open source

Canada’s New Open Work Permit Restrictions: What You Need to Know

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Canada is renowned for its welcoming immigration policies, but recent reforms to Open Work Permits (OWPs) signal a shift in priorities. Effective January 21, 2025, the government is implementing significant restrictions on OWPs for family members of international students and foreign workers. Here’s a breakdown of the changes and what they mean for prospective applicants.

The Drop Times: Making Drupal CMS Truly User-centered

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From its inception at DrupalCon Portland 2024 to the official launch of Drupal CMS 1.0, user experience (UX) has been at the forefront of development. Join Emma Horell, UX Manager at the University of Edinburgh, as she reflects on the key UX strategies and milestones that have shaped this groundbreaking product, ensuring it meets the needs of non-technical audiences and keeps the user at its core.

Refresh your home-screen

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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 30 Jan 2025, Week 5

F-Droid core

F-Droid and F-Droid Basic were updated to 1.22.0 stable, but not yet ‘suggested’. If you’ve missed the quick alpha version you can read the list of changes.

Current changelog since the alpha is short:

  • automatically add newly installed apps to home-screen for most launchers (Thanks Dhina!)
  • disable gentle app updates again because of update issues (Find out why here)
  • some bug fixes

As usual we ask brave users to test this release and offer feedback as soon as possible. How to install this release? In F-Droid Client, on its own page, either scroll down, expand Versions and install the latest, or in the upper right menu choose “Allow Beta updates”.

Community News

Does IOCipher ring any bells for you as a developer? If so, you’d be informed that @Zoff, the developer behind Trifa – Tox Client, has picked up maintaining a fork of IOCipher and updated to version 1.0. You’ll have to adapt your code a bit so do read about this community reboot here.

Delta Chat and ArcaneChat were updated to 1.52.0, with fixes all around. That aside, their push of Webxdc is getting more traction, across protocols and with many more apps for users to drop in their chats. Were you rehearsing your elevator pitch for the moment you see a VC going up? Maybe you need to cross out some of those app ideas as Webdxc might replace billionairish platforms with ZIP files.

Dolphin Emulator was updated to 2412, and you can read about all the new goodies while it installs. Oh, wait, I lied, Release 2407 and 2409 notes will take you at least 30 minutes, and you might need to grab a beverage as Release 2412 notes will need 40 more.

KDE Connect was updated to 1.32.11, and maybe you should keep an eye on any popups about the update being blocked, as some reported this week and last week.

NewPipe was updated to 0.27.5, fixing one of the recent issues with Youtube, the other issue that stops videos at 59 seconds is work in progress.

Tarnhelm version 1.6.6 was rebuilt, to fix an issue with Xposed API, so now it’s missing for one cycle but it will come back in the next one along with the next version.

@linsui transfers our words:

CatShare, App for Mutual Transmission Alliance, was just added. Do you have a phone made in China which comes with a convenient file transfer function? Some phones made in China support Mutual Transmission Alliance in the stock ROM but this function is not available in FOSS ROMs such as LineageOS. CatShare is a FOSS implementation of Mutual Transmission Alliance protocol. Now you can transfer files between any ROM with Mutual Transmission Alliance protocol thanks to the power of FOSS.

Ciyue was updated to 1.0.0, bringing multiple dictionaries support. The external storage permission is removed, therefore when upgrading from old versions the dicts won’t work anymore. Please clear the data and import them again.

Removed Apps

2 apps were removed as announced last week
  • Podcini.R – Podcast instrument: Modern, feature-rich, capable of handling Youtube and YT Music contents
  • VPN Hotspot: tethering/Wi-Fi repeater

Newly Added Apps

4 more apps were newly added

Updated Apps

145 more apps were updated

(expand for the full list)

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

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Android 16’s Linux Terminal will soon let you run graphical apps, so of course we ran Doom

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Regardless, the fact that Android’s Linux Terminal can run graphical apps like Doom now is good news. Hopefully we’ll be able to run more complex desktop-class Linux programs in the future. I tried running GIMP, for example, but it didn’t work. Eventually, Android should be able to run Linux apps as well as Chromebooks can, as I believe one of the goals of this project is to help the transition of Chrome OS to an Android base. ↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority It was of course inevitable that someone would run Doom on Android’s new Debian container, and it’s pretty cool to see it work without much issue already, even if the new terminal and container setup are still in such heavy development. Like many other people, I love the idea of my smartphone being both my, well, smartphone, as well as a full desktop PC once you connect it to a display and some input devices. As wireless technology keeps advancing, we soon might not even need to plug anything into the phone at all, and just having it in our pocket is good enough, which would be amazing. That being said, I would want such functionality to come from a traditional Linux setup, not Android’s idea of a Linux setup. Running a Debian virtual machine on top of Android is probably preferable for a lot of people for a variety of reasons, but I’m a Linux user and want plain, regular Linux running directly on my smartphone, not some virtual machine on Android, which, while being a Linux distribution, is not the most pleasant variant of Linux to run and use.