9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: February 18th, 2024

The 175th installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here for the week ending on February 18th, 2024, keeping you guys up to date with the most important things happening in the Linux world. If you missed last week’s 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup, catch up with everything GNU/Linux/Open Source here.

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This week we got some cool news and releases, starting with UBports Foundation’s announcement about the new release model for Ubuntu Touch OTA updates starting with the rebase on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat), which received a couple of good news this week too.

There’s a new Linux gaming laptop in town from UK-based Linux hardware vendor Juno Computers, the IPFire Linux firewall distribution received a major update with a newer kernel, and the GNOME Project published two important updates for both stable and development versions of their desktop environment.

On top of that, the popular Mixxx DJ software received a massive update more than three years in the works and I tell you all about the upcoming DebConf24 conference. Below you can check out this week’s hottest news and access all the distro and package downloads released this past week in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for February 18th, 2024.

Website changes

I’ve made some changes to the website this week that you should be aware of. First, on the frontend, I’ve moved the “Download Latest Distributions” and “Download Latest Packages” sections from the sidebar to the bottom of the website.

They also won’t appear on smartphones anymore as it’s irrelevant (no one downloads Linux distributions and packages on smartphones) and it makes the website load faster on mobile. Having them at the bottom makes these sections, which I update daily, more visible, and the ultimate goal is for the website to load faster.

Second, on the backend, I’ve moved the website to a new server. We had a bit of downtime on Sunday (about 5-6 hours – sorry about that but transferring over 70K files takes a while), but it’s worth it in the long term as the website now runs from an NVMe SSD storage (finally!) and there’s also more RAM, so the website should load faster.