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In some aspects, such as in gaming, the Linux desktop has made enormous strides in the past few years. In others, such as accessibility, things have stagnated. At Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA), Matt Campbell spoke about the need for, and an approach to, modernizing accessibility for desktop Linux. This included a discussion of Newton, a fledgling project that may greatly improve accessibility on the Linux desktop.

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Kernel developers are encouraged to send their changes in small batches as a way of making life easier for reviewers. So when a longtime developer and maintainer hits the list with a 437-patch series touching 859 files, eyebrows are certain to head skyward. Specifically, this series from Jens Axboe is cleaning up one of the core abstractions that has been part of the Linux kernel almost since the beginning; authors of device drivers (among others) will have to take note.

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In Unix-like systems, an open file descriptor carries the right to access the opened object in specific ways. As a general rule, that file descriptor does not enable access to any other objects. The recently merged BPF token feature runs counter to this practice by creating file descriptors that carry specific BPF-related access rights. A similar but different approach to capability-carrying file descriptors, in the form of directory file descriptors that include their own credentials, is currently under consideration in the kernel community.

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Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, code-named "Noble Numbat", was released on April 25. This release includes GNOME 46, installer updates, security enhancements, a lot of updated packages, and a new App Center that puts a heavy emphasis on using Snaps to install software. It is not an ambitious release, but it brings enough to the table that it's a worthwhile update.

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When it comes to security, telling developers to do (or not do) something can be ineffective. Helping them understand the why behind instructions, by illustrating good and bad practices using stories, can be much more effective. With several such stories Marta Rybczyńska fashioned an interesting talk about patterns and anti-patterns in embedded Linux security at the Embedded Open Source Summit (EOSS), co-located with Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA), on April 16 in Seattle, Washington.

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On April 21, a group of anonymous authors and non-anonymous signatories published a lengthy open letter to the Nix community and Nix founder Eelco Dolstra calling for his resignation from the project. They claimed ongoing problems with the project's leadership, primarily focusing on the way his actions have allegedly undermined people nominally empowered to perform various moderation and governance tasks. Since its release, the letter has gained more than 100 signatures.

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Video playback is undeniably one of the most important features in modern consumer devices. Yet, surprisingly, users are by and large unaware of the intricate engineering involved in the compression and decompression of video data, with codecs being left to find a delicate balance between image quality, bandwidth, and power consumption. In response to constant performance pressure, video codecs have become complex and hardware implementations are now common, but programming these devices is becoming increasingly difficult and fraught with opportunities for exploitation. I hope to convey how Rust can help fix this problem.

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At the CPU level, a memory model describes, among other things, the amount of freedom the processor has to reorder memory operations. If low-level code does not take the memory model into account, unpleasant surprises are likely to follow. Naturally, different CPUs offer different memory models, complicating the portability of certain types of concurrent software. To make life easier, some Arm CPUs offer the ability to emulate the x86 memory model, but efforts to make that feature available in the kernel are running into opposition.

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On April 11, Brandt Bucher posted PEP 744 ("JIT Compilation"), which summarizes the current state of Python's new copy-and-patch just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The JIT is currently experimental, but the PEP proposes some criteria for the circumstances under which it should become a non-experimental part of Python. The discussion of the PEP hasn't reached a conclusion, but several members of the community have already raised questions about how the JIT would fit into future iterations of the Python language.

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