We try out Pop!_OS 21.04 and share our thoughts on the COSMIC desktop and our reaction to Audacity’s new troubling privacy policy.

Plus the good, the bad, and the impressive in the new Linux 5.13 release.

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Links:

System76 Blog — Pop!OS 21.04: A Release of COSMIC Proportions — Pop!OS COSMIC (Computer Operating System Main Interface Components) gives you the freedom to navigate your workflow via your mouse, keyboard, and/or trackpad.
Pop OS 21.04 Cosmic Desktop Brings Much Needed Productivity Boost
Pop!_OS 21.04 Released with New ‘Cosmic’ Desktop
Audacity Is Now A Possible Spyware, Remove It ASAP — The updated privacy policy page for Audacity includes a wide range of data collection mechanisms. It states for example that it can hand any user data to state regulators where it is located, which is basically Russia, USA and the EEA zone.
Audacity GitHub: Clarification of Privacy Policy
Audacity GitHub: New privacy policy is completely unacceptable!
Audacity Desktop Privacy Notice
GitHub - cookiengineer/audacity: Audacity Fork without any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting.
HN Audacity Discussion
Fedora Audacity discussion
Google is moving away from APKs on the Play Store — Starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps will have to be published using the Android App Bundle format. Your phone will still download apps as APKs, but the app bundles will create APKs that are optimized for your device.
Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.13 after seven release candidates — “In fact," he said, "it’s one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers.
Some 5.13 development statistics [LWN.net]
Linux Git: Merge tag ‘landlock_v34’
(2016) Sandboxing with the Landlock security module [LWN.net]
NFS is broken in Linux 5.13 — This made it into 5.13 final, and completely breaks NFSD for me. Existing mounts on clients hang, as do new mounts from new clients.
Ubuntu 20.10 End of Life Warning — Official support for Ubuntu 20.10 ends on July 22, 2021.

Meta Soars and Fed Slows