Last year the news circulated that Fedora was introducing a new package manager. Despite having made it into the last release, Fedora 18, DNF is still considered experimental. It is a fork of Yum that "uses libsolv via hawkey for a backed." Developers think the DNF is the answer to their packaging woes and Rahul Sundaram recently blogged about the progress.

Some of the benefits of DNF over Yum include:

* more compatibility with other languages
* better performance & memory consumption
* leaner codebase than Yum

Rahul Sundaram, Fedora contributor, said, "In the course of the last several months, I have filed over a dozen bug reports and new feature requests mostly to bring dnf in line with what yum already supports." Some of the features it doesn’t yet support include:

*Delta RPM
* history undo
* parallel downloads
* auto-remove
* bash completion

Despite the soon-to-be-added features, Sundaram implies that DNF is right on track to eventually replace Yum. Its commands are the same or compatible with Yum and Sundaram says he’s put an alias for it in his .bashrc so as not to "have to throw away my muscle memory." Little else was said at this time, but the main point of the post is that DNF is shaping up nicely and is the future of Fedora package management.

In an unsurprising announcement, Apple has confirmed that the keynote address for the Worldwide Developers Conference will be at the Moscone Center on June 10, the first day of the conference.

The company did not disclose any speakers or agenda, but Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to take the stage with other Apple executives to present new versions of both OS X and the iOS operating systems.

Prior WWDC keynotes have started at 10 AM Pacific time.

Tickets for the 2013 WWDC sold out in two minutes this year, an all-time record for the event.

The creation of new Android-related open source projects picked up in a big way in 2012, radically outpacing new iOS projects, according to data released by Black Duck Software. Black Duck manages and secures implementations of open source software, and has large samples of real-world data on open source software in use and in development. Its latest study shows that new Android mobile projects outstripped iOS projects by a factor of four in 2012, expanding by at least 96 percent in each year since 2007. New iOS project growth, by comparison, was 32 percent from 2011 to 2012.

The analysis of open source mobile project data pulled from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, a repository of data containing about one million open source projects, and Ohloh.net, the public directory of free and open source software, looked at the growth of mobile open source projects over a five-year period beginning in 2007.

According to Black Duck’s findings:

"Over 15, 000 new Android mobile projects were launched in 2012, bringing the total number of Android projects in the KnowledgeBase to more than 28,000. New projects associated with the iOS platform numbered nearly 2,500 in 2012, with a cumulative total of more than 7,000 projects. All other mobile platforms accounted for fewer than 500 new projects in 2012, for a total of fewer than 2,000 projects over the 2007 – 2012 period."

"As the growth of open source has continued to evolve and shape attitudes towards the commercial value of software, it has begun to fundamentally alter a variety of software markets," said Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk, in a statement. "Black Duck’s data on mobile OSS growth is yet more evidence of this."

As we’ve noted, among handset makers, Samsung continues to be the big winner as developers and users continue to flock to Android. We’ve also reported on the fact that developers have more economic incentives to develop for the iPhone.

Still, Android development is clearly running at a very healthy clip and the ecosystem of applications for Android is at critical mass. That news is even good for iOS users, because the more competition there is among app developers, the better things turn out for all mobile users.

It was just last week we looked at some of the proposed features for upcoming KDE 4.11 as it neared soft feature freeze. Well, today some new information about KDE 4.11 came to light. Aaron Seigo said today that 4.11 would be a "long term release."

A long term release means a particular version will be kept up to date with stabilization and security updates for an extended period of time; in this case, two years. This will give distributions that skate safely in the well-worn groove of stability a chance to have a longer term plan and more stable offerings. Seigo said, "no new features [will be] added after 4.11.0 to Plasma Desktop and Netbook, though the code will be adjusted as needed to maintain and improve existing functionality." He believes this will help developers and distribution developers a chance to focus on polishing.

For those that like upgrading each release Seigo said:

This does not effect, in any way, anything other than the code currently in the kde-workspace repository. Applications are not affected, kdelibs and kderuntime will continue on as they currently are (with kdelibs in a feature freeze of its own already). I fully expect there to be a 4.12 and likely a 4.13 release of the applications, and how long that goes on will be up to the application developers and release team.

Seigo continues as if this news will get ruffle some feathers. I suppose they’ve come to expect that any announcement will. He said focusing on stabilization and security for so long helped KDE 3.5 become so successful, but hopes any updates to 4.1x won’t be overlooked when KDE built on QT5 and Plasma Workspaces 2 appear. So, hold on to your socks boys and girls, announcing a LTR is actually announcing KDE 5. It’ll be here within two years if all goes as planned and distributions will begin including it. <cue ominous music>

Additionally, Seigo took the opportunity to speak of "decoupling the Software Compilation" from the KDE base. He feels a longer release cycle than is the norm now would help developers make better apps. He said it’s just getting too hard to get every little sub-project all ready to release at the same exact time. So, perhaps more independent development of the application stack would promote stability and less stressed developers (and release managers).

So the Xbox One was revealed yesterday and the consensus from a huge numbers of gamers, is that they hate it. While Sony isn’t doing everything right with its next-gen system, it does seem to have done one thing: listen to consumers and developers. But Microsoft, it just seems completely out of touch. If it’s listened to anyone, it’s game publishers.

Looking at the big Xbox One reveal, you’d be forgiven for thinking Microsoft was launching a new television service or its own TV hardware (which arguably it is) for the amount of times its spokespersons mentioned “TV” or “Television.” This raises eyebrows and red flags for many people, for several reasons: 1: The majority of people watching the reveal are gamers, they’re far more interested in gaming than TV watching. 2: TV is a dying medium. Streaming and on-demand services, recorded shows to skip adverts; these are the futures of media viewing, not advert interspersed programming. 3: People can already switch between TV and gaming in an instant if they want, it’s called an input select. My TV is connected to my aerial socket, my console(s) to the other AV inputs. I hit one button on the TV remote to jump between them. Explain to me how exactly the Xbox One is going to do anything outstandingly different than that?

If ever there was a time to bring back the wooden console, it’s now. Source: Kotaku

But that’s just one of several “features” of the new system that makes it sound like Microsoft hasn’t quizzed anyone about what they want in a new games console. There’s the privacy concerns. Sure if perhaps a few years ago when Facebook was new and fresh and everyone was sharing everything you could get away with saying there would be a microphone equipped camera that was always on and connected to the internet in your living room; people might have accepted that, but now? New waves of privacy advocates are spreading, with services like Kim Dotcom’s Mega leading the way. A lot of people, especially more educated parents, don’t want their kids to have a camera on them all day that could potentially be hacked. We know big companies get hacked and so do consoles, it happens all the time.

Then there’s the issue of used games requiring a fee in order to be activated. Has Microsoft not listened to any of the raging that’s been going on in the past year in the lead up to this reveal? Every time a rumour appeared that suggested the next Xbox wouldn’t support used games, people went into a frenzy. People like to buy used games and people like to share games among friends, or take a console to a mate’s house or perhaps give games to charity shops or send them as care packages to soldiers. None of that is doable now unless your pal logs in on your machine first or you’re willing to pay a fee on top of the game’s price. Microsoft knows all this stuff and it’s actively choosing to ignore it.

What about no backwards compatibility? Admittedly Sony is making this mistake too, but with the recent surge in retro gaming through software like MAME, ported titles from the past onto XBLA, the increasing values of collectible consoles from yesteryear, shouldn’t Microsoft consider at least allowing Xbox 360 games on its new system? That would certainly give it a much bigger game library on launch day than the 10 or so titles that it’ll end up with. Again though, screw that right? It’s got TV connectivity.