LWDW: Firefox Is Back

Kernel 4.14 is out! Samsung demos Dex, Fedora opens the Pipe and Quantum has arrived. All this plus your emails.

Special thanks:
Yishan (new patreon)
Mlangston (new patreon)
Linuxgnuru (tablet stand)

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Colour key – Venn Pedro

News

You know what other operating system is vulnerable to having someone getting physical access to a machine?
All of them!
Not all of these 79 vulnerabilities have been reported, let alone patched.
Most are simple DoS (Denial of Service) bugs that freeze or restart the OS.
You know what prevents all of this? Glue.

AMD has a similarly terrifying thing living in it and many other architectures
I am curious to see what kind of tomfoolery can be achieved with a standard run of the mill intel processor after the internet at large grabs a hold of this.
What if we went through all this trouble and nothing malicious was found.

TLDNR: Electron is for the lazy.
It’s the lazy man’s framework. Baby’s first app maker.
There’s a reason most electron apps chug worse than a high school freshman at a frat party.
Electron is a lot like Virtual Programming’s eON, a crappy wrapper which its sole selling point is quickly dissipating.

Again, this will not become a “thing” until it’s 100% wireless.
I still support the one phone army knife concept of a single device.
While you’re walking about during the work day, it’s your phone.
You get home, you plug it into a dock with an external GPU enclosure, a few monitors and peripherals, boom! You got all your device needs in something which fits in your pocket.
This still isn’t it.

Ctrl+F ryzen
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/12/linux_4_14_released/

Installed it on the 17.10 box using mainline.
No issues and the NVIDIA binary blob worked OOTB.
Alright, one issue with the Steam controlla but it was a bit bizarre.
Memory limits have been increased to 128PiB of virtual address space and 4PiB of physical address space.
AMD Secure Memory Encryption support has been added.
Heterogeneous Memory Management has been added for GPUs.
There’s also lots of fixes for the recent crop of USB vulnerabilities that have turned up.
First to have a six-year support cycle.

With parts like the Centriq 2400 server system-on-a-chip (SoC) about to show up this comes as no surprise.
For the server space ARM just makes sense.
And servers mean RHEL… in any type of environment where people care more about getting stuff done than politics.

Let it go, let it go
http://www.openshotvideo.com/2017/11/openshot-241-released-improved-playback.html

Improved image quality and playback smoothness.
Yeah, at this point you would have to introduce something that would bring me back.
That, that ain’t going to do it.

Opera is still a thing
http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2017/11/opera-49-adds-snapshot-tool-editing-tools/

Opera 49 offers a snapshot tool with editing features, including a selfie camera.
VK Messenger joins built-in sidebar communicators.
Five new currencies for currency converter.
I noticed the other day I still have Opera installed in this box.

Quantum of browsers
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Seems about the same in Google Docs.
Good luck getting me back, and I mean that, no snark.
The style inspector feels a lot more like Chrome.
Google is now default for search.
Still runs like a dog on Android.
Remember when I said Firefox betas are always faster than the actual released version?
Well, someone better pick up that phone because I called it!

Fedora brings the Pipes
https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-27-workstation/

Something similar to Google Docs, but without any coordinating server.
Right now you can edit a text document but that’s about it.
It’s google docs without any other functionality than the multiple people editing it at once.

Slice of Pi

Super pip
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/piwheels/

Imagine a beowulf cluster
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12037/cheap-supercomputers-lanl-has-750node-raspberry-pi-development-clusters

Feedback

Room
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?4lH3uHl