Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Automatic Tea Bag

Ubuntu Phones Snap! Lumina brings the business, Inkscape 0.92 gets released, and do we really need a 7 inch Linux touchscreen laptop?

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

News

To the surprise of noone.
I get why people want a device like this but sorry, Android won.
Current phones running Ubuntu Touch will only get an update if they can run a newer kernel, which is required to run snap packages
A lot of people misunderstood, thinking Ubuntu Phone was dead. It’s not, they’re only stopping their current packaging system (Click packages) to switch to snaps.
Distributing phone apps as Snap packages makes sense.
It’s not that far a stretch from Android’s APKs.
Shafting the early adopters, though, that’s not just burning away good faith from those people, it’s salting the very ground they walked on.

Inkscaped
https://inkscape.org/en/news/2017/01/04/inkscape-version-092-released/

Lumina
https://lumina-desktop.org/version-1-2-0-released/

VulGTKan
https://blog.gtk.org/2017/01/09/this-week-in-gtk-30/
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/commit/?id=f05f0377df567fc3d0211d4385b90dd1c951d9aa

It can be seen as the follow up to Clutter (which never really took off)
Having an hardware accelerated framework built on top of vulkan
Gsk is the technology under consideration for Lutris “Big picture mode”
I hope this technology gains traction, it’s time we got some application with rich interfaces.
Good! Vulkan support for base desktop rendering and/or compositing is something I’ve been very much looking forward to.
Hopefully the GTK 3 version of MATE will also provide Vulkan rendering in the not too distant future and we’ll have a proper desktop to run it with.
I’d ask KDE to do it too, but knowing them they would just break everything again.

Cool to see the language used outside of Mozilla
No need to apologize, it’s the distribution’s job to provide toolchains for current languages
Could this be the beginning of Gnome moving away from Vala in favor of Rust?

GPD Pocket
https://liliputing.com/2017/01/gpd-pocket-will-7-inch-touchscreen-laptop-windows-ubuntu-support.html

Didn’t we already try this?
IndieGoGo, where crowdfunding goes to not require a working prototype.
The touchscreen kinda makes up for that awkward trackpoint
Oh, it will be crowdfunded… well, too bad. This would have been a neat little device.

Targeted at Chinese Android users. I can see that working, for some reason I imagine they are big consumers of APKs downloaded outside the Play Store.
The hack is nothing fancy, it’s based on the assumption that people don’t change the password for their router, which is generally true.

The good kind of DRM (I vote to remove this one too)
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2017-January/128775.html

The current target is currently the Raspberry Pi
This is a good thing for a few reason. On embedded devices this will allow for more exotic displays without having to merge every single driver in the kernel
And it if catches on, we will finally have proper support for Plymouth or the framebuffer in the Nvidia driver which never happened before because the driver is closed source.

Grumpy
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/01/grumpy-go-running-python.html

It’s a transpiler from Python to Go
It addresses Python’s biggest flaw: lack of good concurrency due to the Global Interpreter Lock.
But for reasons easily understandable, it only a drop in replacement for pure Python packages. Packages written in C won’t be usable in such a scenario.
But on the other hand, you can directly use Go modules in your Grumpy code!
With Google behind the project and more specifically Youtube, I can see the technology gaining some traction in the next few years.
That’s if Google doesn’t get bored and switches to something totally different.

Linux After Dark
http://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-episode-01/

Finally, new Linux content… not from us.
“Expect drinking, swearing, strong opinions… ” ok, you got my attention
“and Ikey being told to shut up about Solus.” wait… is that even possible?
First episode was as you’d expect a bit like treading on eggshells, but if they keep it up it’ll definitely become entertaining.
There was a disturbing amount amount of content and not enough tangents for what I’m used to! Though that may not be a bad thing, considering some of the “content” Venn, Jordan and I craft on Saturday.

Pats