LWDW 198: Wayland When?

Linux 5.4 adds support for the exfat! Slimbook Pro X15 brings the Turing, Glimpse 0.1.0 is ready for public consumption, and Wayland fails an important test.


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Timestamps:
03:57 Slimbook Pro X15
07:27 Glimpse 0.1.0
10:02 Audacity 2.3.3
12:57 Flan scan
15:32 Linux 5.4
21:12 Wayland yet?
25:12 ManGL
27:47 Penguin subtitles
30:42 Left handed Ploopy
33:37 Blender RTX
38:57 Shameless self promotion
41:02 Pi recovery kit
44:12 Emails


Colour key – Venn Jill Pedro

Slimbook Pro X15

  • That seems a lot nicer and a heck of a better value proposition when compared to the KDE Slimbook I had a look at.
  • The Slimbook Pro X15 also includes two webcams, one standard 720p and one for facial recognition.
  • And, even though it has a thin profile, you can add another SSD.
  • I love that the Slimbook Pro marketing campaign is using #NoMoreApplesInLinuxConferences, because that is a thing!
  • And it sports many Linux operating systems of your choice including Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Debian, Manjaro, Zorin OS, and even an option to DualBoot Linux and Windows.

 

Glimpse 0.1.0

  • The Glimpse 0.1.0 image editor, the fork of GIMP we have talked about, has debuted.
  • Glimpse 1.0 is a vanilla version of the GIMP, without the Wilber mascot, branding and easter eggs. 
  • I was happy to hear that an AppImage is in the works as well.
  • Okay, so this is just the rebrand for now… fair enough.
  • I hope they will automate this going forward so they can pull from the GIMP Master and not have to worry about it anymore.
  • Available as a Flatpak. 

 

Audacity 2.3.3

  • They finally sorted the 4GB export restriction. 
  • Yes, that actually tripped me up a few times. 
  • When exporting the compressed audio formats AAC/M4A there are now audio settings.
  • Removed some obsolete/redundant bits

 

Flan Scan

  • Nmap on performance enhancers
  • It makes NMap slightly easier to use for this particular use case.
  • Also makes it so the reports generated after scans are a lot easier to understand and action any fixes.
  • This being Cloudflare, they also make it so you can upload those reports directly to the cloud.

 

Linux 5.4

  • No joy with the Vulkan beta drivers. 
  • Bluetooth works again. 
  • EOL Dec, 2021.
  • The remaining Navi 12/14 bits and support for the 3000 series APUs.
  • Work on rt scheduler is underway. 
  • PREEMPT_RT lets you preempt when inside kernel code (ie, interrupt handlers, syscalls, device drivers, though not all code universally).
  • This will save you from having to manually patch the kernel but it will not save you from the nightmare of configuring it. 
  • Initial exFat drivers added in this release
  • Linux Kernel 5.4 has been released with lots of updates and important changes.
  • The new kernel lockdown mode is now included that we talked about last month, which helps to improve the separation of the User identifier 0/UID 0, or root and the kernel.
  • This goes a long way in hardening Linux from arbitrary code execution from malicious code supplied by userland processes.
  • The high performance, low memory and read-only enhanced Erofs file system is now out of staging.
  • This is especially good for Live USBs/CDs and firmwares for mobile phones and SoCs.
  • And, as we have talked about here on LWDW, this is the first kernel release to include exFAT file system support.

 

Wayland ready?

    • Pipewire allows for WebRTC under Wayland.
    • Support is already in Chromium 53+, but needs to be manually enabled with the chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer flag.
    • xdg-desktop-portal-gtk is also required if you use Gnome (or xdg-desktop-portal-kde if you use kde).
  • When games play without a hitch and spanning three monitors without issues, I will happily do Wayland!
  • The problem with Wayland is that this post could have been from 5 years ago. 
  • I’m reading through this post about someone using ARCH!!1! and not once did they feel the need to state as much.
  • That is, until you look at the comments and it’s right there in the first one.
  • *golf clap*

 

GUi Man

  • Mangl is a graphical man page viewer based on the mandoc library and it uses OpenGL to display man pages with clickable hyperlinks and smooth scrolling.
  • Being able to use a draggable scrollbar with the mouse is so convenient, instead of having to hold the up and down arrows or pageup and pagedown for a long time.
  • And the search feature on launch is so nice.
  • Not going to lie, man pages died shortly after I had my first always on internet connection. 
  • Having a locally cached manual for everything installed is very nice to have.
  • Especially one with a search function that doesn’t involve grep’ing for straws.

 

字幕

  • The Penguin Subtitle Player allows you to change the fonts, font size and color of the subtitle text.
  • This is a game changer for me, because the font sizes on most subtitles played on videos are to small for me to read.
  • A sub player for Linux, which most likely will not work with that obscure player you might actually want to use it with.
  • Unless you use it exclusively with Youtube to watch old public domain movies.
  • They suggest getting the subtitles from OpenSubtitles.

 

Left-handed Ploopy

  • Yeah, now Pedro can have a Ploopy too :-D
  • Yeah, now I just need to find a place with a 3D printer.
    • Cambridge University 3D Printing Society.

 

Blend RTX (Mfoxdogg)

  • Over 1K fixes and support for RTX ray tracing. 
  • Intel Open Image denoising made it into this one. 
  • The new file browser looks slightly less, ‘90s.
  • Blender 2.81 includes so many important updates and fixes.
  • Including a sculpting tools overhaul for better workflow.
  • Updates to Grease Pencil, new brushes and tools . . .
  • Updates to the real-time renderer EEVEE.

Slice of Pi

Field of Pelican Pi’s

  • TSA acceptance factor on this one is great, unless they ask you to open the Pelican case.
  • I love the flip switches to turn everything off and on.
  • Bonus points if you can rig something up to beep when the case opens. 

 


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