[0:00]Hey everyone, and oh boy, we have some weird stuff going on this week with some office suite drama, with OnlyOffice beefing with the recent fork Euro Office, even going as far as removing their partnership with Nextcloud, who's involved in that initial fork.
[0:15]We also have the Document Foundation and Collabora beefing around the governance of the Document Foundation, leading to Collabora maybe no longer contributing to LibreOffice.
[0:24]So we're going to talk about all of this. We also have some cool Wayland improvements and the usual a bunch of updates to Linux, open source, privacy related stuff.
[0:33]You know the drill. Okay, so you might have heard about Euro Office.
[0:36]It's a new office suite/Nextcloud based workspace made in the EU that used OnlyOffice as the base for a web-based office suite.
[0:46]This is supported by IONOS, by Nextcloud, by Proton and a lot of others.
[0:51]And the goal was to review and clean up OnlyOffice's codebase to make it easier to collaborate to.
[0:58]Now, they say it wasn't really possible to collaborate directly with OnlyOffice.
[1:01]They apparently do not review or accept pull requests, meaning only they can actually contribute code.
[1:08]The build instructions aren't apparently reliable, the company had made some controversial decisions, the development process isn't transparent, mobile apps are just wrappers and not really open source, and OnlyOffice is a Russian company that could potentially thus be controlled by the Russian government, too.
[1:25]All these reasons are why they forked OnlyOffice. But the company isn't letting this happen quietly.
[1:30]They say that while OnlyOffice is released under the AGPLv3, Euro Office did break their licensing terms by not following the additional rules that OnlyOffice slapped on top of the AGPL, regarding branding and giving credit.
[1:47]They say Euro Office removed those requirements and thus doesn't have the right to redistribute the software.
[1:50]Euro Office says that these extra terms can't really be enforced because they would conflict with the AGPL itself.
[1:57]That's often a sticking point with some open source licenses, you're not supposed to add extra requirements and conditions for people to access and redistribute the source code.
[2:08]That was the whole issue with Red Hat preventing their customers from redistributing the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
[2:13]Now, there's no legal action yet, it's just public statements being thrown at each other and we don't know if it's going to escalate or not.
[2:21]It's hard to know who's in the right or the wrong here. I'm no lawyer, I don't know licenses well enough to be a definitive authority on saying, hey, they did break the license or no, those additional requirements are not supposed to be here.
[2:34]What's for sure is this is not going to go well, this is going to create some conflict, as we're going to see with this next story.
[2:40]Because in the wake of that dispute, the partnership between Nextcloud and OnlyOffice has been suspended because the office suite doesn't like the fact that Nextcloud participated in a fork of OnlyOffice without permission.
[2:53]Which, to be clear, I don't think they would have to ask for that permission because OnlyOffice uses the AGPL, they had every right to fork without consulting them, although whether they had to respect various additional requirements, that's not up to me to decide.
[3:06]OnlyOffice requires that Euro Office complies with all the conditions that they added on top of the AGPL related to branding, to logos and all of that stuff.
[3:17]Basically, they're asking Euro Office to just use OnlyOffice as it is provided and to not fork it.
[3:22]They say that partnerships are built on trust and that this trust has here been breached, thus they are suspending the partnership.
[3:28]Apparently, no current client or partner will be affected, no integration of OnlyOffice in Nextcloud will stop working.
[3:35]Now we'll see where this is going. I will admit, I do trust Nextcloud and Proton and the other partners involved in Euro Office a bit more than OnlyOffice.
[3:45]I actually stopped working with OnlyOffice as a sponsor a long while back because of their Russian origin and some other controversial stuff related to how they actually handle their open source codebase.
[3:57]They've been accused of being open source hostile by kind of locking down their development process.
[4:02]So I stopped working with them a while back. I will admit, I trust Nextcloud a bit more than them, but we'll see who's right and who's wrong, as time will go on and presumably as lawyers get involved to unwrap this GPL, this AGPLv3 situation.
[4:16]But the office suite drama is not done yet because it looks like the Document Foundation, the entity behind LibreOffice, kicked out all of the staff of Collabora from being members of the Document Foundation.
[4:29]Collabora being one of the major contributors to LibreOffice and to a bunch of other open source projects.
[4:38]They're also makers of the Collabora Online office suite that was recently in heated debate with the Document Foundation over the relaunch of LibreOffice Online, a competitor project whose codebase is basically unmaintained and super old when all the development moved to Collabora Office specifically.
[4:53]Apparently, this removal of Collabora staff includes the top 10 committers for Collabora. They wrote a blog post about this saying that the Document Foundation is now stacked with non-technical staff.
[5:05]It overrides previous decisions from the board and the steering committee and they even apparently threatened contributors for using the free to use LibreOffice trademark.
[5:15]They also accuse the Document Foundation of not paying certain contributors for the code they actually delivered, they accuse them of overturning elections or making big changes to the bylaws of the Document Foundation.
[5:24]Collabora said that they helped make LibreOffice a reality before the Document Foundation even existed and that they plan to keep doing so.
[5:30]This will apparently happen through making Collabora Office for the desktop, presumably as a different project to LibreOffice with a newer codebase, without Java, without web-based toolkits and more.
[5:43]And they've launched their own code repo to host that to no longer depend on the Document Foundation.
[5:47]They say that they will still contribute to LibreOffice if the Document Foundation lets them, but that it wouldn't just make sense to build this product if they're not wanted by the entity running it.
[5:58]Now I have no clue what's happening here. Again, I don't know if it's the Document Foundation trying to grab control of the entire LibreOffice project from a few companies that got involved in it.
[6:12]Although I don't think Collabora could be classified as an evil company, they've contributed to a lot of projects and they've done a lot of really good stuff for open source and Linux.
[6:20]Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's the Document Foundation being basically hijacked by politicians who just don't want anyone challenging their views and their way of doing things.
[6:31]I have no idea what's happening there. Again, time will tell. What is sure is that this is all really not good for Linux and open source.
[6:40]We don't need more division of those core projects. We already don't have a strong competitor to Microsoft Office for a lot of businesses.
[6:50]LibreOffice or even OnlyOffice isn't really enough. So if those projects split their codebases, if those projects split their contributors, then we're going to have multiple projects that don't achieve as much as they would have, even though they currently don't achieve as much as would be necessary to actually compete with Microsoft Office.
[7:05]So that's not a good situation and hopefully this can be resolved.
[7:08]Now let's talk about Wayland and I know we talk about it every six months as if it was a brand new thing, but this time it's actually merged.
[7:14]The Wayland session management protocol made it in the Wayland protocols.
[7:20]The message accompanying this says that it's desirable to have a method that lets you restore previously used states for your windows of Wayland clients, meaning applications.
[7:30]The protocol adds that and is apparently loosely based on what Enlightenment has done on session recovery, that's something that's been in use for two years or something approaching that.
[7:41]So this protocol just means desktops will be able to have some kind of toggle in their settings that lets you restore the position and the state of your windows when you restart your computer, when you log out and then back in, all of that stuff.
[7:51]Apps need to take advantage of this to restore the right state or the right page and the right documents, and presumably the window sizes and positions would be remembered by the compositor itself.
[8:01]This took six years to be merged, which is extremely long for such an important feature.
[8:08]And KWin already supports that protocol as a first implementation. Gnome also started working on it, but they pushed it back to Gnome 51.
[8:14]So yeah, this is now official. This is an important feature that a lot of people depend upon and want.
[8:21]Like I said, I personally don't really need it. I actually think it's detrimental to my workflow, but I have a specific use case where I don't use thousands of windows cluttered everywhere.
[8:32]So I know why it's super important for people and that's one less problem that people have with Wayland that is finally solved, or at least it will be in the next versions of Plasma and Gnome when they actually implement this protocol.
[8:42]There's also an update to the Wayland fractional scaling protocols. This version two aims to fix a few issues with how fractional scaling is handled with the usual KWin implementation for review.
[8:52]What seems to be missing from the current version of fractional scaling on Wayland is a way to let unscaled pixels exist instead of using a logical coordinate space based on integers, which can lose some parts of the surface that is being drawn on screen or map elements incorrectly.
[9:08]Currently, when you use fractional scaling on Wayland, you can end up with gaps between maximized windows and panels or gaps between sub-surfaces, which doesn't really look right.
[9:19]KWin developers made a little visual aid to demonstrate with a simple calculator-like interface where you can see some lines and gaps between elements with the current implementation of the protocol, which disappear with the new one.
[9:31]Now we'll see where this goes, but that's good stuff. Fractional scaling works well on Wayland, but there are a few visual inconsistencies and so fixing them is good, it gives a better experience for everyone, it looks more polished, so props to the developers for working on that.
[9:44]Now we had a nice little what the hell, Microsoft kind of moment this week because it seems that Copilot injected ads into pull requests made on GitHub using Copilot.
[9:54]So apparently a developer used Copilot to fix a basic typo in a pull request, and Copilot then edited the description to add a little ad for Raycast, specifically writing, quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your MacOS or Windows machine with Raycast.
[10:13]Something that has literally nothing to do in the description of a pull request.
[10:17]This apparently appears in more than 11,000 pull requests across thousands of repositories. Even merge requests on GitLab aren't safe from the injection.
[10:25]So what's happening? Well, Raycast has a Copilot extension that can do things like create pull requests from a natural language command.
[10:32]The ad directly names Raycast, so you might think that Raycast is injecting the promo into the PRs to market its own app. What it looks like is that Microsoft appended a hidden HTML comment to the markdown of these pull requests made on GitHub that instructs Copilot to start what they call Copilot coding agent tips, which are the ads.
[10:40]Neowin looked at this and found 1.5 million GitHub pull requests containing ads through Copilot.
[10:48]Ads for VS Code, for Visual Studio, for JetBrains, for Eclipse, or for Copilot itself.
[10:51]And of course, GitHub reversed this feature after a lot of user backlash. People obviously did not like the fact that ads popped up in their projects.
[10:59]They also complain about how these ads were added because they appeared as if the developers themselves had written them, which obviously was not the case.
[11:08]GitHub said that they made the wrong call, that they have disabled those so-called tips from appearing in pull requests. They say that they do not want to include ads, they do not plan to include ads on the platform.
[11:18]They said that this was a bug that made these product tips appear in pull requests comments.
[11:24]They said that their goal was to share new ways of using the Copilot agent.
[11:29]They also said that they don't plan to add ads on GitHub, this being a simple twist on words, because what they call tips are in fact ads for third-party products and integrations.
[11:37]Now, first, it is insane that they would consider these to be tips. Those are ads for products that you never asked for, that you didn't write yourself in part of your project's history, logs and legacy.
[11:52]It should not be here at all. If they want to display ads on the side of the GitHub interface, that's their right, but not in the actual thing that you're writing.
[12:00]And second, the spin that, oh, it was just a bug. I don't think that flies at all. Like, very clearly, there was some code that was made to add that little descriptor inside descriptions of pull requests.
[12:14]This is not a bug. This is working as intended, they just didn't like the backlash. It seems that Ubuntu MATE is going to lose their main maintainer. Martin Wimpress, who led that project for the past 12 years, apparently has lost the passion and the time to manage this Ubuntu flavor.
[12:28]And this is apparent because Ubuntu MATE didn't apply for LTS qualification for the next version of Ubuntu 26.04.
[12:35]They will only do a non-LTS release on this one, meaning they don't feel 100% confident that they can support it for long enough or at the same level of quality that Ubuntu users would expect of an LTS.
[12:47]Martin says that his interests are elsewhere nowadays when he has time to tinker, so he would like to hand over the maintainer position to someone else who wants to work on Ubuntu MATE.
[12:57]The work involves tracking some upstream code, testing it on Ubuntu's latest versions and packaging it. In this case, it's basically MATE and its default apps that need to be tested and packaged.
[13:07]You have a few meetings to attend as well. You need to triage and fix bugs. It's a lot of work.
[13:12]Ubuntu MATE is just another one of these flavors to lose a bit of steam over time. The Lubuntu flavor is in maintenance mode.
[13:19]Ubuntu Unity doesn't really have a developer anymore, and Ubuntu MATE feels a little left behind too. It's not the most popular desktop there is out there.
[13:28]Still, it is also fully normal that after 12 years, maybe you start losing passion for something. Maybe you're looking at other stuff. Maybe you want to spend your time on other projects.
[13:40]And it's entirely normal to want to pass the torch to someone else. Hopefully, they can find someone to keep this version going, and if not, I guess you have other distros that will ship MATE like Linux Mint.
[13:51]Although I don't know if their MATE desktop or MATE version is based on the work Ubuntu MATE does, or if it's completely separate and they do their own packaging and testing.
[13:57]This week, Gnome officially confirmed that they will drop Google Drive integration or that they already dropped it from the project.
[14:04]You used to be able to see your Google Drive mounted in the sidebar of Nautilus, like if it was network storage.
[14:11]But this no longer works, you can see it, click on it, but it's not going to open anything.
[14:16]And there's a good reason for that. Libgdata, the library that coordinates communication between Gnome apps and Google's APIs, has gone without a maintainer for nearly four years.
[14:26]Which, in turn, means other projects that made use of it, decided to drop support for it, including GVFS, the file system layer of Gnome.
[14:31]Also, the Gnome Online Accounts implementation checks for the presence of these two libraries and their support for Google Drive before even allowing you to turn on the Google Drive integration.
[14:44]So Gnome had disabled this functionality years ago, but distros sometimes move slowly.
[14:50]If Fedora had disabled it sooner, then perhaps users would have noticed the problem before the project was archived rather than after. Oh well.
[14:55]Apparently there was a call for maintainers back in 2022 to pick up the maintenance of the libgdata library, but no one really seemed interested.
[15:00]There are also plenty of vulnerabilities linked to these old libraries, which no project really wants to leave in there for the sake of an unmaintained integration with a closed source ecosystem.
[15:10]Now it is fully understandable why this would be gone from Gnome.
[15:16]It was a long way coming. If no one maintains the actual integration, then there's no reason to keep shipping it.
[15:21]Also, I don't think it's up to desktops to ship that, it's up to Google to ship a Google Drive client for Linux that integrates with various file managers.
[15:31]Nextcloud manages to do it really well, and they are a much, much smaller business than Google is.
[15:38]You have plenty of smaller actors that have syncing clients for their network storage or their cloud storage for Linux that work really well.
[15:45]The big one missing is still Proton. Google Drive also. Google needs to build their own client, that's what they need to do.
[15:51]It's not up to the open source community to keep maintaining that, I think. Now, interestingly, this week, Linux smashed past the 5% market share mark on Steam, and this is from April the 2nd, so it was not an April's fools, maybe.
[16:03]Linux seems to be at 5.33%, MacOS at 2.35%, and Windows at 92.33%, still absolutely dominating, but losing ground basically every single month.
[16:15]Not surprising, as Windows 11 is an absolute disaster, so much so that Microsoft had to publicly announce that they will work on fixing things up because every update busted something and the fix for that update busted things further.
[16:29]In terms of distros, SteamOS is about 25%. Arch is at 8.78%, and they have two distros that don't have names in their list, one at 17.6% and another one at 8.01%.
[16:43]Surely, it's a bug, it's probably something like cache OS, maybe the flat pack, or maybe it's just a bug and those numbers don't exist.
[16:49]Now, of course, this statistic will fluctuate month over month, but the trajectory is clear.
[16:58]Linux is growing extremely fast on the gaming side of things, and it might not look like much, 5% is pretty low, but it has been growing super fast ever since Steam added Proton and people have been really tired of Windows 11.
[17:10]This is a good entryway for people to move into Linux. You start with gaming, then you have that on your main computer, then you start installing other software, and you just start using Linux as your main system.
[17:21]The recent push from plenty of big tech YouTubers also probably helped a lot with that.
[17:28]So that's good. We're in a really good climate for Linux growth, and I love seeing it.
[17:31]Now, NVIDIA announced a new version of their drivers that actually support the color management API that's been in the works for a while.
[17:40]It's linked to color accuracy, to HDR, to mixing SDR and HDR content on the same display, all of that stuff.
[17:45]NVIDIA says that their kernel modules will add support for that API. Of course, that's Wayland only.
[17:51]Although they do say that Wayland compositors might need to do some extra work to support how NVIDIA will make this work.
[17:58]They're offering a preview of what they're working on to help with that to help compositor developers to manage that support.
[18:07]They say there's already a known issue with KWin, for example, they provided a fix to to go around that.
[18:12]They also said that they started using AI tools to write that driver code. Apparently, most of the code that they added for that color pipeline API comes from Gen AI.
[18:21]They used Claude here. Now, it's good to see NVIDIA following that stuff relatively closely.
[18:26]The API was finalized in December 2025, and so they're not that far behind with their official drivers.
[18:34]And it's also good that they're giving a preview to compositors so they can start implementing that stuff without having, basically, the code in front of them saying, hey, it's on you now, just fix it.
[18:45]So I guess that's good. But also kind of a shame that a multi-billion dollar company would just resort to using AI to write all of that code for us.
[18:53]Like, are we going to start seeing people treating Linux as a third-rate platform by just pushing AI code onto us and saying that's good enough for them?
[19:01]I hope not. And to conclude, we have some interesting stuff coming to Wine.
[19:06]It looks like Wine might start using Zink for its OpenGL backend, meaning it would basically use Vulcan to make OpenGL stuff work instead of using their own OpenGL implementation.
[19:15]A recent merge request proposes to use what is in Mesa 26 to implement Zink, which incidentally has been developed by Collabora a while back.
[19:24]Zink is apparently really efficient and it gives potentially better performance than a native OpenGL implementation, on top of automatically benefiting from the Vulcan improvements on the driver side, and that's where most driver developers are focusing nowadays.
[19:41]They don't really focus on writing better OpenGL drivers, they're focusing on writing better Vulcan drivers.
[19:46]It would also very much help with devices that don't have OpenGL drivers at all, and that is bound to increase over time, as Vulcan is now the API used for graphics on Linux in a lot of places.
[19:57]For now, apparently, Steam and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic work with Zink, which, according to the developer, means that everything else works as well.
[20:06]Obviously, that's meant as a joke. It's still pretty good, because it means that all the legacy software, all the older stuff that relies on OpenGL will still be able to run through Wine as time goes on, as OpenGL drivers are maybe abandoned or not even written for new hardware.
[20:21]It gives more resilience to Wine and to the programs you might want to run. Potentially, it gives better performance as well. That's just good stuff.
[20:29]Speaking of good stuff, you also have the devices from our sponsor, Tuxedo Computers.
[20:33]So Tuxedo makes hardware that ships with Linux out of the box. They are based in Germany, but they ship to most countries in the world, and they have a big range of devices from more affordable laptops, all the way up to workstations, gaming laptops, gaming desktops, everything you want in between.
[20:50]A lot of their devices offer a lot of choice in terms of the components that you can get in your device. You also have choices for the keyboard layouts, for the logo you want engraved on your laptop or no logo at all.
[21:03]They're a really fantastic manufacturer. They also work with every Linux distro basically. They even have repos if you want all the little things like the light bars or the colored backlight for your keyboard to work.
[21:13]So they're really supporting open source, they're supporting Linux. I only use their stuff nowadays. Everything that you see from me is done on a Tuxedo computer, and I can only recommend them.
[21:22]So as usual, the link is down in the description. Anyway, this will conclude this episode. You know where all the usual YouTube buttons are and why you should click them. You have plenty of links in the description to all the sources I use to make this episode, and also to plenty of ways to support the channel, get a daily version of these news, so go check that out down there.
[21:39]Anyway, thank you all for listening and or watching, and I guess you'll see me in the next one next week. Bye.
