Old Skype lives! XFCE4 gets a makeover, Humble releases an amazing bundle, and Munich ditches Linux?
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Notes:
Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan
News
GPD
https://liliputing.com/2017/02/gpd-pocket-7-inch-laptop-crowfunding-campaign-starts-feb-15th.html
- The price of this machine is an absolute joke. This has an Atom processor, I wouldn’t put more than $200 for what it is.
- That’s way too expensive. Which is also the reason those VAIOs never really sold all that much to start with.
- It has active cooling, wow.
- It’s basically my $50 Winbook /w 4GB or RAM and a keyboard.
AppStore
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/appcenter-the-pay-what-you-want-app-store#/
- This is a brilliant idea that bring something really missing in the open source community
- It’s from the Elementary team so you know it will be done well, they are part of the very few teams that give a close attention to details and design
- I hope this platform will grow outside of ElementaryOS, it’s needed everywhere!
- Ubuntu already has an app store.
Ryzen
http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-full-lineup-pricing-clock-speeds-leaked/
http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-1700x-389-8-core-cpu-benchmarks-leaked/
- In most of the leaked tests, keeping in mind these aren’t game benchmarks, the 1700X (8c/16t) at 3.4GHz is outperforming the 6900K and the 5960X.
- In the single-threaded tests, the i7 7700K mops the floor with everything else, seeing as it has a 4.2GHz clock speed.
- I did some maths on the side and if we are talking 1:1 scaling in clock speeds, which is never the case, the 1700X would be slightly faster at 4.2GHz than the 7700K in single-threaded tasks, read games.
- This isn’t exactly destroying Intel’s performance but, if the final round of official benchmarks from most outlets confirm this, this is going to force team blue to revise their pricing.
- There’s still plenty of time, from now to “early March”, for AMD to screw this up, though.
- I wonder what’s the performance on Linux specifically
- And yes, I’m referring to gaming, not video encoding or 3D rendering
- Lucky me, I don’t have to change my CPU until 2020 and I’ll get something much better (pretty sure it will be an Intel)
- I’m looking at you, AMD Ryzen 5 1500.
Humble Freedom
https://www.humblebundle.com/freedom
- That has to be one of the best bundle ever released, if not the best
- …if you don’t already have most of the games.
- And it’s for a very good cause
- I’m finding it very hard to drop €28 to help the US get out of the stupid-hole they dug themselves into.
- You do get the sliders to decide where your money goes.
- Unfortunately I (like most of you) already own most of the games.
XFCE
https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2017/02/13/releases-releases-releases/
- STAHP!
- Keep XFCE fulgy!
- Saying that you know a thing or two about making a desktop ugly would be quite an understatement!
- You could even consider making a /r/unixgore subreddit!
- Things are shaping up quite nicely, it’s not up to the level of Elementary or Solus design wise but it’s still looking pretty good!
Still kicking
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/skype-for-linux-keep-working-email-error
- My bet is that oldSkype will stop working one day, not because of Microsoft but because it’s so old that it won’t work on future linux distros.
- The only things it depends on, outside of the usual stuff, are QT4 and libssl1.0.0
- Short of a distro not including those in the repo – *cough*Solus*cough* – it’ll work fine for as long as Microsoft feels like it.
- Oh, they planned on killing it next month.
- They just were not prepared for the backlash.
- Didn’t want to tell Win/MAC users the service would still be running but they can’t use it.
For no apparent reason
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-pioneer-munich-poised-to-ditch-open-source-and-return-to-windows/
- Looks like a bunch of old people having a tantrum because Linux is different
- Still, I can’t blame them. When they say they have issues with Linux, I believe them. Most Linux systems wouldn’t pass a basic QA test.
- The issues are because the previous administration is gone and so was most of the support for LiMux.
- Imagine having to use Ubuntu 12.04 now and being told the only choice is to either keep using it or move to Windows.
- Yes, most of us Linux users think that it is the best OS ever, probably because it is. But do gain real marketshare, it needs to do a lot better. There’s still a lot of work to do.
- This comes in the heels of a previous story late last year where a Microsoft affiliated consulting company recommended the, self-proclaimed “Microsoft fan”, mayor move the infrastructure back to Windows.
Flat Video
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/releases/tag/0.8.3
- Allowing flatpak’ed applications to access the NVidia drivers could be a way of providing video games instead of relying on the Steam Runtime.
- Of course, this is breaking containerization a bit for the sake of letting applications work with the drivers.
- So even if the sandbox holds up everywhere else, any malicious exploits coming from a compromised flatpak could use the graphics drivers as a means of escaping the sandbox.
Rebort
https://github.com/marcan/takeover.sh
- In the world of “That’s neat but why?”
Slice of Pi
Gaming Pi
https://www.linuxforum.com/threads/recalboxos-raspberry-pi-gaming-system.3716/
- Libretro emulation + Kodi? Yes! I’m sold!
- The only complaint I have about this is that it’s running EmulationStation instead of Retroarch but that’s very minor detail.
Snap story of the week
https://fossbytes.com/dragonboard-820c-worlds-first-computer-based-snapdragon-820/
- This is probably the most powerful mini-computer soon to hit the market
- Even better than the Asus Tinker board we covered in the past
- No price announced yet but I don’t think it will be cheap
- Sadly there is no official Linux support
Feedback
14.04
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?GxErhpIhttp://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?GxErhpI
- If it works then it’s not wrong
- That said, I wonder about would be the performance difference between the old school fglrx and Mesa 17
- You know what? Just find out for yourself! Install 16.04 on a USB drive and see if you take a big performance hit!
