Jeremy Morgan: Hello and welcome
to Linux This Month. I'm here at the Pluralsight headquarters in Salt Lake
City with the whole Developer Relations team, and I've roped some of them in to
help me with this show. We've got some exciting news for the month of April,
including new updates from Ubuntu and Pop!_OS, kernel updates, and more. So let's get to it.
First up the Microsoft 365 Defender research team discovered a set of vulnerabilities that exposed
Linux desktop users. These vulnerabilities include the ability to deploy root backdoors
and perform arbitrary code execution. Not good. It's been named Nibuspwn and it can provide
full root access to Linux machines. This means anything from executing a few commands as root to
full-on malware or ransomware is possible. The exploits involve D-Bus. D-Bus is an interprocess
communication mechanism. It's a simple way for applications to talk to one another.
While this is a well-designed system for Linux that run stable and has been around for years,
it's not that great when the bad guys start inserting things into it. Vulcan Cyber's
Mike Park says there's no indication that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild
and that exploiting these vulnerabilities appears to require a local account. That
means someone has to have shell access into the machine already. Now this is a little reassuring,
but still something you should be aware of. And hopefully there will be a patch soon.
David Neal: Ubuntu Linux,
one of the most popular Linux distributions for the desktop, has released version 22.04. Linux
on the desktop continues to grow in popularity. No, 2022 isn't the year of the Linux desktop, but
more people are using Linux than ever. Ubuntu has been one of the most popular Linux distributions
on the market, mostly because it's very user-friendly and stable. So what's new in Ubuntu?
Ubuntu 22.04, the Jammy Jellyfish, is an LTS release. LTS means long term support. So the
code is accepted as stable and theoretically you can go five years without having to upgrade
your operating system to the next version. So if you want a solid, stable Linux system, and don't
need bleeding-edge software, now is your time to install Ubuntu 22.04. One of the biggest selling
points of Ubuntu 22.04 is a rebooted installer that's easy to use for anyone of any skill level.
The new release also comes with GNOME 42. There have been tons of changes to this
desktop environment, including a new theme, better layouts, and just great overall polish.
The new desktop is clean, fast, and very professional looking. There are
extensive changes to the desktop, and you can configure even more things to make it your own.
You can customize your machine to make it exactly how you want it. It comes with the new Libwadwaita
application, which allows consistent desktop theming and gets rid of many
of the problems folks had in the past with desktop differences breaking their themes.
Aisha Blake:
Linux kernel 5.15.35 is released. One of the biggest things about this release is a fix
for Intel Alder Lake systems. This fix improves performance by improving the selection between P
and E cores. This is important for the many Linux users running Alder Lake systems, and
hey, who doesn't like a free performance upgrade?
Pop!_OS, one of Jeremy's favorite Linux distributions, has released version 22.04
in tandem with the Ubuntu release we mentioned earlier. Remember, Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu
with a lot of cool stuff added on. Pop 22.04 now uses GNOME 42, like Ubuntu,
with the Custom Cosmic desktop provided by Pop. Jeremy has used this desktop himself and
it's by far one of the most user friendly, productive desktops out there. So he says. It
uses that new kernel we just mentioned, built in light and dark mode and automatic updates.
So if you're like Jeremy, you turn on your Linux machine and it's bugging you for updates pretty
much every day. Now you can set your machine to update every day. Pop is also replacing PulseAudio
with Pipewire, which seems to be a popular move for Linux distributions these days, as users are
far happier with Pipewire. There are also UI changes and performance updates in the Pop Shop.
Mattias Andersson: There's a bit of a shake
up in the Linux community around display servers. Nvidia is requesting canonical,
bring back x.org as the default display server when using the Nvidia driver.
And it's been that way for a while. Generally Ubuntu would use Wayland for Intel and Radeon
drivers, and Xorg for Nvidia. But they recently made Wayland the default for all of them. This
caused several display problems for people with Nvidia drivers. Nvidia is working on the bug, but
it turns out it's a tricky one. The GNOME Display Manager package has been updated. If you have an
Nvidia driver, you will use Xorg by default, however you can select Wayland if you like.
Rocky Linux, a fork of CentOS, is making its way to the cloud. CentOS is a very
popular Linux system and is loved by system administrators, and has been for decades.
But with Red Hat shifting focus away from it, many CentOS clones have popped up and now Rocky Linux
is available on Google Cloud as an option when building out servers. Rocky Linux was built by
CIQ, a high performance computing company, but maintained by the community. They're partnering
with Google to provide support for anyone using Rocky Linux in the cloud. Gregory M. Kurtzer,
one of the original founders of CentOS, is leading the Rocky Linux project. He says, "Through this
partnership, anytime you use our Rocky Linux on Google Cloud, CIQ with Google has your back! From
the cloud platform itself, all the way through the enterprise operating system, every aspect of
using Google Cloud is supported by a single call to Google, and together, we are your escalation
team." This is great news. CIQ is working right now to provide a streamlined installation
experience, performance-tuned images, and infrastructure tools to support easy migration.
Jeremy Morgan: There's a new Linux distro in town for beginners,
and it's worth a look. It's called XeroLinux. And I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
It's user friendly, highly customizable, and high performing.
It has a ton of applications available. It's based on one of my favorite distributions,
Arch Linux. While it's based on Arch Linux, it's not difficult to install like Arch.
In fact, it's targeted to beginner Linux users. The whole idea behind XeroLinux is to make
something that's really easy to install and run, that is high performant, and can be customized.
By creating the distro on top of Arch Linux, you get the best of all those worlds. Check it out.
That's it for this month's Linux This Month. If you liked the show, be sure to give this
episode a big thumbs up. Have a question? Add it into the comments. And I'd like to thank my new
team members for helping me out today. Come on in folks. May your source remain open and your code
compile. See you next time, subscribe to stay up to date, and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.