Nvidia & Intel focus on Linux, KDE Connect redesign, standard for digital apps - Linux Weekly News

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Linux and open source news show. This week we've got clear signs that both Intel and Nvidia are looking at better supporting Linux as they're hiring people to work on graphics drivers and also specifically Linux gaming. We also have a new open standard being proposed to have better interoperability between digital services at least maybe in the EU. We also have a big KD Connect redesign in the works and a bunch of other things, including this message from our sponsor. So, this video is sponsored by Proton Pass. You already know about Proton Mail and ProtonVPN. But when you create that free Proton account, you also get access to their password manager, Proton Pass, which is the one I personally use. It's really great. It integrates with any browsers. You've got extensions for everything. You even have apps for your mobile phones. It's going to sync all your login and passwords. You can even store specific files in the password manager like for example ids. It is a really fullfeatured and fantastic option. And of course when you create that proton pass account you will get access to proton mail uh proton calendar your contacts some storage space the VPN and all of that stuff. Of course all of it is free but you have paid plans that will bring you more features more storage space more capacity for storing specific files that you want to secure in your password manager. It also lets you automatically create aliases instead of using your regular email address. You can also have two factor authentication tokens in there. You have pass keys and all the things that you might expect from a password manager in 2026. So, as usual, the link is down in the description. Proton Pass is the one I use. I really like it and I can only recommend it. So recently, Intel laid off a bunch of their engineers, which resulted in a lot of people working on Linux related projects to have to drop their efforts. But it seems that they're now hiring again, specifically Linux developers. So they posted some job offers for six new engineering roles. Three of them are to work on GPU drivers for Linux, on Linux gaming, and other GPU related stuff potentially like AI. They're specifically looking for people who have experience with the Mesa drivers obviously, but also with the Linux gaming stack. They specifically mention Wine and Proton in the job offers. They also are looking for people with experience on Vulcan and OpenGL because this is what you're going to be using on Linux. The other roles are for compute related stuff with Intel's hardware or for Intel CPU and GPU support in data centers. And right after Intel posted job offers for their Linux developers, Nvidia did the same thing. They posted a few offers. One for a senior system software engineer for Vulcan performance and another one for a Linux graphics senior software engineer. So the first job will apparently work on diagnosing GPU and CPU performance bottlenecks for Vulcan and for Proton games, so Linux gaming focused. The second job is expected to work on box 64 and fax or fe which is the x86 to arm emulator and also more generally this job entails working on Linux graphics software presumably the Nvidia drivers. Both jobs of course require some previous experience in these fields. Knowledge of Linux and its graphics system and of course experience writing C and C++. This is pretty interesting because Intel was giving us signs that they were disengaging a little bit from Linux by laying off a bunch of people working on Linux specific versions of their software or toolkits that interact with their hardware. But now they're hiring a lot of people to work specifically on Linux drivers, which is a good sign. and Nvidia also focusing specifically on Vulcan and Proton might mean that they're finally taking AMD seriously in the gaming handheld gaming PC market which is starting to look like uh Linux might be something interesting in there. So maybe they're focusing on that so they can actually compete with AMD's APUs and offerings so people or manufacturers can ship handhelds and gaming devices running Linux but with Nvidia hardware which right now is not really something that you're seeing all that much. Maybe they're just waking up. All in all, it's just good. More work paid by those companies on Linux that will benefit everyone. I think that's just good news. Now if you love KD Connect, who doesn't? then you'll be happy to know that they have big plans for the future. Now, these are just the ideas that they want to implement in the future. They have nicel lookinging mock-ups, but of course, none of it is developed just yet. It's still some pretty interesting stuff. First, they want to add a main homepage that would be the replacement for the current homepage and sidebar design, which means both the sidebar and the homepage have little few things in there and they just want to do something much clearer. So, they have nice looking markups that merge the two with first the remote for any media playing on your PC that you could control with your phone, but also all the main controls and options for all the plugins you enabled like sending files to and from your phone, copying the contents of the clipboard, using your phone as a remote, stuff like that. Second, they want to change the settings page, notably all the plug-in settings. Currently, the settings page has both global settings that apply to all devices, but also device specific settings, meaning it's just unclear and it is a very, very long list of toggles that is really impossible to parse without any separators. It's just not very clear. So, they want to have global settings in one page that will apply to all the devices you paired with KD Connect and then device specific settings for each plug-in that you want to enable, all with a much more legible UI style. Next, it's permissions. Currently, when you set up KD Connect, it's going to bombard you with a bunch of pop-ups asking you to enable all of these permissions, which can look pretty scary. You might wonder why such an application would ask you for so much access to your phone. So, instead, they will request permissions as you need them as you start using the features of the app, which will be a little bit more streamlined. All in all, they also want to tinker with most of the screens in the app. They have mock-ups for about everything. If only to bring those screens to the current Android look and feel, which I absolutely hate personally, that pastel, semi-rounded, ultra flat look that Android has these days. I really don't like it. But you got to adapt to the platform you're on. So, you got to follow those guidelines. No specific news for the iOS version of the app. Probably because it's seen more as a bonus version. iOS doesn't let you do as many things as Android would for KD Connect. So, no plans currently on that one as far as I could tell. But still, it's good. KD Connect is a really fantastic app. You can also use it on Gnome with the JS Connect extension. It's just a fantastic option to better integrate your phone and your computer together, share some things, and generally makes computing a little bit easier. So, cool to see that they're still evolving. Now, there's a new open standard that aims to unify office and teams workspace apps specifically in the hopes of accompanying the current digital sovereignty movement that we're seeing in Europe. It is called open bureau or open bureau spelled B U. It's being pushed by the French interministry office for everything digital which we call in France the denim and by linagora who support and promote open source and also they developed twork workspace which is an open-source Microsoft 365 competitor. So the base idea of the standard is that Europe never really had any of their own digital solutions at least not a good enough solution that could compete with the US-made proprietary ones. And this means that you can't easily just build a better all-in-one solution, but you can at least make sure that all the individual components that you can pick from work well together. So the standard lets you access all the individual digital services that you picked for your own online solution from the same place. You would get a unified app grid. It would let you use global search through all of the services that you integrated. It would let you manage user groups and permissions through all of these apps. even though they come from entirely different providers provided of course those services uh use the standard. This is completely open. This is accessible to any company or organization that would want to use it and it will be governed by a foundation to avoid a single actor taking over. It's some kind of federation standard for digital services like chat, storage space, online office suites, email services, and the like that providers can adopt to ensure that their stuff works well with others and can be included as part of a bigger all-in-one digital suite that actors can build themselves by picking all the services that they want. This is pretty cool stuff. It is just a proposed standard right now, so it hasn't really been adopted or implemented. I think the biggest indicator that this thing could work would be if NexCloud starts implementing it because this is probably the biggest competitor to anything Google, Microsoft or Apple might offer these days. So if Nexcloud starts jumping on that bandwagon as well and integrates the standard and lets people replace certain components by others, then it means this truly has a shot of shining and doing something new. I hope it will work out, but for now it's way too early to tell. Now, Ubuntu broke with tradition with version 26.04 that will release in April by committing the cardinal sin of now displaying asterisks when typing the pseudo password in a terminal. Up until now, you just typed characters in a void with nothing happening on screen. Then you hit enter and you waited to see if you typed things correctly. Now you will see a symbol for each character you type, which is obviously much much better for usability and for feedback for users. Seeing nothing happening when you're typing on your keyboard is just dumb. But also security-wise, it's not that great because people looking over your shoulder can at least know how many characters are in your password. Also, people looking at screencasts that you might have recorded off your screen while you were using the terminal might also be able to guess the length. Although, I would argue people looking over your shoulder could also just look at your fingers and get the entire password altogether. So yeah, not really such a big deal. Someone filed a bug report against this change that was marked as won't fix by Ubuntu. So it seems that their mind is made up. The behavior can be changed in the pseudo file. And this is a change that Ubuntu only made in pseudo rust. So the new rust version of pseudo that they use. It will not affect the regular non rust version of pseudo. Now personally I do prefer having some feedback when I type. I have no one that's going to look over my shoulder. And when I record screencast, I really don't think that people knowing how many characters are in my password, will really help them all that much for my desktop PC, which I completely turn off as soon as I'm done using, but I can understand why people would be a little bit miffed about this. You can change it. I don't think it's really a big deal. Now, this week, Firefox 148 was released with the much talked about AI kill switch that disables all the current and all the future AI features in the browser. It's in the AI controls settings page, which seems to be a new page, and it's called block AI enhancements, which I think is kind of a misleading name. Uh, it should have been an opt-in in the first place, calling those enhancements and telling people that it's going to block them. Makes it look a little bit scarier than it should be, but at least you have control over this. Blocking those AI features will also delete all the local models that were downloaded to power those features. It will also block all the potential popups that Firefox would give you to tell you to use this or that AI tool that they just added. Of course, you can also just disable individual features if you prefer, which is good. And of course, Mozilla will collect some telemetry on that toggle to see how many people enable or disable each feature or all those features. I would expect the disable telemetry toggle to also disable that kind of data collection. In the process, Modzilla also added a preview for their AI window feature, which is a promptbased navigation experience where you just talk to a chatbot instead of looking for what you would actually want to find. It looks pretty bad visually currently, but it's just a preview, so of course things will improve. You'll be able to choose which model powers that AI assistant as well. You'll apparently get to control the data being collected and used. And apart from that, Firefox added sections for their stories in the new tab page. Those are basically promoted articles that I would expect Firefox gets paid to push to you. You can turn that off in the homepage settings. Finally, you can also access and manage the data for each Firefox profile from the settings as well. Instead of going to the about profiles page, the PDF viewer has better screen reader support. Service workers now support web GPU and the telemetry has been expanded to now also know which Linux DRO you're using. As usual, you can disable that telemetry. Some people will find use in those AI tools, some won't. I personally think that going all in on AI like Firefox seems to be doing is not the right choice. Their differentiating factor has always been that they were more ethical, more respectful of of anything on the internet basically. And AI is definitely not that at all. So focusing on that feels pretty weird. I wish they would have let extension developers manage all of this instead of baking it in the browser as per the promoted stories. This has existed for a while and I'm not a fan of seeing what are basically ads uh in the homepage but you can disable that and Firefox has to make money at some point uh to get themselves out of the grip of Google and I don't think they have many possibilities for doing that. So that's one that at least they have. I will always disable it personally, but yeah, that exists. It's fine. Now, it seems that the Libre Office online project is starting a new. In 2022, the Document Foundation froze the project after they had announced that they wanted to halt development of it. Most developers flocked to Collabora Online, which took over, forked the project, and kept maintaining it. But now, they've gone back on that decision, inviting the community to resume development of Libre Office Online. If you don't know, this is a web-based version of Libre Office. You can self-host it to have something as similar to Google Docs basically, but free and open source with collaborative editing, support for writer, cal and impress, and of course the ability to integrate that into other cloud platforms. Collabora office still exists. It is based on all of those efforts, but they contributed the vast majority of the code, and the solution has evolved immensely since Libri Office online has been uh stopped. And this is generating some tension between Collabora and the document foundation because Kabora basically says that Libri Office and the document foundation is not really recognizing all the work that Collabora did on that solution. Reopening the old obsolete codebase when there's everything available for Collabora online doesn't really make sense. But also rebasing the entire Libri Office online onto Collabora office would be basically negating the fact that Collabora did all the work on this for years. So, this seems to be creating tension. I honestly don't really understand why not just take Collabora online and say, "Hey, let's work together. Let's maybe rebrand that as Libri Office online. Would you be amenable to that Collabora? How can you work on this? How can we work on this?" Like something more concerted, a more conversational tone maybe would be best from the Document Foundation. This kind of seems like they just want to get back control over something that they themselves abandoned and where the community moved on. They seem to just want to take over what has been created and rebrand it as Libri Office online with no effort from their part. Doesn't quite feel very good. I think we also have some news on the ARM front. Linaro and ARM are launching the core collective consortium. This is a new organization focused on improving collaboration around the ARM software ecosystem. It is focused on open-source which explains the presence of Linaro here. They've been doing some great work around ARM support for Linux. This consortium is also backed by AMD, by Canonicle, by Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Souza among others. And the presence of AMD is especially interesting as they currently don't really do ARMbased offerings at at least in terms of hardware that I know of. But there are rumors around an APU that would use this architecture and them supporting this new ARM consortium would probably mean that they have at least some amount of interest in making ARMbased solutions. Now we'll see what this actually accomplishes. Much like the standard for digital stuff, this is just a consortium being created. It doesn't mean that anything will result of it in the long run, but if it could help with Linux development of ARM, it would be pretty good because the problem with ARM is that generally manufacturers don't really publish any kind of specs. They don't generally contribute much code. So, it's a lot of reverse engineering on a per device basis, which is pretty tricky. If all manufacturers could agree to be more open, more collaborative, then we would have at least a basic core that could be shared in terms of code that would be easier to expand upon. And I think that would make Linux support for ARM much much better. Whether we'll need better ARM support in the future remains to be seen, but ARM system on a chips might really be interesting for gaming handhelds in the future, especially with FEX. They might be interesting for Linux phones as well where hardware support is generally the main problem. So, there are a bunch of avenues that could be very useful for us. So, I guess we'll just wait and see. Now, something that is sure to annoy a few DRO makers, the new release candidate of systemd version 260RC1 now removed support for system 5 init scripts. This support was already deprecated. It had been for a while, but it is now fully removed from the project. Meaning providing distributions that let the user pick between system 5 init or systemd might become a bit more difficult because you're really going to have to reimplement the whole in it sequence for both systems. System D also adds a new command line tool in there that lets you handle overlay FS file systems, something that is used in a lot of immutable dros. There are other changes like supporting integrity checks for encrypted drives. There's better integration with modem manager for the network subsystem and there's the ability to run portable services as an unprivileged user. SystemD will also now require the kernel 5.10 at least, but 6.6 is the ideal version for the full breadth of functionality that it provides. And there's no two ways about it. Systemd is the default in it system and subsystem and system services manager for Linux right now. If you don't want to use it, that's fine. But most distros will just not spend time and resources they don't have on re-implementing all of this when it already exists and it already works and it's known by people and it's easy to handle. The main problem I have with this is that it does create some form of monoculture and it also gives a very straightforward single point of entry for potential malicious attackers because virtually all distros have at least the core of systemd maybe not all services but at least the core of systemd running. And that makes it one single attack vector that you can reliably use to attack Linux distros. Obviously having more diversity there with standards and protocols that you could plug into would be better for that avenue. Uh but in the meantime that's what we have and developers would be foolish not to rely upon those because it's just here and it works. And finally to conclude on this episode Microsoft published an update to their DirectX Shader compiler which you might say who cares about that but the thing is this compiler is now open source. It has been since 2017. It also now supports Linux and it also has compatibility with Vulcan shader formats. DirectX actually adopted the Vulcan shader format officially recently and thus the new shader compiler update improves that support significantly. This means better interoperability with Vulcan drivers, Vulcan development tools, the whole Vulcan tooling suite that people use, which in turns means it might just be easier to translate DirectX shaders into Vulcan shaders for Linux. or you might even no longer need to translate them because DirectX will just work with the shader format that we use and expect on Linux. That's pretty cool stuff. I think uh it's backend stuff, so might not be extremely exciting, but everything that can make the whole translation process from DirectX to Vulcan easier is really welcome. And it's always both intriguing and suspicious when you see Microsoft doing stuff that aims at being more interoperable. You always wonder if there's not a hidden agenda behind it. But in the meantime, it is good to have that access. And they're not trying to replace the Vulcan format with their own. They are just supporting the format that we already use, which I think works. Okay, so the last thing we need to talk about is the segue to our sponsor, Tuxedo Computers. Tuxedo is a German hardware manufacturer that makes laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box. They are based in Germany, but they ship to most countries in the world. And they have a big range of devices from more affordable laptops all the way up to workstations, gaming PCs, gaming laptops, and all you might want. You have plenty of options to customize your devices. Plenty of potential keyboard layout options. All of that stuff. I only use their computers. Everything that I edit, write, or record is done on a Tuxedo computer. I'm actually running their DRO, but you can run any DRO you want on there. They're really fantastic. So, as usual, the link is down in the description. Anyway, this will conclude today's episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to it or watching it. You know where all the usual YouTube buttons are and why you should absolutely click them to help the channel grow. And also, you have plenty of links down in the description to help this show going. You know how this works. You get some perks. You click on that. You know, it's just the usual stuff. Anyway, thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one. Bye.

Secure your passwords and logins with Proton Pass: https://proton.me/pass/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 00:30 Sponsor: Proton Pass 01:40 Nvidia & Intel hire Linux devs 04:25 KDE Connect plans full redesign 07:03 New open standard aims to unify digital services 09:25 Ubuntu adds password feedback for sudo 11:08 Firefox 148 out with AI killswitch 14:06 LibreOffice Online resumes efforts 16:10 ARM & Linaro create CoreCollective for ARM 18:02 SystemD removes support for SysV Init 20:06 Microsoft improves compatibility between DX and Vulkan 21:30 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers Links: Nvidia &Intel hire Linux devs https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/02/nvidia-hiring-linux-driver-engineers-to-help-with-vulkan-proton-and-more/ https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-Jobs-February-2026 KDE Connect plans full redesign https://tintotint.eu/programming/kde-connect/ New open standard aims to unify digital services https://goodtech.info/openburo-standard-europeen-orchestration-alternative-microsoft-365-dinum-linagora/ https://open-buro.eu/#news Ubuntu adds password feedback for sudo https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/02/ubuntu-26-04-sudo-password-asterisks Firefox 148 out with AI killswitch https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/02/firefox-148-released-ai-kill-switch LibreOffice Online resumes efforts https://linuxiac.com/libreoffice-online-project-reopened-with-new-community-focus/ https://en.ubunlog.com/LibreOffice-Online-Resurrection-Conflict-Collabora-Document-Foundation/ ARM & Linaro create CoreCollective for ARM https://www.phoronix.com/news/CoreCollective SystemD removes support for SysV Init https://github.com/systemd/systemd/releases/tag/v260-rc1 Microsoft improves compatibility between DX and Vulkan https://www.phoronix.com/news/DX-Shader-Compiler-Better-VLK #linuxdistro #linuxdesktop #technews