Demonstrating its commitment to open source software, we are thrilled to announce that Google is now a Platinum Member of The Linux Foundation. Google has been an active and committed contributor to the open source community for many years, releasing and contributing to more than 10,000 open source projects to date. Some of The Linux Foundation communities Google supports include Cloud Foundry, Node.js Foundation, Open API Initiative and Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which it helped found with its Kubernetes contribution.

“The Linux Foundation is a fixture in the open source community. By working closely with the organization, we can better engage with the community-at-large and continue to build a more inclusive ecosystem where everyone can benefit,” said Sarah Novotny, head of open source strategy, Google Cloud. 

Read more at The Linux Foundation

Recently, premium headphone manufacturer Master & Dynamic upgraded their popular MW50 headphones, appending a + to the end to signify the newly launched model —and AppleInsider has a set.

Most of the internals have stayed the same, with the enhancements coming to the exterior. Instead of needing to choose between on-ear and over-ear headphones, the MW50+ offer the unique option of being able to swap between the two at any time.

Using magnets, the earpieces can easily be removed to alternate between on- and over-ear, depending on your listening environment. As frequent travelers, we love this idea for a set of headphones. On-ear can be great for general use, but over-ear can better isolate sound and thrive in noisier environments like planes.

In the box

Opening the box, you are greeted by the headphones, coming with the on-ear pads equipped by default. Underneath them, you’ll find a few cables, a canvas carrying bag, and a leather-wrapped box containing the over-ear pads.

At first blush, everything seems really spot on. Each and every component oozes quality, down to the canvas bag and cables. We particularly love their cables, some of which were recently released. We took a look at their new Lightning to 3.5mm audio jack when they were updated earlier this year and the quality really holds up.

The headphones

Without getting to much into the details just yet, the headphones themselves seem crafted from high-quality materials.

The leather-wrapped headband is exceptionally soft and supple and was really comfortable in our limited listening time thus far. A lot of the metalwork is stainless steel which gives quite a bit more heft than a lightweight alloy cheaper models adapt.

We were thrilled to see that the MW50+ also utilize USB-C for charging rather than micro USB. This is always appreciated and helps integrate with modern products. The only downside we see right now is that they include a USB-A to USB-C cable, which means to charge on our MacBook Pro we still need to provide our own USB-C to USB-C cable, or use something like an iPhone AC adapter plug.

Earpieces

The biggest story here is the earpieces. Either option is super comfortable and the leather is, once again, super soft.

Swapping them couldn’t be simpler —there is no twisting or pulling to get them in place. Magnets keep them in their groove and cover up those 42mm custom drivers.

Between the two, we slightly preferred the on-ear set, finding the over-ear a bit stiff. This will (hopefully) loosen up over time and we will certainly find out in our full review.

Audio quality

Much more listening time needs to be put in before a definite answer can be provided on audio quality, but we clearly had to try these out as soon as we got them. Thus far, audio sounds pretty great. We found plenty of detail and sufficient bass listening to a few Eagles and other classic rock tracks.

Volume also wasn’t an issue here, though we haven’t taken them into any extremely noisy environments quite yet.

Stay tuned for our full review to see further impressions on audio quality, but so far we are very pleased.

Where to buy

Master & Dynamic’s upgraded MW50+ convertible on-ear and over-ear wireless headphones are available in three different finishes for $399, the same price as the older model. You can buy them directly from Master & Dynamic’s website.

A lot of people are probably trolling the app stores looking for a game just like Cartoon Craft–a mobile-focused simplified RTS with swords and monsters all built from gold and trees. Obviously, Cartoon Craft is a clone of Warcraft, with armies of orc and humans facing off in a fantasy world. The one thing Cartoon Craft does really well is to make the units super cute, like a high-school graph paper battle come to life. Everything else seems not quite finished.

It’s a standard humans-vs-orcs story, with zombies as a mutual antagonist that forces the two natural enemies to band together. Each mission has its own setup and slightly varying goal, but they all come down to surviving and killing the enemy forces.

Like Warcraft, first you have to build a base, sending workers to gather gold and wood, building farms to increase your unit cap, and building a couple of production buildings to pump out soldiers.

There are only five units the humans can build: worker, swordsman, archer, catapult, and flyer. There’s not a lot of difference between the units beyond being able to make ranged attacks or not. There’s not even a basic rock-paper-scissors circle of effectiveness. The catapult is significantly stronger than any other unit, which makes it the core of your army once you build the requisite production buildings. The orc side has similar units, but a strong melee ogre unit instead of a catapult. Each side also has a turret tower, which comes in incredibly handy both as a ranged defensive structure and a simple wall to keep the hordes of zombies out. Strategic decisions basically boil down to finding the correct time to shift your production from development of your resources to building a massive army.

There are a dozen missions you play in campaign mode, but there doesn’t appear to be any AI to speak of. There is certainly no global opponent AI. The missions are simply structured as automatic waves of enemies that must be fended off on a timer, and bases that have to be hunted down and razed. The enemies can be phenomenally dumb (to be fair, a lot of them are zombies) and will just let themselves be mowed down by your turrets and archers if there is a line of trees that keeps your forces protected. Your allies will also do nothing to protect themselves or build their forces.

Unit AI is also dumb. Worker units are particularly frustrating in how they cut trees. No matter what area of the forest you tap on, they will interpret it as an order to cut trees in general and beeline for the nearest tree to their position. This can be particularly problematic when the forests form part of the walls that protect you from enemy attack. They will also sometimes just stop cutting trees entirely, for reasons I could not decipher.

Poor AI is just one sign of a game that needs a lot more time to bake before its ready for sale. I hit a major bug halfway through. Supposedly, my human forces were supposed to ally with the orcish forces to fight off a zombie attack, but the mission opened with the two groups slaughtering each other. Apparently, my mission is to protect the remaining empty orc structures? Then the game just froze.

There’s no multiplayer, which is a real shame. Against a human, the game mechanics might offer a few hours of entertainment. There’s no skirmish mode, but that’s understandable seeing as the AI probably does not actually know how to build a base or develop an army.

The translation is painfully bad–so bad that I initially thought the writers were deliberately affecting caveman/ogre grammar to fit the theme. That’s not really very important since the story text is totally skippable and does nothing to impact the gameplay. Then I realized that there was a major typo on the title screen … in the title. (Unless the game was actually meant to be titled Catoon Craft?) It’s just another sign of how unpolished the game really is.

A cute, simple version of Warcraft for mobile isn’t a bad idea, but Cartoon Craft definitely isn’t it. There’s no meat to the game, and the lack of basic RTS features combined with the silly AI and bugs makes this one to avoid at any price.

Last week, the Fedora Magazine covered the new features and improvements in the Fedora 28 Installer. The Fedora installer team is already hard at work adding new features for Fedora 29. This article covers some of these improvements.

Progress hub

The progress hub is mostly empty (on Fedora Workstation) after moving the user creation step to GNOME Initial Setup.

Discussions are on going with the Fedora Workstation working group  about re-working the progress hub. Hit the comments with suggestions on how you think this could be improved.

More Anaconda on DBus

Fedora 28 was the start of the ultimate goal of modularizing Anaconda. The main idea is to split the code into several modules that will communicate over DBus. Ultimately, this will enable a UI-less installation process.

The goal in Fedora 29 is to move all the storage-related code to the storage module.   Additionally, plans are in place to extend some of the other modules and introduce installation tasks, so you can monitor the installation steps.

Supporting Fedora Modularity

Fedora Modularity was introduced in Fedora 28 for the Server variant. This effort is still expanding, adding more modules, features and bug fixes. The Anaconda team is  working on module installation support for Anaconda.

First of all, the new kickstart command, called “module”, is used to enable modules. Additionally, support for installing modules via the %packages section in kickstart.

There are already patches for Anaconda, DNF, Pykickstart and libdnf that make module installation from kickstart possible.

Reducing Initial Setup dependencies even more

Fedora 28 reduced Initial Setup dependencies from Anaconda and the compose tools greatly. Next on the list is to do the same with Blivet.

Currently, the python-blivet package has hard dependencies on many storage handling tools. The current plan is to introduce a blivet-minimal package to just provide the bare minimum of Blivet functionality, such as architecture detection and device-tree based storage modeling. The current python-blivet package will maintain its current dependencies. Consequently, Initial Setup won’t drag in unnecessary dependencies, making packaging more flexible.

LUKS2 as default

LUKS2 is the new generation of the Linux storage encryption workhorse, bringing various improvements and new features. Work has started adding support for creating LUKS2-based encrypted storage volumes during installation.