LWDW 140: Kiss Of A GNOME

KDE celebrates its 22nd anniversary, GNOME bids application menus farewell and PLEX goes Snap.

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill

KISS of a GNOME

  • Not even remotely shocked.
  • Application menus go back to where they should have never left from.
  • I agree with mikeg in shatrealm, “Some apps used it, many did not.  Keeps me from searching needlessly.”
  • The global menu on OSX is annoying but at least I can kinda see how it makes sense.
  • This, this never made any sense.
  • Can we get rid of the hamburger menu?
  • Those are designed for mobile (touch) and simply do not belong on the desktop.

 

KDE Trivia

  • 22 years ago the KDE, or Kool Desktop Environment was born!
  • Matthias Ettrich KDE’s creator was not quite happy with the look and feel of CDE, or the Common Desktop Environment,  KDE is a pun on CDE.
  • In December 2014 the now popular educational software GCompris joined the KDE Incubator project.
  • I first enjoyed KDE as the default desktop of the Knoppix Live CD.
  • My favorite KDE apps:  Kdenlive, Krita, K3b, QtParted . . . and, yes I have always liked the file manager and web browser Konqueror, and thought it brought a fresh and unique approach to file management and web browsing.  And WebKit to boot!
  • It’s hard to believe KDE was designed as a better CDE.
  • I remember downloading KDE @ Uni back in 98 and going through the elaborate process of getting permission to use the CD burner.
  • Qt not being completely free was a weekly dabte on Slashdot back in the day.

 

XFCE4 Screensaver

  • If the point is simplicity, why not take the Cinnamon approach and just have a muted, darkened version of the wallpaper with the clock on it?
  • Xscreensaver support is all well and good but current LCDs can take a bit more punishment and if you’re not actively using them, let them time out.
  • Looking forward to using Xscreensaver with proper integration with Xfce4, Xfce libraries and Xfconf configuration backend.
  • Completely agree with Pedro, the Cinnamon implementation of a screen saver is really one of the most elegant of any window manager.
  • Neat, but ultimately useless.
  • Modern screens (those made in the last decade) do not suffer from burn-in.
  • Set your screens to power off instead of using a screensaver.
  • Both The ActivityPub protocol and

 

PLEX in a Snap

  • Because apt install plex was to hard?
  • Not quite sure I would want to use a Snap to run a server application.
  • “In adopting the universal Linux app packaging format”
    • Technically true is the best kind of true.
  • Free 30 day trial of Plex Pass: PLEXPASS-SNAP
  • On a side jag, PLEX you lot are borderline shady with getting people to create accounts.
  • The skip button that was roughly 0.5 a shade different vs the background, in mice type and hidden in a corner is GONE.
  • Now it’s behind a link that reads What’s this?”
  • Then I get another sales pitch informing me my life will be negatively impacted and WILL NOT BE SECURE #boogabooga if I do not create an account.
  • Then I get the option to Skip and accept “limited functionality” which is what 99% of users actually need and you know that… or you would not have spent time and energy hiding it.

 

RIP OpenID

  • With all the discussions recently of a decentralized Internet being the future, it seems this open source technology should be increasing, or maybe it will make a come back at a future time?
  • To be fair, with stuff like the Facebook leak and G+ shutting down, a lot of the services for which it would make sense are either dying or not a safe option.
  • OpenID is great but it needs those extra services.
  • OpenID never really gained mass adoption so it’s really no surprise it’s in little use.
  • There are alternatives to OpenID but like most of you at home I’m not one to use social logins in the first place.

 

GPD2 Pocket Script

  • Thank you to Martin Wimpress for this awesome script for Ubuntu to configure the monitor and touch screen rotation on the GPD Pocket 2.

 

Touch OTA 5

  • In August Ubports released Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 with Ubuntu 16.04, but it had to be manually updated, now many bugs have been fixed and the OTA-5 release with Ubuntu 16.04 is available with an automatic update!
  • This is the start of a regularly bi-monthly release cycle of updates.
  • Now includes the new Morph Browser based on QtWebEngine and a more recent Chromium engine base.
    • Uses Qt Automatic Scaling which allows the browser to adjust to any screen size and scales webpages properly.
    • And is a lot less buggy and faster than the older web browser.  That was one of my biggest complaints about Ubuntu Touch.

 

Calf

  • I know this is nothing new but I’m learning about digital mixing.
  • This is a gang of is available exclusively for LINUX-based operating systems and runs as a stand-alone effect rack connectable through Jack sound server or as plug-ins in every audio host that is able to fire up LV2 compliant devices,
  • e.g. the highly recommended Ardour Audio Workstation
  • Reverb, compressors, gates, synths and the like.
  • Wicked easy to build from source.
  • Also, typo on your webzone, compliant.

 

Encrypted Mail

  • Tutanota, the first encrypted email service with an app on F-Droid, is open source and an alternative to Gmail.
  • An easy to use encrypted email client without having to install OpenPGP, PGP, or GPG or paying for an expensive encryption email service.
  • ProtonMail and CounterMail are nice encrypted email alternatives also, but are not available on F-Droid.

 

30 years of IRC

  • Wow, I first used IRC on BBSes before the Web.  We used it to communicate and share the warez . . .  
  • And then I found a little podcast called LinuxGameCast and started using it again!
  • I still don’t know how IRC works. 

 

MSFAT32

  • This is the extra bit I tacked on to the end of the story last week.

Slice of Pi

Pocket Pih

 

Frite Pi

  • Libre Computer’s $10 La Frite board offers a cheap alternative and better specs to the Raspberry Pi A+ and is available now to purchase on Kickstarter!
  • The La Frite is running on an S805X system on a chip that features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 at 1.2GHz and Arm Mali-450 GPU Cores.
  • The $10 option features 512MB of RAM and the $15 option features 1GB of RAM.
  • No Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support.

Feedback

ARM Mounted

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