Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Goodbye Hello

Firefox 49 is here! Plex enters the cloud, PocketCHIP gets a desktop, and someone ungoogled Chromium?

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu

News

If anyone pays the certification for me, I’ll let you the Chromebook.
- WIll you let me the whole thing?
  - Yes
Read a manpage once in your lifetime, that’s free.
It’s not a giveaway, it’s just a compensation for buying an overpriced certification.
The funny thing is that in order to pass the certification (aka having any idea what Linux is about), you’d have to wipe the Chromebook and install a proper GNU/Linux distribution.
Go take the RHCE and use the change to buy a Chromebook.

Firefox 49
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/20/firefox-49-arrives-with-reader-mode-improvements-offline-viewing-on-android-and-removes-firefox-hello/

Oh, I’m in the Multiprocess Windows beta.
I was too but it was disabled “because of extras”.
So I forced it on in the craptop and blimey that’s actually much faster.
I am the 99% (mostly because I don’t care until it’s ready to ship)
You know what else I don’t care about? Firefox Hello. And that must be the same for most users since it got axed violently.
They recommend a few other options instead of Hello, including Jitsi which we are using right now.
They sure brought lots of improvements for people who don’t have hardware acceleration. Here’s a nickel, kid, go buy yourself a real computer.
The biggest improvement I noted was the Google Docs.
It’s too late, ive already switched to Vivaldi.
Should have noped FirefoxOS sooner and focused on your core product, Brad.

Ungoogled Chrome
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

This will prevent Google from doing all that ooky spooky data collection… that your ISP already does.
Wonder how long this project will be maintained.
But it’s about time we got a Webkit based browser that isn’t tied to Google. Because Midori, Epiphany, Rekonq, Uzbl and Konqueror don’t count.
- Vivaldi!
Choice is great, but why waste your time on something like this when there are so many other browsers already out there?
I also read the FAQ and the first question that popped into my head wasn’t there.
- How is this different from regular Chromium to justify a fork?

It’s time people learned the meaning of the word unsupported. Unsupported does not mean it won’t work, it means that they don’t want to hear about your problems.
And the people on the Google product boards shouldn’t have to provide support for Chromium at all, for any feature.
- Googs Product Expert =’s unpaid volunteer.
If you got an issue with Chromium, use the Chromium issue tracker like a grown up.
This is yet more evidence that a certain subset of Linux users need to grow a thicker skin and keep their pants on until there’s official confirmation one way or another.

Protip: Amazon explicitly bans users from hosting infringing content on its servers — content such as downloaded movies.
That seems to be a brilliant idea, hosting pirated content in the cloud.
“Plex does not do any file level encryption or modify your files on Amazon Drive in any way” did they really think this one through?
- These are the same mental juggernauts that removed *.rar support.
- We at LWDW only use Plex for our extensive ripped DVD collection and Plex believes that??

This falls under DiWHY
I’ve ranted a bunch about people who make useless distros, now I will rant about they should have made a distro out of this.
I’ve noticed that people underestimate a lot the power of the Chip but I want to remind everyone that this is a 1Ghz CPU we’re talking about.
If you had a 1Ghz CPU in the early 2000’s you know it was capable of quite a few things. Why would this device be any less capable?
- Because the 1GHz Allwinner R8 processor is meant for printers and routers?
- Tree Fiddy says a 440 MHz Sun module from 95 would trounce that sucker.
Missing the Point 101!

TIL how to run an AppImage.
- So chmod +x appimage && ./appimage ?
  - That’s what the Googs said.
Makes me wonder what kind of GUI toolkit they used. This looks like a less polished version of the toolkit Blender uses.
- I looks like a WINE GUI.
- Qt5
  - Same difference.
The AppImage is provided by Morevna, an initiative for producing animation using open source software.
I’m starting to like the FlatAppSnaps.
- AppImages are probably the most self contained of all the app containers. That’s a weird sentence.
- They’re just chroots which depend on almost nothing other than ability to run ELFs.

SkreensOS =’s Linux?
http://skreens.com/

Don’t know but I doubt it’s Win10.
One device to stream them all? One device to decode them? One device to connect them all and in pointlessness bind them?
At least we got something that’s better than Back to the future 2’s TVs
This device makes sense in the day and age of the Chromecast, Steam Link and OBS
This would make a wicked cheap video switcher for people doing shows on an incredibly small budget.

Tessellate! Tessellate!
https://blogs.igalia.com/itoral/2016/07/13/story-and-status-of-arb_gpu_shader_fp64-on-intel-gpus/

This is a bit of old news which is only now relevant to me.
This is about the fp64 shader and the vertex 64bit extensions for Gen7 Intel chips.
The only way this is relevant is because I’d like to have OpenGL 4.5 support on my new i3 4005U cheapo calculator.
And proper tessellation support also means better Vulkan support.
This is coming from Igalia, a private company completely unrelated to Intel
Which shows how little Intel actually cares about Linux in general.
I’d switch over to AMD without any thought if they were capable of designing good products.

If you’re gonna target snapchat users, making them look like hipster glasses actually demonstrates a good understanding of your audience.
Unfortunately, targeting the hipster crowd is going to drive everyone else away and without those, you can’t put these out there and break even.
- Not hipsters, teens.
I’m too old to even get what Snapchat is…

Slice of Pi

I don’t see how this destroy the Pi, this is just some clickbait title.
Small form factor x86 boards have existed for a while and this one happens to be a bit smaller than the previous ones but it’s still as expensive.
It’s $350 for the full package (with the most powerful board)
This is the second semester class, Missing the Point 102.
Can that stock passive Braswell Heatsink really keep it cool?

Feedback

Sink
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?yECZ9El

Pi-Hole 2
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?ZTBaL27