News briefs for August 21, 2018. Freespire 4.0 has been released. This release brings a migration of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS codebase to the 18.04 LTS codebase, which adds many usability improvements and more hardware support. Other updates include intuitive dark mode, "night light", Geary 0.12, Chromium browser 68 and much more.

Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) development team just announced the release of TDE R14.0.5. The TDE project began as a continuation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) version 3.

Some of us may recall a time when ASUS used to ship a stripped down version of Xandros Linux with their line of Eee PC netbooks. Last week, the same company announced that Endless OS will be supporting non-OS offerings of their product. However it comes with a big disclaimer stating that ASUS will not officially support the operating system's compatibility issues.

  Happy belated 21st birthday to GNOME! The project celebrated this milestone by releasing version 3.29.91.

News briefs for August 15, 2018.

News briefs for August 14, 2018. Dropbox recently announced in its forum that it will be supporting only the ext4 filesystem for Linux starting in November. Here's the post: "Hi everyone, on Nov. 7, 2018, we're ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems. The supported file systems are NTFS for Windows, HFS+ or APFS for Mac, and Ext4 for Linux." (Source: It's FOSS.)

News briefs for August 13, 2018.

News briefs for August 10, 2018.

News briefs for August 9, 2018.

News briefs for August 8, 2018.

News briefs for August 7, 2018.

News briefs for August 6, 2018. Thunderbird 60.0 was released today. You can download the new version from here (note, this is a direct download, not an upgrade). Changes include improvements for dealing with attachments, new light and dark themes, WebExtension themes are now enabled, several new calendar features and much more.

News briefs for August 3, 2018. The Linux Foundation's EdgeX Foundry announced its second major release, "California". This new release of the EdgeX IoT middleware for edge computing adds security features, such as reverse proxy and secure credentials storage. In addition, it has been rewritten in Go, which makes it possible to run on the Raspberry Pi 3, the official target platform for California.

News briefs for August 2, 2018.

News briefs for August 1, 2018.

News briefs for July 31, 2018. The Linux Mint team announces the LMDE 3 "Cindy" Cinnamon Beta release. LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition, and its goal is "to see how viable the distribution would be and how much work would be necessary if Ubuntu was ever to disappear". It's as similar as possible to Linux Mint, but doesn't use Ubuntu. See the release notes for more information, and note that this is a beta release, not intended for production environments.

News briefs for July 30, 2018.

News briefs for July 27, 2018. Kata Containers, the lightweight, fast booting, open-source VM, is now available as a Snap from the Snap Store. According to the Ubuntu blog post, "Kata Containers are compatible with the OCI specification for Docker and CRI for Kubernetes which means they can be managed like a traditional container. Its agnostic design allows Kata Containers to run on multiple architectures like amd64, ppc64 and aarch64 with different hypervisors including QEMU."

News briefs for July 26, 2018. A new version of KStars—the free, open-source, cross-platform astronomy software—was released today. Version 2.9.7 includes new features, such as improvements to the polar alignment assistant and support for Ekos Live, as well as stability fixes. See the release notes for all the changes.

News briefs for July 25, 2018.