Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Comrade FLOSS

Skype 1.10 Alpha enables video! Pierre-Loup teases a Linux VR demo, Ubuntu 16.10 ships with Unity 8, and in Soviet Russia open-source prefers you!

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

News

Unity 8 Desktop fallback
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/10/unity-8-desktop-session-ubuntu-1610

“Whether Unity 8 actually loads for you after you ‘log in’ will depend, largely, on which graphics card you have and which drivers you use with it. Unity 8 (or rather Mir, the display server that Unity 8 runs on) only plays nice with open-source Nvidia (nouveau) and open-source Intel GPU drivers.”
- Okay, so only people with NVidia Fermi GPUs and Intel Laptops can use it.
Remember during Debconf14, when asked about Wayland, John Vert from VALVe said that without any clear advantage to Wayland over X when it comes to games, they see no reason to support it.
What do you think will happen to Mir when you can’t even use the proprietary Nvidia drivers or ANY AMD drivers along with it?
- They work swimmingly with Wayland, right?
If people can’t play their games, they’re not going to use your little pet project.
sudo apt-get remove unity unity-2d unity-2d-panel unity-2d-spread unity-asset-pool unity-services unity-lens-files unity-lens-music unity-lens-applications gir1.2-unity-5.0 unity-common indicator-sound indicator-power indicator-appmenu libindicator7 indicator-application indicator-datetime indicator-messages libnux-2.0-0 nux-tools libunity-misc4 unity-2d-common
Or as I call it, Step 1.
It ships as a preview so no need for a PPA.
Ubuntu ships with Unity 8 is the equivalent of Fedora shiping with Wayland.
None of those are going to be a thing until widely supported by all drivers

Video skeep
https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/What-s-New-in-Skype-1-10-for-Linux-Alpha/td-p/4495850

MS finally figured out how to WebRTC, yo.
I’M KIDDING… it’s rubbish
Alright, brass tax.
Linux to Linux video works when it’s not busy buggin the heck out.
It seems to be 4:3 with a zoomed 16:9 when you double click the video.
Only sending +/- 300 up for both video and audio.
Audio is better than the last Skeep Alpha but horrid compared to the Desktop client.
Joining a conference call (don’t expect video) it cuts the already bad quality in half.
VIdeo looks considerably worse than Jitsi.
Aaand it’s more CPU intensive than Jitsi.
For a brand new Skype client, they are making progress quite fast
At this pace it may get to feature parity with the old Sky client soon
And let’s not forget the most important, its got a dancing penguin in the about dialog

4.8.1 kernel with CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY enabled by default
Libreoffice 5.2.2
Open-sauce radeon Vulkan driver
And a bunch of updates for the usual suspects
They now support LVM2 with full disk encryption, as well.
Nothing like a 16.3MB *.gif loading over a mobile connection.
teeworlds 0.6.3, FINALLY!
This distro has come out from nowhere in the past few months and it’s gaining popularity at an incredible pace.
That must be a side effect of proposing a new distro that isn’t an Ubuntu with a custom theme and also doing things the right way
I’m even convinced to install it on my laptop

Comrade FOSS
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-05/russia-weighs-replacing-ibm-microsoft-with-open-source-software

This is a politically charged article of which we’re only taking away the fact that, Russia is embracing open sauce.
That’s good! The UK is also moving towards that. Germany has already changed several municipal systems over to their own custom Linux distro.
This is progress and if progress means giving US corporations a kick in the nuts for years of malpractice, that’s just the cherry on top.
Pfffft! This should read “Russia bluffs so IBM/Oracle will give them a better deal”
Russia already runs on Open Sauce, I replaced Putin with a refurbished Pedro MKIII in February.
That answers more questions than it raises, doesn’t it.

“we’ve contributed support for generating Visual Studio C++ projects targeting Windows Store and Windows Phone”
- Why?
I can’t imagine those to be very popular regardless of Microsoft’s marketing machine.
Talk about deserving each other.
Wait… what’s wrong with CMake? Don’t tell me you prefer autoconf
That will improve build processes in cross platform projects and I’m all for that.
I always cringe a little when I see some Visual Studio stuff in my open source
Let it be all CMake and I’m happy with that

And what a lot of people asked when they made the announcement on the social networks was: “Will this do Vulkan benchmarking?”
To which the reply was “No, not at launch.”
Why is everyone so scared of pissing of Microsoft and showing the world that Vulkan is just as good, if not better than DX12?
- I doubt MS knows what a Unigine is.
- Kinda like game developers.
Admittedly, I don’t know for sure if this supports DX12 at all, either.
- But it wouldn’t really surprise me if it did.
I like the idea of having this on the Steams.
I’m not sure the lack of Vulkan is because it would make MS angry
Vulkan is very young and also very hard to master. Those things will take time.

Talking about Vulkan ✅
Talking about VR ✅
I can’t believe that Valve is caring about SteamOS again!
When this event is over, I’ll maybe have a bit more respect for Valve than I did last week
But they still enable gambling websites with their CSGO knives… you know who else does gambling stuff? Konami.

Speaking of
https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/786032888156295168

Slice of Pi

So as it turns out, some of the stuff used in the PIXEL DE for Raspbian isn’t exactly above board.
The background image for one, is only free for personal use.
Which means, you can’t preload raspbian with PIXEL on a Raspberry Pi and give it to a student.
You can’t redistribute it, at all.
Unless you’re doing promotional work for PIXEL, at which point reproduction (not redistribution) is acceptable.
That’s adorable, some people actually got scared of being sued over a wallpaper
And of course a fork ensued
That said, it wasn’t very clever from RaspberryPI to ship an open system with content having a restrictive license.

Feedback

Rang Rang
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?kSpYwvs

Skeep
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?9sDrG3I

Skeep 2
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?nm92TMS

First off, it’s FLOSS.
Going to tell that interviewer or Grandma to use Ring?
I only half joke since J-man straight up told an interviewer to get his keester on Jitsi.
Jitsi is actually a really nice option for everyone since it requires zero setup (unless you want to share your desktop)