Linux News, articles and other cool stuff | biweekly #2

This is the second biweekly roundup of noteworthy news articles, blog posts, launches, and other cool Linux-related content that I’ve come across over the past two weeks.

New F(x)tec PRO¹ runs LineageOS, Ubuntu, Android, or Sailfish OS.

With the F(x)tec PRO¹ smartphone, you can give yourself the freedom to choose between a virtual keyboard or a physical keyboard. Open the slider to reveal a full physical landscape keyboard. The Pro1 comes with multiple PC-like shortcuts. So to quickly copy and paste, press Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V.

With the Pro1’s unlocked bootloader, you can easily load other popular OS’s such as Android, Ubuntu Touch, Lineage, and Sailfish.

Splunk acquires Plumbr and Rigor to build out its observability platform.

Splunk has acquired two startups, Plumbr and Rigor, to build out its new Observability Suite. Plumbr is an APM (application performance monitoring) service, while Rigor focuses on DEM (digital experience monitoring). Last year Splunk also acquired SignalFx for over $1 billion, which complements these new acquisitions and better positions Splunk to compete in the observability market.

Fedora 33 Workstation released.

Fedora 33 was released on 27 October 2020. It features Gnome 3.38, defaults to using Btrfs, and swap-on-zram is enabled by default instead of a swap partition. Also, read What’s new in Fedora 33 Workstation.

1Password for Linux beta is now open

1Password announced the first beta release for Linux. A full-featured desktop app that you can use to find, edit, and manage your passwords quickly.

Time to upgrade to PHP 7.3 or higher.

PHP 7.2 hits end-of-life and will lose all support in less than a month. While PHP 7.3 will lose active support in a month. It’s time to upgrade! There are a few tools/scripts which automate the process of checking PHP 7.* compatibility:

• php7mar – PHP 7 Migration Assistant Report.
• phan – a static analyzer. PHP 7 checker.
• phpstan – PHP Static Analysis and compatibility check.
• There’s also PHPStorm for developers.

Obscurix – new Arch Linux based distro configured for privacy and security.

Obscurix Linux forces all traffic through the Tor network, has support for other networks such as I2P, and is hardened for security. All data is lost at shutdown as it is run from RAM.

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