Linux Action News 157

Quite a bit from Google this week, with new products and notable changes coming for developers and users.

Plus our take on DuckDuckGo's new fight.

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Links:

• Open-source devs drown in DigitalOcean's latest tsunami of pull-request spam that is Hacktoberfest — Rewarding pointless patches with free swag leads to 'DDoS' against projects
• One solution — @derekapp will close them for you automatically and mark them as invalid.
• Require PRs be in a repo with hacktoberfest topic and be accepted by MattIPv4
• Hacktoberfest presented by DigitalOcean — We’re making Hacktoberfest opt-in only for projects – which maintainers can do simply by adding the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic to a repository.
• What is Google TV and how is it different from Android TV? — Google TV is a new interface for Android TV that is powered by Google's machine learning, Google Assistant and the Google Knowledge Graph. It also reorganizes your content to help make it easier for you to find what you want to work.
• The new Chromecast with Google TV won’t officially support Stadia at launch
• WireGuard announces a big Android update with Android TV support — WireGuard now has a slew of announcements, with support for Android TV through their app, pre-built kernel modules for popular phones, a Kotlin rewrite of the UI, and much more.
• Unofficial LineageOS 17.1 brings Android 10 to NVIDIA SHIELD TVs — The unofficial LineageOS 17.1 build for NVIDIA Shield TVs allows users to run a heavily customizable, near-stock Android 10 experience on their Android TV boxes. I
• Listening to Developer Feedback to Improve Google Play — Our policies apply equally to all apps distributed on Google Play, including Google’s own apps. We use the same standards to decide which apps to promote on Google Play, whether they're third-party apps or our own apps.
• Android 12 will make it easier to install app stores — Google today announced it will make it easier to install and use third-party app stores with the release of Android 12 next year.
• Apple v. Epic hearing: Judge hints at July 2021 trial
• Google’s Search Preference Menu Eliminates DuckDuckGo — The Q4 2020 results of Google’s search preference menu auction have been released and, as we predicted, DuckDuckGo has been eliminated in most countries.
• Atari VCS Backer Units are On the Way! — This shipment includes the one-time-only, Indiegogo-exclusive Atari VCS 800 Collector’s Edition model. Inspired by and designed as an homage to the original Atari 2600, there will only be 6,000 numbered and authenticated versions of this model.
• Atari VCS backers on IndieGoGo might actually get their units soon