also add a wide range of extensions in the shape of widgets that send you ongoing and updated information.

Regolith requires a bit more training, but it does set itself up for you so you can continue as you did with GNOME. Adding extensions and other gadgets is a bit more tricky, however... With Awesome you have to set up and practice to use it! It's easily the hardest in the group to get started with. When you are up and running, Awesome does deliver the most benefits from a resource point of view...

Overall Winner: Cinnamon...because of its strong combination of user experience, performance and customization.

Click through to read reactions and share your own thoughts. (And to see a short list of some of the article's other highlights.)

Today, Fedora 32 becomes available for download. From a report: It comes with GNOME 3.36 which you can read more about here. If you don't like GNOME, it isn't the end of the world -- you can instead choose KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE, and more. There is even a special ARM variant of Fedora 32 that will work with Raspberry Pi devices. "Fedora 32 includes new features aimed at addressing issues facing modern developers and IT teams. Highlights include key updates to Fedora's desktop-focused edition, Fedora 32 Workstation, and a new computational neuroscience lab image, aimed at bringing those working in science fields to open source software. Each Fedora edition is designed to address specific use cases for modern developers and IT teams with Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server providing open operating systems built to meet the needs of forward-looking developers and server projects," says The Fedora Project development team.

Phoronix reports on a new concern about Qt, the free and open-source widget toolkit for creating GUIs and cross-platform applications: Wednesday a KDE developer who serves on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation commented that The Qt Company is evaluating restricting new releases to paying customers for 12 months. That was said to be under consideration due to COVID19 / coronavirus impacting their finances and needing to boost short-term revenues... [Slashdot editor's note: the comment also claims the Qt Company "says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas."] This comes months after The Qt Company already shifted to make Qt long-term support releases customer-only, among other steps to boost their commercial business at the beginning of the year.

Following all the speculation and concerns from the statement by KDE's Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer, The Qt Company released this very brief statement:

There have been discussions on various internet forums about the future of Qt open source in the last two days. The contents do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company.

The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model.
But in the event of a one-year freeze on free releases, Phoronix now reports, "several individuals and projects are already expressing interest in a Qt fork should it come to it." The hope is first and foremost that The Qt Company and KDE / KDE Free Qt Foundation can reach a mutual agreement without this embargo on future releases, which would effectively close up its development... Among those backing the concept of forking Qt as a last resort if necessary has been developers from consulting firm KDAB, the Qute browser developer, and the QGIS project as one of the leading geographic information system software packages, among many KDE developers themselves.

The mailing list thread is quite active in talking about the possible fork if necessary, including aspects like web-hosting down to what such a fork should be called ("Kt" seems to be a popular choice so far with several different members in the community).

jrepin writes: The KDE community today announced the release of Plasma 5.18. This version of the popular desktop environment is the latest long-term supported release and brings an emoji selector, user feedback capabilities, a global edit mode, and improvements to System Settings, the Discover software manager, widgets, GTK integration and much more. The full Plasma 5.18.0 changelog is available here.

You can buy an official Kubuntu laptop. Called "Focus". It is an absolutely powerhouse with top specs. From a report: Here's the specs list:
CPU: Core i7-9750H 6c/12t 4.5GHz Turbo
GPU: 6GB GTX-2060
RAM: 32GB Dual Channel DDR4 2666 RAM
Storage: 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe
Display: 16.1" matte 1080p IPS
Keyboard: LED backlit, 3-4mm travel
User expandable SDD, NVMe, and RAM
Superior cooling
The starting price for the Kubuntu Focus Laptop is $2395.

From a report: Calculate Linux 20, a Gentoo-based operating system, is ready to be installed on your computer. Calculate Linux 20 is based on Gentoo 17.1 and comes with several desktop environment choices, such as Cinnamon, KDE, Xfce, MATE, and more. Unfortunately for some users, the operating system is now 64-bit only. Yes, with version 20, the developers have chosen to kill the 32-bit variants. While some people will be upset, it is definitely the correct choice -- 32-bit only processors are very old at this point. You can likely get a better 64-bit machine for a steal at a thrift store these days.

intensivevocoder writes: Fedora -- as a Linux distribution -- will celebrate the 15th anniversary of its first release in November, though its technical lineage is much older, as Fedora Core 1 was created following the discontinuation of Red Hat Linux 9 in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Five years after the start of Fedora.next, the distribution is on the right track -- stability has improved, and work on minimizing hard dependencies in packages and containers, including more audio/video codecs by default, flicker-free boot, and lowering power consumption for notebooks, among other changes, have greatly improved the Fedora experience, while improvements in upstream projects such as GNOME and KDE have likewise improved the desktop experience. In a wide-ranging interview with TechRepublic, Fedora project leader Matthew Miller discussed lessons learned from the past, popular adoption and competing standards for software containers, potential changes coming to Fedora, as well as hot-button topics, including systemd.

On Tuesday Purism announced their first Librem 5 smartphones were rolling off the assembly line and heading to customers. "Seeing the amazing effort of the Purism team, and holding the first fully functioning Librem 5, has been the most inspirational moment of Purism's five year history," said their founder and CEO Todd Weaver.

On Wednesday they posted a video announcing that the phones were now shipping, and Friday they posted a short walk-through video. "The crowdsourced $700 Linux phone is actually becoming a real product," reports Ars Technica: Purism's demand that everything be open means most of the major component manufacturers were out of the question. Perhaps because of the limited hardware options, the internal construction of the Librem 5 is absolutely wild. While smartphones today are mostly a single mainboard with every component integrated into it, the Librem 5 actually has a pair of M.2 slots that house full-size, off-the-shelf LTE and Wi-Fi cards for connectivity, just like what you would find in an old laptop. The M.2 sockets look massive on top of the tiny phone motherboard, but you could probably replace or upgrade the cards if you wanted...

[Y]ou're not going to get cutting-edge hardware at a great price with the Librem 5. That's not the point, though. The point is that you are buying a Linux phone, with privacy and open source at the forefront of the design. There are hardware kill switches for the camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband on the side of the phone, ensuring none of the I/O turns on unless you want it to. The OS is the Free Software Foundation-endorsed PureOS, a Linux distribution that, in this case, has been reworked with a mobile UI. Purism says it will provide updates for the "lifetime" of the device, which would be a stark contrast to the two years of updates you get with an Android phone.

PureOS is a Debian-based Linux distro, and on the Librem 5, you'll get to switch between mobile versions of the Gnome and KDE environments. If you're at all interested in PureOS, Purism's YouTube page is worth picking through. Dozens of short videos show that, yes, this phone really runs full desktop-class Linux. Those same videos show the dev kit running things like the APT package manager through a terminal, a desktop version of Solitaire, Emacs, the Gnome disk utility, DOSBox, Apache Web Server, and more. If it runs on your desktop Linux computer, it will probably run on the Librem 5, albeit with a possibly not-touch-friendly UI. The Librem 5 can even be hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and you can run all these Linux apps with the normal input tools...

Selling a smartphone is a cutthroat business, and we've seen dozens of companies try and fail over the years. Purism didn't just survive long enough to ship a product -- it survived in what is probably the hardest way possible, by building a non-Android phone with demands that all the hardware components use open code. Making it this far is an amazing accomplishment.

Canonical today released the official beta for the upcoming Ubuntu Linux 19.10. Code-named "Eoan Ermine," it features Linux kernel 5.3. From a report: There are several great desktop environments from which to choose too, such as KDE Plasma, Budgie, and the default GNOME. Ubuntu 19.10 is not a long term support (LTS) version, sadly, so support for the stable release will only be a mere 9 months. "The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the beta pre-release of the Ubuntu 19.10 Desktop, Server, and Cloud products. Codenamed "Eoan Ermine," 19.10 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs," says Adam Conrad, Software Engineer, Canonical.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Manjaro may have lofty goals of becoming a successful company, but let's be honest -- users of the Linux-based operating system don't really care about that. Don't get me wrong, I am sure most members of the Linux community are rooting for the newly-formed company's success, but they are probably more interested in the excellent operating system itself. Today, Manjaro Linux 18.1.0 "Juhraya" finally becomes available for download, and it isn't without some controversy. You see, rather than just offer up LibreOffice like most distributions, Juhraya offers an alternative choice at installation -- FreeOffice.

"After six months of development, version 18.1 of Manjaro Linux is now available. Juhraya offers numerous improvements, especially with regard to Office productivity applications and package management. Another significant innovation in Manjaro 18.1 is the integrated support for FlatPak and Snap packages. For this purpose, the graphical package management tool 'bauh' (formerly known as 'fpakman' ) is now available to users," says Philip Muller, Manjaro developer.

Long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov writes: A security researcher has published proof-of-concept (PoC) code for a vulnerability in the KDE software framework. A fix is not available at the time of writing. The bug was discovered by Dominik "zer0pwn" Penner and impacts the KDE Frameworks package 5.60.0 and below. The KDE Frameworks software library is at the base of the KDE desktop environment v4 and v5 (Plasma), currently included with a large number of Linux distributions.

The vulnerability occurs because of the way the KDesktopFile class (part of KDE Frameworks) handles .desktop or .directory files. It was discovered that malicious .desktop and .directory files could be created that could be used to run malicious code on a user's computer. When a user opens the KDE file viewer to access the directory where these files are stored, the malicious code contained within the .desktop or .directory files executes without user interaction — such as running the file.

Zero user interaction is required to trigger code execution — all you have to do is to browse a directory with a malicious file using any of KDE file system browsing applications like Dolphin.
When ZDNet contacted KDE for a comment Tuesday, their spokesperson provided this response.

"We would appreciate if people would contact security@kde.org before releasing an exploit into the public, rather than the other way around, so that we can decide on a timeline together."

GNOME and KDE are co-hosting this year's Linux App Summit (LAS) in Barcelona from November 12th to 15th.

An anonymous reader shared the big announcement: LAS is the first collaborative event co-hosted by the two organizations since the Desktop Summit in 2009. Both organizations are eager to bring their communities together in building an application ecosystem that transcends individual distros and broadens the market for everyone involved.

KDE and GNOME will no longer be taking a passive role in the free desktop sector. With the joint influence of the two desktop projects, LAS will shepherd the growth of the FOSS desktop by encouraging the creation of quality applications, seeking opportunities for compensation for FOSS developers, and fostering a vibrant market for the Linux operating system.

• "I am excited to see GNOME and KDE working together on LAS, and I believe that the event will help lay down strong foundations for collaborative cross-project development that would benefit Linux users across all distributions and on any compatible device." -- Christel Dahlskjaer, Private Internet Access and freenode Project Lead.

• "Together with GNOME, counting with the collaboration of many distributions and application developers, we'll have the opportunity to work side by side, share our perspectives and offer the platform that the next generation of solutions will be built on." -- Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE e.V Vice-President says about the inaugural effort about LAS.

• "By partnering with KDE we show the desire to build the kind of application ecosystem that demonstrates that Open Source and Free Software are important; the technology and organization we build to achieve this is valuable and necessary." -- GNOME executive director, Neil McGovern

• "The desktop wars is not really a thing any more. It makes more sense to work together and pool resources." -- Paul Brown, a KDE Communications Specialist (quoted by ZDNet)

ZDNet called the collaboration "a major step forward," giving their story the headline "GNOME and KDE work together on the Linux desktop." But the Twitter feed for the KDE community quickly clarified that KDE "is working with GNOME to create a common, fair, sustainable and open app ecosystem, not a desktop."

"The GNOME and KDE communities want to provide users with free and open applications that will respect their privacy and rights. That is what Linux App Summit is about."

The Linux Mint project today released the Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina", which is now available for download as Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions. From a report: If your computer is fairly modern, take my advice and opt for the excellent Cinnamon. MATE and Xfce are solid choices too, although they are more appropriate for computers with meager hardware. For new users, choosing amongst three interfaces can be confusing -- thankfully, the Mint developers stopped using KDE almost two years ago. Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina" is based on the wildly popular Ubuntu operating system, but on 18.04 rather than the new 19.04. Why use an older version of Ubuntu as a base? Because 18.04 is an LTS or "Long Term Support" variant. While version 19.04 will be supported for less than a year, 18.04 is being supported for a mind-boggling 10 years! The Linux kernel is version 4.15 and not part of the newer 5.x series.

mfilion writes: Want to use the GNOME or KDE Linux desktops on your virtual-reality headset? A new open-source project aims to let you play games and use your Linux desktop with your VR head-mounted display. Xrdesktop is an open-source project "designed to let you work with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR," reports ZDNet. "It does this by making window managers aware of VR. It then uses VR runtimes to render desktop windows in 3D space. Once there, you'll be able to work on the desktop using VR controllers in place of a mouse and keyboard."

You can find installation instructions on xrdesktop Wiki. The Valve-backed program is available in packages for Arch Linux and Ubuntu Linux. You can also install it on other distributions, but you'll need to install xrdesktop from source.

"After 25 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 10 (code name 'buster'), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team."

An anonymous reader quotes Debian.org: In this release, GNOME defaults to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. Wayland has a simpler and more modern design, which has advantages for security. However, the Xorg display server is still installed by default and the default display manager allows users to choose Xorg as the display server for their next session.

Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 91% of the source packages included in Debian 10 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users against malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.

For those in security-sensitive environments AppArmor, a mandatory access control framework for restricting programs' capabilities, is installed and enabled by default. Furthermore, all methods provided by APT (except cdrom, gpgv, and rsh) can optionally make use of "seccomp-BPF" sandboxing. The https method for APT is included in the apt package and does not need to be installed separately... Secure Boot support is included in this release for amd64, i386 and arm64 architectures and should work out of the box on most Secure Boot-enabled machines.
The announcement touts Debian's "traditional wide architecture support," arguing that it shows Debian "once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system." It ships with several desktop applications and environments, including the following:

• Cinnamon 3.8

• GNOME 3.30

• KDE Plasma 5.14

• LXDE 0.99.2

• LXQt 0.14

• MATE 1.20

• Xfce 4.12

"If you simply want to try Debian 10 'buster' without installing it, you can use one of the available live images which load and run the complete operating system in a read-only state via your computer's memory... Should you enjoy the operating system you have the option of installing from the live image onto your computer's hard disk."

Long-time Slashdot reader jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.16, the newest iteration of the popular desktop environment. It features an improved notification system, Not only can you mute notifications altogether with the Do Not Disturb mode, but the system also groups notifications by app.

Developers also focused on user's privacy. When any application accesses the microphone, an icon will pop up in your system tray, showing that something is listening. Vaults, a built-in utility to encrypt folders, are easier and more convenient to use.

Dolphin file and folder manager now opens folders you click on in new tabs instead of new windows. Discover software manager is cleaner and clearer as it now has two distinct areas for downloading and installing software. The Wallpaper Slideshow settings window displays the images in the folders you selected, and lets you select only the graphics you want to display in the slideshow.

For a more comprehensive overview of what to expect in Plasma 5.16, check out the official announcement or the changelog for the complete list of changes.

Google's Play Store made a bad mistake on Tuesday, long-time Slashdot reader sombragris writes: KDE Connect, a project designed to enable seamless communcation and control between a desktop computer and a mobile phone, was suddenly removed from Android's Google Play store. According to a Twitter thread by Albert Vaca, KDE Connect's maintainer, the removal was allegedly because the app was in breach of Google's new SMS policy.

There's an exemption which applies to KDE Connect, but the maintainer was unable to contact anyone at Google to provide support. "There is simply no way to talk to a human being at @Google", he said.
Cintora also announced on Twitter that while trying to comply with the Play Store's new policy, he'd initially been stopped again by technical problems. "The @GooglePlay console gives me an internal error, so I can't upload the version without SMS support."

But on Thursday Cintora tweeted that KDE Connect "finally got approved, and SMS support is back in version 1.12.4, both on the Play Store and F-Droid!" Cintora credits this resolution partly to his Twitter thread, which got over half a million impressions.

Its last tweet now features a picture of a celebrating parrot.

jrepin writes: Today, KDE launched Plasma 5.15, the first stable release of the popular desktop environment in 2019. For this release the Plasma team has focused on hunting down and removing all the paper cuts that slow you down. Plasma 5.15 brings a number of changes to the configuration interfaces, including more options for complex network configurations. Many icons have been added or redesigned to make them clearer. Integration with third-party technologies like GTK and Firefox has been improved substantially. Discover, Plasma's software and add-on installer, has received tons of improvements to help you stay up-to-date and find the tools you need to get your tasks done. For a more detailed list of features/changes, you can browse the full Plasma 5.15 changelog.

New submitter vivekgite writes: The 12th version of the FreeBSD has been released, bringing support for updated hardware. Some of the highlights include: OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS). Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been enabled by default. OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1. Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8). Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to version 6.0.1. The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been updated to version 4.46. The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation option. The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default. The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and MINIMAL kernel configurations. The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a system panic. The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements, drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster.

Various improvements to graphics support for current generation hardware. Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by default. The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously. The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support. The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9). The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation. The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run within a jail(8). Various Lua loader(8) improvements. KDE has been updated to version 5.12.