Recently the Register pointed out that the new (Debian-based) Raspberry Pi OS 5.0 has "a completely new Wayland desktop environment replacing PIXEL, the older desktop based on LXDE and X.org, augmented with Mutter in its previous release."

And when elementary OS 8 finally arrives, "the development team plans to finally shift to the Wayland display server by default," reports Linux magazine (adding "If you'd like to get early access to daily builds, you can do so by becoming an elementary OS sponsor on GitHub.")

"This is a transition that we have been planning and working towards for several years," writes CEO/co-founder Danielle Foré, "and we're finally in the home stretch... Wayland will bring us improved performance, better app security, and opens the doors to support more complex display setups like mixed DPI multi-monitor setups." There are other things that we're experimenting with, like the possibility of an immutable OS, and there are more mundane things that will certainly happen like shipping Pipewire. You'll also see on the project board that we're looking to replace the onscreen keyboard and it's time to re-evaluate some things like SystemD Boot. You can expect lots more little features to be detailed over the coming months.
Meanwhile, Linux Mint is getting "experimental" Wayland support next month. And also in December, Firefox will let Wayland support be enabled by default.

And last month the Register noted a merge request for GNOME to remove the gnome-xorg.desktop file. "To put this in context, the Fedora project is considering a comparable change: removing or hiding the GNOME on X.org session from the login menu, which is already the plan for the Fedora KDE spin when it moves to KDE version 6, which is still in development."

Canonical hosted an amusingly failure-filled demo of its new easy-to-install, Ubuntu-powered tool for building small-to-medium scale, on-premises high-availability clusters, Microcloud, at an event in London yesterday. From a report: The intro to the talk leaned heavily on Canonical's looming 20th anniversary, and with good reason. Ubuntu has carved out a substantial slice of the Linux market for itself on the basis of being easier to use than most of its rivals, at no cost -- something that many Linux players still seem not to fully comprehend. The presentation was as buzzword-heavy as one might expect, and it's also extensively based on Canonical's in-house tech, such as the LXD containervisor, Snap packaging, and, optionally, the Ubuntu Core snap-based immutable distro. (The only missing buzzword didn't crop up until the Q&A session, and we were pleased by its absence: it's not built on and doesn't use Kubernetes, but you can run Kubernetes on it if you wish.)

We're certain this is going to turn off or alienate a lot of the more fundamentalist Penguinistas, but we are equally sure that Canonical won't care. In the immortal words of Kevin Smith, it's not for critics. Microcloud combines several existing bits of off-the-shelf FOSS tech in order to make it easy to link from three to 50 Ubuntu machines into an in-house, private high-availability cluster, with live migration and automatic failover. It uses its own LXD containervisor to manage nodes and workloads, Ceph for distributed storage, OpenZFS for local storage, and OVN to virtualize the cluster interconnect. All the tools are packaged as snaps. It supports both x86-64 and Arm64 nodes, including Raspberry Pi kit, and clusters can mix both architectures. The event included several demonstrations using an on-stage cluster of three ODROID machines with "Intel N6005" processors, so we reckon they were ODROID H3+ units -- which we suspect the company chose because of their dual Ethernet connections.

Next April a new LTS Ubuntu arrives, and alongside it will be a whole new immutable desktop edition. At this year's Ubuntu conference in Riga, Latvia, Canonical revealed more details about its forthcoming immutable desktop distro. From a report: Core Desktop is not the next version of Ubuntu itself. Ordinary desktop and server Ubuntu aren't going anywhere, and the next release, numbered 24.04 and codenamed Noble Numbat as we mentioned last month, will be the default and come with all the usual editions and flavors. Nor is this a whole new product: it is a graphical desktop edition of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, as we examined on its release in June last year, a couple of months after 22.04. Ubuntu Core is Canonical's Internet of Things (IoT) distro, intended to be embedded on edge devices, such as digital signs and smart displays. It is an immutable distro, meaning that the root filesystem is read-only and there's no conventional package manager.

Rather than being a basis for customization, like a conventional Linux, the idea is that immutable distros are rolled out and updated more like a phone or tablet OS: there's a single fixed and heavily tested OS image, and it's deployed onto the devices out in the field without modification. Updates are monolithic: a whole fresh image is pushed out, and all the OS components are upgraded in a single operation to the same combination. That isn't unique. Most of the major Linux vendors have immutable offerings, and The Reg has looked at several over the years, including MicroOS, the basis of SUSE's next-gen enterprise OS ALP. As well as the well-known ChromeOS, another immutable desktop is the educational distro Endless OS.

[...] Canonical believes it has some unique new angles. Core Desktop is constructed as additional layers on top of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, and like Core, it's entirely built with a single packaging system: Ubuntu's Snap. While Snap remains controversial, it does have some compelling advantages over both SUSE and Red Hat's tooling. SUSE's transactional_update tool, while simpler than its rivals in implementation, requires a snapshot-capable filesystem, meaning that its immutable distros must use Btrfs. While it has many admirers, the number and the contents of the orange and red cells in the feature tables here in its own documentation reflect the FOSS desk's serious reservations about Btrfs.

Mozilla has some news for users of Debian-based Linux distributions (such as Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and others): installing, updating, and testing the latest Firefox Nightly builds just got a lot easier. We've set up a new APT repository for you to install Firefox Nightly as a .deb package... These packages are compatible with the same Debian and Ubuntu versions as our traditional binaries. If you've previously used our traditional binaries (distributed as .tar.bz2 archives), switching to Mozilla's APT repository allows Firefox to be installed and updated like any other application... You will not have to restart Firefox after updating the package with APT...

For those of you who would like to use Firefox Nightly in a different language than American English, we have also created .deb packages containing the Firefox language packs.
Some context from 9to5Linux: Back in April, I reported that Mozilla was offering a DEB package of the Firefox 113 release during the beta testing phase. Unfortunately, that was the only time a DEB package was available for download and, of course, it didn't make it into the final release of Firefox 113, nor future releases. It would appear that Mozilla needed more time to work on the DEB package for Debian and Ubuntu-based distributions, and it looks like it will finally become a thing starting with an upcoming Firefox release, like Firefox 121 or later...

Using the DEB package over Snap or the official binary package offers some benefits like better performance due to advanced compiler-based optimizations, hardened binaries with all security flags enabled, access to the latest Firefox releases as fast as possible [because the .deb is integrated into Firefox's release process], and you won't have to create your own .desktop file anymore.

"The work started on Wayland," the Linux Mint project announced in their monthly newsletter.

An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux about an upcoming new option in the Ubuntu-based distro: Linux Mint 21.3 [planned for Christmas of 2023] will be the first Linux Mint release to offer a Wayland session, but in an experimental state. The default session will still be the X11 one, but users who want to try Wayland can do so by selecting the "Cinnamon on Wayland" session from the login screen.

"The Wayland session won't be as stable as the default one. It will lack features and it will come with its own limitations. We won't recommend it but you'll be able to give it a shot if you want to and it'll be there for interested people if they want to give us feedback," said Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre.

I said that "2024 is the year of the Wayland desktop", but Clement Lefebvre doesn't think Linux Mint needs Wayland support before 2026... By that time, I believe Xfce will also be fully Wayland compatible so that Linux Mint can fully switch to Wayland by default.
The newsletter says the 2026 target "leaves us two years to identify and to fix all the issues. It's something we'll continue to work on.

"Whenever it happens, assuming it does, we'll consider switching defaults. We'll use the best tools to do the job and provide the best experience. Today that means Xorg. Tomorrow it might mean Wayland. We'll be ready and compatible with both."

Linus Torvalds has said he bought a Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux for his daughter. Now ZDNet shares some trivia from the history of "the most well-known Linux laptop," citing a presentation by Barton George, Dell Technologies' Developer Community manager, at the Linux/open-source conference All Things Open: First, however, you should know that Dell has supported Linux desktops and laptops since the middle 2000s. In 2006, Michael Dell told me that Dell would be the first major PC vendor to release and support desktop Linux — and this proved to be a success. Barton George explained that Dell had always done great volume with these computers. Not volume, like the Windows machines, of course, but enough that Dell has always offered Linux-based — primarily Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) powered — workstations.

Still, none of these machines really appealed to developers... George announced on his personal blog what Dell was planning, and his traffic went from 60 views a day to 15,000. Then, as now, there's a lot of interest in laptops that come with Linux ready to go... Dell got together with Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, to make sure all the drivers were in place for a top-notch Ubuntu Linux developer desktop experience. Indeed, the name 'Project Sputnik' is a nod to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO. A decade before the project itself, Shuttleworth had spent eight days orbiting the Earth in a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. George and the crew decided "Soyuz" didn't have an inspiring ring to it, so the company went with "Sputnik" instead.

George continued: "We announced a beta program for the machine with a 10% off offer. We thought, well, we'll probably get 300 people. Instead, we got 6,000. This is where senior management said OK, you've got something real."

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu: The System Monitor app Ubuntu comes with does an okay job of letting you monitor system resources and oversee running processes — but it does look dated... [T]he app's graphs and charts are tiny, compact, and lack the glanceability and granular-detail that similar tools on other systems offer.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ace System Monitor alternatives available on Linux, with the Rust-based Resources being the latest tool to the join the club. And it's a real looker... Resources shows real-time graphs showing the utilisation of core system components... You can also see a [sortable and searchable] list of running apps and processes, which are separated in this app.
It's also possible to select a refresh interval "from very slow/slow/normal/fast/very fast (though tempting to select, 'very fast' can increase CPU usage)." And selecting an app or process "activates a big red button you can click to 'end' the app/process (a submenu has options to kill, halt, or continue the app/process instead)..."

"If you don't like the 'Windows-iness' of Mission Center — which you may have briefly spotted it in my Ubuntu 23.10 release video — then Resources is a solid alternative."

SpzToid writes: Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed Mantic Minotaur, is the 39th Ubuntu release, and it's one of the three smaller interim releases Canonical puts out between long-term support (LTS) versions. This last interim before the next LTS doesn't stand out with bold features you can identify at a glance. But it does set up some useful options and upgrades that should persist in Ubuntu for some time.

Two of the biggest changes in Ubuntu 23.10 are in the installer. Ubuntu now defaults to a "Default installation," which is quite different from what the "default" was even just one release prior. "Default" is described as "Just the essentials, web browser, and basic utilities," while "Full" is "An offline-friendly selection of office tools, utilities, web browser, and games." "Default" is somewhat similar to what "Minimal" used to be in prior versions, while "Full" is intended for those who are offline or have slow connections or just want as many options as possible right away.

Elsewhere in the installer, you can now choose ZFS as your primary file system. There's also an experimental option to set up Trusted Platform Module (TPM) full-disk encryption rather than rely entirely on passphrases to encrypt your disk. This brings Ubuntu up to speed with Windows in offering a way to both secure your system and find out the hard way that you lack a backup key to get in after messing with your boot options. (Kidding! Somewhat.)

Thursday ZDNet reported... As security holes go, CVE-2023-4911, aka "Looney Tunables," isn't horrid. It has a Common Vulnerability Scoring System score of 7.8, which is ranked as important, not critical.

On the other hand, this GNU C Library's (glibc) dynamic loader vulnerability is a buffer overflow, which is always big trouble, and it's in pretty much all Linux distributions, so it's more than bad enough. After all, its discoverers, the Qualys Threat Research Unit, were able to exploit "this vulnerability (a local privilege escalation that grants full root privileges) on the default installations of Fedora 37 and 38, Ubuntu 22.04 and 23.04, and Debian 12 and 13." Other distributions are almost certainly vulnerable to attack. The one major exception is the highly secure Alpine Linux. Thanks to this vulnerability, it's trivial to take over most Linux systems as a root user. As the researchers noted, this exploitation method "works against almost all of the SUID-root programs that are installed by default on Linux...."

The good news is that Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, and Gentoo have all released their own updates. In addition, the upstream glibc code has been patched with the fix. If you can't patch it, Red Hat has a script that should work on most Linux systems to mitigate the problem by setting your system to terminate any setuid program invoked with GLIBC_TUNABLES in the environment.

Yesterday the "temporary suspension" of automatic Snap registrations was announced on Canonical's Snapcraft forum by developer advocate Igor Ljubuncic, after what was described as a "security incident". On September 28, 2023, the Snap Store team was notified of a potential security incident. A number of snap users reported several recently published and potentially malicious snaps. As a consequence of these reports, the Snap Store team has immediately taken down these snaps, and they can no longer be searched or installed. Furthermore, the Snap Store team has placed a temporary manual review requirement on all new snap registrations, effectively immediately...

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our snap publishers and developers. However, we believe it is the most prudent action at this moment. We want to thoroughly investigate this incident without introducing any noise into the system, and more importantly, we want to make sure our users have a safe and trusted experience with the Snap Store. Please bear with us while we conduct our investigation. We will provide a more detailed update in the coming days.
Some background from the Linux blog OMG Ubuntu: This isn't the first time the Snap Store has had issues with icky uploads. In 2018 an innocuous-sounding app hid crypto-mining capabilities unbeknownst to users. Not disclosing this in its description rendered it malware (Canonical later clarified to say crypto-miners are allowed so long as they're disclosed).

In this instance it appears that folks have uploaded apps purporting to be official apps/tools for crypto ledger tool Ledger and these apps were able to get folks backups codes (which people enter thinking it's legit) and ...the bad actors can use that to extract funds.

In GNOME Shell there's a dark background for the Quick Settings menu, the calendar applet, and desktop notification-- but in Ubuntu 23.10, "the default Yaru theme uses a light style for GNOME Shell elements," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu.

"But there's a new GNOME extension that lets you change this without affecting the rest of your desktop..." You can make GNOME Shell dark in Ubuntu by turning the 'Dark Style' toggle on but that also makes apps use a dark theme too. Not everyone wants that; they want a 'mixed' look... [I]f you would like to use dark GNOME Shell elements in Ubuntu 23.10 without using the dark mode preference (which, as said, will turn your apps dark too) then the Dark Style GNOME extension is exactly what you need.
It only works with Ubuntu 23.10 and GNOME 45.

This week saw the public beta-testing release of "Linux Mint Debian Edition". Besides listing download locations, its release notes also list out the project's three goals:

- Ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver the same user experience
- See how much work would be involved if Ubuntu was ever to disappear.
- Guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu.

9to5Linux reports: Based on the Debian GNU/Linux 12 "Bookworm" operating system series, Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 is powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series and features the latest Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment that was introduced with the Linux Mint 21.2 "Victoria" release in July 2023⦠[T]his release comes with a new look and feel thanks to newly added folder icons with different color variants, improved consistency of tooltips to look the same across different apps and desktops, support for symbolic icons that adapt to their background, and full support for HEIF and AVIF

OS News' managing editor calls Firefox "the single most important desktop Linux application," shipping in most distros (with some users later opting for a post-installation download of Chrome).

But "I'm genuinely worried about the state of browsers on Linux, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular..." While both GNOME and KDE nominally invest in their own two browsers, GNOME Web and Falkon, their uptake is limited and releases few and far between. For instance, none of the major Linux distributions ship GNOME Web as their default browser, and it lacks many of the features users come to expect from a browser. Falkon, meanwhile, is updated only sporadically, often going years between releases. Worse yet, Falkon uses Chromium through QtWebEngine, and GNOME Web uses WebKit (which are updated separately from the browser, so browser releases are not always a solid metric!), so both are dependent on the goodwill of two of the most ruthless corporations in the world, Google and Apple respectively.

Even Firefox itself, even though it's clearly the browser of choice of distributions and Linux users alike, does not consider Linux a first-tier platform. Firefox is first and foremost a Windows browser, followed by macOS second, and Linux third. The love the Linux world has for Firefox is not reciprocated by Mozilla in the same way, and this shows in various places where issues fixed and addressed on the Windows side are ignored on the Linux side for years or longer. The best and most visible example of that is hardware video acceleration. This feature has been a default part of the Windows version since forever, but it wasn't enabled by default for Linux until Firefox 115, released only in early July 2023. Even then, the feature is only enabled by default for users of Intel graphics — AMD and Nvidia users need not apply. This lack of video acceleration was — and for AMD and Nvidia users, still is — a major contributing factor to Linux battery life on laptops taking a serious hit compared to their Windows counterparts... It's not just hardware accelerated video decoding. Gesture support has taken much longer to arrive on the Linux version than it did on the Windows version — things like using swipes to go back and forward, or pinch to zoom on images...

I don't see anyone talking about this problem, or planning for the eventual possible demise of Firefox, what that would mean for the Linux desktop, and how it can be avoided or mitigated. In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop — KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions — would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop. Stop living off the scraps and leftovers thrown across the fence from Windows and macOS browser makers, and focus entirely on making a browser engine that is optimised fully for Linux, its graphics stack, and its desktops. Have the major stakeholders work together on a Linux-first — or even Linux-only — browser engine, leaving the graphical front-end to the various toolkits and desktop environments....

I think it's highly irresponsible of the various prominent players in the desktop Linux community, from GNOME to KDE, from Ubuntu to Fedora, to seemingly have absolutely zero contingency plans for when Firefox enshittifies or dies...

Google's long-running project to split up ChromeOS and its Chrome browser is currently in beta and should be live in the stable channel later this month. The flags that turn on the feature by default were spotted by Kevin Tofel from About Chromebooks. Ars Technica reports: The project is called "Lacros" which Google says stands for "Linux And ChRome OS." This will split ChromeOS's Linux OS from the Chrome browser, allowing Google to update each one independently. Google documentation on the project says, "On Chrome OS, the system UI (ash window manager, login screen, etc.) and the web browser are the same binary. Lacros separates this functionality into two binaries, henceforth known as ash-chrome (system UI) and lacros-chrome (web browser)." Part of the project involves sprucing up the ChromeOS OS, and Google's docs say, "Lacros can be imagined as 'Linux chrome with more Wayland support.'"

On the browser side, ChromeOS would stop using the bespoke Chrome browser for ChromeOS and switch to the Chrome browser for Linux. The same browser you get on Ubuntu would now ship on ChromeOS. In the past, turning on Lacros in ChromeOS would show both Chrome browsers, the outgoing ChromeOS one and the new Linux one. Lacros has been in development for around two years and can be enabled via a Chrome flag. Tofel says his 116 build no longer has that flag since it's the default now. Google hasn't officially confirmed this is happening, but so far, the code is headed that way.

The Register shares its collection of "signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux." - The team developing Linux for Apple Silicon Macs said they didn't have the manpower to work on X.org support.

- A year ago, the developers of the Gtk toolkit used by many Linux apps and desktops said that the next version may drop support for X11...

- One of the developers of the Budgie desktop, Campbell Jones, recently published a blog post with a wildly controversial title that made The Reg FOSS desk smile: "Wayland is pretty good, actually." He lays out various benefits that Wayland brings to developers, and concludes: "Primarily, what I've learned is that Wayland is actually really well-designed. The writing is on the wall for X, and Wayland really is the future." Partly as a result of this, it looks likely that the next version of the Budgie desktop, Budgie 11, will only support Wayland, completely dropping support for X11. The team point out that this is not such a radical proposition: there was a proposal to make KDE 6 sessions default to Wayland as long ago as last October...

- The GNOME spin of Fedora has defaulted to Wayland since version 25 in 2017, and the GNOME flavor of Ubuntu since 21.04.

- [T]here's now an experimental effort to get Wayland working on OpenBSD. The effort happened at the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia, and the developer's comments are encouraging. It's already available as part of FreeBSD.

Linux magazine reports that "Former Snap co-developer Alan Pope, who left Canonical in 2021 after 10 years with the company, has developed unsnap, a script that replaces snaps with Flatpaks where available. The script, hosted on GitHub, has been tested by the developers for use on Ubuntu and all derivatives that offer snapd and packages in the Snap format."

Pope clarifies its status on GitHub: Let's say it's "Pre-alpha", as in "It kinda works on my computer". Unless you plan on contributing (see below) it's probably not ready for you, yet.
And Pope notes the existence of "related projects" like the custom-desktop project by Natan Junges "which provides a set of packages to revert an existing Ubuntu install back to something many users may appreciate more." And "deb-get enables Ubuntu users to install and update deb-based packages of popular applications"

But Linux magazine tested out unsnap: The flatpak list command can be used to determine which snaps were converted to Flatpak format. For snaps with a Flatpak equivalent, unsnap converted these snaps cleanly, and all of the programs remained functional. The script left the remaining snaps and the infrastructure untouched...

An equivalent Flatpak must be available, which is very often the case with graphical applications. With a little manual work, the Snap infrastructure can also be removed.

Intel has announced Intel One Mono, a new font catering to "the needs of developers" with an "expressive" monospace for clarity and legibility" It's easier to read, and available for free, with an open-source font license.

Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, Frere-Jones Type designed the Intel One Mono typeface in partnership with the Intel Brand Team and VMLY&R, for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors. A panel of low-vision and legally blind developers provided feedback at each stage of design.
The Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu calls the new font "pretty decent," adding that "Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great.

"Still, there's always room for more, right...?" Better yet, it's not only free to download and use but free to edit, and free to redistribute... Overall, I think Intel One Mono looks great, especially in a text editor (GUI or CLI). There's a noticeable upper and lower margin to the font that in dense text situations allows text to breathe, but in some terminal tools, like Neofetch, the gaps can seem a bit too happy.
The Intel One Mono repository on GitHub includes instructions for activating the font in VSCode and Sublime Text, and lists some extra features accessible in some applications and via CSS:

• There is an option for a raised colon, either applied contextually between numbers or activated generally.

• Superior/superscript and inferior/subscript figures are included via their Unicode codepoints, or you can produce them from the default figures via the sups (Superscript), subs (Subscript), and si (Scientific Inferior) features.

• Fraction numerals are similarly available via the numr (Numerator) and dnom (Denominator) features. A set of premade fractions is also available in the fonts.

motang writes: Canonical, the sponsor of widely popular Ubuntu Linux, plans on shipping the next LTS in two versions. In addition to the traditional version, there will be one immutable desktop OS flavor. From Canonical blog: The technology behind snaps extends beyond the distribution of desktop applications however. With Ubuntu Core this philosophy of security and stability applies equally to the components that make up the entire Ubuntu operating system. Rather than treating the OS as a single immutable 'blob,' Ubuntu Core breaks it up into discrete components. The base of Ubuntu Core, for example, is built on four primary snaps:

Gadget: Defines the system's bootloader, partition layout and default configurations for snaps.
Kernel: Containing the Linux kernel and hardware drivers.
Base: A minimal Ubuntu OS image containing only the necessary services and utilities to support the applications running on top.
Snapd: Manages the lifecycle of all snaps in an Ubuntu Core system.
Additional OS snaps can then be layered onto this image to enable other elements of the operating system such as a desktop environment.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: The Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix distribution has become an official Ubuntu flavor and will join the rest of the flavors starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) release. Created and maintained by members of the Linux community, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix is an Ubuntu derivative that features the modern Cinnamon desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint team. Cinnamon Remix aims to offer a traditional approach to the modern Linux desktop.

Until now, the maintainers of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix did a very good job keeping up with all upstream Ubuntu releases, even offering a custom version of the official wallpaper of each new Ubuntu release to match the Cinnamon desktop environment's style. Ubuntu Cinnamon will not be the only new official Ubuntu flavor this Spring when Ubuntu 23.04 will be released as the maintainers of Ubuntu Unity have also managed to obtain official Ubuntu flavor status last year in September. As with Ubuntu Unity, the next step now for the Ubuntu Cinnamon maintainers is to bake daily ISO images in preparation for the upcoming Lunar Lobster release and maybe even take part in the Ubuntu 23.04 beta release later this week on March 30th. The latest Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix release and can be downloaded here.

"With an 8-core Rockchip RK3588S SoC, the Orange Pi 5 is leaps and bounds faster than the aging Raspberry Pi 4," writes Phoronix: With up to 32GB of RAM, the Orange Pi 5 is also capable of serving for a more diverse user-base and even has enough potential for assembling a budget Arm Linux developer desktop. I've been testing out the Orange Pi 5 the past few weeks and it's quite fast and nice for its low price point.

The Orange Pi 5 single board computer was announced last year and went up for pre-ordering at the end of 2022.... When it comes to the software support, among the officially available options for the Orange Pi 5 are Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu, Debian, Android, and Armbian. Other ARM Linux distributions will surely see varying levels of support while even the readily available ISO selection offered by Orange Pi is off to a great start....

Granted, the Orange Pi developer community isn't as large as that of the Raspberry Pi community or the current range of accessories and documentation, but for those more concerned about features and performance, the Orange Pi 5 is extremely interesting.
The article includes Orange Pi 5 specs:

• A 26-pin header
• HDMI 2.1, Gigabit LAN, M.2 PCIe 2.0, and USB3 connectivity
• A Mali G510 MP4 graphics processor, "which has open-source driver hope via the Panfrost driver stack."
• Four different versions with 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of RAM using LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X. "The Orange Pi 4GB retails for ~$88, the Orange Pi 5 8GB version retails for $108, and the Orange Pi 5 16GB version retails for $138, while as of writing the 32GB version wasn't in stock."

In 169 performance benchmarks (compared to Raspberry Pi 4 boards), "this single board computer came out to delivering 2.85x the performance of the Raspberry Pi 400 overall." And through all this the average SoC temperature was 71 degrees with a peak of 85 degrees — without any extra heatsink or cooling.