News briefs for May 15, 2019.

Nextcloud this morning announced a new partnership with Nitrokey, maker of highly secure, open-source encryption USB keys. From the press release: "The Nitrokey Pro 2 and Nitrokey Storage 2 devices have been verified to work easily with Nextcloud's one-time passwords for secure two-factor authentication (2FA). This protects users' accounts in the event of compromised passwords. Furthermore the USB keys feature a password manager, a cryptographic key store for email encryption and SSH administration. In addition the Nitrokey Storage 2 contains an encryption mass storage drive with the option of hidden volumes." In addition, Nextcloud and Nitrokey will explore further collaboration "especially in the area of end-to-end encryption and secure storage of cryptographic keys". See the Nextcloud blog for more details.

An unauthorized version of Arch Linux for WSL is now available from the Microsoft Store. Bleeping Computer reports that "an Arch Linux team member has also pointed out that the distribution on the Microsoft Store added an unknown repository to the pacman.conf file, so if you install packages through it, it is not known if they have been tampered with."

VirtualBox 6.0.8 has been released. According to Softpedia News, this is a maintenance and stability release, but it does fix some important problems, such as saved state resume failures and mouse click pass-through issues. For Linux platforms, this release also adds "support for shared folders on systems powered by Linux kernel 3.16.35 LTS, support for correctly handling the read-only flag of shared folders, and support for successfully building the VirtualBox kernel module in both non-default and debug build setups." See the full changelog for more information.

KDE needs your help with testing Plasma Theme switching: "Please get one of the Live images with latest code from the Plasma developers hands (or if you build manually yourself from master branches, last night's code should be fine) and give the switching of Plasma Themes a good test, so we can be sure things will work as expected on arrival of Plasma 5.16: KDE neon Unstable Edition and openSUSE Krypton. If you find glitches, please report them here in the comments, or better on the #plasma IRC channel.

Intel announces a major update to Clear Linux and a new developer edition. ZDNet reports that "In the new developer edition, besides giving developers a Linux designed to make the most of Intel hardware, its basic programmer bundles are curated to provide all the relevant developer tools with one installation command." With this update, Clear Linux also includes "Intel hardware optimized programmer software stacks for Deep Learning and Data Analytics".