Jeremy Morgan: Hello and welcome   to Linux This Month. I'm here at the  Pluralsight headquarters in Salt Lake   City with the whole Developer Relations  team, and I've roped some of them in to   help me with this show. We've got some  exciting news for the month of April,   including new updates from Ubuntu and Pop!_OS,  kernel updates, and more. So let's get to it. First up the Microsoft 365 Defender research team  discovered a set of vulnerabilities that exposed   Linux desktop users. These vulnerabilities  include the ability to deploy root backdoors   and perform arbitrary code execution. Not good.  It's been named Nibuspwn and it can provide  

full root access to Linux machines. This means  anything from executing a few commands as root to   full-on malware or ransomware is possible. The  exploits involve D-Bus. D-Bus is an interprocess   communication mechanism. It's a simple way  for applications to talk to one another.   While this is a well-designed system for Linux  that run stable and has been around for years,   it's not that great when the bad guys start  inserting things into it. Vulcan Cyber's   Mike Park says there's no indication that these  vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild   and that exploiting these vulnerabilities  appears to require a local account. That  

means someone has to have shell access into the  machine already. Now this is a little reassuring,   but still something you should be aware of.  And hopefully there will be a patch soon. David Neal: Ubuntu Linux,   one of the most popular Linux distributions for  the desktop, has released version 22.04. Linux   on the desktop continues to grow in popularity.  No, 2022 isn't the year of the Linux desktop, but   more people are using Linux than ever. Ubuntu has  been one of the most popular Linux distributions  

on the market, mostly because it's very  user-friendly and stable. So what's new in Ubuntu?   Ubuntu 22.04, the Jammy Jellyfish, is an LTS  release. LTS means long term support. So the   code is accepted as stable and theoretically  you can go five years without having to upgrade   your operating system to the next version. So if  you want a solid, stable Linux system, and don't   need bleeding-edge software, now is your time to  install Ubuntu 22.04. One of the biggest selling   points of Ubuntu 22.04 is a rebooted installer  that's easy to use for anyone of any skill level.

The new release also comes with GNOME 42.  There have been tons of changes to this   desktop environment, including a new theme,  better layouts, and just great overall polish.   The new desktop is clean, fast, and  very professional looking. There are   extensive changes to the desktop, and you can  configure even more things to make it your own.   You can customize your machine to make it exactly  how you want it. It comes with the new Libwadwaita  

application, which allows consistent  desktop theming and gets rid of many   of the problems folks had in the past with  desktop differences breaking their themes. Aisha Blake:  Linux kernel 5.15.35 is released. One of the  biggest things about this release is a fix   for Intel Alder Lake systems. This fix improves  performance by improving the selection between P   and E cores. This is important for the many  Linux users running Alder Lake systems, and   hey, who doesn't like a free performance upgrade? Pop!_OS, one of Jeremy's favorite Linux  distributions, has released version 22.04  

in tandem with the Ubuntu release we mentioned  earlier. Remember, Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu   with a lot of cool stuff added on. Pop  22.04 now uses GNOME 42, like Ubuntu,   with the Custom Cosmic desktop provided by  Pop. Jeremy has used this desktop himself and   it's by far one of the most user friendly,  productive desktops out there. So he says. It   uses that new kernel we just mentioned, built  in light and dark mode and automatic updates.  

So if you're like Jeremy, you turn on your Linux  machine and it's bugging you for updates pretty   much every day. Now you can set your machine to  update every day. Pop is also replacing PulseAudio   with Pipewire, which seems to be a popular move  for Linux distributions these days, as users are   far happier with Pipewire. There are also UI  changes and performance updates in the Pop Shop. Mattias Andersson: There's a bit of a shake   up in the Linux community around display  servers. Nvidia is requesting canonical,   bring back x.org as the default display  server when using the Nvidia driver.   And it's been that way for a while. Generally  Ubuntu would use Wayland for Intel and Radeon  

drivers, and Xorg for Nvidia. But they recently  made Wayland the default for all of them. This   caused several display problems for people with  Nvidia drivers. Nvidia is working on the bug, but   it turns out it's a tricky one. The GNOME Display  Manager package has been updated. If you have an   Nvidia driver, you will use Xorg by default,  however you can select Wayland if you like. Rocky Linux, a fork of CentOS, is making  its way to the cloud. CentOS is a very  

popular Linux system and is loved by system  administrators, and has been for decades.   But with Red Hat shifting focus away from it, many  CentOS clones have popped up and now Rocky Linux   is available on Google Cloud as an option when  building out servers. Rocky Linux was built by   CIQ, a high performance computing company, but  maintained by the community. They're partnering   with Google to provide support for anyone using  Rocky Linux in the cloud. Gregory M. Kurtzer,   one of the original founders of CentOS, is leading  the Rocky Linux project. He says, "Through this  

partnership, anytime you use our Rocky Linux on  Google Cloud, CIQ with Google has your back! From   the cloud platform itself, all the way through  the enterprise operating system, every aspect of   using Google Cloud is supported by a single call  to Google, and together, we are your escalation   team." This is great news. CIQ is working  right now to provide a streamlined installation   experience, performance-tuned images, and  infrastructure tools to support easy migration. Jeremy Morgan: There's a new Linux distro in town for beginners,   and it's worth a look. It's called XeroLinux.  And I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.   It's user friendly, highly  customizable, and high performing.   It has a ton of applications available. It's  based on one of my favorite distributions,  

Arch Linux. While it's based on Arch Linux,  it's not difficult to install like Arch.   In fact, it's targeted to beginner Linux users.  The whole idea behind XeroLinux is to make   something that's really easy to install and run,  that is high performant, and can be customized.   By creating the distro on top of Arch Linux, you  get the best of all those worlds. Check it out. That's it for this month's Linux This Month.  If you liked the show, be sure to give this  

episode a big thumbs up. Have a question? Add it  into the comments. And I'd like to thank my new   team members for helping me out today. Come on in  folks. May your source remain open and your code   compile. See you next time, subscribe to stay  up to date, and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.