Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

Microsoft surprised everyone with its new Windows Package Manager (winget) last week, but it looks like the company copied the core mechanics from a developer it interviewed and ghosted.

The GNOME Foundation has settled a US lawsuit brought against it by Rothschild Patent Imaging, complete with an undertaking by the patent assertion entity that it will not sue GNOME for IP infringment again.

Running Linux on Windows 10 is about to get a whole lot easier as Microsoft is making a number of improvements to its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) including GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration.

It’s finally happening. Microsoft is giving developers a command line interface to install their favorite tools. That’s right — at Build 2020 today, Microsoft announced Windows Package Manager in preview. This is not simply about helping developers build for Windows. It’s about helping developers and businesses embrace Windows. Microsoft is on a mission to get developers to love using Windows over macOS and Linux.

In a notable U-turn for the city, newly elected politicians in Munich have decided that its administration needs to use open-source software, instead of proprietary products like Microsoft Office.

Picked up by the always-excellent BleepingComputer, Microsoft’s May 2020 Patch Tuesday has landed and it’s a monster with fixes for 111 vulnerabilities. Moreover, Microsoft has classified 91 of these as ‘Important’ and 13 as ‘Critical’.

Huawei denied on Monday having any official involvement in an insecure patch submitted to the Linux kernel project over the weekend; patch that introduced a “trivially exploitable” vulnerability. The buggy patch was submitted to the official Linux kernel project via its mailing list on Sunday. Named HKSP (Huawei Kernel Self Protection), the patch allegedly introduced a series of security-hardening options to the Linux kernel.

Microsoft’s Windows 10 actually experienced a rare drop in market share (down to 56.08 percent in April from its March 2020 share of 57.34 percent). Meanwhile, popular Linux distribution Ubuntu enjoyed an explosive increase. How explosive? Ubuntu’s overall share of operating system usage ballooned from 0.27% in March to 1.89% in April. To put that in perspective, that’s an increase of 599 percent.

Open-source, cross-platform vector drawing package Inkscape has reached its version 1.0 milestone after many years of development. Inkscape can be seen as an alternative to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator or Serif Affinity Designer – though unlike Inkscape, neither of those run on Linux. The native format of Inkscape is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), the web standard.

It looks like Lenovo may upstage Dell as the big name in OEM Linux laptops—not counting specialty retailers like System76, of course. Red Hat and Lenovo are announcing pre-installed and factory-supported Fedora Workstation on several models of ThinkPad laptops at Red Hat Summit this week.