Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Merry Birthday Vim

Vim turns 25! Ubuntu gets Budgie, Plasma goes mobile and we chat with Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen from the MetaBrainz Foundation.

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

News

25 VIM Street
https://opensource.com/life/16/11/happy-birthday-vim-25

There’s a good chance that I might still be using vim in 25 years.
Kinda disappointed that Vim 8.0 didn’t make it to Ubuntu 16.10, I blame Debian.
Even if I swear by it and is the software I spend most of my day in, it’s not something I would push people to use. But if you want to get into vim, that’s great! Be sure to read lots of different vim configs, that’s very helpful. You can read mine at github.com/strycore/dotfiles
I bet you there’s someone out there, which for 25 years, still hasn’t been able to quit out of VIM.
Gedit master race!
Remember kids, you can run vim natively inside emacs.
Wonder if it’s raptor-buss proof?
- If you’re asking this then you probably haven’t heard of neovim

RinGNU (Thanks eMpTy)
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-11/msg00001.html

Going GNU usually doesn’t mean a lot but it sure is better than going to the Apache foundation, where open source projects go to die.
GNU people usually don’t care a whole lot about good software, they care about their freedom. To me this doesn’t mean that Ring will get better, even I really want it to become a solid replacement to Skype (it has the potential to become that)
It’d be great if they managed to fix the tiny niggling issues with it and we could start using that instead of Skype.
- Allow more than one instance to run without any moon-magic.
  - Separate audio channels are best channels.
- Separate video windows.
- DON’T PUT POPUP OVERLAY CRAP WHEN MOUSING OVER SAID VIDEO WINDOWS.
- Proper echo cancellation.
- Let us nuke AGC from orbit!
  - This is 9000% possible on Chrome and Foxfire.
- If, if you sort this business podcasters will at least give ring a second look.
Then again, I can imagine working in the constraints of the Electron Framework is probably not an easy task.

It’s not that complicated: make a phone OS that can run both Android apps and Linux apps and then you have a chance of gaining a massive market share.
The Ubuntu phone was aiming for that in 2011ish, see where they are now.
Tbh, I don’t even see myself using regular Linux apps on a phone, ever. I like my Linux apps on a 27″ screen and a Cherry MX blue keyboard.
Sensationalist headline aside, Ubuntu phone, Firefox Mobile, SailfishOS and others have all fallen short of the mark.
Even iOS, which was the mobile market leader at the turn of the decade is now dwindling.
I’m all for competition, but how do you compete with Android?
If Plasma Mobile had full support for the Play store, assuming Google would be willing to play ball in that field to avoid the Monopoly lawsuit, it may have a chance.
Starting a new platform with no 3rd party support at the end of 2016 just feels like throwing money down the drain.
You know how usable VR is about a decade out?
Same goes for the mobile that turns into a full fledged PC.
Not saying that’s the aim of the project just the only actual need for it.

Ubuntu Nexus 7 laptop
https://hackaday.com/2016/11/05/turn-that-old-tablet-into-a-sub-100-linux-laptop/

PSA: you can get the keyboard case for $20 on Amazon instead of $80
I’ve already tried installing early builds of Ubuntu Touch on the Nexus 7 but never a regular Ubuntu desktop, might give it a try.
For some reason, what was a very reactive tablet in 2012 is now the most sluggish thing ever. I even downgraded the OS to it’s original version and it’s still damn slow.
Putting Ubuntu on that thing might be the right thing to do since Android is not possible on that tablet anymore.
The comment section on that article is filled with Netbook Nostalgiers.
I get the appeal of netbooks, especially the old ones which let you have a proper SSD or HDD, these new ones with the eMMC flash drives on the other hand just make me want to cry.
Install the Ubuntu image on a Nexus 7 and tape on a blueteeth keyboard, right.

Ubuntu Budgie
https://liliputing.com/2016/11/ubuntu-budgie-latest-official-flavor-ubuntu-linux.html

The only real complaint I have is that they made the default desktop look like default GNOME3.
- Unfortunately some people think the only way to change that is to install another distro.
- How is that a bad thing?
Budgie looks and behaves much more similarly to the typical desktop environment.
Right now, it doesn’t offer as much granular control like XFCE or KDE do, but the Solus team is working on making it modular.
Giving users that much more control over the DE while being able to maintain a solid basis and not relying as much on the GNOME development cycle.

The SUSE that should have been
https://geckolinux.github.io/

I’ve had so many problems with SUSE that it has now become one of my least favorite Linux distros
- Welcome to the club, we used to have cookies but we ran out long ago.
I like that Gecko focuses on “polish and out-of-the-box usability on the desktop” because it’s true that OpenSUSE is quite unpolished.
I usually don’t like distros that only provide a different choice of packages and settings than another base distro but SUSE needs to be fixed and Gecko does just that.
- That’s what goes through the mind of the people behind Mint and Elementary, nowadays.
- And there was definitely a point where those “Sanity spin” distros were necessary, nowadays with official Ubuntu flavors providing most of that on their own, they’re all a bit redundant. Not that any of the people involved will ever see that.
Doesn’t change the fact that if you install Tumbleweed (or Rolling as they call it with Gecko), you’re going to have a bad time. Please install the Static version.

Dual Udev
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/0/312265782625482896/

Don’t have a PS4 controller but yay, I guess?
Jordan mentioned in last weekend’s Linux Gamecast Weekly, that other show we do, that he couldn’t get the Dual Shock 4 to work with Steam and get all the nice configurability options.
So babby learned about udev rules?

GG NVIDIA
http://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/geforce-experience-telemetry-monitor-spying

Doesn’t affect us so hahahahahahahahahahahahah
- Xorg is bad enough a security hole as it is.
It’s amazing watching the NVIDIA fanbois explain how this is totes okay.
Yes, the same ones who would lose their collective shite if this was AMD.
This is about Windows, we cover Linux news ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Slice of Pi

Q3Chip
https://liliputing.com/2016/11/pocketchip-update-brings

One more reason to stop underestimating the power behind a 1Ghz processor
This might give me a legit reason to get one.
This is good in the sense they’re improving, but it also shines a very bad light on some of the things they were doing.
I’m almost willing to forgive the lack of proper hardware acceleration, that can be a sticky subject even in the most mainstream ARM boards like the Pi.
But how do you justify cutting the storage in half based on not having an MLC NAND driver and just going with the SLC driver, effectively kneecapping the system storage?
I genuinely want to know. If anyone from the PocketCHiP team is watching or listening, please send us some feedback.

Green
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/detecting-landmines-with-spinach/

What next? Stopping missiles with kale?
Plants nom the soil then shot with a “laser”.
A Pi then reads the light via infrared camera providing a map of landmine locations.
So, where exactly do you hide the shark?