The Linux Mint project has announced version 5 of its Debian edition, code-named Elsie.

Linux Mint is one of the longest-running and most polished distros downstream of Ubuntu, and really took off after Ubuntu switched to the controversial Unity desktop with 11.04. Around that time, Mint 12 retained a Windows-like look and feel that later evolved into the Cinnamon desktop.

This won it a lot of converts who didn't care for Ubuntu's more Mac-like look. Even thought Ubuntu killed Unity and switched back to GNOME, it's GNOME 3 – still very unlike Windows. Mint provides familiarity for the many people who feel more comfy with a taskbar, a start menu, and so on.

We looked at Mint 20 when it came out a couple of years ago, and last January, the latest 20.3 release, too – which includes a natively packaged version of Firefox, direct from Mozilla, instead of Ubuntu's Snap version. In fact it's notable that Mint eschews Ubuntu's Snap apps altogether. Instead, you get Red Hat-style Flatpaks.

Linux Mint Debian Edition – LMDE for short – is the other flavour of Mint. Instead of being based on the stable LTS version of Ubuntu, LMDE is directly based on Debian, which is largely Ubuntu's upstream. LMDE 5 is based on Debian 11, code-named Bullseye.

The thing is, though, it's hard to tell. LMDE uses the same Cinnamon desktop as its Ubuntu-based sibling. It has the latest native Firefox from Mozilla, rather than Debian's outdated ESR version that's tricky to update. It has Flatpak integrated as well, along with multimedia codecs and so on. It has the same tools as the default Ubuntu-based edition, for software updates, backup, and so on.

There are advantages to being close to a widely used desktop distro. For instance, sometimes desktop users need third-party drivers, such as for graphics cards or printers. Ubuntu has first-rate driver support. If you encounter issues, it's often easy to find Ubuntu-based solutions online, and they are very likely to work, at least so long as they don't depend on a specific desktop.

Debian is rather more polished than it used to be, as well. The old joke is that Ubuntu is an ancient word, meaning: "I can't configure Debian." (It doesn't, but it's a good gag.)

That jibe's not true any more. Contemporary Debian is relatively easy: you can readily add Flatpak support – or Snap if you prefer, or both – and install non-FOSS firmware and so on. Bullseye includes Cinnamon, too, albeit a slightly older version.

Even so, LMDE 5 does make it a smoother, easier process, and it looks good, too. If you want to run Debian on a desktop or laptop, you don't mind (or even actively need) non-FOSS codecs or firmware, and you're not a Debian guru, then Elsie is a solid choice.

The positions of the Mint project and Ubuntu seem to be diverging. Ubuntu officially favors GNOME 3, while Mint has built its own next-gen desktop. Ubuntu favors its own Snaps, whereas Mint favors Flatpak. Ubuntu is packaging fast-changing apps such as Firefox as Snaps, whereas Mint favors natively packaged browsers. And Mint, as ever, includes non-FOSS freeware such as codecs and apps such as Spotify in its repos.

Other Ubuntu-based distros have switched upstream and moved to Debian in the past, such as the late Crunchbang Linux. Up to version 9, it used Ubuntu; 10 and onward used Debian, as do its continuing derivatives BunsenLabs and Crunchbang++. We wouldn't be surprised to see a future version of Mint sideline its Ubuntu-derived edition in favor of the Debian edition, or even discontinue it altogether. ®

South Korea's ambition to launch a space industry on the back of a locally developed rocket have stalled, after a glitch saw the countdown halted for its latest attempt to place its Nuri vehicle into orbit.

The launch was planned for Wednesday, but postponed by a day due to unfavourable weather.

The Korea Aerospace and Research Institute tried again but, as the countdown progressed, an anomaly appeared in a first stage oxidizer tank. That issue was considered so serious that Nuri was returned to its assembly facility.

Cisco Live In his first in-person Cisco Live keynote in two years, CEO Chuck Robbins didn't make any lofty claims about how AI is taking over the network or how the company's latest products would turn networking on its head. Instead, the presentation was all about working with customers to make their lives easier.

"We need to simplify the things that we do with you. If I think back to eight or ten years ago, I think we've made progress, but we still have more to do," he said, promising to address customers' biggest complaints with the networking giant's various platforms.

"Everything we find that is inhibiting your experience from being the best that it can be, we're going to tackle," he declared, appealing to customers to share their pain points at the show.

GPUs are a powerful tool for machine-learning workloads, though they’re not necessarily the right tool for every AI job, according to Michael Bronstein, Twitter’s head of graph learning research.

His team recently showed Graphcore’s AI hardware offered an “order of magnitude speedup when comparing a single IPU processor to an Nvidia A100 GPU,” in temporal graph network (TGN) models.

“The choice of hardware for implementing Graph ML models is a crucial, yet often overlooked problem,” reads a joint article penned by Bronstein with Emanuele Rossi, an ML researcher at Twitter, and Daniel Justus, a researcher at Graphcore.

Japan is reportedly hoping to join the ranks of countries producing leading-edge 2nm chips as soon as 2025, and it's working with the US to make such ambitions a reality.

Nikkei reported Wednesday that businesses from both countries will jointly research the design and manufacturing of such components for devices ranging from smartphones to servers as part of a "bilateral chip technology partnership" between America and Japan.

The report arrives less than a month after US and Japanese leaders said they would collaborate on next-generation semiconductors as part of broader agreement that also calls for "protecting and promoting critical technologies, including through the use of export controls."

Elon Musk still hopes to quash a 2018 settlement agreement with the SEC requiring Tesla-related tweets to be approved by a lawyer before he can post them: on Wednesday, he took his case to the US Court of Appeals after a lower court denied this request.

The Tesla CEO landed himself in hot water with the watchdog when he tweeted he was thinking of taking the company private at $420 a share, and claimed to have already secured the necessary funding (sound familiar?) In reality, however, Musk did not have the funding or approval to do so. Investors, however, took him seriously and they started buying more shares, bumping up the stock price over 10 per cent.

The SEC accused Musk of fraud, saying his tweets were false and misled the public and caused disruption in the market. Musk was sued by the US regulator; he later settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay $40 million in penalties, step down as chairman of the automaker's board, and accepted that any tweets discussing Tesla would have to be screened from now on.

Samsung has once again been accused of cheating in benchmark tests to inflate the apparent abilities of its hardware.

The South Korean titan was said to have unfairly goosed Galaxy Note 3 phone benchmarks in 2013, and faced with similar allegations about the Galaxy S4 in 2018 settled that matter for $13.4 million.

This time Samsung has allegedly fudged the results for its televisions, specifically the S95B QD-OLED and QN95B Neo OLED LCD TVs. 

American lawmakers held a hearing on Tuesday to discuss a proposed federal information privacy bill that many want yet few believe will be approved in its current form.

The hearing, dubbed "Protecting America's Consumers: Bipartisan Legislation to Strengthen Data Privacy and Security," was overseen by the House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Therein, legislators and various concerned parties opined on the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) [PDF], proposed by Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Representatives Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA).

There's no such thing as free beer for Father's Day — at least not from Heineken. The brewing giant confirmed that a contest circulating on WhatsApp, which promises a chance to win one of 5,000 coolers full of green-bottled lager, is a frothy fraud.

"This is a scam and is not sanctioned by Heineken," the beermaker said in a tweet, adding it has alerted the UK's national fraud and cybercrime reporting agency. The tweet also referred netizens to the company's official statement on scams tied to the brewer's name.

"We strongly recommend that you do not open any documents attached to those communications, and that you do not respond in any way to such communications received, hence do not give any personal information or bank details," it said. 

Aerospike, the value-key NoSQL database, has launched a collaboration with data connection vendor StarBurst to offer SQL access to its datastores.

Dubbed Aerospike SQL Powered by Starburst, the system hopes to offer data analysts and data scientists a single point of access to federated data in Aerospike using existing SQL analytic tools such as Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI. It is the first time Aerospike has offered an off-the-shelf tool to analyze its database using SQL, the ubiquitous database language.

Aerospike was purpose-built with a highly parallelized architecture to support real-time, data-driven applications that cost-effectively scale up and out. It claims to offer predictable sub-millisecond performance up to petabyte-scale with five-nines uptime with globally distributed, strongly consistent data.

A letter has been filed with America's communications watchdog confirming that SpaceX and OneWeb, which are building mega-constellations of broadband satellites, are content to play nicely.

The letter sweeps all the unpleasantness between the two neatly under the rug "after extensive good-faith coordination discussions." Despite what could charitably be described as snarky remarks about each other to the FCC over the years, the duo have agreed that their first-generation broadband satellite services can, after all, co-exist.

"Their respective second-round systems can also efficiently coexist with each other while protecting their respective first-round systems," the memo, dated June 13 and shared by Reuters' journo Joey Roulette today, reads.

Big Tech in America has had enough of Congress' inability to pass pending legislation that includes tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to boost semiconductor manufacturing and R&D in the country.

In a letter [PDF] sent to Senate and House leaders Wednesday, the CEOs of Alphabet, Amazon, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, VMware, and dozens of other tech and tech-adjacent companies urged the two chambers of Congress to reach consensus on a long-stalled bill they believe will make the US more competitive against China and other countries.

"The rest of the world is not waiting for the US to act. Our global competitors are investing in their industry, their workers, and their economies, and it is imperative that Congress act to enhance US competitiveness," said the letter.

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