LWDW 134: Pure Progress

Ubuntu needs help testing NVIDIA drivers, Chrome turns 10, Purism gets Chatty and Plasma powered Pinebooks are now a thing.

Special thanks to:
Romeo Sid Vicious (increased pledge)

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill

NVIDIA bits

This is to test the installation and the default working state of the NVidia drivers.
If you’d like to help test, please use a fresh install and follow the instructions.
They say it is valid for any of the official flavours, as long as you report the issues to the correct tracker.
This is a test to test both the proprietary NVidia drivers and the open source drivers, which could lead to huge improvements with both.
The open source NVidia drivers in Ubuntu in particular have been extremely lacking in performance compared to the AMD Mesa open source drivers.
“if they choose to use the proprietary or open source drivers”
- Funniest thing I read this week.
The program involves fresh installations of Ubuntu so you will need a spare partition.

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 3, is based on Debian 9 “Stretch” with the Cinnamon desktop.
Hasn’t been a major update since April 2015.
Features Linux kernel 4.9, a more polished software center, and all software has been updated.
And because LMDE is Debian based, there are both 32 bit and 64 bit versions available, which is wonderful for those of us who still have 32 bit hardware.
- Especially since other distros have abandoned 32 bit releases.
Cinnamon on the Linux Mint Debian Edition runs really smooth, even on older hardware.
This right here is a reason to use Mint if you are in the market for a Debian based OS that’s not Debian or Ubuntu.
They actually have a plan B in case Canonical goes full-artard.

I do want a Pinebook.
The idea of ARM laptops has certainly grown in the community and, if nothing else, the peer pressure is getting to me.
Though, I wouldn’t run KDE on it.
Seriously! What kind of drugs do you have to be on to think that’s a good idea?
Since KDE Plasma is enhanced to run on the Pinebook, maybe that means this version will run as well as the mobile version?
Powered by a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz
2 GB of RAM
16GB of eMMC storage (eww)
14″ TN LCD at 1366×768.
When Deimos and Hercules chips roll out I will look into ARM on desktop.
Don’t care how great the battery life is if it’s not in the business of giving the business.

It’s the first browser to become an OS.
- Although Linux Web Kiosk distros like Webconverger running Firefox where inspiration.
Chrome also popularised the WebKit engine, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.
Omnibox was a nice improvement.
Incognito was a damn FSM send to anyone doing web development.
The speed was real, Firefox had become a sluggish bloated mess by the time chrome was released.
It was difficult to scroll Myspace and Facepage on our single-core processors.
The each-tab-is-a-process approach was ahead of its time since sites today are basically mini application.

If there’s one thing I hate nowadays are the page blocking pop-ups for the GDPR evasion BS.
Tell you what, internet: If you didn’t have invasive cookies all over the damn place, you would need the stupid pop-up, would you?
Another forward thinking security feature in Firefox. First Firefox allowed you to block ads, then added password protection, and now cross-site tracking.
This will make pages load more than 50% faster.
A lot of companies, including Google make money off ads and tracking. Do we have them to blame for the state of toxic cookies on the internets?
In a study by Ghostery, 55.4% of the total time required to load an average website was spent loading third party trackers.
A new feature in Firefox Nightly that blocks trackers that slow down page loads.
If it performs well it will become default in FF63.
Router + hosts.deny, people.

Tracktion has supported Linux since V4 in 2013 and thanks to a post on Reddit I was reminded it was still around.
You can get T7 for free and it’s worth checking out if Ardour / Reaper both anger and confuse you.

Chatty is a decentralized open source communication app being developed for the Librem 5 Linux phone.
It was originally just going to be an SMS client.
But the developers realized it would be convenient and achievable to combine instant messaging via XMMP and the Matrix protocol as well as SMS.
- So, they reinvented Hangouts before Google killed the SMS functionality.
About that progress
- The Librem 5 has been delayed to April because reasons.

Slice of Pi

0 mobile

It’s an interesting proof of concept, just hard to imagine living in 2G land nowadays.

Now we know the face of the person chasing this particular unicorn.
Simon Long, software engineer responsible for the RasPi desktop, says that polishing the Linux desktop is the extra 10% that proprietary desktops don’t allow you to do.
Being able to customize your linux desktop is the beauty of Linux.

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