Iron Sysadmin Open Source News Recap: Mastodon Quote Posts, Linux Gaming Growth, & Azure Outage

In this week’s Iron Sysadmin Open Source News Recap, Nate breaks down the biggest tech stories, including the controversial arrival of Quote Posts in Mastodon 4.5, now with anti-harassment controls. We analyze why Linux gaming is surging on Steam, recently surpassing MacOS. Plus, we cover Nvidia’s move into open-source drivers with the new Nova project for their next-gen accelerators , and dive into the details of Microsoft Azure’s 8-hour outage. Tune in for your weekly dose of open source news and community updates!

🎙️ Show Notes: Week of November 7th This week, Nate dives into some big updates for open source social networking, major growth in Linux gaming, an interesting move from Nvidia, and another cloud provider facing downtime. Social Media & Open Source News Mastodon 4.5 Introduces Quote Posts: The platform has finally rolled out quote-posting, a feature that was previously unavailable. Quote posts are considered controversial on platforms like X and Threads due to frequent abuse and being used to single-out users in an effort to harass them. Mastodon aims to mitigate this by allowing users to set quoting permissions, which the platform will then respect, giving users more control over their interactions. https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/mastodon-4-5-brings-quote-posts-with-anti-harassment-controls Nvidia’s Open Source Initiative: Nvidia engineers are developing a new open-source driver named Nova. The driver is currently being prepared to support select GPU’s, namely the Hopper and Blackwell generations. These do not appear to be gaming adapters, but likely for compute. https://www.techpowerup.com/342552/3-of-steam-users-play-on-linux-a-third-of-them-on-steamos Gaming & Operating Systems Linux Gaming Market Share Rises: Linux gaming now accounts for 3% of all Steam users. This figure is greater than the 2.11% of users on MacOS. Approximately one-third of the Linux users are on SteamOS, with the remaining two-thirds on other Linux distributions. Windows still holds a dominant share at over 94% of Steam users, with 3% of that being Windows 11. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hopper-Blackwell-Nova-Prep Cloud & Tech Outages Microsoft Azure Suffers Outage: Azure had its own outage last week. The outage began at 3:45 PM UTC on Wednesday and lasted until 12:05 AM Thursday. The core issue affected the “Azure Front Door” (AFD) service, which is the CDN for Azure. This impacted a number of downstream services. The problem sounds like a config mishap: an “inadvertent tennant config”. https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/microsoft-s-eight-hour-azure-outage-5-things-we-ve-learned-so-far Events Defcon 610 Pub Crawl: A reminder that the Defcon 610 Pub Crawl is happening this weekend (November 8th) in Easton, Pennsylvania! https://www.meetup.com/defcon610/events/311572906