A Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop from TUXEDO, Firefox 127 makes deduplicating tabs easy, Raspberry Pi goes public, and a cross-platform circle menu, thingy.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:41 Recapping MOTU
01:16 New sound card
02:37 Linux summer racing league
04:28 Snapdragon X Elite Laptops With Linux
10:37 Firefox 127
13:46 Circle menus with Kando
20:06 Raspberry Pi IPO
Tuxedo laptop with Snapdragon X Elite
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-on-ARM-is-coming.tuxedo
- You may have seen a few outlets covering some exciting news this week the past few days.
- Tuxedo has taken a Snapdragon X Elite laptop from everyone’s favorite German PC maker Schenker, and slapped some Linux on it.
- Well, I should say gently rubbed some Linux on it because it’s very much a prototype.
- And by prototype, I mean the demo PC was stuck in a boot loop at Computex.
- 12-core Snapdragon X Elite with 32 GB RAM, 14-inch 2560 x 1600 display, M.2, and USB 4.
- No pricing info but it’s not going to be cheap.
- So last Wednesday after LWDW, when I was reading more online posts covering Computex 2024, I found the pictures of the prototype Tuxedo Linux Snapdragon X Elite laptop being shown off at the German PC OEM Schenker/Tuxedo booth, and I was filled with excitement!
- So four weeks ago on LWDW 423, we talked about Linux Kernel 6.9 being released, and that it had better support for ARM processors, including ARM64 Rust code support.
- And one of the reasons for this is that Linus Torvalds now has a more powerful ARM64 machine to compile the Linux kernel on.
- Also, in that same episode of LWDW, we talked about Qualcomm upping their support of the latest Snapdragon X Elite on Linux, and that Linus’s new ARM64 computer has a lot to do with Qualcomm upping that support.
- And now we have this awesome news about the Tuxedo Computers Linux Snapdragon X Elite laptop possibly coming out by the end of the year.
- This is because full support by Qualcomm of the Snapdragon X Elite SoC is expected in the next six months in the Linux Kernel 6.11.
- This laptop is being developed under the codename “Drako”, which according to Wikipedia “is the Greco-Latin word for serpent, or dragon.”
- This makes a lot of sense since the processor is called the Snapdragon X Elite LOL
- Also, Tuxedo Computers Tuxedo OS, which is Tuxedo’s own Ubuntu-based KDE Plasma distro, will be featured on this beautiful laptop.
- I am looking forward to seeing the specs on performance vs battery life in the future, as this Snapdragon X Elite System on Chip can outperform Apple’s M2 SoCs and be more energy efficient.
- And Linux getting even more ARM64 love!
Firefox 127
https://9to5linux.com/mozilla-firefox-127-is-now-available-for-download-heres-whats-new/amp
- Mozilla Firefox 127 has been released, and includes some cool new features for our favorite open source web browser.
- In the “List all tabs” tab bar widget there is a new “Close Duplicate Tabs” option which enables you to close all your duplicate tabs in one click.
- I am appreciative of this feature because when doing research for LWDW show notes, I seem to always have at least 2-4 duplicate tabs of news stories that I am currently reading.
- Firefox 127 also improves the webpage screenshot tool, which includes the ability to take snapshots of certain file types like SVG and XML, and lets you take screenshots of some internal :about pages.
- The built-in Firefox webpage screenshot tool also includes new keyboard shortcuts and High Contrast Mode support for greater accessibility.
- Also another great feature included in this release, Mozilla states:
- “We completed work to optimize and enable DNS prefetching for HTTPS documents via the rel=”dns-prefetch” link hint. This standard allows web developers to specify domain names for important assets that should be resolved preemptively”
- And specific for us Linux users, Firefox 127 makes the 32-bit Linux user-string report 64-bit, for greater website compatibility.
Menu Pie
https://github.com/kando-menu/kando?tab=readme-ov-file
- Have you been looking for a cross-platform pie menu for your desktop?
- Guess I should explain a pie menu first, eh?
- Click on an area, mini circle explosion, think planet + moons, click on one of the wee ones, follow the line, more circles.
- It’s like a mini menu dungeon crawl.
- I remember wondering why no one was doing something like this back in the 90’s.
- But even then I realized that while it looked cool, it was a lot of extra movement.
- FF to 2024 when everything has touchscreens and we might need to revisit this.
- That’s what Kando is doing and it’s doing it on all the things.
- Windows, MocOS, XFCE, KDE, GNOME, i3 and others.
- Works with mouse, stylus, and yes, touch.
- I enjoyed using the Kando pie menu to create quick links to websites I visit often for doing my LWDW show notes.
- And I also used it for a quick way to mute, play and pause my audio when playing music and YouTube videos.
- Oh, and I was happy you could change the default keyboard shortcut keys to launch the Kando pie menu from “ctrl+space” to whatever you wanted in the settings menu.
- I used my keyboard’s “insert” key as my shortcut to launch the Kando pie menu because I very rarely use it.
Slice of Pi
Public Pi
- Several weeks ago we mentioned that the Raspberry Pi went public with an IPO.
- Well since that announcement, the Raspberry Pi company’s shares went up by 32% after its IPO pricing!
- So on the London Stock Exchange yesterday morning, Raspberry Pi priced its IPO at £2.80 per share.
- That made it valued at £542 million, or $690 million US dollars at today’s exchange rate.
- Right after that, Raspberry Pi Ltd shares jumped 32% to £3.70, and raise up more than $200 million during this process.
- On Friday, retail investors will be able to buy/sell shares.
- Ebon Upton, Raspberry Pi founder has assured us that a lot of the money from the IPO will go to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
- Of the 7.4 million single-board computers and modules that Raspberry Pi sold last year, 72% went to industrial and embedded customers.
- The company made a profit of almost $40mn last year.
- Arm has committed to buying $35mn of shares in the IPO.
- Other significant shareholders in Raspberry Pi include technology group Sony.
- Raspberry Pi could end up raising more than $200 million during its IPO process.
