Unix Tutorial – Annual Digest – 2019

As promised, this is my very first annual summary of interesting things in my industry (Unix/Linux administration) and on my Unix Tutorial blog.

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Unix Tutorial News

2019 has been a tremendous year for my blog: almost a million visits to my posts and pages, hundreds of interesting topics researched and even more planned for the year ahead.

Here are just some of the notable changes on Unix Tutorial:

Unix and Linux News

Quite a few great changes happened in 2019:

Software News

  • Brave 1.0 browser got released – my primary browser that keeps blocking ads and trackers at an impressive rate
  • VirtualBox 6.1 released – this is the must-have software on Linux and Windows platforms, such a great and stable desktop virtualization product
  • tmux 3.0 arrived – I already upgraded tmux to 3.0a on my macOS systems to tmux 3.0a version
  • Firefox established new release cycle so improved versions are made available much sooner now
  • Homebrew 2.0.0 was released
  • Perl 6 (can’t believe it’s been around since 2015!) was renamed into Raku
  • Swift 5 was released by Apple
  • Java SE 12 arrived
  • HTTP/3 gained adoption and full support in Chrome and Firefox. Naturally, nginx led the way with an HTTP/3 module.
  • Jekyll 4 arrived – I really like using it for my static sites so I upgraded my macOS systems to Jekyll 4
  • Glimpse, a fork of GIMP graphics editor, finally became available

Scary Stuff

It didn’t always seem like it, but 2019 turned out to be a very scary year in terms of exploits, hardware and software vulnerabilities and hacks of major software repos

  • Docker Hub was hacked and information about 190k users (including password hashes) got leaked in April
  • PEAR (PHP) repository got hacked
  • Even more hardware attacks got identified for both Intel and AMD processes
  • GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab all got affected by ransom attacks encrypting repositories
  • In May Firefox had that incident with intermediary certificates which instantly blocked browser extensions in millions of browsers
  • In September, Richard Stallman was forced to resign from Free Software Foundation

We live in exciting times. It’s been fun to try new products and services in 2019 and all the things indicate that 2020 will be even more impressive in terms of innovations and rapid adoption of new standards and technologies.

That’s it for the Year of 2019!

See Also