Blog de Mageia (English)
A Cauldron of ideas to help those facing the end of Windows 10
By Aguador.
The end is coming, the end is coming…the end of Windows 10 support, that is…and as part of the Linux community we can help those affected.
As of 14 October support for Windows 10 will end, leaving its users of older, less powerful machines three choices:
- Suffer slower performance (IF their machine does at least meet the minimum requirements for Win 11)
- Pay for support to continue with Win 10
- Buy new, more powerful equipment
As Linux users we know that these are not the only choices, Linux offers a range of options to suit virtually any personal taste and computer. KDE, source of one of Mageia’s flagship1 desktops, has an attractive multimedia website2 for the about-to-be orphaned Windows users.
It lays out the case for switching to Linux, with Plasma and the KDE universe of software as the alternative. The site presents the modern features of KDE-Plasma, the advantages of Free and Open Source Software, and compatibility with files produced by proprietary software. It is a great resource which Mageia community members can offer friends and colleagues facing “the end”. And, of course, as mageians, we can provide that link along with an offer to help them in getting set up with Mageia.
You do not use Plasma or do not think it is right for your friends or friends’ machines? The site also offers links to other popular desktops and, at the end, a link to the more general Endof10 website, which is also hosted by KDE. It not only offers the arguments for switching to Linux, but provides guidance in choosing a system and, most importantly, places around the world where people can find hands-on help in making the switch.
As Mageia users we know it offers all the beauty and power of Plasma and the KDE suite of programs. So do your friends, family, colleagues and neighbours a favour by not only sharing these sites (and, of course, Mageia’s), but also showing Plasma and/or other desktops in action on your machine. Oh, and if you want to write a Live ISO to a USB stick, you can even show them the Mageia we use every day in action on THEIR machines.
To us mageians it is obvious, that Mageia 9 > Win10 is not a typo!
Firefox and Thunderbird updates for armv7hl
Written by katnatek.
This is an unusual post… As we warned in the past updates MGASA-2025-01951, MGASA-2025-01972 and MGASA-2025-02013, the updates for Firefox and Thunderbird could not be delivered for armv7hl for a long time.
The issue had two causes. The first one, noticed during the QA process for the linked Security Advisories, was produced by a bug in the tools used to build Firefox for this architecture4.
The second one was harder to squash, and we were on the verge of informing you that we could not continue updating these software products in Mageia 9 for the armv7hl architecture.
But then, Pascal Terjan (one of our packagers), found a patch in the Debian community for exactly the same issue (a Rust component was using the fat link time optimization)
Firefox is now updated in all architectures, in both Mageia 9 and Cauldron, to the 128.12.0 ESR version – an upgrade from 115.13.0 on armv7hl – and Thunderbird will follow once version 128.12 is ready.
An avalanche of AI bots is repeatedly taking parts of our website down
We have always had bots visiting our website. They were mostly kind bots, like the crawlers that keep the databases of search engines up-to-date. Those kind bots start by looking at our robots.txt files before doing anything, and respect the restrictions that are set in those files.
However, things have changed. Like other websites, for instance Wikipedia, we are more and more being visited by AI scrapers, bots that scrape the Internet for anything they can find to train AI applications. They are usually extremely hungry for information, so they download much, much more than an ordinary user would do. Moreover, many of them are impolite: they don’t respect the rules set in our robots.txt files, they hide who they really are, they don’t put a little pause in between requests – on the contrary, they hammer our servers with requests from lots and lots of different IP addresses at the same time. The result is that parts of mageia.org, like our Bugzilla, Wiki and Forums, become unreachable.
Below you can see the CPU load of one of our most important servers, where, amongst other things, our forums and wiki are located:
Even if our infra upgrade had already been finished, this would be really hard to mitigate.
Blocking the used IP addresses is useless because they constantly switch to new ones. One of our sysadmins just told me about a big issue: “mobile proxies” where bots proxy their request through unsuspecting users’ phones. That makes the requests look much more legitimate and hard to block without also blocking real users. A lot of that happens without users even knowing their phone is being used like this. Some applications include proxies along with some game or other app and hide it in fine print in the terms of service. Last year, it was reported that Google had removed a bunch of such applications from their store.
Apart from phones, there are IoT devices and also ordinary computers that ended up in botnets, because they were not well protected. They can be used for AI scraping and probably are now.
Our sysadmins do time and again succeed in mitigating the problem, but it is a “cat and mouse game”, so the problem is likely to reoccur.
If you know people working on AI applications which need to be trained, please ask them to make sure their bots read and respect the robots.txt files they encounter. And, of course, please nudge your friends and family, when you think they need that, to make sure their computers and other smart devices get all security updates as soon as they are released.
