LWDW 162: KDE Waifu

Solus counts to 4, WireGuard invades GNOME, Firefox Send makes encrypted file sharing easy, and using persistent memory as RAM. All this plus your emails.

Special thanks to:
Joel 

Timestamps:
02:04 Optane RAM
05:31 Firefox 66
08:06 Firefox Send
11:25 GNOME 3.32
15:37 Wireguard
17:58 Solus 4
21:15 Deepin Stable
24:11 Shameless Self Promotion
25:48 Google Coaral
28:36 NVIDIA Jetson
30:50 Email

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Colour key – Venn Jill Pedro

Optane RAM

  • This is wonderful and makes sense because flash memory is a lot cheaper than traditional volatile RAM.
  • Also I remember using hard drive storage as a RAMdrive in Windows to increase performance when rendering in 3D animation apps.  It worked quite well.
  • You can get 32GB of Optane for under $100.
  • Linus put the brakes on it until Intel is done with the ‘splaining on their memory thing.
  • Probably has something to do with SPOILER.

 

Firefox 66 (RTheren)

  • Smooth scrolling.
  • Blocking autoplay.
  • For Linux users, the System title bar is hidden by default to match Gnome guideline.
  • Extension settings are now stored in a Firefox database instead of individual JSON files, which helps websites load a lot quicker.
  • That autoplay curb can’t come soon enough!

 

Firefox Encrypted Sharing

  • This does exactly what other companies like Hightail charge for, albeit the 2.5GB limitation when signed in or 1GB limit when anonymous.
  • This is neat for the privacy concerned which means it’s also ripe for abuse.
  • I wish the project well but I have a Gdive with 15GB… well, I have, like, 13 of those because Google gave all my accounts an account… for their accounts.
  • At least it’s friction free.
  • If it’s properly encrypted end to end, then mozilla is probably safe.

 

Gnome 3.32

  • GNOME 3.32 has been released, with a lot of promised updates now included.
  • As we talked about in January, The Big App Icon Redesign comes with a radical new icon style and new guidelines for app developers featuring scalable vector icons for GNOME has been officially released with GNOME 3.32.  
  • Buttons are more rounded and have a softer “shadow” border… know your audience, I guess.
  • Proper non-integer GTK scaling.
  • Pedro will now take a swipe at Gnome.
  • For all its flaws and faults, at least KDE has been able to do fp scaling for a good long while now.
  • Introduces an experimental feature for Wayland desktop sessions that enables fractional scaling.
  • But hey, several improvements to data structures in the GNOME Desktop led to noticeable frame rate improvements because that’s a thing.

 

Wireguard in GNOME

  • Having WireGuard implemented in Gnome’s NetworkManager API, GUI, CLI and applet is a game changer for the average Linux user who wants to use WireGuard’s powerful VPN tunneling services.
  • Not only does this give you the ability for VPN tunneling, but the added benefit of DNS and firewalld setup as well.
  • You can import existing WireGuard profiles.
  • By configuring WireGuard with NetworkManager you get other features beyond the plain WireGuard tunnel setup. Most notably you get DNS and firewalld setup in a consistent manner.
  • NetworkManager’s support for WireGuard requires the kernel module for Linux.
  • Still waiting on that upstream, Linus.
  • Most of the Network Manager implementations have OpenVPN support.
  • It’s how I use PIA in Solus.
  • Speaking of which…

 

Solus 4

  • I have been waiting for this– pavucontrol features in the new Budgie Sound Input and Sound Output widgets.
  • Basically, if you’re already running Solus, you’re all caught up.
  • It’s the first release to have a publicly available KDE iso.
  • Which is good, since 15.2 is the only usable version of Plasma 5 thus far.
  • Glad it’s still progressing.

 

Sta(b)le

  • The distro everyone keeps praising for being very good looking.
  • Honestly, it looks very similar to Windows 10 but it certainly is very well integrated as far as the theme is concerned.
  • Be it QT or GTK apps, both look exactly as they should with that theme.
  • Deepin switches to Debian stable in 15.9.2 beta, from Debian unstable.
  • This is a good move, because honestly, many users like me who use Debian use it because of its stability and reliability, thus Debian stable is the logical choice.
  • One thing to point out is Debian stable updates come at the speed of smell.
  • For the commonly used applications, they will be upgraded and maintained by deepin development team with the goal to follow upstream updates within one week.

Slice of Pi

Google Pi

  • You remember the TPU announcement, right?
  • The internet as a whole had a collective brown moment because Google were making their own processor.
  • Here is a dev board with it.

 

Artificial Pi

  • The CUDA-X GPU delivers 472 GFLOPS of performance but manages to keep TDP to 5 to 10 watts.
  • 4 GB of RAM, a microSD card slot, HDMI 2.0 and eDP 1.4 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet.
  • The module will arrive in June for $129 but will be available only to enterprise customers and in bulk quantities of 1,000 or more.
  • While this will be good for schools wanting to tinker with AI on the cheap we need to ask the hard hitting question.
  • How well does PLEX run on this critter?

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