GNOME 50 and GNOME OS progress, KDE debunks systemD FUD - Linux weekly News

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Linux and open- source news show. This week we've got the release of the beta for Gnome 50 which looks to be a gigantic release just like plasma 6.6 which also released this week is a massive release. So we'll talk about that. We also have some progress on Gnome OS. The official Gnome DRO that is immutable and trying to solve a fair few problems around that. We've got KD developers debunking some fear, uncertainty, and doubt around systemd and a bunch of other stuff, including this segue to our sponsor. So, this video is sponsored by ProtonVPN. You probably all have heard about Proton Mail, which is the end to end and zero access encrypted solution to replace Gmail and other very invasive solutions for your personal communications. Well, ProtonVPN is the thing that they have for VPN use. You all know why a VPN is a fantastic tool to have in your toolbox. Uh whether you want to connect to a public Wi-Fi, whether you want to just protect what you're doing from your ISP's data collection practices, which I'm pretty sure they have cuz most of them do. A VPN is just great. And ProtonVPN is the one I use and I recommend because it comes part of your free Proton account. It has servers basically everywhere. It's really speedy with technology made to make sure that your browsing stays fast. Even though you have to go through another server, they don't collect any logs. It's all encrypted. It's just a fantastic solution. And of course, if you want more speed, if you want more features, you have paid plans that generally encompass all of the entire Proton suite. So, email, calendar, contacts, drive, pass, and also VPN. As always, the link is down in the description. I use ProtonVPN virtually every day. It's fantastic. Go check it out. So, let's start with the beta for Gnome 50. It is a packed release. You can expect variable refresh rate out of the experimental status. I've also seen that fractional scaling might be out of experimental in this one. So, finally, those two features just accessible right there from the settings. There's also better dedicated GPU detection. So, if you run an app on a hybrid GPU system, it's going to default to the right GPU a lot more reliably. There's better high DPI support and virtual monitor support, so remote desktops should work much better. GDM is moving to a unified authentication mechanism. Uh there's also better handling of keyboard layouts in Gnome, better keyboard navigation in the quick settings menu. There's a new text size settings slider in the accessibility settings, so you can change the size of the text without changing the scaling of the display. There's also a setting to change what is the first day of the week in your region. Uh, here in France it's Monday, but apparently some regions start with other days. The Epiphany web browser now lets you delete service worker data that is stored on your PC. There's a button for web apps that you created through Epiphany to access the site permissions that you granted and enable and revoke them. You can also navigate different search engines to pick the one you prefer. There are also improvements to remote desktop support like enabling access to cameras, throttling connections, carbos authentication, remote login as well to headless GDM sessions. There's also initial support for Vulcan video acceleration. There's also all the new work on parental controls and screen time that we already talked about a while back. It's a massive project. The screen reader got a new preferences window. There's also support for global settings and shortcuts in there. It can also auto switch languages when you're browsing the web and it's reading content to you. So, it can read things properly in multiple languages. It sounds like a major upgrade to the OrCA screen reader. Here, we also have more file formats supported in the image viewer, progress indicators when you're installing add-ons in Gnome software, and a lot more work on the default apps, calendars, maps, the file manager, and all of that stuff. It looks to be a gigantic release and I'll obviously make a video on it when it releases in March. Hopefully I won't leave anything out. I found a few resources this time to make sure that I can cover most if not all of the changes. But as always, you always let something slip by. Hopefully this time it's nothing major. We also have some work on Gnome OS specifically with a hackfest that happened at Fosm. So, Gnome OS, if you don't know, is the official Gnome DRO made to showcase Gnome as its developers intended without any meddling from any DRO. The first thing that they did was defining what will count as a stable version of Gnome OS. So, they can define when they can actually release it to the public for actual use. The main blocking item for them is systemd homed. This is the system the service that handles user home directory encryption and they want to include that in the US. The issue is they also don't want to have to support older versions of Gnome OS that don't currently use systemd homed. So they are looking at a migration script. The problem is uh this is playing with encrypted files and data. So if anything goes wrong a user could potentially be locked out of all of their files or user directory. So in the end the route they seem to be taking is they will apply the stable label only to a configuration that they can see themselves supporting for a long period of time that uses systemd homed and also that means that all the versions that are published before that is implemented will be marked as unstable potentially unsupported in the long run and of course you should only use them if you're aware of that. They also have to address one issue with the slashetc directory which in some immutable dros is in a weird place because you don't want to make it fully writable because that defeats the purpose of a fully immutable system. But if you don't make it writable at all then you're going to have issues because a lot of stuff wants to write in there. Gnome OS will thus be using systemd confx for configure extensions. This is what manages systemd extensions. Basically, those are small file systems that you mount over the immutable base. So, you don't actually break that base. You don't change that immutable system, but you still have the functionality added to that. They're also looking at integrating FEX or FEX, the ARM 64 emulator, and they also want to plug it with flatpack. So, they're working on a flatp pack runtime extension for this. So that's pretty cool cuz of course you're going to run flat packs on that immutable dro and if you are running it on an ARM 64 system then you're going to want to have a translation layer to make sure all those apps can still run. This looks like really cool stuff. It looks like Gnome OS has an actual direction which is building an immutable system to showcase the default vanilla Gnome desktop at its best or at least as a developers intended it. But also they want to heavily rely on all those systemd subsystems. It looks like every problem they're encountering by building an immutable dro because it creates a lot of problems to solve. Uh, they're fixing them by using systemd services, which I think is fine. You pick a technological solution and you push with it. I think it's good. I probably will not run Gnom OS on my system, but I will at the very least give it a shot when it releases in stable form. I do think all desktops should have their very own DRO, if only as a showcase of how things should be when there's no meddling from any third party, and Gum OS will do exactly that. Now, of course, this week, we also got the release of Plasma 6.6. I made a dedicated video about it. It's already on the channel, but if you want the TLDDR, you've got a brand new onscreen keyboard. You've got a brand new login manager in the form of Plasma login manager. It does depend on systemd. It is optional. Dros can still use anything else. KD is not going full systemd. You also have OCR in the spectacle screenshot tool. You also have a brand new setup tool that DRO can use for OEM install. So you actually create your user and set things up after the install is done. You also have a new way to save your current global theme. So all the color styles, application styles, plasma styles, icons, layouts, whatever you want, you can save those in a bundle. So, if you experiment and change things, you can always go back to the one you used previously. You also now have a skin tone picker in the emoji picker, meaning you can just restrict uh some emojis, the ones showing hands or people to a skin color that you want to use, so you don't have to scroll past all the ones that you would not use. You can also now scan QR codes to connect to Wi-Fi. You also have the ability to pin certain plasmoids or they are called widgets now. Plasmoids was KD4. uh you can pin them on top of everything else. So you have sort of picturein picture windows for video playing uh or for a little web browser. You can also alt plus doubleclick on a file that is on the desktop. So you can automatically open its properties just like what you can do on the dolphin the file manager. In terms of accessibility, you've got a grayscale filter for certain types of color blindness. You also have a new way to zoom on the desktop where the pointer is always at the middle of the screen and the desktop scrolls around instead. You have support for slow keys under Wayland. You also have a new reduced motion accessibility setting where if you disable animations in plasma, all the applications that support that universal setting will also disable their inside animations. All the stuff that moves inside the windows. You also now have the ability to filter out windows from screencast. So, if you're recording the screen, you can just right click on a Windows title bar and say exclude from screencast. You can also do that from the task manager or with a window rule if you want to always exclude something. If you have a device that has ambient light sensors, you can enable automatic screen brightness. Game controllers are now detected as regular input devices and will stop the computer from going to sleep if you want to. You can install phones from discover if your DRO uses package kit for that. You can choose processors priority in the system monitor. There's support for the USB portal as well. A refresh of the UI for selecting what you actually want to share or record on your screen. A bunch of stuff in there. It is a massive release. Go check out the video I made about it. In there, I actually forgot two things. The setup and the virtual keyboard uh which just slipped through the cracks of the script. There were so many things to talk about. And still on KD Plasma as the new plasma login manager now requires systemd to be used. There was a lot of misinformation or misunderstanding about the need for systemd when you want to use KDE. So they actually set the record straight. What seems to have prompted this response seems to be the announcement of one dro ka OS that they were going to maybe drop KD or at least they were going to test dropping KD and replacing it with something else because they want to remain systemd free. Of course, KD reacted and clarified that the only component that actually requires systemd for KDE is the login manager that they're introducing in plasma 6.6. But this is entirely optional. You can ship SDDDM as most distros currently do with KDE. You can ship something else. Uh that doesn't mean other login managers can't be used and that doesn't mean you need systemd for KDE. They also said that they have no plans to make the core of KD depend on systemd so they can keep working on BSD systems and on systemd free Linux distros. And two opinions on the topic. First, you really would have to willfully misunderstand what KD said when they said plasma login manager moved to systemd. If you interpret that as KD in its entirety move to systemd, you just didn't read the post that KD made about plasma login manager that stated that only that would use systemd. And second, I've seen some people saying that these moves towards systemd are making non-systemd distros into secondclass citizens. And yes, but that's by choice. System D, whether you like it or not, whether you think it's too big or not, whether you think it's a monoculture or not, brings tools for developers to write stuff way faster than if those things did not exist. Meaning as a developer you have to really think on where you want to invest your time and resources which we all know for Linux desktops and apps are not that numerous. You don't have a lot of time and volunteer and money. So what are you going to do? reinvent the wheel and redevelop something from scratch just so you can say you support the 2% of Linux distros that don't use systemd or are you going to use the thing that is already developed works well and is used by the vast majority of the ecosystem as a user you have every right to not want to use systemd and you have options for that but I don't think it is fair to expect all developers to support non-systemd options out there because that's virtually the basis for all Linux distros apart from a few specific ones. Now, for maintaining compatibility with stuff like BSD, obviously you don't want to depend too much on something that doesn't exist on BSD. But for Linux, if you don't want to use systemd, you are putting yourself in a niche and you can't expect developers to support that niche more than they already do. Now, we also have some news about Budgie 11. They're working on their first preview of that brand new version and rewrite of the desktop. And so they've sorted through the stuff that they want to do for that first preview, which as a reminder is a full redevelopment. So that first preview will include alts tab, of course, multiple panels on different uh monitors if possible. So you could span the panels or decide not to span them across displays. They also want to support, of course, extensions for these panels. So the little applets you can put in there, the system tray, the Raven panel, and all the stuff that goes in there. They also want the on-creen display elements to be fully functional. They also want basic notifications. No specific notification history, but at least displaying them. On the compositor side of things, they want to support shortcuts using the super key because that's what you use on Linux to interact with Windows. They want to support tiling. They want to support various focus methods, which apparently are already implemented there. Some of the work is already done on some of these items, and the budget team has a public board for that first preview. So, you can check out how they're doing and how fast it's moving. Now, of course, don't forget that they're using cute and some of the KD frameworks to build this desktop. They're not starting from scratch. I wouldn't expect them to take as long as Cosmic did, for example, when they wrote their new desktop from scratch because Cosmic had to redevelop a bunch of libraries. Uh, Budgie doesn't really have to do that. So, they probably will move a little bit faster. I'm very interested in seeing what they're going to do with that. Of course, the first preview will be just that, a preview. It seems like they are just implementing the most basic stuff, but that's what the preview is for. Uh to test how things are actually running, to test new designs and stuff like that. Now, the EU is looking at making infinite scrolling a thing of the past. The European Commission is of course always looking at big tech companies and forcing them to make changes. And this time, uh they want to fight the addictive nature of social media platforms that just let you scroll without any visible stop. So, you get sucked into the app and you never leave. They told Tik Tok to change a few features of their app specifically, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting time breaks automatically, and changing the algorithm for recommendations. Although, this is very vague and we don't really know what they want them to change. The reason and justification is that Tik Tok's design is intentionally addictive, especially for children who don't necessarily know better if their parents haven't given them a bit of digital education. Now, of course, this has the potential of completely breaking the entire business model of Tik Tok. The fact that it's currently only targeted at Tik Tok means at some point, I'm pretty sure it will also target YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms with similar behaviors in their feeds. And of course, Tik Tok can defend their position. They can try and make that demand go away. But it's the first time that the EU has treated addicting behavior as a real risk and not just as a frowned upon sort of thing. So, it looks like they're serious about this. And I'll be honest, I really don't like infinite scroll. It is not a good method. You don't build a mental image or model of what you're navigating. That's why reading a book on paper lets you remember a lot more of that book than if you read it on a Kindle or or e-reader or a tablet because you actually build a mental model of what is where on a specific page, which you don't really do when you don't have actual physical stuff to turn. For search, for example, infinite scroll is a terrible design because you want to remember the page numbers and in consciously, subconsciously, your brain is going to remember some of that. You're going to remember the position on screen and stuff like that. And infinite scroll breaks that. But I don't think the EU is addressing the real problem. The real problem is not necessarily infinite scrolling. It's the fact that you don't pick what you watch. The real problem that is making those things addictive is the fact that they just give you stuff all the time. You don't pick what you want to watch. And so you don't have those stop gaps in the middle of your watching or browsing experience. You just keep being fed stuff again and again and again. That obviously triggers a big surge of dopamine because you don't know what you're going to get. And when you get something that you actually enjoy, it just pleases your brain. When you have to pick the stuff that you watch or read, you have to make a conscious decision about it. It's maybe less rewarding, but it's also a lot more intentional and this just prevents those addicting behaviors in large part at least. I think what they should focus on is the recommendation auto feed that just feeds you stuff, not specifically infinite scroll, even though I do think it is a terrible solution for most cases. Now, we have yet another move from the EU. to the European Parliament decided to block AI features on their work devices, of course, because of concerns over cyber security and data protection. So, they disabled all the built-in AI features on those devices, apparently computers and tablets, after their IT department determined that they just could not vouch for the data security on these devices because, of course, those AI tools call back to remote servers. Most of them aren't running locally in a sandbox or whatever. They just send data back to their mother ship. They are generally meant to collect as much data as they can. So the European Parliament says that until the full extent of the data being shared is determined, they consider it safer to disable these features. We don't know if they also blocked access to stuff like chat, GPT, and other AI tools are using a web browser. And if they didn't, then the point is moot because people will just use those solutions instead. and this might result in even worse security outcomes. The European Parliament actually declined to point out the exact features that they disabled, but an internal email seem to warn people to be cautious about third party AI tools, meaning it is likely that access to those onlinebased tools was not disabled. And that's just basic digital etiquette or hygiene. You don't feed your personal or your work documents to a third-party tool that you don't pay for that you just use on the side away from your IT ecosystem because obviously those uh free versions will grab the data will train on it and maybe we'll even regurgitate some of that information to other users because that already happened in the past. So disabling stuff like for example Copilot on Windows is all fine and dandy, but if you don't block access to stuff like chat GPT in the browser, you're not really making things safer. You're just telling people to move to a potentially even less safe solution instead. Not the best idea, I think, but yeah, you should absolutely disable AI features uh in very sensitive governmental organizations. You do not want this data to go back to these companies. Now, let's move back to some more fun stuff. And this week I learned about Asteroid OS, which is a Linux-based operating system that can replace Wear OS in a bunch of smart watches. It uses cute and QML and open embedded, and it just got its brand new version 2.0. Now, of course, this system doesn't collect any data. It is fully open source, so you can actually check for that. It gives you the opportunity to keep your older smartwatch running when the manufacturer decided to make it obsolete after like 3 years. Uh, and the new version now supports a bunch of stuff. You have always on display now. You have a palm to sleep to put your watch to sleep when you put your palm to the screen. You have support for heart rate monitors. You have support for step counting. There's a new compass application. There's also audio and Bluetooth support and the interface received a redesign for their settings. There's also a nightstand mode. Apps got improvements over the previous release. There's battery life improvements, smoothness improvements for the animations. There's a new font that should be more legible, a way more translations in more languages. The OS also added support for 15 new watch models, and they actually have a page listing what is supported and what is not. This includes watches from OPPO, Huawei, LG, Asus, Fossil, Tick Watch, and more. Asteroid OS even has an Android app to sync the watch to your phone. And there's an Ubuntu Touch and a Salefish OS client, too. Although I don't think there is an iOS one, probably because iOS really restricts what you can sync between devices if you're not using Apple devices. This is pretty cool stuff for people who have smart watches but want to escape the locked in ecosystems that these generally belong to or if you just have an older smartwatch that was abandoned by the manufacturer and you want to get it back to a running state, then you can do that. Now, they don't seem to support the Galaxy watches from Samsung yet or at all. I know those are very popular in France. I don't know if that's the case in the rest of the world, but this obviously will be a major problem, but they do have a lot of models being supported. So, if you like smart watches, go give it a shot. And to conclude, we have some fun stuff with BSD and Linux. If you regularly switch between NetBSD and Linux, then you'll be happy to know that there's a new project called Netbase. This is a compatibility layer that lets you use BSD's userland command line tools on Linux. Now, if you don't know, BSD uses a lot of the same basic commands that Linux does, like ls, cp, move, cat, chmod, make me make, dear, all of that stuff. But NetBSD has stricter pix compliance than Linux. And their tools often don't have the same syntax or the same option names or options period that Linux has. Meaning, if you switch between Linux and BSD, often, chances are you're getting things mixed up a bit and things don't work exactly in the same way. Netpase aims to fix that. They want to give you the BSD implementations of these tools on top of the new ones that you already likely have on your Linux distro. The goal is not to port those BSD tools to Linux. It's just to implement what is needed from the NetBSD environment into Linux. It is version 0.1, so it is likely not very stable or not fullfeatured, but it is pretty cool. And it could also potentially let you reuse scripts that you wrote on BSD, but on Linux with minimal tweaks to the path and file locations. I would assume those are needed because probably BSD doesn't store everything in the same way that Linux does. I think it's a really cool thing. I do need to take a look at any form of BSD at some point. I ran it a few times in a VM for an hour or two, but I never actually tried to install it on regular hardware and give it a shot. So maybe I will do that this year. Uh that that's the goal. Before the end of the year, I will have made a video about at least one BSD just to see what the fuss is about. And if you want to check what the fuss about our sponsor is about, uh then keep listening. That's Tuxedo Computers. Tuxedo is a laptop and desktop manufacturer based in Germany. They ship to most countries in the world. And what they ship is computers that have Linux pre-install. That's the entire point. All their devices run Linux absolutely fantastically well. And when I say all of their devices, they do have a fair few of those. From the smallest, more affordable laptops all the way up to gaming laptops, gaming PCs, workstations. You've got plenty of agency on what you can put inside of those devices. The keyboard layout you want, the logo you want engraved on your laptop. They're really fantastic. They're all I use. Everything that you see here or read from me is done on one of their computers. All my gaming is done on one of their computers on Linux as well. And they're just fantastic. So, as always, the link is down in the description. Anyway, this will conclude this episode. You have all the usual YouTube buttons. You know why you should click them. So, please do click all of that if you would. And also, you have plenty of links down in the description for all the articles I use to write this show. Go check out the websites I regularly visit and include there. They're the original authors of everything I talk about. And also, you'll find links to support the show if you like watching it or listening to it. Thank you all uh for listening or watching. And I guess you'll hear me in the next video. Bye. Back.

Use a secure, encrypted, and fast VPN with Proton VPN: https://protonvpn.com/TheLinuxEXP Grab a brand new laptop or desktop running Linux: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en# 👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to: - a Daily Linux News show - a weekly patroncast for more thoughts - your name in the credits YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheLinuxEXP/join Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thelinuxexperiment Or, you can donate whatever you want: https://paypal.me/thelinuxexp Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/TheLinuxExperiment/ 👕 GET TLE MERCH Support the channel AND get cool new gear: https://the-linux-experiment.creator-spring.com/ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:32 Sponsor: Proton VPN 01:44 GNOME 50 got a massive beta 04:10 GNOME OS nearing stable release 07:19 Plasma 6.6 released 10:17 KDE debunks FUD around systemD 13:06 Budgie 11 gearing up for first preview 14:48 EU takes aim at infinite scrolling 17:45 EU parliament blocks AI features 19:52 AsteroidOS brings Linux to your smartwatch 21:57 Project aims to bring NetBSD utilities to Linux 23:41 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers Links: GNOME 50 got a massive beta https://9to5linux.com/gnome-50-desktop-environment-enters-public-beta-testing-with-more-new-features GNOME OS nearing stable release https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2026/02/18/gnome-os-hackfest-fosdem-2026/ Plasma 6.6 released https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.6.0/ KDE debunks FUD around systemD https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1r68jmi/a_quick_antifud_faq_to_debunk_the_kde_is_forcing/ Budgie 11 gearing up for first preview https://buddiesofbudgie.org/blog/chirp-5 EU takes aim at infinite scrolling https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagram-brussels-kill-infinite-scrolling/ EU parliament blocks AI features https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-parliament-blocks-ai-features-over-cyber-privacy-fears/ AsteroidOS brings Linux to your smartwatch https://itsfoss.com/news/asteroidos-2-release/ Project aims to bring NetBSD utilities to Linux https://linuxiac.com/netbase-brings-netbsd-userland-utilities-to-linux/ #linuxdesktop #linuxdistro #technews