A proposal was made to change the default desktop environment of Fedora 42 to KDE Plasma from GNOME.
The proposal was made by Joshua Strobl, the lead for the Budgie desktop, and was submitted on April 1st.
The justification for the change is that KDE Plasma provides a more flexible experience for users, supports more standards, and has better Wayland support.
The proposal argues that KDE Plasma has pushed for more advancements to the Linux desktop than GNOME recently.
The proposal also mentions that KDE Plasma is used on the Steam Deck, Pine 64 products, and by Linux manufacturers like Tuxedo.
The proposal suggests that having KDE Plasma as the default would make Fedora more appealing to users and would make Linux as a whole more popular.
The proposal has been met with skepticism and the discussion has devolved into arguments about which desktop environment is better.
The repercussions of the backdoor in the popular XZ library continue, causing Canonical to delay the beta of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
The backdoor has pushed other distributions, like openSUSE Tumbleweed and Debian 12.6, to postpone their next releases to fix the problem.
Systemd is considering reducing its dependencies to limit the surface of attack for the init system.
A scanner called “binarly” has been created to detect the specific backdoor in any file that might implement it.
One of Germany’s federal states, Schleswig-Holstein, is moving from Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice.
The move will transition 30,000 computers to open-source software and is part of recent European moves for more digital sovereignty.
The transition will also move them to things like Nextcloud, Thunderbird, and Open-Xchange, and will replace Microsoft Active Directory.
The move to Linux is mandatory for every computer affected, but they are willing to take their time and allow for possible delays and exceptions.
Linux Mint 22 will move to PipeWire as its main sound server, undo recent changes to distribute Thunderbird as a snap, and bring two new applications.
Mint 22 will also start changing how they distribute kernel updates, automatically distributing all Hardware Enablement updates to the kernel version they ship.
AMD is opening up more portions of their software stack to the community, including the documentation and source code for their microcontroller scheduler.
Thunderbird is making progress on the addition of Exchange support natively in the email client, implementing Exchange Auto Discovery and OAuth compatibility in the account setup.
Thunderbird will also take control of their snap package, which will be the default format used for Thunderbird in Ubuntu 22.04 instead of using a deb package.
The snap package has been added to Thunderbird’s built-in infrastructure to make sure everything is always nice and up to date whenever a new version is pushed to the Thunderbird snap GitHub repo.
