FOSS Weekly #24.18: Ubuntu MATE Concerns, COSMIC Desktop, Garuda Linux Release and More

It seems my rant on Ubuntu 24.04’s handling of third-party deb files rattled many in the community. While many people agreed with me, some think it’s a non-issue. A few crass comments are there telling me ‘to just use the command line’. I believe they missed the point I was trying to raise. Yes, it can be done by other means but no, the functionality should not have been removed as it leaves a bad first experience for users who think Ubuntu provides an ‘out of the box’ experience.

💬 Let’s see what else you get in this edition:

Big tech being prioritized, again.
Ubuntu MATE fading away slowly, but surely.
Some good news about KDE’s Amarok music player.
And other Linux news, videos and, of course, memes!
Warp supports this edition of FOSS Weekly.

✨ Warp: Linux Terminal With AI

Warp is a modern terminal emulator built with Rust. It has AI assistant integrated along with IDE like features. Consider it the VS Code of terminal. Although not open source and initially developed for macOS, Warp is now also available for Linux.

📰 Linux news

Here’s what you should know about the long-awaited COSMIC Desktop release:

🧠 What we’re thinking about

What does this signify? Only big tech and bureaucrats are allowed to shape AI?

We love Mastodon, but we have encountered a strange issue with it.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials and More

You can get the Pop!_OS experience on GNOME with this guide:

Did you run into the ‘Cannot refresh snap-store‘ error in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS? I’ll be writing more on Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40 as I use them and encounter issues.

🛍️ Learning deal

This book bundle from Packt will get you up to speed on Rust, the blazingly fast, memory-safe programming language that’s revolutionizing systems programming.

📹 What we are watching

We haven’t forgot about Fedora 40 while focusing on Ubuntu 24.04. Here’s an overview video.

✨ Project highlights

Boost your productivity with this FOSS Android app.

🧩 New quiz

Dive into the kernel chronicles with this week’s quiz!

💡 Quick handy tip

On Firefox, we can assign tags to bookmarks so that they can be easily accessed by entering the tag name in the address bar.

Visit the site you want to bookmark and click on the bookmark button. Then, add a name to the tag. (new name, if there is none, or select from the list, if existing tags are there)

Now, if we enter one of your tags in the address bar, all the bookmarks associated with that tag will be suggested to you.

🤣 Meme of the week

Oh Canonical, why are you like this?

🗓️ Tech Trivia

The first known virus to target the BIOS, CIH/Chernobyl Virus, was discovered on April 26, 1999, when it started off to cause $1 Billion damages globally.