LWDW 139: R.I.P G+

Google kills the Plus, ​Microsoft open-sources its patent portfolio, Firefox on Wayland adds support for PipeWire and Albert is the neatest launcher, ever.

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill

RIP G+

  • And there goes the one social network I didn’t hate.
  • Ah, the classic nuke it from orbit approach.
  • A lot of people use G+ because the average person is unaware of its existence.
  • BTW, if you have a Google account you have/had a G+ account.
  • Considering they have done nothing but strip it for parts I’m surprised it took this long.
  • Guess you will just have to join https://mast.linuxgamecast.com
  • You can blame Cybik for it.
  • First Google kills Google Wave and now they kill G+ :-(
  • It is the best social network where all us nerds and techs hang out.  
  • The posts can be long format, thoughtful discussions occur, and the picture sharing is wonderful.
  • G+ will become an enterprise communications tool, and we know that Googlers use it as their in-house communication platform.
  • It will become like Microsoft’s Yammer.

 

Audacity 2.3.0

  • Over 90 bugs that were in 2.2.2 fixed.
  • Play-at-speed now can be adjusted whilst playing.
  • Toolbars controlling volume and speed can now be resized for greater precision.
  • Improved saving of projects with “Save Lossless Copy of Project” option which allows you to make a backup of the project while you are working on it.
    • Unlike “Save As…” which closes the project you are working on.

 

Albert

  • One launcher to rule them all.
  • I started building it from sauce and realized it was already in the Solus repos.
  • Holy cow! How did I not know about this launcher?
  • Albert can even launch a VM, search wikipedia, run google translate and search the internet!
  • Awesome!  And you can even logout or shutdown your system.
  • Wimp has an older PPA and I can’t be arsed to build it.  

 

Cosmic Release

  • Features GNOME 3.30 as the default desktop which includes patches fixing memory garbage collection and it uses fewer system resources.
  • Faster installs and 10% faster booting with new compression algorithms developed by Facebook, called Zstandard and LZ4.
  • I love the new default wallpaper featuring the Cuttlefish mascot.
  • I’m glad they’re taking clues from Fedora and improving battery life on laptops.
  • It’s possibly also a good idea since both these distros now ship GNOME 3 out of the box and Fedora has been doing that for a lot longer.

 

Speed up the Buntu

  • Reduce boot time by altering grub configuration from 10 seconds to 2 or 0.
  • Been using a lot of these tricks for years, but the best one is to use a much lighter desktop like XFCE or Fluxbox.
  • Replace spinning rust drives with SSDs or NVMe drives.
    • A whole lot of this.
    • You can get a fast SSD for $40 in 2018.
    • That will be the biggest, most noticeable improvement in terms of desktop speed.
  • Using fast apt and setting your mirrors is also highly recommended.
  • Preload is mostly a matter of use case.
  • For me it’s never really done anything to speed up my use case.

 

Wayland and Firefox

  • WebRTC on Wayland with Foxfire using PipeWire.
  • HiDPi and Vsync, it’s like we’re living in the future!

 

Affordable Power 9?

  • In May we talked about Raptor Computing Systems releasing the Talos™ II Lite workstation for the lowest price you can buy an IBM Power9 RISC workstation under $15,000.
  • Now the low cost and low powered Power9 Blackbird MicroATX motherboard will soon be available!
  • Both of Raptor Computing Systems previous Power9 motherboards have been server sized ExtendedATX boards costing $1,099.99 and more.
  • I am curious, but the price tag will dictate just how curious!
  • If they can ship a bare-bones system for under 1K they might have something.

 

Google Slate

  • The Pixel Slate has high end specs and an x86 CPU ranging from an 8th Gen Celeron to a CoreTM i5 or i7, 4GB to 16GB of RAM and 32GB to 256GB SSD.
  • Price ranging from $599-$1599.
  • Google seems to have done a good job of converting Chrome OS from tablet mode to laptop mode when detaching and attaching the keyboard.
  • No 3.5 inch audio port, but an adapter is in the box.
  • This things starts @ $599 PLUS whatever you are willing to spend on a keyboard.
  • Mark, my, words, you will need a keyboard for Chrome OS.
  • Also, X86? Really?
  • It’s a Chrome Surface!
  • I like the 3:2 aspect ratio.
  • But I do not like the price.

 

MS Linux

  • As much as I dislike MS, can’t find anything wrong with this.
  • Submit one pull request to any Microsoft open source project and get a Hacktoberfest shirt.
  • In contrast to the 5 pull requests needed for all the other open source projects on GitHub to receive a Hacktoberfest T-shirt that we talked about two weeks ago.
  • That’s one way to keep the numbers up for Github, get that Microsoft Money going.

 

Ms Patents

  • Huh, guess I need to schedule a snowball fight.
  • RIP Pedro’s favourite Android whipping boy.
  • Microsoft is bringing 60,000 patents to OIN.
  • Skype, open source Skype.  
  • I… I didn’t see that happening any time soon.
  • So, what exactly is in the other shoe and what happens it drops?
  • Now the real question is after this, what will MS have to do to earn our trust?

Slice of Pi

A Posh Enclosure for your RasPi

  • The Argon ONE case is an aluminium-alloy case that is sleek looking, has a small footprint, easy access to GPIO, has good heat dissipation, great cable management,  and a proper shutdown button!
  • A Raspberry Pi case with all the bells and whistles akin to it’s larger computer case brethren of a microATX or ATX computer.
  • Only $20.00.
  • All its missing are the RGB LEDS which you can case mod later ;-D

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