Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – We Are The 2%

Linux hits 2% market share! Mozilla releases some nightmare-fuel, PITIVI 0.96 edits by proxy, and a handy guide for building your own Vortex Manipulator. All this and more on LWDW.

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu

2%
https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2016&month=6

  • I’m pretty sure this would be mirrored in the Steam Survey, if that survey didn’t suck as bad as it does.
    • That’s the good thing about browser statistics. Every browser sends a User Agent to the server. The Valve hardware survey is what it says it is, an *hardware* survey. Valve could very easily generate reliable statistics on their client software usage if they wanted to.
    • Steam can make the hardware surveys say whatever they want.
  • Linux stats tend to go up during the summer every year but it’s the first time it’s reached 2% so that’s good. Just don’t be surprised if it goes down in september.

 

Servo
http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Mozilla-Publishes-Servo-Nightly-Mac-and-Linux

  • Those kind of initiatives are much welcome. We may not notice is because our computers are overpowered but web rendering is slow as hell. They struggle to display a few hundred rectangle surfaces and text where OpenGL or Vulkan can draw millions of vertices per second.
  • Hope this put an end to the Webkit monopoly
  • Eats about 3GB of RAM per instance.
  • Loads pages at the speed of 56K, if they load.

 

Proxy
https://pitivi.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/pitivi-0-96-cogito-ergo-proxy/

  • What I wish for every video editing program on Linux is to have a very robust foundation before having fancy features. The new proxy feature seems to go in that direction.
  • Builds are available via Flatpak, I’m so pleased that this is becoming a thing. No longer will we have to wait a year to use new releases of software!
  • Sometimes low SPEC machines have issues scrubbing through video.
  • This aims to sort that.

 

Swag
https://github.com/stevelacy/msi-keyboard-gui

  • This is nice to have, since MSI were selling their G series laptops with the option of not having Windows pre-installed.
  • If you bought one of those and you installed something reasonable, like say… Linux, this way you don’t miss out on the keyboard eye-candy.
  • It’s been a while since we covered an Electron app on the show!
  • Remember kids, this is the mid-2000s equivalent of having spinners on your motoring vehicle.

 

Stahp!
http://www.ocsmag.com/2016/07/05/guix-the-non-aligned-universal-package-manager/

  • 2016 is officially the year of cross-distribution binary packages on Linux!
  • We talked about Red Hat and Canonical’s projects but the party wouldn’t be complete without GNU
  • Of course it’s written in Scheme, of course its main purpose is to protect the user’s freedom and of course it’s available on Hurd.

 

Over
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3090404/linux/30-days-in-a-terminal-day-10-the-experiment-is-over.html

  • He should have allowed social media, youtube and some browsing on an Android device to let his experiment last longer
  • Or the Ubuntu tablet since that’s what he’s currently testing, if you’re going to be masochist, why not go all the way.
  • Soo you spent 10 days using the CLI and decided you had enough to write a few articles, adorable.

 

Pats
https://www.patreon.com/linuxgamecast

  • New goal.

 

Exploit or Backdoor?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/04/lenovo_scrambling_to_get_a_fix_for_bios_vuln/

  • We lived most of our lives without Secure Boot and we are still okay
  • Most Linux users disable it anyway, just to be able to install Linux so I wouldn’t freak out too much over this “vulnerability”

 

Snapitch.io
https://github.com/itchio/itch/issues/670

  • Oh look, Itch.io does have a Linux client.
  • And it works!
  • Unlike some other gaming store, I’m looking at you, GOG.
  • And Itch.io joins the sandboxed binary distribution party.

 

SSL story of the week
https://www.computest.nl/blog/startencrypt-considered-harmful-today/

  • This week it’s StartSSL which was known for their free SSL certificates.
  • LetsEncrypt being much simpler to use they wanted to do the same
  • Of course it failed
  • Why not just fork the LetsEncrypt project, I don’t see anything that would forbid it?
  • I’m missing something here, what use can you have for a valid certificate for facebook.com or google if you don’t have access to the DNS?

 

Au revoir le Google Images
https://lafibre.info/piratage/google-images/
http://www.nextinpact.com/news/100342-redevance-sur-l-indexation-d-image-but-france-contre-moteurs-recherche.htm

  • French law wants to tax Google for indexing images
  • This includes all images, including those under a license such as Creative Commons
  • Given how Google doesn’t deal with this kind of BS, Google Image will likely be inaccessible from French IPs in the near future. Google did similar things in Spain (Google News blocked) and in Germany (all music videos on youtube blocked).
  • Frexit!

 

Plasma Mycroft
http://news.softpedia.com/news/mycroft-ai-intelligent-personal-assistant-now-available-on-kde-plasma-desktops-505926.shtml

  • This is a good idea, if you’re an “Ok, Google” user or you’re coming from Windows 10 and actually enabled the “Cortana” functionality.
  • Mycroft has made several leaps and bounds when it comes to understanding natural speech, similarly to how Google Now does.
  • Now, it still doesn’t have as large a functionality spectrum as Google’s but seeing as it is open sauce, everyone can add new stuff.
  • And, should the KDE people ever decide to stop impersonating GNOME developers and pull their heads outta their asses, after all the current standing issues with Plasma 5 are fixed, integrating Mycroft onto the DE would give it all the same functionality as the Windows 10 desktop. (Except for the embedded ads.)
  • I hope they get their new speech synthesizer integrated soon, the demo sounds like my old Amiga 500. Apparently, the new default voice is Alan Pope’s.
  • Seems a bit slow to respond, hope they improve that as well

 

Anything that moves
http://timelyparadox.com/2016/07/tiny-linux-computer-built-into-vortex-manipulator-from-doctor-who

  • It’s a bit bulkier than an Apple Watch or a Samsung Gear
  • But less than the Raspberry Pi PipBoy 3000!
    • If I’m wearing a wrist PC it should look like this.

Feedback

32-bit

http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?3L96gRw

Unity

http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?uWqk62h

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