FLOSS Weekly Episode 840: End-of-10; Not Just Some Guy In A Van

This week Jonathan chats with Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss about KDE’s eco initiative and the End of 10 campaign! Is Open Source really a win for environmentalism? How does the End of 10 campaign tie in? And what does Pewdiepie have to do with it? Watch to find out!

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Now KDE Users Will Get Easy Virtual Machine Management, Too

If you work with virtual machines, perhaps to spin up a clean OS install for testing, historically you have either bitten the bullet and used one of the commercial options, or spent time getting your hands dirty with something open source. Over recent years that has changed, with the arrival of open source graphical applications for effortless VM usage. We’ve used GNOME Boxes here to make our lives a lot easier.  Now KDE are also joining the party with Karton, a project which will deliver what looks very similar to Boxes in the KDE desktop.

The news comes in a post from Derek Lin, and shows us what work has already been done as well as a roadmap for future work. At the moment it’s in no way production ready and it only works with QEMU, but it can generate new VMs, run them, and capture their screens to a desktop window. Having no wish to join in any Linux desktop holy wars we look forward to seeing this piece of software progress, as it’s a Google Summer Of Code project we hope there will be plenty more to see shortly.

Still using the commercial option? You can move to open source too!

User Beware: The Fine Line Between Content And Code

Everyone loves themes. Doesn’t matter if it’s a text editor or a smart display in the kitchen, we want to be able to easily customize its look and feel to our liking. When setting up a new device or piece of software, playing around with the available themes may be one of the first things you do without giving it much thought. After all, it’s not like picking the wrong one is going to do something crazy like silently delete all the files on your computer, right?

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened a few days ago to [JeansenVaars] while trying out a Plasma Global Theme from the KDE Store. According to their Reddit post, shortly after installing the “Gray Layout” theme for the popular Linux graphical environment, the system started behaving oddly and then prompted for a root password. Realizing something didn’t seem right they declined, but at that point, it was already too late for all of the personal files in their home directory.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 771: Kalpa — Because Nobody Knows What Hysteresis Is

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch talk with Shawn W Dunn about openSUSE Kalpa, the atomic version of openSUSE Tumbleweed, with a KDE twist. What exactly do we mean by an Atomic desktop? Is ALP going to replace openSUSE Tumbleweed? Are snaps coming to Kalpa?

Shawn gives us the rundown of all the above, and what’s holding back a stable release of Kalpa, what’s up with Project Greybeard, and why Kalpa really doesn’t need a firewall.

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