LWDW 245: The Linux Edge

Microsoft releases Edge for Linux. Jami begins getting things Together, openSUSE is looking for writers and video editors, and a new Pi Compute Module with PCIe powers.

Special Tanks:
Rtheren (H20 from the wishlist)
Lordmokka (new patreon)
Daniel (patreon)
Jaoheah (Twitch sub)

Listen:

Download:

Timestamps:
06:20 openSUSE call for volunteers
09:45 KDE Plasma 5.20
15:50 Wttr.in
18:35 Another bluetooth flaw
22:20 Jami Together
25:35 Audio Gridder
28:25 Saffire Pro 40 under Linux
31:50 Microsoft Edge for Linux
38:30 Windows calculator Snap
41:10 Shilling and self promotion!
49:50 Pi compute module
54:50 Emails

sUse need U

Would you like to contribute to a wonderful and friendly Linux distro?
openSUSE is looking for volunteers!
For writing and editing for documentation and wikis.
For creating videos tutorials, including producing, editing and scripting.
Also for testing software workflow and settings on new hardware.
If you use suse and know how to lay down some knowledge consider helping them out.
People who know how to make Linux educational material for Linux users are always in short supply.
Translators, also needed.

Plasma (RTheren)

I love the new wallpaper!
KDE has always had one of the best notification systems of any desktop manager, and this update improves on that.
- You get notified when you run low on disk space.
- You can now enter the Do Not Disturb mode by simply middle-clicking on the Notifications applet or system tray icon.
KDE 5.20 is out, you can play with it on many distros at this point.
Most of the system settings screens now use the “modern”, supposedly more integrated looking UI.
As long as I don’t get more memory leaks, I’ll be fine.

Curly Weather

This is wttr.in, my favorite weather app on Linux, and I have mentioned this before, but here is a bit more detail.
You can run wttr.in in the shell, $ curl wttr.in, or in a web browser at wttr.in.
And embed it as a widget on your desktop or website.
Or save it as a png: $ wget wttr.in/Paris.png
I love the ASCII weather art!
Being able to just curl wttr.in makes this a lot more useful than most weather apps.
And you don’t need to install anything other than curl

Bleeding Teeth (RTheren)

This will probably not effect you at home with BlueZ running, unless your family wants to hack your system and has the know how to do it.
And when portable using your laptop at Starbucks Coffee, same thing. Not many people have the know-how to hack BlueZ and Linux.
This is a far more serious vulnerability than most of the ones we’ve covered.
Keep your devices invisible if you keep bluetooth on.
Some DEs get a bit shouty if you have bt on but it’s not visible, so it may be time to change that particular behavior KDE.

Jami together

Might give it another look.
The underlying tech always seemed solid but that client, wow.
I remember the couple of times we tried to use Ring.
Jami is a peer to peer softphone and instant messenger that has positioned itself as the free and Open Source alternative to Skype.
It was formerly GNU Ring, and SFLphone before that.
This is the latest update, called Jami “Together”, whose focus is not just on peer to peer but on large group collaboration.
It has been updated to work better on low bandwidth networks.
50 kB/s in audio/video mode, and 10 kB/s for audio-only calls.

VST Server
https://github.com/apohl79/audiogridder

Running Windows VSTs in Linux can be hit or miss.
Such is the way of all things WINE.
If we’re being honest, running native VST3 plugins can be spotty.
This aims to alleviate that by turning Windows into a butter robot.

Pro 40 in 2020

Focusrite is like Behringer, they make cheap (but usable) gear.
Granted, Focusrite has better marketing.
I wish I could tell you that this is a cheap alternative to the Scarlett series, bit it’s not.

The Edge

Edge on Linux is no longer an idle threat.
We can finally harness the power of Chromium on Linux.
Deb or rpm, take your pick.
Dev Channel is live and the Beta channel is coming spoon.
It’s so weird to be using a Google Chromium based browser with a sign in to your Microsoft Account instead of Google.
Has three page layouts on startup to choose from for your start page/new tabs: Focused, Inspirational and Informational. Or you can customize it.
I chose inspirational, because it is pretty and relaxing, and is one of the things I like about Bing search, its use of pretty background pictures.
It was just released for Android in the Google Play store as well.
On Android, I like the grid style used for the hamburger menu, and how easy it is to rearrange the menu with drag and drop.
I opened the deb before installing it just in case.
The only weird thing I noticed was that it uses a cron job to check and create the apt repo entry for updates on the daily.

Calculate Windows

Back in the day I used to use the Windows Calculator all the time.
Now I just use gcalccmd in the terminal or the Google calculator in Google search.
Now you don’t have to electron wrap all the things.
You can use Uno instead.
I’ve never used Windows calculator.
It’s a snap!
I do like the idea behind Uno, it’s mono that runs native mono or .NET applications from a single unified codebase and could effectively run on any OS.
Don’t make it a snap exclusive platform, though.