Germany has made ODF mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure. The decision is incorporated into the Deutschland-Stack, the framework governing the development, procurement and management of digital systems for public administration at all levels. This is neither a pilot project nor a recommendation from a working group, but a mandate backed by the federal government and the coalition agreement.

The official document has been published by the IT-Planungsrat, the central political steering body comprising the federal government and state governments, which promotes and develops common, user-oriented IT solutions for efficient and secure digital administration in Germany: https://www.it-planungsrat.de/beschluss/b-2026-03-it.

At this point, the question for all other European governments is clear: what are you waiting for? With this decision, the distinction between those who care about digital sovereignty and those who do not becomes stark.

Distro developers began discussing ways to reduce the size of firmware updates last year. Now, in Ubuntu 26.04, it’s introducing meta-packaging to spread Linux firmware across 17 smaller packages in the resolute archives. This resolves a bug filed in 2022.

The sub-packages are:

• linux-firmware-mellanox-spectrum
• linux-firmware-intel-wireless
• linux-firmware-intel-graphics
• linux-firmware-amd-graphics
• linux-firmware-nvidia-graphics
• linux-firmware-intel-misc
• linux-firmware-broadcom-wireless
• linux-firmware-netronome
• linux-firmware-misc
• linux-firmware-qlogic
• linux-firmware-marvell-wireless
• linux-firmware-mediatek
• linux-firmware-marvell-prestera
• linux-firmware-realtek
• linux-firmware-qualcomm-wireless
• linux-firmware-qualcomm-graphics
• linux-firmware-qualcomm-misc

As reported by VGC and Japanese gaming outlet Beep21, Sega console designer Hideki Sato has died. The engineer and former Sega president was 77. Sato's career with Sega began in the 1970s⁠—SegaRetro.org lists his earliest projects as the arcade games MonacoGP, Turbo, and Star Jacker.

Sato's most notable contribution to gaming history, however, would be leading the engineering teams behind every Sega home console from 1983 to the company's exit from the hardware business in 2001.

https://archive.ph/38vaz

This Valentine's Day there is a lot of red on the screen for the X.Org Server with the code delta as a result of renaming of their main Git development branch and in the process selectively dropping questionable patches to the prior "master" codebase.

The effort noted in January of X.Org Server May Create A New Selective Git Branch With Hopes Of A New Release This Year has now been realized. As of a short time ago today, the "master" Git branch is ended with new X.Org Server development now on "main" and in the process starting off from a starting point of 2024 and then laying on the acceptable patches that were queued up over the past two years. See that aforelinked article for more details.