Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Open Shade

Vivaldi attacks Microsoft! ASUS releases a Pi competitor, WINE hits 2.0, and Dell talks Sputnik.

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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

News

DX12 ALL TEH THINGS!!1!
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2017/01/23/

They worded this post very carefully.
The source isn’t open, it’s public. The source isn’t open, it’s available.
It’s under the MIT license so yes, it fully qualifies as open source
It is yet to be proven if any of this will benefit anything other than DirectX. Personally, I don’t believe it will.
But eh, good for them. It’s a step in the right direction, I won’t complain.
HLSL is a shader language that’s been a part of the DirectX API since DirectX 9.
Clang was released under an open-source license in 2007

Dude
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/01/dell-talk-linux-laptops-distros-sales

Dell is doing the right thing by focusing on a single distribution.
If it works with one distribution, it works with all of them.
It’s also a smart move not to sell those in stores. Linux users are smart enough to order online while others… have no clue what an operating system is.
- Still, it would be nice to have a local place to get em fixed… or exchanged.
DELL has come a long way from the days of having to find an obscure page on their site that allowed you to buy a lappy without Windows.
“ initial investment of $40,000 it has returned, over the four years, tens of millions [of dollars].”
- ^ This is the biggest thing people need to keep in mind, especially other Hardware providers.

Pulse audio
http://www.almost-working.com/multiroom-synced-audio-using-openwrt-and-pulseaudio/

That’s a neat idea but at this stage it’s only some experimentation, the author even states that it “almost works”
And that neat idea is enabling multi room audio that stays in sync.
That and the requirement to use OpenWRT doesn’t make it very accessible for everyone.
- Yep, the type of people who will attempt something like this will be thrown by OpenWRT, yes sir.
Homebrew Sonos on a budget, kinda.
All you need to get started is $40 and a little patience.

Strider’s optimism knows no bounds
https://plus.google.com/+MathieuComandon/posts/K5j5odwTXdn
https://github.com/shellac-linux/tasks/issues/1

As usual there was a lot of misunderstanding regarding what I wrote
But it’s okay, I kinda expect that it takes a couple years for people to get where I’m getting at.
I just hope that people don’t expect that I will fix their Linux problems.
Just install XFCE4 and be done with it.
Strider was tired of all those distros and spins which could easily be replaced with an sh script, and being an unwavering idealist he decided to create a cross-distro standard to fix several different issues with desktop Linux.
He’s also looking to draft some of the big wig new distro head-honchos like Martin Wimpress and Ikey Doherty, from Ubuntu MATE and Solus respectively.

Tutorials
http://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/01/20/tutorials-ubuntu-com-goes-live/

There is currently only Snap related tutorials
“They are just like learning from pair programming“
- Really? Really?
- You secretly resent the other person? You fantasize about driving that smug superiority they’ve been giving you out of their skull with a certain body part?
You can use the tutorials offline thanks to the amazing snap technology.
Also, in the age of the ARCH!!1! Wiki this isn’t just redundant, it’s obsolete.

Hammertime
https://vivaldi.net/en-US/teamblog/220-it-s-time-to-do-the-right-thing-microsoft

Co-Founder/CEO of Vivaldi is a little upset at Microsoft being Microsoft.
Every time Windows 10 upgrades, it changes the default browser to Edge.
Why? Because Edge is that bad.
Chrome and Foxfire did this shite a while back.
Each time you opened one it would ask to be the default.
OMG a *third* story about microsoft‽
I don’t get it, Windows developers are usually all about the sneaky stuff. Why don’t the browser vendors write a daemon that reverts the default browser to the user’s choice?

WHINE
https://www.winehq.org/announce/2.0

Office 2013 being the highlight of this release is just so … sad
It’s an okay release, still a bit meh… but if you add Wine Staging then it suddenly becomes a totally awesome release!
I’m just glad that this release cycle is over, I’m expecting some really cool stuff in the near future and the 2.0 release was slowing down everything. For me, that’s the highlight of this release!
More Direct3D 10 and 11 features are implemented.
The WineD3D graphics card database recognizes more graphics cards.
I thought they were waiting for the Dx11 translation layer was finished for them to release 2.0
- The releases are time based now

Pepsi Challenge
https://plus.google.com/+MartinWimpress/posts/At8NTB16uiT

sudo apt remove ubuntu-mate-core
sudo apt-get autoremove
Guessing you might have picked up things didn’t go well.
For starters CRTL + ALT + t does not make /w the working on XFCE4.
But I did manage to add the ppa and install ubuntu-mate-core.
After a wicked-quick reboot I was met with a MATE background on my session manager.
…ick
I say ick because Mate was one of four DM’s installed and the only one that changed the background.
Anywho, I logged into the Mate and to its credit, it detected all three of my monitors.
However, it only displayed Desktop icons on my primary.
Kinda useless since I run separate X screens.
I could ignore this but Right Clicking the Desktop does not bring up an applications menu.
I was however able to add a launcher to each screen so I could theoretically live with Mate.
I know that doesn’t sound like a glowing endorsement but considering it’s coming from a XFCE zealot that’s pretty high praise.
Oh, I do have to say this.
I wanted to test gaming performance so I ran the Talos Vulkan bench using the latest NVIDIA drivers.
But it hard-noped the box of Business.
Not blaming Mate for that but full disclosure and all.
That’s the proof that you should just upgrade to 16.10.
Actually no, there are very high chances that this PPA will just work for you.
One thing I’ve noticed, full on DEs tend to not work as well when added to a system at a later date instead of the just installing the system with it.
It’s especially prevalent with KDE, but that’s neither here nor there.
The big thing is that MATE is now available with GTK3 for 16.04, something that if people wanted it before they’d have to pull a Strider and use a non-LTS version.

Slice of Pi

Just a taste
https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/23/asus-tinker-board/?sr_source=Facebook

Considering the specs I don’t find it overpriced.
- £55 is a fair price for the kit.
- 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 CPU
- 2GB LPDDR3 RAM
- Four USB 2.0 ports
- Gigabit LAN
- Bluetooth 4.0
- 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi antennas
- HDMI 2.0
Looks like the board can fit in standard RaspberryPi cases, that’s a nice move from Asus

Smart Pi
http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-is-bringing-ai-to-your-raspberry-pi/

And we just found a good use case for that Asus tinker board.
The kind of people who like tinkering /w Pi are usually the type that are fiercely protective of their privacy.

Feedback

Links…again
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?qHFpp1W