LWDW 131: Dropping Dropbox

Blender releases a standalone benchmarking tool, Blackmagic announces DaVinci Resolve 15, Solus celebrates summer and Dropbox goes Ext4 only.

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill

Now with audio
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20180813-01

Decided to check on a whim and yes, audio now works for everyone.
Everyone /w a NVIDIA card.
Blackmagic Design has integrating all their software into one application.
DaVinci Resolve 15 Studio not only does video and audio editing and color correction, but motion graphics, 3D compositing and visual effects, and can do multi user collaboration.
This is exactly what users have wanted for years who use the Adobe Creative Suite, and gets rid of the complexities and technical issues importing from separate programs, such as from Adobe After Effects to Adobe Premiere.
Also, supports online as well as offline editing.
DaVinci Resolve 15 is free, but the full-featured DaVinci Studio is only $299. Take that Adobe.
It works (and works well) as long as you convert everything to pro-res.
I’m going to be playing around with some of the post prod audio tools.
The free version of DaVinci Resolve 15 can be used for professional work and has more features than virtually every other paid application for post production.
No annual subscription fees or requirements for online connectivity once its been activated.
If you are on a *.deb system use this.

Open Source Hollywood!
https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/academy-software-foundation-open-source-1202901261/
https://www.fxguide.com/featured/open-source-academy-software-foundation/

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — best known for ‘The Oscars’ award ceremony — has teamed up with The Linux Foundation to launch the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF).
ASWFs goal is to promote, advance and advocate for the use of open source software in the film, television and gaming industry.
- That includes helping media companies use the correct open source licenses.
This is huge! For years, the film industry has been dominated by and using open source software and Linux, and finally the likes of Variety magazine are talking about it!
All the major studios–Disney, Pixar, ILM, Weta Digital, DreamWorks, Epic Games are all part of the Academy and have developed open source animation tools.
- Disney, for example, not only develops open source plugins for proprietary software such as for Maya on Linux, but also for the open source Blender. And they have even released their own Linux animation software that they used for their movies, such as for Finding Dory etc.
And, since the mid 1990’s all rendering has been done on Linux servers, which was a shift away from very expensive Unix servers.
And now content creation is being done on Linux.
Having worked in the television, film and gaming industry, and for many of the studios, I am very excited about this collaboration between the industry and The Linux Foundation because it will help innovate progress in the right direction. It’s about time!
If we start seeing more of this, I might just end up going to movies more often.

Blender introduces benchmark (RTheren)
https://www.blender.org/news/introducing-blender-benchmark/

Works.
Epyc is winning in the multithread CPU tests, much to the surprise of no one.
NVidia is winning in the GPU compute tests with CUDA, again to the surprise of no one.
I like the fact that the benchmark is an easy to use standalone app, and includes a copy of Blender in the Tar archive.
You can’t do that with proprietary animation software!
I ran both the GPU compute and CPU benchmarks on several of my render workstations.
The CUDA GPU and OpenCL GPU benchmarks were amazing!
My AMD FirePro W9100 render card from 2014 stomped my GTX 1060!
Now to test one of my newer Nvidia Quadro cards . . .

Is our penguins learning
https://liliputing.com/2018/08/educational-linux-distribution-edubuntu-has-been-just-about-discontinued.html

Ubermix is a lightweight educational Linux distro aimed at older hardware that is the most used now and has taken the place of the heavier Edubuntu.
- http://www.ubermix.org
Ubermix is the Linux distro that Kids on Computers (KOC) is using to teach computers and linux to kids in developing countries. The LinuxChix LA volunteer a lot of time to KOC.
- https://www.kidsoncomputers.org
Antix is a lightweight Debian based distro for older hardware that is used a lot in education.
- https://antixlinux.com
And, of course, Raspbian for the Raspberry Pi is one of the best educational distros out there!
Devels were hoping that someone else might be willing to step up and take over leadership of the project, didn’t happen.
You can still download and use Edubuntu 14.04.5 today, but it’s based on a 4-year-old version of Ubuntu.
When Canonical pulls the plug on support for Ubuntu 14.04 in April, 2019 then the latest version of Edubuntu will also be unsupported.
Best educational distro on the market?
Arch for fun and Fedora for work.

Clean source
https://betanews.com/2018/08/09/free-open-source-vulnerability-checker/

Could be useful as a high level check for a system relying on stuff that’s already been put through the ringer.
But it is very high level and if you are serious about security, you’re gonna want a much deeper dive to your infrastructure.
Like the idea, but reminds me a little too much of running a virus checker on windows.

Solus updates
https://solus-project.com/2018/08/10/summertime-solus/

New tools for developers, including dependency hell ameliorator eopkg-deps and the tool which actually makes good use of this, Cuppa.
It keeps track of upstream projects and, with the help of eopkg-deps, ensures everything is kosher to pull the source and build the eopkg.
Improvements to Budgie, though my biggest complaint with it is still there.
Mutter is crap! Mutter makes KWin look like a good piece of kit by comparison.
And it is no small part to my dislike of GNOME3.
If you ever tried metacity compositing in GNOME2, mutter is it’s GNOME3 counterpart and arguably more pointless.
And in Budgie, with it’s GD/TK3 reliance, only supports mutter.
I hear that functionality may be a part of Budgie 11 but until then I’ll stick to flaky old KDE.
At least I can use Compton to work around the KWin crap.

Dropping Dropbox
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Syncing-and-uploads/Linux-Dropbox-client-warn-me-that-it-ll-stop-syncing-in-Nov-why/m-p/290065/highlight/true#M42255

This is bad for people or businesses using encrypted Ext4, or the widely used XFS file system in their workflow.
Most people are using the Ext4 file system in Linux, such as is the default in Ubuntu. So this won’t affect them.
You can always use the web client instead of the standalone app, but that isn’t as convenient for backing up large amounts of data.
If you’re going to be using the web client might as well move over to Gdrive.
There’s this portuguese ISP, MEO, that offers 5GB for free and you can use it with most Linux supported file systems.
Last time I tried, F2FS wasn’t working though.

Legacy podcasting
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/08/gnome-podcast-app

I haven’t used a desktop podcast client for half a decade.
Does this do something gpodder is incapable of?
I have this great podcasting app I use on the desktop for when I’m listening while doing other stuff, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s called VLC.
Podcasting listenership is increasing and it’s nice to see a new standalone app in this space.
I enjoy having a separate app for all my Linux podcast feeds because I listen to so many.
This is yet another way to listen to our LWDW/LGC RSS feeds!
It’s compatible with the iTunes podcast directory.

Steamy
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/08/linux-4-18-kernel-release-features

Initial support for the Intel/AMD hybrid Kaby Lake G GPU.
Continued work to get rid of the 32bit integer which will cause Y2K v2.0, in January 19th 2038.
Areola Controlla support for the mouse/keyboard inputs without Steam installed and battery reporting.
Linux 4.18 is the first upstream kernel to ship with complete support for the Raspberry Pi 3B and the 3B+.
Improved ARM laptop support.

Nope
https://www.xda-developers.com/chromebooks-chrome-os-windows-10-dual-boot-apple-boot-camp-campfire/

The real reason Pedro loves Chromebooks.
If this allows the running of a full distro similar to what bootcamp does for Windows in OSX, I say bring it!
I’ll even be able to run Vulkan stuff on the Chromebook, then.
Dual booting Windows 10 on a Chromebook? That just defeats the purpose.
Only buy ARM chromebooks, gotcha.
The “continue using their device safely beyond Google’s arbitrary 6.5-year EOL milestone” rings hollow.

Slice of Pi

TubePi
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/10-raspberry-pi-youtube/

Christopher Barnatt’s Explaining Computers is one of my favorite YouTube channels, and he has great instructional videos, especially for the newbie, for the RasPi, Linux and computers in general. I often have my Steve_Husband watch them to learn about Linux and computers.
I also love the Adafruit videos https://www.youtube.com/adafruit

NightPi
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero-night-vision-goggles/