LWDW 250: Linus Wants An ARM

Linus Torvalds shares his thoughts on the M1 Mac, PipeWire could replace Pulseaudio in Fedora 34, preserving Flash with Rust, and ASUS releases two new Tinker Boards.

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:25 Linus on the M1 MAC
07:30 Ubuntu Web Remix
10:15 Ruffle Flash player
13:00 CamBoard whiteboard app
15:05 Ardour 6.5 VST3 support
16:45 Fedora 34 gets PipeWire
21:20 Unstable Flatpaks
24:25 GCompris turns 20
27:02 Shameless self-promotion
28:37 Clockwork Pi
31:42 ASUS Tinker Board 2

Linus wants ARMs

Lots of us Linux users and developers run Linux on Macs.
It would be nice if Apple made that official, like Dell and Lenovo.
Like most people Linus wants an ARM laptop.
Guessing he would be a fan of the fanless design.
Linux on the M1 should be possible?
Unless Apple really doubles down on the lock in, in theory you should be able to.

Ubuntu Web Remix (LinuxGNUru)

It is so nice to see fast progress on this Chrome OS alternative that just started in the summer.
It’s hard for me to see this as a ChromeOS alternative when ChromeOS is so lightweight and works really well on passively cooled Celerons and ARM laptops
This runs what looks like GNOME.

Flash preservation

I think we have just found the answer to playing our old flash games and animations!
Ruffle is an Adobe Flash Player emulator written in Rust, and works as a standalone app, for the web, and as a web browser plugin.
Ruffle works great, and you can try the demo.
It plays most flash swf games and animations, but if it doesn’t play the ones you want to play correctly consider contributing.
This is a neat project and it’s what the Internet Archive uses to Flash all the things.
I tried the old Isaac swf from the Humble Bundle and that’s still a slideshow

CamBoard

Brilliant, a virtual white board for Zoom, Jitsi, Skype is so needed right now with so many of us at home working.
Difficulty: Requires a printer.
Printing the symbols out once and then reusing them can be done.
Or if you’re skilled enough, you might be able to draw the symbols out yourself.

Ardour 6.4 er 5

Ardour 6.4 had a little issue with export so yeah, 6.5 is out and ready for consumption.
You can build it from source as always or get it from your distribution.
Binaries are available for backers.
The big thing in this release is the addition of VST3 support.
It will autohide VST2 plugins if it finds the equivalent VST3.
That Is going to cause some confusion.
Handling of MIDI encoders in “Generic MIDI” support is fixed.
Websocket/JS support now properly supports MIDI strips.
Several fixes for Ardour on RasPi.

Pipe Wire for Fedora 34

Nuke Pulseaudio and Jack from orbit.
All roads will lead to PipeWire.
This will be really big for desktop users looking to take advantage of their audio interface.
Holding off until netjack and FFADO support lands.
Will we have to use GNOME to test this?
- Nay.
For legacy ALSA clients, there will be an ALSA plugin that routes to PipeWire.
I still use some old music and demo apps that use ALSA and OSS, so this will be much needed!

Unstable Flatpaks (RTheren)

This will come in handy:
- During a universal flatpak update, flatpak will now automatically add uninstall operations for end-of-life runtimes that are unused.
Getting the OSTree metadata and setting up the prerequisites for installing a flatpak on the local system will supposedly be faster now.
This should also allow people to only see/download a subset of flatpaks without having to have duplicate packages in the multiple repositories
- The example they give are FOSS/non-FOSS package subsets

GCompris is 20

Yeah, GCompris is 20 years old and to celebrate, we now have version 1.0!
The GCompris is a suite of educational software for kids that has been used for years in schools, and in Linux distros that are used to teach children computing in third world countries.
This new version has a new Activity Settings menu with Dataset selection for more than 50 activities, allowing to choose more specifically what can be learned on the activities.
There is a new Analog Electricity activity which teaches how to draw circuits and run their simulations.
There are also new activities for addition, subtraction and typing as well.

Slice of Pi

ClockworkPi (RTheren)

This is the DevTerm from ClockworkPi, it is an open source portable terminal for every developer and Linux nerd.
DevTerm is an A5 sized notebook with a 6.8 inch ultrawide IPS screen and a ClockworkPI mainboard.
You can preorder the kit starting at $219.00 and it will ship by April 2021.
This reminds me of a mini version of the word processor I learned to type on, and one of my classic portable computers of yore.

ASUS Pi