LWDW 206: Murder Switches

PinePhone ‘Brave Heart’ editions begin shipping! Wine gets a big 5.0 release, Ubuntu nopes the Amazon button, and Kubuntu powered laptops. All this (and more) plus your emails.

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Timestamps:
03:53 Kubuntu Focus shipping
07:28 PinePhone shipping
11:58 Wine 5.0
14:33 State of CentOS
16:43 Ubuntu removes Amazon web app
20:18 Mozilla downsizes
24:43 OBS recording tricks
28:33 Shameless self promotion
31:33 Fake Pi cases
34:18 Underwater Pi
37:53 Emails

Colour key – Venn Jordan Pedro

Kubuntu Focus shipping

The starting price for the Kubuntu Focus Laptop is $2395.
And because work flow is such a huge “focus” of the Kubuntu Focus, the terminal command ‘rm’ is remapped to trash, to help avoid accidental data loss.
It uses similar hardware, Clevo-960x, to the current generation System 76 Galago Pro and Tuxedo XP1610.
Two percent of each sale of the Focus laptop is donated to the Kubuntu Foundation.
I thought that looked familiar.
That’s the higher end, current year version of the Entroware Kratos.

Pinephones shipping

March for sale, and April for general shipping.
I shall wait.
At $149.99 I’ll probably end up getting one to tinker with.
That said, I’m violently against carrying a mobile device at all times.
It supports all major Linux phone projects such as Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS and Plasma Mobile.
2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and a camera along with a USBC port.
That and it has dip switches that let you murder GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, microphone and cameras.
I am also happy to hear that my favorite phone OS webOS LuneOS that I have on my OnePlus One is also being ported to the PinePhone, as well as the Android based Replicant OS.

WINE 5.0 (RTheren)

Another stable version of WINE is now available.
It includes all the 4.X updates rolled up, if for some reason you were still holding on to 4.0 stable.
It supports Vulkan 1.1, just in time for 1.2 to be released.
Lots of care was put into getting WINE files and folders to mimic those of an actual windows install, which will hopefully stop the copy protection woes.
Better multi-monitor support.

State of CentOS

Transparency of workflow and giving the community a breakdown of their progress, is the CentOS teams commitment going forward.
CentOS Stream is a rolling release distro between Cent and Fedora, in terms of package up-to-date-ness.
- I think I like that idea!

Ubuntu removes Amazon

The Amazon web app, which was first introduced in Ubuntu 12.10 and has been a part of the Ubuntu desktop for the past 8 years, has been removed, thanks to Canonical’s Alan Pope and the Ubuntu Desktop Director Martin Wimpress.
When Canonical’s upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release lands this April, the Amazon icon will be no more.
The icon was being used as an Amazon Affiliate link for Canonical.
I literally haven’t used the Amazon Web Launcher since the Unity days with Ubuntu 14.04, and then maybe twice.
For those of you who will miss this, just save a shortcut of the webpage to your desktop with any web browser.
And you can donate to Canonical via PayPal with this link:
- https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you
Oh, can I drop the web-launchers from the very first apt remove run I do on a fresh system?
apport* and snap* are still there, though.
The only problem I ever had with the Amazon bits were them not being opt-in and bit of a PITA to remove.
One of the reasons I moved everything in the studio to Debian was having to de-Ubuntu a box after install.
Granted, most of the things I noped from orbit (arguably) make sense on a desktop, just not a workstation.

Mozilla downsizes

Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker announced the company would lay off approximately 70 employees.
Mozilla had made money from Google and other companies by embedding their services into the Firefox browser.
In 2011 Mozilla made just under $300 million a year by making Google Firefox’s default search engine.
These sources of money have dried up.
I was so sad to hear this and am hoping that their new security subscription services via their VPN, Firefox Private Network, will help them gain revenue.
I donate to Mozilla every year via Paypal, and now is the time for the Linux community to do so and keep our favorite open source web browser alive.
- https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

Multi-track OBS

A little something for my creator brothers and sisters on Linux.
Record two audio tracks independently for editing in post.
Using your existing hardware, nothing fancy needed.
I couldn’t find a serviceable guide for doing this, so I made one.
Up next is …

Slice of Pi

Fake Pi (RTheren)

Someone making cheap knockoffs of your product is almost a right of passage.
They just told the counterfeiters how to make better knockoffs!
People have found fake Raspberry Pi cases online that are badly molded knockoffs to the originals and violate the RasPi Foundation’s trademarks.
Yeh, not good, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a not-for-profit that supports their work in education and this is costing them lots of money that would be used to fund their charitable work.

Fishy Pi