LWDW 124: No Place Like /home

Ubuntu 18.04 metrics, PulseAudio Bluetooth improvements, Pwning Firefox and certified NUC’s. All this, plus your emails.

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News

Ubuntu Metrics
https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/06/22/a-first-look-at-desktop-metrics

53.8% nuke and pave:
- This percentage is probably high because of people coming back to Ubuntu because of Gnome now being the default WM.
- Virtual Machine installs.
- The 18.04.1 update release isn’t scheduled till July 26th.
It doesn’t surprise me that most Linux users in the survey use 4 Gigs of Ram, because of how memory efficient Linux is. And you would never see 1 GB of Ram with a modern Windows install.
- I think a lot of those 4GB installs are Butter Robots.
- E.g. I’m about to built a test NUC and it’s only getting the bare minimum needed to pass the butter.
2/3rds of all installs opted in.
I always disable the download of updates during the install but enable the media codecs.
1 CPU means actual CPU, not cores.
- In 2018, this seems like an odd decision.
Metrics are a wee off, there should be at least one entry showing 5 monitors.

NUC Certs
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/06/intels-7th-gen-nucs-are-now-ubuntu-certified

Canonical has made a certified Ubuntu 16.04 LTS image just for the 7th Gen Nuc.
That is a first, and will aid device manufacturer’s and their developers to a smoother path to the development and deployment of IoT devices.
Now we can put “Ubuntu Certified” case badges on our Nucs instead of “Windows Certified”!
For the mainstream, these are small form factor PC’s for driving a TV or monitor without the need for extra space.
For the “enthusiast”, these are toys and Linux is the perfect toy OS.
Just ask Google how their Linux based “toy” laptops are doing for them.

Pulse 12.0
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/12.0/

Walls of Fire
https://www.techradar.com/news/best-free-linux-firewall

Iptables for beginners.
If you have a raspi or something with dual NICs, ClearOS is a pretty good choice.
Even my limited experience with it, it let’s you do a lot of stuff without too big a hassle.
Didn’t know about IPFire
I have used IPFire on a RasPi, and is a great firewall distro for beginners, and has a nice web interface.
You can also get several of these distros, including IPFire and ClearOS pre installed on hardware blade servers and routers.
Smoothwall Express is best for compatibility with older hardware, and is what IPFire and IPCop are forked from.
I have used the powerful pfSense on my routers in recent years, but used to use DD-WRT (which is not mentioned in this article) on all my previous routers.
Alright, I gotta be that guy.
As someone who has been tinkering with firewalls (because Jötunheim) list fails without UFW.

Fire Pwned
https://www.troyhunt.com/were-baking-have-i-been-pwned-into-firefox-and-1password/

This is good for the oblivious people in your family.
Ask them that if they have to register a new account for a website, they do it through the Fox.
It’ll scream and bellow if they try to use a compromised password.
To have https://haveibeenpwned.com integrated as a password checker for 1Password and included in Firefox, goes a long way to making Firefox one of the most secure web browsers available. Mozilla’s dedication to security is top notch.
Ironically, my email address was pwned back in 2015 when Patreon got hacked! I had just created an account for Patreon to become an LGC Patron ;-D
I have used two factor auth whenever possible since, and change my passwords every 6 months.
Also, I still use an encrypted floppy disk to store my account usernames and passwords. Having lots of vintage computers makes this possible.
This new addition to Firefox might finally tip me over the edge to using a password manager.

Gitlab updates
https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/22/gitlab-11-0-released/

As we have talked about before, it is because of GitLab’s use of software containers, and now deploying them on Kubernetes, that AutoDevOp software testing and management can even exist.
- Auto DevOps covers the end-to-end lifecycle: Simply commit your code to GitLab, then Auto DevOps does the rest: building, testing, code quality scanning, security scanning, license scanning, packaging, performance testing, deploying, and monitoring your application.
GitLab is a great example of a company that is progressing Open Source software, during the midst of a great upheaval in the Open Source community.
GitLab’s move off Azure to Google cloud totally unrelated to Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition.
Nope, no sir! They just wanted some of that Kubernetes goodness.
Pssst! Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) went to general availability earlier in June.

Windows
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenuMigration

What’s with this sudden return to sanity?
- Ubuntu 18.04
Instead of putting it in a Hamburger Menu, lets just go back completely to using classic Gnome Application Menus please! Like almost every other WM, Mate and Xfce . . .
At least they realized nobody was adopting it and decided not to double down.

Facts
https://opensource.com/article/18/6/xfce-desktop

~~Developers~~ Stability ~~developers~~ stability ~~developers~~ stability!
Easily Configurable.
The display settings works great with multi-monitor and shares nicely with nvidia-settings manager.
Lightweight, RodentiaOS. Look and feel of Sun CDE.
Having something with a “traditional” desktop and with support for everything MATE can have, without as big a reliance on GTK3 is probably not a bad option for lower spec systems.
- 4.14 would like a word /w you.

Android Messages
https://github.com/chrisknepper/android-messages-desktop