LWDW 148: Linux Edge

Linux.org gets hacked, Canada embraces FLOSS, Steam Link on a Raspberry Pi, and the best XFCE distro of 2018.

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Colour key – Venn Jill Pedro

D, N, S!

No 2 factor auth in today’s day? Whaaa!
I noticed linux.org was down last week when doing research for LWDW.
Linux.org also has some great Linux tutorials for beginners and advanced users alike.
Listen, I get it, 2FA can (and often is) a royal PITA but some things demand it.
Steam, Paypal, and friggin DNS are three that come to mind.
Presumably the hacker worked their way into the Yahoo! email account listed on whois and requested a password change in her Network Solutions account.
Lack of 2-factor in the DNS is egregious enough as is but not having 2-FA in the email you used to set it up is doubling down on that edgy life choice.

This is what Microsoft has to do to make Edge a relevant web browser that actually gets use.
Microsoft loves open source so much it bought github and now it’s showing everyone it’s extra super cereal by ditching the Edge rendering system for internets and replacing it with… Chromium!
They have even begun making contributions to the Chromium project to help move browsing forward on new ARM-based Windows devices.
And that I think is the big tell, MS needs a browser that knows how to ARM going forwards.
Chromium makes it rather simple to create “native” application.
More on that at 11.
If Microsoft wants to claim to have market leading browser technology, this is their one option.
It’s not like the olden times when IE6/7 reigned supreme.

- Microsoft has bowed down to our internet overlord, Google.
- EdgeHTML was never a thing.
- Were back to 2 standards on the internet again, Blink and Gecko.
- Dude comes off a little salty.

“We compete with Google not because it’s a good business opportunity. We compete with Google because the health of the internet and online life depend on competition and choice.”

- Nay, Mozilla competes with Google because Firefox became such a sluggish mess Google was able to release something that barely knew how to browser and people flocked to it.
- I know you don’t like hearing that but let’s not pretend otherwise.
Where was this worry when Vivaldi and Brave showed up on the scene?
Edge went from 0.05% usage to 4.25% in 2018.
Firefox from 18.7% to 10.96%.
Chrome from 51% to 67%.
Ladies and gentlemen need I remind you Browsers Wars 2 is not being fought on the desktop this go around.
Media consumption has moved to phones and everyone, even Apple, has some variant of WebKit running.
Firefox came at a time which the only alternative was IE on Windows, that’s the sole reason it ever got as big.

Canada Federal Government publishes a new IT directive that mandates the use of open source software first before considering proprietary software.
All governments and schools should be using open source software for greater transparency, as well as less money spent for taxpayers.
That read like my job description.
Except for those bits.

- C.2.3.8
“Where possible, use open standards and open source software first”
“If an open source option is not available or does not meet user needs, favour platform-agnostic COTS over proprietary COTS”
- D.2.2.1.4.2
“Leveraging open source tools and frameworks to implement the API where possible.”
The software has to meet standards first and foremost in any case regardless of the license.
This will at the very least cause some intern to pretend to explore open options.

Finally Google Assistant will work on my old first edition Samsung Chromebook.
Chrome OS can now search for content inside of Android apps thanks to Firebase App Indexing.
Hmm, maybe this is a job for the Albert keyboard launcher we have talked about before, since creating “Keyword” searches in the .desktop file is not needed to search Linux Apps.
Chrome OS can now search for content inside of Android apps.
A second improvement to the search box is also coming, promising to improve the ability to search for installed Linux apps.
It will allow developers to include keyword into the .desktop file.
I can’t help but feel like those keywords could easily be worded into an apt Description= field.

Seems like a really contrived way to point out how much you like a particular distro.
I do love MX Linux, a Debian distro with a medium sized footprint which is a joint collaboration between antiX and former MEPIS communities.
Xubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver, where can you go wrong there.
I usually just install the xfce desktop within the default distro that I am using at the time, like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora.
I included this article because it’s silly in 2018.
I completely understand the need for confirmation bias and if you use MX Linux MX-17 Horizon, (yes that’s a real distro) there you go.
Linux is FAR too granular a beast to be limited by a Distro+Desktop paradigm.
The only “best” XFCE desktop is the one you install and configure to your liking.

One of my favourite features of mcfly is that the directory where you ran the command is listed in the search! Thus alleviating having to remember what directory you ran it in.
This is a great tool, and so much more powerful than using ctrl+r or the up and down arrow keys that I use all the time.
McFly’s suggestions are prioritized in real time with a small neural network.
Written in Rust, so it’s fast and safe… LOL JK, Skynet!
I’m not entirely sure using the words “neural network” will accomplish what you mean to accomplish.
Unless you mean to fuel the paranoia of 2018 *NIX users. At which point, kudos! Mission accomplished.

I don’t think native means what he think it means.
An easy peasy way to Electron all the things via the command line.
We can now easily make an electron app for linuxgamecast.com! TeeHee ;-)
What hellscape have millennials created where everything is written in javascript?
- They just call it The Internet, now.

Slice of Pi

You found a dead link