Chris goes to Microsoft & gets the inside scoop on the awkward situation Microsoft finds themselves in with Windows & why they’ve been releasing more code as open source.

Plus we check in and & wrap up the Plasma Desktop challenge, Daniel Foré sets the record straight on the week’s Elementary OS news & more!

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Follow Up / Catch Up

Apple’s top-secret iBoot firmware source code spills onto GitHub for some insane reason

Fun thing about the DMCA: it required Apple to state, under penalty of perjury, that the iBoot source code was legit: https://t.co/PKHZqcEe6h

— Karl (@supersat) February 8, 2018

Crucially, within the past day or so, someone decided to dump a copy of this secret sauce on popular developer hangout GitHub for all to find. Links to the files began circulating on Twitter in the past few hours.

Razer doesn’t care about Linux

I offered to upstream any example code they could share under a free license, or to write the code from scratch given enough specifications to do so. This is something I’ve done for other vendors, and doesn’t take long as most vendor firmware updaters all do the same kind of thing; there are only so many ways to send a few kb of data to USB devices.

KDE Slimbook II Plasma-Based Linux Ultrabook Laptop Is Cheaper, More Powerfu l

Meet KDE Slimbook II, the second-generation of the KDE Slimbook laptop that emphasizes the widely-used KDE Plasma open-source desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions. Build for running the KDE Neon Linux distro, the 1st-generation KDE Slimbook laptop was announced a year ago and offered some attractive features, including a 13.3-inch screen, faster SSDs, and latest Plasma desktop.

TING

• **Ting – mobile that makes sense

Let’s talk about elementary OS 5.0 Juno

But we’re finally ready to start (cautiously!) talking about Juno, the next major release of elementary OS.

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Chris Goes to Microsoft

The third floor of one of the swankiest Microsoft offices I’ve ever been in 😳 #microsoft #opensourse #powershell

A post shared by Chris Fisher (@instachrislas) on Feb 12, 2018 at 10:10am PST

"Ambient Microsoft" interesting cross-cultural talk between @ChrisLAS and @jsnover that addresses the strategic (sea)change in Redmond [starts at 38:12]. cc:@maryjofoley @bdsams Hmm. All that's missing is an OS that runs all binary flavors… 😉 https://t.co/93Wqbj6mf5

— SpragueD (@SpragueD) February 13, 2018

• Administering Linux on Azure | Linux Foundation Training

• github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901

KDE neon Developers Blog

With the new Plasma LTS came an update to KDE neon LTS Edition and lots of people asking which edition to use and what the difference is. This caused us to review the purpose of LTS and as a result we’ve just hidden LTS from the download page. The only difference with the LTS edition is that it stays on Plasma’s LTS release but apps and libraries still get updates. This doesn’t fit well with the main use cases of an LTS which is that it only gets bug fixes and no new features.

• Until last week, you could pwn KDE Linux desktop with a USB stick

The CVE-2018-6791 vulnerability – unsurprisingly designated as high risk – was fixed on Thursday with an update to the Plasma Desktop.

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