Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Born In The Windows

Zen numbers leak! Darktable prepares for a major release, Kdenlive squishes bugs, and Debian merges all the things.

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

News

Darktable 2.2.0
http://www.darktable.org/2016/11/darktable-2-2-0rc1-released/

I gave up after installing the fourth dependency.
- Reading the wiki page about compilation is kinda boring, isn’t it?
Had to replace libtiff4 by libtiff5 on Ubuntu 16.10 but other than that, it’s really simple to install (and it’s fast too!)
Never used the program before but it’s quite straightforward and produces good results
The Phoronix benchmark on OpenCL with Darktable are very interesting, they show that AMD GPUs can actually be good for something.

Chromebook
http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/24/pinebook-arm-linux-laptop-powered-by-allwinner-a64-processor-to-sell-for-89-and-up/

That will work just fine as a laptop replacement until I get one with a Baby Kale CPU
You can get notified by email when this goes on sale
Only 16GB of storage but there’s a SD card slot so that’s ok.
There’s no release date yet, I just hope it doesn’t take too long
If it was an actual Chromebook, that would be something to consider since you’d get all that PlayStore goodies.
And since Google has been very quiet about if the PlayStore will work with regular Linux using Chrome going forward, I don’t see it happening.
As it stands, you’re relying on ARM support for the user-grade software, which is to say not ideal!

Squish
https://kdenlive.org/2016/11/kdenlives-first-bug-squashing-day/

Version 16.08 was already very stable, I haven’t had a single crash while using it
Good thing that they are improving it even more.
We’ve waited long enough but at last, we have a good non linear video editor on Linux!

/Opt
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/24/debian_testing_merged_codeusrcode/

Freakin’ finally!
I can’t think of one single reason why anyone would want /usr on a separate partition in 2016
But I’m not entitled to have an opinion on that, I hate all types of disk partitions, if I could install several Linux distros on a single partition, that would make my day.
- Also, I’ve heard you defend Ubuntu’s decision to have 6 different lib folders.
  - I don’t defend it but it doesn’t bother me either

Silly ginger
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/11/28/mir-is-not-only-about-unity8/

This post raises more questions than it answers them
The only thing that is made clear is that programs such as screenkey will disappear
Also, any other program that register global hotkeys won’t work and I use xbindkeys!
- Everything you’ve taken for granted, like xset, xbindkeys, x<whatever> is going to go away.
The only thing I want is for Xmir (or Xwayland) to be able to do dynamic scaling with an option to preserve aspect ratio and prevent X applications to block alt-tab.
“While some see these as competing, there are a lot of areas where they have common interests”
- Yes, that’s what competition is. Two different people or companies targeting the exact same issue and each offering their own solution.
- Seeing as Mir has no support outside of Unity and Ubuntu, Wayland is already the better alternative.

Skeep update
https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/What-s-New-in-Skype-1-13-for-Linux-Alpha/td-p/4532982

It runs but still sounds infinitely worse than the 4+ year old client.
You can send SMS with that version but want they forgot to tell you is that you need to buy Skype credit to send them
The cost / SMS is 11¢ which seems a bit expensive

3.50
http://fudzilla.com/news/processors/42231-zen-pricing-document-shows-four-skus-under-500

I guess it’s good for people who value cores over GHz
I’m happy with just 4 cores (or 8 threads) and my 4.4Ghz CPU
Yes, according to Cinebench and doing some simple maths you would get basically the same performance as the 6950X if it only had 8 cores and ran at the same clocks speeds.
I’m guessing that could be call competitive if we had the hardware to back it up.
Unfortunately, we don’t and this is all pre-release speculation based on hyped up, cherry picked, investor appeasing performance numbers.
And AMD being AMD is doing what they always do, they’re riding the hype train and not doing a damn thing to prevent the inevitable disappointment which will come when the parts are out and people get to put them to the test in real world situations.
I don’t want to spend €500 or £500 to buy a hyper-threaded quad-core.
It’s great that AMD is finally releasing CPUs with proper IPC, it only took them 5 years.

Missing
http://www.datamation.com/open-source/missing-linux-components-possible-fixes.html

I have a GUI Firewall… it’s called a router.
Why do people keep comparing Linux to Windows?
Linux works like Linux, Windows works like Windows, and OSX… well, yeah.
The abandonware aspect is one of the greatest failures of Open Source. Once a program stops receiving updates from its original team then it rarely gets picked up by new people. That’s really a shame since it’s one of the powers that open source gives you. Oh, and there’s no need to fork and rename the project unless you do it to satisfy your big fat ego.
The second point, about different software versions can be mostly solved by not running an outdated Linux distro. I’ve run non-LTS Ubuntu for years without any issue (and it’s also the reason why I avoid Debian Stable at all cost). It’s far easier to run old software on newer distros than doing the opposite
No Venn, I don’t care about AWS and I’m not finished yet.
The third point about UI hiccups boils down to two things: lack of maintainers in themes and extensions and plain nonsense. A Gnome desktop that is correctly configured will display Qt apps just fine. I use Picard and KDenlive on Gnome and they look fine.
The firewall paragraph is really missing the point hard. The only thing missing in Linux is an application firewall. Build a GUI for iptables and no one will want it, as Venn said, people use routers now. Application firewalls on the other hand would be much more appreciated. I found the Douane firewall which seems to go in the right direction: http://douaneapp.com/ Again, there is a lack of maintainers for this project to make it widely available.
The Samba paragraph is kinda misleading (when I read networking, I don’t think about Samba). This is also due to a lack of maintainers (and a lack of people who care about this issue).
So pretty much all of these issues have a point in common: a lack of developers and maintainers. And this is not going to get better because most people are too lazy to get their hands dirty (or, for some reason, think that they are unable to contribute anything which is basically an excuse to stay lazy).
This all boils down to the old trite argument of fragmentation vs freedom of choice.
Matt is arguing that it’s fragmentation and to some degree Strider is arguing the same point but coming from a different PoV.
Fact of the matter is, there are a lot of small teams working in different projects which provide similar functionality; in an ideal world all these people would come together and make something awesome, but this isn’t an ideal world.
- The fact is I have no problem with fragmentation and diversity, I just wish more people went from doing nothing to doing something.
And no matter how much I personally agree with the UI flustercuck points Matt’s raised, I would rather get shot again than have to use GNOME3 for longer than 30 minutes.

Ubuntu AWS (thanks Orn)
http://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/11/28/canonical-and-aws-partner-to-deliver-world-class-support-in-the-cloud

AWS is a service for companies that can afford it. It’s a spit in the face of regular people who wish to build products. I’ll stop here if we want to stay a kid friendly show.
This is Canonical finding a way to cozy up to Amazon after the the Unity Lenses flopped harder than Adam Sandler movies after Little Nicky.

HWE can upgrade
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/RollingLTSEnablementStack

Or you can use the mainline Kernel PPA (which isn’t a PPA), that’s probably more updated and it doesn’t require you to stay on a LTS version.
Introducing rolling kernels to an LTS has a couple of advantages, mostly hardware support and to a lesser extent better performance for people using the open sauce drivers (be it Intel or AMD).

Slice of Pi

80s
http://hackaday.com/2016/11/26/the-most-flexible-synthesizer-is-diy-raspberry-pi/