Yesterday, April 1st (04/2020/XNUMX) various notes were released on the net about news that for many could be out of place and the intention is that those who are unaware of "April fools" fall for these jokes.
One for example was the one our colleague Pablinux shared on the blog yesterday about a leaked project by the KDE and Gnome developers presented the KNOME desk Jointly developed, it incorporates the technologies of both projects and is designed to please both GNOME supporters and KDE lovers.
Guix abandons the Linux kernel
Other april fool that caught my attention yesterday was from the GNU Guix project what was there announced its intention to stop using the Linux kernel in favor of the GNU Hurd kernel.
It should be noted that the use of Hurd was the original goal of the Guix project and now this goal has become a reality.
Continued support for the Linux kernel in Guix was deemed inappropriateas the project does not have the resources to support two editions at the same time. The Guix 1.1 release will be the last to ship with the Linux-Libre kernel.
In Guix 2.0, Linux-Libre support will be removed completely, but the option to use the Guix package manager over third-party Linux distributions will be left behind. It is noteworthy that the initial ability to use GNU Hurd a few weeks ago was actually implemented in Guix.
Source: https://guix.gnu.org
Kernel developers will only review changes
Moreover, a script was proposed for Linux kernel developers to automatically check for changes. With that Attendees are expected to be forced to spend a lot of time studying and verifying the changes.
Day after day, the volume of patches is constantly increasing and the process of analyzing them becomes excruciating and leaves no time to write your own code.
The script solves this problem by automatically adding the "Reviewed by" tag.. The developer just has to sit down and monitor the opinions of other participants on the adopted changes.
In order not to arouse suspicion after receiving the letter, the script does not send the peer-reviewed response immediately, but through a random delay.
Source: https://lkml.org
Cloudflare Announces New Services
As well Cloudflare joined the spirit of jokes of this day and is that continuing with the practice of not presenting jokes on April 1 under the pretext of jokes, Cloudflare announced a version of the service 1.1.1.1 for family use.
Besides that two new public DNS 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3 have been released, that provide content filtering. 1.1.1.2 blocks attempts to access malicious and fraudulent sites and 1.1.1.3 also blocks access to adult content.
Interestingly, filter 1.1.1.3, which aimed to block content that negatively affects children's psyches, also provided blocking of LGBTQIA sites, causing a storm of outrage among relevant minorities. Cloudflare representatives were forced to apologize and remove these sites from the filter.
Kodi reduces streaming quality
Finally another of the projects that joined this day, were the developers of the Kodi media center, in which in an announcement they announced that due to the increasing load on the network due to the transition of many people to work at home , for example, Netflix, YouTube and Amazon services followed, which have reduced the quality of the default video output.
To save bandwidth, video on Kodi will be displayed in reduced color in 4-bit monochrome mode and only 1 channel will be used for audio.
The loss of quality will be compensated by the use of a machine learning system that restores the lost parts.
Broadcasting and IPTV will be limited to local regional broadcasts only. To ensure self-isolation mode, Kodi will only work from a home network and access via public wireless networks will be blocked. To meet social distance conditions, viewing will only be possible on screens larger than 60 inches.
Source: https://kodi.tv