Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Shaky Cam

Lightworks 14 is out! Pitti leaves Canonical, ffmpeg gets stable, and Valet comes to Linux.

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

News

AMD Derp-Learning (thanks Orn)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3148693/hardware/amd-announces-radeon-ins

I’ll wait for actual real life benchmark to really tell if this beats a TitanX with CUDA
- I have no doubt they will, with OpenCL.
- But then we’re comparing apples to custard.
But this could be a good stepping stone for AMD to care about Linux a bit more
I’m pretty sure that the only screenshot they provided is from a machine running Linux

lowRISC
http://www.lowrisc.org/

The RISC architecture seems to be making a huge comeback lately, good thing it didn’t totally disappear when Apple ditched the PowerPC for Intel.
The first versions won’t have a GPU, I guess they’re trying to target embedded and IoT devices first.
Who remembers the old RISC tablets?
- Given that ARM chipsets are also RISC based, I’d say, yeah, I remember them pretty well
There’s probably a reason they never really took off and somehow I don’t see this “resurgence” as doing anything to change that.

LightWerks 14
http://www.provideocoalition.com/lightworks-14-new-features-interface/

Where is my source, Summer?
I’m glad this project is DEAD.
It’s not dead at all, it’s currently used in the industry
- Really?
Good to see there is finally a professional grade video editor on Linux
The new version installs without any issue and I haven’t come across bugs of any sort
It might take a few hours to get used to the software but that’s true with any professional software, it’s not something you can jump straight in and master in 5 minutes like, say, Openshot ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Thankfully there is “Sharky”, the Lightworks equivalent of Clippy, always there to give you tips (and by always there, it really is. I haven’t found a way to disable it)
There are so many creative programs getting huge upgrades lately: Blender, Krita, KDEnlive, Darktable…
Sadly, the area where Linux is lacking is with music software.
- What were you just saying about professional-grade stuff not being the easiest?
- Pucker up and learn Ardour (and JACK too, while you’re at it)
  - There was recently a thread on /r/linux about feedback on music software on Linux from a guy with years of experience, he was saying it was nightmarish and pretty much everyone agreed.
  - That said, there is also Bitwig Studio on Linux as a paid option and the free stuff is pretty powerful once it’s correctly set up.

Clean
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/12/free-space-ubuntu-cleaner-janitor-app

I was a bit keen on this since it would speed up removing old kernels.
Aaaaaand it froze.
I have a tip for removing old kernels: sudo apt autoremove
It’s basically a less powerful version of Bleachbit
Not really something I need to run but I can probably learn a thing or two from reading the source code, being a Python and Gtk project.
Why do people keep making stuff like this?
It’s not like Linux has big an issue with stray files like Windows, we don’t really need a CCleaner.

Snap this (Thanks Gnarlin)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-software/+bug/1581713

Breaking news! Software have bugs!
I thought it was more or less accepted that snap packages were not ready for prime time yet.
It doesn’t look like something really hard to fix, there will probably be a fix published soon.
Funny that they are still using the Ubuntu One logo for their single sign-on form.

Because valve
http://www.zdnet.com/article/alienware-exec-changes-to-windows-blunted-appeal-steam-machines/

This is 100% on VALVe.
I blame VR for this. The moment Valve started to focus on VR, they abandoned SteamOS, Steam machines and Linux in general.
I also blame CSGO knives, I always blame CSGO knives
But it’s good to see that Linux gaming is still growing, even without the help of Valve
This is on VALVe, not just because of the delay and the slump of support SteamOS has had past the first few versions.
The third-party Steam Machines were undercut by VALVe themselves and the Steam Link.
The Steam Link is a cheap, unified device which allows people to stream from their PC (regardless of OS) into their TV.
That is what a significant chunk of PC gamers wanted and VALVe themselves provided it.
While at the same time, the third party Steam Machines had enough variety for you to lose your dog in. So there goes the marketing plan for selling those to console players.
If you’ve ever had any interaction with someone who is thick in the head, like your average console player, the moment you start giving them multiple choices and what they perceive to be conflicting information, they will just retreat into their safe space and shout profanities at you.
But, everyone hated Steam (the client) itself when it was first introduced and I do believe in time people will see the benefits. Hell Microsoft and Sony did, hence the PS4 Pro and Project Scorpio.

Just the tip
https://laravel-news.com/valet-for-ubuntu-linux

Someone should tell them about this thing called Docker.
So if I get this right, it’s kinda like Docker but only for the Laravel framework, that’s a strange project…
That’s said, if for whatever reason I *had* to go back to PHP, I’d give Laravel a try. It seems to be made by somewhat sane people… compared to Symfony.
This isn’t for people who already use Linux.
This is a stepping block to ease the transition for developers who feel they’ve been slapped across the face by Apple and the new macbooks.
And it’s probably a very smart decision to support Ubuntu specifically, since Canonical is very clearly putting design above everything else in their Linux distro, not too dissimilar from what Apple’s been doing to BSD.
Which is probably why Unity is the mess that it is. It looks nice, but it barely works.

Stable
https://www.epifocal.net/blog/video-stabilization-with-ffmpeg

It’s a neat trick, I wonder if Youtube uses this to stabilize videos
I had no idea that kind of feature was integrated into ffmpeg
- In the olden times, if you’d said something like this on the Fedora forums you would have gotten a RTFM.
Makes me wonder what kind of other hidden features they have
What about shakey audio?

Roccat Linux
https://sourceforge.net/p/roccat/support-requests/32/

This really pisses me off, I really hate to see the open source development model fail that bad.
All the comments are about being sad and not going to buy Roccat devices in the future.
Not one person, not a single one, to say “hey this project is already a huge knowledge base about Roccat devices, maybe adding support for future devices isn’t that hard, let’s try it!”
This is the kind of situation that makes me think that people do not deserve open source software, the vast majority acts like leeches.
I’m not saying that everyone should become a developer, that would lead to total chaos. But maybe 1% of the userbase for any given project? Is that too much to ask?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: no contribution is too small, show some interest, show that you care, don’t just let die a project because its only developer has other life plans.
This sucks. I bought my Roccat Kova[+] specifically because this project existed.
I even provided several bug and missing functionality reports which Stefan added very promptly.
I’ve tried to reach out to see if I could learn more as to why this happened so if he replies we’ll have an update, next week.
But it’s probably safe to assume this is just another case of a developer getting burnt out on a project which no else really helps him with.
This is why I don’t buy fancy gerbils.
Also, anyone else getting invalid SSL cert from sourceforge?

Apt remove pitti
http://www.piware.de/2016/12/last-day-at-canonical/

Anyone who has followed the development of Ubuntu knows about Martin Pitt
He was part of the original gang, when it’s wasn’t even named Ubuntu!
He’s the main maintainer for PyGObject and and lately has been focusing on testing tools such as autopilot and autopkgtest. With these tools, he has contributed a lot to the quality of the distribution
Now he’s leaving for Red Hat, which makes me think that his contributions will reach a wider audience since his previous work was closely related to Ubuntu.
I do hope that he gets to work on Gtk more which would make sense since Gnome is more or less a Red Hat project.

Slice of Pi

64
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/slack-commodore-64/