LWDW 194: Purism Woes

Purism explains supply and demand, MPV Player gets the Vulkan treatment, Ubuntu 19.10 brings the DNLA, and KDE develops a nut allergy.


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Timestamps:
05:51 RIP KDE Cashew!
07:46 Boosting Gnome Shell performance
11:46 Ubuntu 19.10 DNLA
14:36 Unity Reflect
17:16 Reddit desktop client
20:11 MPV Player with Vulkan
22:16 Image masks in OBS
24:26 Purims Woes
28:11 Leaving Linux after 15 years
35:56 Shameless self promotion
37:21 Ubuntu server Pi
40:12 Emails!


Colour key – Venn Jill Pedro

See you, Cashew! (RTheren)

  • After 11 years (almost 12) that piece of software trash, which always stuck out like a sore thumb and was made completely redundant by a right click on the desktop, is finally gone.
  • I always liked to call it the magic bean that brought forth access to some not very pretty desktop widgets and activities.

 

Boosting Gnome Shell performance 

  • So the fix was to nuke the power saving/cpu cycle reducing bits of the code.
  • Fair enough!
  • I hope that’s not going to hurt the majority of people who use desktop Linux distros… You know, people who have it on a laptop?
  • I know this is supposed to be a positive post describing how they got GNOME to perform better.
  • To me this post tickles my confirmation bias by showing exactly just how fundamentally broken GNOME is/was and by design too.
  • The goal for GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is to make GNOME high performance on newer machines.
  • And then the goal for GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 20.10 is to make GNOME high performance on slower older machines.
  •  Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be released on April 23, 2020 with GNOME 3.36.

 

Ubuntu 19.10 DNLA Server (Sandy)

  • Yeah!!  Ubuntu 19.10 out of the box comes with the ability to enable a DNLA media server without the need to install 3rd party software!!!
  • It uses the DNLA and UPnP Universal Plug and Play protocols to communicate with other multimedia devices on your network, such as a Roku box, Smart TV or game console.
  • You don’t need to install PLEX, Kodi, Jellyfin etc. for simple media sharing, unless you want to have the advanced features these apps give you.

 

Unity Reflect 

  • Bringing in 3D models to game engines like Unity has always been a challenge, whether it’s from Revit, 3DS Max, CAD, Maya, Modo or Blender.
  • Often, vertices and polygons get moved or misplaced in the conversion and you have to spend a lot of time and sometimes a lot of money on software to fix it.
  • Reflect helps solve this by making it easier for architects to visuilize their data without having to learn game development.
  • Not only are they doing a good by providing a tool for people who aren’t game developers, they’re releasing it free of charge and providing sauce.
  • I haven’t been able to find a link to check which license they’re releasing it under

 

Reddit desktop client 

  • Oh, cool! It also builds an AppImage along with the deb and unpackaged versions.
  • It also works.
  • Don’t know why you’d want it since you get the same experience on your browser, but hey! It’s a thing.
  • Only need 231 dependencies from npm…
    • It was about this time Old Man Venn tapped the nope button. 
  • Pro Tip: from the root of the project folder run npm uninstall `ls -1 node_modules | tr ‘/\n’ ‘ ‘` to get rid of everything.
  • The AppImage works great!
  • This Electron wrapped Reddit is quite zippy.
  • Thank you for the dark theme.
  • As a user of old reddit and the Reddit Enhancement suite, nope. 
  • Daddy needs his dark mode. 

 

MPV Player 0.30.0

  • Gamepad support. 
  • Vulkan/CUDA interoperability
  • Basically, by implementing libplacebo’s Vulkan they’ve enabled Vulkan hardware decoding all over the shop.
  • Very much in favor of this move!
  • I want a full Vulkan desktop to be a thing in 2022.
  • Also includes multiple Wayland performance improvements and fixes.

 

Image Masks in OBS

  • Creating an image mask in OBS is relativity straightforward. 
  • Creating an image mask while retaining the original shot, not so much. 
  • Let’s take a look at how this works on Linux.

 

Purism woes

  • People don’t necessarily want an early batch, they just want something to justify the money they put down on the crowdfunding.
  • This is not a good thing.
  • If a lot more people than you expected are asking for something for something for their money, it’s been too long.
  • And you guys specifically say you went too long without public updates on these batches.
  • That’s going to make people antsy.
  • And titling a bullet point list of things that you’ve done that aren’t the Librem 5 “Purism Delivers”, in a post about the Librem 5, isn’t helping matters. 
  • Hardware is hard, really really hard. 
  • And you know what, you may never get it because that’s how crowdfunding works. 
  • If you backed this product expecting something completely baked get your refund and stop the screeching. 
  • That said, this post triggered the spidey senses, hard. 
  • Reading an electrical engineers take on the situation didn’t help those feels.
  • I think Purism really underestimated how difficult hardware manufacturing can be, particularly with cell phones.
  • The transparency from Purism just isn’t at the same level as Pine64.
  • We will just have to wait and see what comes next.

 

Leaving Linux 

  • By “15 years” do you mean you installed it once in a VM in 2004?
  • I’m just going to come right out and say this with no malice and or snark. 
  • I don’t believe you, not even a little bit. 
  • The big (and I mean BIG) giveaway is that you bought a RX 5700 XT and expected the Mesa drivers to be in a workable state. 
  • That’s never happened in the history of ever. 
  • Also, NVIDIA shipped drivers for the 20 RTX series less than a week after release. 
  • And they work on Linux, using a 2060 to encode and stream the show at this very moment. 
  • I’m mostly speechless about your comment on pavucontrol.
  • It’s as user friendly as you can make a tool for configuring sound output, inputs, and modes. 
  • I don’t have a problem with you ditching Linux for a MAC, nay.
  • I got a problem with you throwing Linux under the bus over issues that could be solved after a weekend with Linux, much less 15 years. 
  • Wow… 
  • The mental gymnastics and strawman arguments on display here are something I haven’t seen since the early 2010s.
  • You wanted to buy a MacBook, that’s fine!
  • I want an X86 Macbook or Macbook pro for my hoarding collection.
  • But you don’t need to make stuff up.
  • Wow, one of the commenters in the article states: “Are these the kinds of posts we can expect from staff? Pretty juvenile.”  Kind of sums it up for me!
  • Did you even try to do a google search to check if your Intel audio card on your motherboard had an issue with Linux?
  • This is very rare with today’s modern Linux OSs.
  • You could have just bought a $2 dollar USB Audio card dongle on Ebay that works!

Slice of Pi

Server Pi 

  • This is a quintessential Linux story!
  • Do you want something? You have the tools to make it!
  • This is awesome!
  • And should help contribute to the mainline Ubuntu Server 20.04 Raspberry Pi 4 support.

Feedback

Hugs

 

Trolls

  • Not a fan of the Gnome desktop but they are fighting the good fight. 
  • Modern society, filled with outrage and cancel culture has forgotten it’s possible to support something you don’t necessarily like. 
  • Enemy of my enemy.
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