JRepin

The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 25.04 has been released.

Codenamed “Plucky Puffin”, Kubuntu 25.04 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

The release features the latest KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop, KDE Gear 24.12.3, kernel 6.14, and many other updated applications and libraries.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28743738

Every four months, the KDE community rolls out a new wave of app releases all at once.

These updates cover a wide range of needs. Whether you’re managing personal files on your laptop or overseeing servers located thousands of miles away, KDE offers powerful tools to help you stay in control. Need to troubleshoot someone’s system remotely from the comfort of your sofa? There’s an app for that, too. From creating short viral clips for social media to producing full-length documentaries, KDE’s creative tools have you covered. And when it’s time to unwind, you can count on KDE for enjoying music, movies, or a good book.

Keep reading to discover what’s new in KDE Gear 25.04…

Every four months, the KDE community rolls out a new wave of app releases all at once.

These updates cover a wide range of needs. Whether you’re managing personal files on your laptop or overseeing servers located thousands of miles away, KDE offers powerful tools to help you stay in control. Need to troubleshoot someone’s system remotely from the comfort of your sofa? There’s an app for that, too. From creating short viral clips for social media to producing full-length documentaries, KDE’s creative tools have you covered. And when it’s time to unwind, you can count on KDE for enjoying music, movies, or a good book.

Keep reading to discover what’s new in KDE Gear 25.04…

What’s new?

We’ve promoted our KDE Plasma Desktop offering to “Edition” status. The Fedora KDE team has been hard at work making sure bugs get fixed and everything is polished just so. We’re confident that this can stand along our other amazing flagship offerings.

I know the naming is a bit confusing, with GNOME-powered “Workstation” using a generic label while KDE Plasma Desktop has the tech right in the name. We’ll get that figured out eventually. If you don’t know where to start, don’t panic. Pick one and see how it goes. They’re both excellent desktop environments with great upstream communities, and the same Fedora system underneath it all.

We also have a new alternative desktop choice: COSMIC. This is a modern, written-all-in-Rust desktop environment from our friends over at System 76.

Perhaps most excitingly, we have a new installation interface! The previous UI was designed to manage a lot of before-you-even-start configuration choices. Over the past decade, though, we’ve gone to “get the full system installed with no fuss, then set up what you need from a complete environment”. That made the “hub and spoke” model more confusing than helpful. The new UI is streamlined and sleek, just like the Heart of Gold.

Of course, there are other big changes, as well as the usual updates to thousands of packages. See the Fedora Linux 42 Release Notes for all of the details, and don’t miss the “What’s New?” posts here on Fedora Magazine.

In the past few days there has been an uptick in patches merged for the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite around "Qt Weld" that has been seeing an increasing number of patches over the past few months for enhancing the Qt toolkit integration.

LibreOffice developer Michael Weghorn has been pushing many patches for enhancing the Qt toolkit support with LibreOffice for its "Weld" theming interface.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28452269

Blender 4.4 brings improved animation workflow, better modeling, new sculpt brush, and smoother video editing, plus over 700 issues fixed.

It introduces Action Slots, revolutionizing animation workflows by letting multiple data-blocks share a single Action. The Video Sequencer continues to improve with quality-of-life upgrades for text editing, expanded support for codecs including H.265 and 10/12-bit videos, and performance improvements that make editing faster than ever.

And much more..

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60644394

Dutch informatics and intelligence expert Bert Hubert explains why European governments are urgently trying to get away from the American clouds and how they do it fastest. The article is in German. Here are few excerpts translated by me using Firefox Translation.

What is happening in the EU, is that the politicians are finally waking up. They should have done this five years ago.

The Dutch Cybersecurity Center NCSC has conducted an in-depth investigation of Microsoft. In an official evaluation, it has recorded mutatis mutandis: "The USA can at any time access the European data storage. But we don't think they will do that." Of course, that has always been pure wishful thinking. [...] It remains subject to American surveillance laws.

The data transfer agreement will be cancelled soon. Either the EU Commission is pulling back the adequacy decision, which presupposes that the US is a country with an adequate level of data protection [...] or the European Court of Justice will declare it invalid.

The whole of Europe should be alarmed. We have become a digital colony of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. [...] Our officials are putting European security and independence at risk just so that they can continue to use Microsoft Outlook! That sounds idiotic, but that's how I experience administrations.

We must finally redeem the many European open source programmers. [...] At some point we stopped believing that we can write good software. Now Europe only offers SAP software as an export hit, that's it. But if we invest billions somewhere, it's in European software development.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28215475

Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release.

RISC-V with Linux 6.15 brings build improvements thanks to a re-architecting of the Kconfig build system options around RISC-V for selecting sub-architecture features.

For the Linux 6.15 kernel with RISC-V there is also support for building relocatable non-MMU kernels, support for huge PFNMAPS to improve TLB utilization, support for runtime constants, new RISC-V instructions supported, and a variety of fixes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28215475

Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release.

RISC-V with Linux 6.15 brings build improvements thanks to a re-architecting of the Kconfig build system options around RISC-V for selecting sub-architecture features.

For the Linux 6.15 kernel with RISC-V there is also support for building relocatable non-MMU kernels, support for huge PFNMAPS to improve TLB utilization, support for runtime constants, new RISC-V instructions supported, and a variety of fixes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28202261

The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are calling on people to cancel Game Pass subscriptions, avoid Microsoft-owned video game properties such as Minecraft and Call Of Duty, and boycott all Microsoft Gaming and Xbox-branded products in protest at the company’s reported business connections with the Israeli military.

The call follows allegations this January about the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and artificial intelligence products in the course of its bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

According to a joint investigation between the Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, with additional reporting from Drop Site News, Microsoft have “deepened” their relationship with Israel’s defence establishment since 7th October 2023, when several Palestinian militant groups struck across the border and massacred over a thousand people. Israel responded to the attack by mounting a ground offensive and airstrikes that have destroyed much of Gaza and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28202261

The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are calling on people to cancel Game Pass subscriptions, avoid Microsoft-owned video game properties such as Minecraft and Call Of Duty, and boycott all Microsoft Gaming and Xbox-branded products in protest at the company’s reported business connections with the Israeli military.

The call follows allegations this January about the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and artificial intelligence products in the course of its bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

According to a joint investigation between the Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, with additional reporting from Drop Site News, Microsoft have “deepened” their relationship with Israel’s defence establishment since 7th October 2023, when several Palestinian militant groups struck across the border and massacred over a thousand people. Israel responded to the attack by mounting a ground offensive and airstrikes that have destroyed much of Gaza and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are calling on people to cancel Game Pass subscriptions, avoid Microsoft-owned video game properties such as Minecraft and Call Of Duty, and boycott all Microsoft Gaming and Xbox-branded products in protest at the company’s reported business connections with the Israeli military.

The call follows allegations this January about the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and artificial intelligence products in the course of its bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

According to a joint investigation between the Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, with additional reporting from Drop Site News, Microsoft have “deepened” their relationship with Israel’s defence establishment since 7th October 2023, when several Palestinian militant groups struck across the border and massacred over a thousand people. Israel responded to the attack by mounting a ground offensive and airstrikes that have destroyed much of Gaza and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.