Compiled by Larry Cafiero
Marcus Nestor of 9 to 5 Linux reported Wednesday that the Gnome Project “released Gnome 50.4 today as the fourth maintenance update to the latest Gnome 50 desktop environment series to fix more bugs across various core apps and components.”
Released a month after Gnome 50.3, “the GNOME 50.4 release improves menu animations in GNOME Shell, which also received fixes for a miscaled magnified cursor on HiDPI displays, a sound glitch when pushing redundant volume changes, and a glitch when switching to a minimized window on another workspace,” the article states.
“GNOME 50.4 also improves the Mutter window and composite manager by fixing blurred rendering with non-pixel-aligned monitors and invalid redraw clips on rotated monitors, while also preventing unsupported fallback monitor modes from being added and filling in mastering display metadata for HDR outputs,” the article continues.
The article also states that GDM (Gnome Display Manager) has been updated to version 50.2 with a fix for a path traversal vulnerability where a compromised greeter could load arbitrary .desktop files via SelectSession, potentially executing attacker-controlled commands as the authenticated user.
“GDM 50.2 also brings fixes for an autologin bypass vulnerability where a compromised greeter could request autologin for any local account by sending arbitrary usernames via BeginAutoLogin, and a fix for a denial of service where an invalid session name from the greeter would cause the entire daemon to exit, terminating all active sessions,” the article says.
It’s not about the distro . . .
Bhuwan Mishra of It’s FOSS wrote on Thursday an article about his experience with distrohopping and came to an interesting conclusion.
“It was never really about the distro,” he writes. “It was about what desktop environment sat on top of it.”
Starting with Linux Mint, Mishra writes that he switched to Ubuntu, where “Ubuntu felt sluggish in ways that bothered me. I blamed Ubuntu.
“Here’s what I discovered later: the culprit wasn’t Ubuntu. It was Gnome, he writes.
The Xfce desktop environment saved his life, Linux-wise, according to the article.
“Xfce doesn’t win ‘most beautiful desktop’ polls,” he writes. “But I ran it on that i3 first-gen machine, and it ran smoothly out of the box. I ran it on a Core 2 Duo at some point.”
Mishra tried KDE, too. “I wanted to like it,” he wrote. “I kept going back, hoping something had changed. What I found, every single time, was that a single click could take three to four seconds to get a response. It felt like the desktop was thinking about whether it wanted to comply with my input.”
He outlines adventures with Kali Linux, Arch Linux, AntiX, and making the discovery about desktop environments, he has chosen now to use a window manager instead.
“Looking back at all of it, I did not like Mint just because it’s Mint,” he writes. “I felt comfortable with Cinnamon. I did not dislike Ubuntu because it’s Ubuntu. It’s because Gnome demanded more of my old hardware than the hardware could give.
“Every distro-hop I’ve listed here, from Kali to Arch to AntiX to Mango WM, was really a hop between desktop environments and window managers wearing a different distro’s name. The package manager changed. The installation experience changed.”
This article is an entertaining read about one distrohopper’s adventure which many, no doubt, can relate to.
And that’s all for today. Don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return with news over the weekend on Monday.