Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Stretching Debian

OpenSUSE makes XFCE pretty, Vivaldi gets personal, WPS Office returns from the dead, and Ubuntu for mobile receives a post mortem.

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

Nine
https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20170617

“Administrators and those in security-sensitive environments can be comforted in the knowledge that the X display system no longer requires “root” privileges to run.”
- Why was this still a thing?
4.9 Kernel, Firefox ESR 45.9, Chromium 59, KDE 5.8 LTS, Mate 1.16, XFCE 4.12.
Basically, this is the one moment in time Debian stable’s life it isn’t as stale as we often imply.
Iceweasel and Icedove will be replaced by Firefox and Thunderbird.
The Debian live images now include support for UEFI booting.
Debian can now be installed in 75 languages.

WPS Who Cares
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/06/wps-office-2016-for-linux-update

After asking around people seemed to be split between “I thought that was canceled” and “what’s that?”
It tweeted that the project was going open source and deleted them followed by blaming blogs and news-sites for spreading fake news.
Short story long: If you are using WPS Office, STOP.

Vivaldi
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-powers-up-the-start-page-and-adds-docked-dev-tools/

XFCE
https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/mouses-chameleons-polishing-xfce-desktop-opensuse/

You silly silly people.
The appeal of XFCE is having a blank slate that you can customize.
Admittedly, they give some good tips for people who want to start futzing with XFCE.
Whisker is in fact a much better menu than the default one, if for no other reason than it has a search box.
I personally wouldn’t bind the menu to the Windows/Mod4/Super key. If you want to use it for other key combos, the menu will always open whether or not you want it to.
The suggestion about Thunar and other archive managers is also good, if for some reason you don’t want to use File Roller.
Instead of janking up XFCE just install Mate.

Make WTF config
https://menuconfig.org/

Ever been so board that you
I didn’t actually go all the way with this, does it just download a bz2 with all the configs you set up?
This weeks challenge is figuring out a use-case for this critter.

Backups
https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/06/web-host-agrees-to-pay-1m-after-its-hit-by-linux-targeting-ransomware/

Wonder what was cheaper, the 1M or having a functional and tested backup solution.
“Windfall payment by poorly secured host is likely to inspire new ransomware attacks.”
- I honestly doubt they will be very successful. Unless there are more people running servers from 2008 completely unpatched.
At that point, they probably deserve it.
Kida wish this host stayed down since there is no telling how many boxes were compromised… and probably still are.

Ring ring
http://www.lieberbiber.de/2017/06/20/my-ubuntu-for-mobile-devices-post-mortem/

2. The user experience was bad and priorities skewed.
- It was running Unity, that much was implied.
6. The life of an app developer was too hard.
- This will kill app development in your platform and without apps, that platform dead on arrival.
He also mentions creating an entirely new graphical server which no one else wanted to use, which if I remember correctly Canonical’s response to that, when everyone told them as much, was to put their fingers in their ears and go NANaNANANA!
I’m going to kinda miss Ubuntu doing wacky bizarre things that have a less than 1% chance of succeeding.
Not even MS could buy their way into the mobile market.