LWDW 143: Feed MACS

Red Hat is drops support for KDE, Mint gets a new layout, System76 shows off their woody and is our children hacking?

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Colour key – Venn Jordan Jill

System 7$

  • As we have talked about in the past, System76 CEO Carl Richell’s dream of open hardware and software has come to fruition, and now Thelio desktop computers can be ordered!
  • Open hardware with the exception of the CPU and GPU, of course.
  • Several years back System 76 brought the press in for a meeting to see what people thought of proposed unique design elements for their future computers, and wood and modern design were voted very highly.
  • I actually love the new case design with wood paneling in your choice of walnut or maple, and 60’s modern minimal design.
  • Also, this marks the first time that System 76 has produced such high end workstations.
    • Up to AMD Ryzen 7 or Intel Core i9 for the lower end Thelio.
    • Up to AMD Threadripper or Intel Core X series for the middle range Major.
    • And a 2× Intel® Xeon Scalable series for the high end Massive.
  • Woodgrain is the new RGB.
  • Like I said on saturday, I guess it’s nice that someone is trying to market some linux workstations and trying to make them visually distinct
  • Granted they are pricey but not outrageously expensive.
  • A 2700X 16GB 250GB NVME and a 2070 will run you $2,178.
  • According to Amazon I could yoink just the parts for $1,486.
  • You are paying a $629 premium for System76 to slap it together, test it, get it shipped and provide a warranty + support.
  • #Vennmaths

 

RH and KDE

  • This could become an issue, in 2024.
  • Red Hat says that interest in KDE has been waning.
  • Maybe this is due to stability issues, and RHEL needs the most stable OS possible.
  • Shouldn’t they be using xfce instead of Gnome if they want stability.
  • Kubuntu founder Jonathan Riddell says that RHEL deprecating KDE is not new or news.
  • I can’t really see how this is surprising to anyone
  • Gnome is a a RHEL sponsored project.   They devote a lot of time and manpower to the project.   Of course they’ll want to promote their project in their enterprise product
  • That said, it’s not going anywhere for now (see marked as deprecated).  
  • RHEL7 doesn’t even have an announced EOL yet (although we’ll probably end up getting one next year) and there’s literally nothing stopping anyone from building it themselves or shoving it in the EPEL repos like xfce
  • And lets be real, if some ultra-mega client with 10,000 seats uses KDE RedBM will provide support.
  • Jonathan Riddell points out RH was kinda-sorta anto KDE in the long login ago.
  • Because Qt was not exactly open.
  • On a side jag, I’m a little shocked so many people took the Register article seriously.
  • Did you just read the headline, because it was wicked tongue in cheek.

 

Tik Tok

  • It’s a wrapper for rsync, for people who can’t man  or –help good
  • Linux TimeMachine is a command line shell script that mimics the behavior of OSX’s timemachine.
  • Yeah, this has little advantage over rsync at the moment.
  • Needs a big honking GUI because the barrier to entry is a little high for people who would not backup in the first place.

 

Lappy Hacks

  • Please don’t send your kids to school with this.
  • Not really much on the specs of the laptop, but given the 300 bucker price point probably some arm board.
  • You get an ASUS Laptop E406MA, which’ll get you a celeron with 4gb of ram.  But hey, at least it’s a 1080p display
  • Has a subscription for content and hacking games?
  • It is nice that it comes with Endless OS pre installed, so that it can be used without an internet connection.
  • The “internet in a box” Endless OS will allow this computer to be used to teach kids computers in developing countries, and would be instrumental in helping organizations like Kids On Computers do just that:  https://www.kidsoncomputers.org
  • The Kano Raspberry Pi 3 Kit for kids to learn how to build a computer and learn to code is another option:  https://kano.me
  • It’s like a Pinebook, that you actually get.
  • Their tagline is an everyday laptop that teaches kids to code.
  • “The laptop comes loaded with Hack apps and educational third-party apps, and a fully interactive game. In the game, Hack characters guide players through the experience and give them different quests to solve each month.”
  • Guessing this aimed at ages 10 and under.
  • The first 500 beta users will get a lifetime subscription to Hack.
  • It’s a fully functional Asus 14-inch laptop with FullHD, and 4GB of ram.

 

Mint Layout

  • Cinnamon be taking a page out of Windows 7’s playbook
  • I suppose with Mint’s goal of being babby’s first linux, keeping those design elements consistent would help with new adopters
  • And for those users who don’t want the more “modern” desktop the old layout is just a click away!
  • Nice, the Mint-Y-Dark theme which I always switch to when using Cinnamon will become the default theme for Mint.
  • The Mint team will be working to get Linux Mint 19.1 out for Christmas this year, with all three editions released at the same time and the upgrade paths open before the holiday season.
  • The icon chooser provides a dialog and a button and will make it easier for applications to select themed icons and/or icon paths.

 

VeeSeeVSTRack

  • VeeSeeVSTRack is an adaption of VCV Rack for the VST2.4 format.
  • Short story long, you can now use VCV Rack (Open-source virtual modular synthesizer) as a plugin with your favourite DAW.

 

Guys, we’re serious

  • In their continuing effort to prove they totes love the open source
  • ProcDump, which is one of the Microsoft Sysinternals command line utilities, provides a convenient way for developers to create core dumps of their application based on performance triggers.
  • I used to use this in Windows all the time to debug 3D animation programs crashes.
  • As if we need any more of these tools on Linux!
  • We already have a ProcDump utility and many other ways to monitor!!!
  • Reduced functionality system internals
  • I guess for windows admins migrating to linux, this might be handy, but like jill mentioned, these tools already exist in linuxland

Slice of Pi

HeathPi

  • Been reading a lot about this lately, not only is this a Raspberry Pi computer for kids that teaches coding software, but electronics as well!
  • It’s a nice little all in one kit for on the fly projects.   
  • Will save you a couple orders from adafruit as well.    
  • Little on the pricey side
    • + $30 for shipping.
  • This is really in the spirit of electronic kits of yore.
  • Good for kids or hella expensive fidget spinner for adults.

Feedback

POWAH

  • Good question dacresni!  And completely agree!
  • Hmm, somehow I think IBM will probably stick with their POWER architecture at the server level, but it sure would be nice to have another high end competitor to RISC-V!
  • But, now that IBM is thinking more about cloud infrastructure, creating a consumer level POWER would be smart and much more powerful than the RasPi can offer.
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