Linux Format December 2021

Jonni Bidwell I use Arch, and also Arch32, Pop!_OS and Debian. And, albeit briefly, whatever’s on our artisanally crafted DVD. LTS distros, through Snaps and Flatpaks, can now obtain the latest applications too, so adding hacky PPAs on the ilk of Mint and elementary OS is no longer de rigueur. Les Pounder My work machine runs Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It gives me the stability to get my work done. For my other machines, my X220 is always distro hopping (currently Kubuntu 21.10) and my X390 is on Ubuntu 21.04. My Raspberry Pis are mainly using Raspberry Pi OS and Diet Pi. David Rutland I use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS which, among Linux distros, is the worn and comfy pair of solid old boots. Sure, I’ll slip into Arch for an occasional dirty weekend, but it’s like…

Jonni Bidwell I use Arch, and also Arch32, Pop!_OS and Debian. And, albeit briefly, whatever’s on our artisanally crafted DVD. LTS distros, through Snaps and Flatpaks, can now obtain the latest applications too, so adding hacky PPAs on the ilk of Mint and elementary OS is no longer de rigueur. Les Pounder My work machine runs Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It gives me the stability to get my work done. For my other machines, my X220 is always distro hopping (currently Kubuntu 21.10) and my X390 is on Ubuntu 21.04. My Raspberry Pis are mainly using Raspberry Pi OS and Diet Pi. David Rutland I use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS which, among Linux distros, is the worn and comfy pair of solid old boots. Sure, I’ll slip into Arch for an occasional…

Ubuntu and Fedora are two of the big names in the Linux distribution world and their stewardships are set up quite differently. While they both have their funding foundations in large commercial segments of the Linux world, Ubuntu is specifically developed to be the commercial offering for all of Canonical’s businesses: desktop (that happens to be used by home consumers); and its server, edge and cloud deployments. Fedora, on the other hand, is the technological bleeding-edge development distro that’s used to forge and test systems that will eventually find their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux – the big serious distro that’s created a multi-billion dollar business. Let’s not forget, of course, that Fedora is blue and Ubuntu is Orange! Luckily it’s Jonni and Mayank rather than myself comparing the two projects…

Ubuntu and Fedora are two of the big names in the Linux distribution world and their stewardships are set up quite differently. While they both have their funding foundations in large commercial segments of the Linux world, Ubuntu is specifically developed to be the commercial offering for all of Canonical’s businesses: desktop (that happens to be used by home consumers); and its server, edge and cloud deployments. Fedora, on the other hand, is the technological bleeding-edge development distro that’s used to forge and test systems that will eventually find their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux – the big serious distro that’s created a multi-billion dollar business. Let’s not forget, of course, that Fedora is blue and Ubuntu is Orange! Luckily it’s Jonni and Mayank rather than myself comparing the…

At the recent Open Source Summit North America 2021 (https://bit.ly/lxf283opensourcesummit), Google engineers Andrew Delgadillo and Dylan Hatch announced Project Icebreaker, a new kernel project from Google that will be as close to the upstream kernel as possible. According to Hatch, for every major upstream kernel release, Google will release a new Icebreaker kernel “on time, we want to stay caught up with upstream Linux.” This will enable developers to introduce features that are close enough to the mainline that they can be included for the upstream. This is one of the main problems with Google’s current Prodkernel, which runs on data centres, because it’s based on an older upstream kernel with a number of patches on top of it. The patches are rebased on to a newer kernel every two…

At the recent Open Source Summit North America 2021 (https://bit.ly/lxf283opensourcesummit), Google engineers Andrew Delgadillo and Dylan Hatch announced Project Icebreaker, a new kernel project from Google that will be as close to the upstream kernel as possible. According to Hatch, for every major upstream kernel release, Google will release a new Icebreaker kernel “on time, we want to stay caught up with upstream Linux.” This will enable developers to introduce features that are close enough to the mainline that they can be included for the upstream. This is one of the main problems with Google’s current Prodkernel, which runs on data centres, because it’s based on an older upstream kernel with a number of patches on top of it. The patches are rebased on to a newer kernel every two years, but…