LWDW 264: Saving Plasma

CUDA on Intel GPUs! RedHat offers no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux to open source organizations, Firefox 86 gets multiple Picture-in-Picture support, and Framework announces their modular laptop.

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:30 Framework laptop
10:00 AMD Pro driver issues
15:05 CUDA on Intel
19:35 RHEL for OSI
23:00 Blander updates
26:45 Firefox 86
32:05 Konsave for Plasma
38:35 Heating with Pi
44:45 Emails


Lego lappy 

  • Imagine being able to replace your motherboard in your laptop as easy as upgrading memory.
  • Fully recyclable.
  • Respects your right to repair and upgrade.
  • Yeh, a 1080p 60fps webcam with hardware privacy switches.
  • Remember when Google tried this with a phone?
  • Socketed storage, WiFi, and two slots for memory, 
  • The entire mainboard can be swapped to boost performance, like a regular lappy. 
  • Ecosystem to enable a community of partners to build and sell compatible modules through the Framework Marketplace.
  • Specs, pricing, pre-order timing, and a summer 2021 ship date over the next weeks.
  • 8/10 on the screen photoshoop. 

 

No ROCm for Userland

  • From what I can tell, people took the close ticket reply at face value and extrapolated from there.
    • Absolutely unprecedented event on the Internet.
  • Then, AMD person jumps in the comments to try and explain things, realizes the issue has been going on for longer than they thought, and the rest of the comments are spent chastising them for it.
  • Long story longer, ROCm was never intended for GUI use.
  • You could get it to work but that was never “official”.
  • And you can still get it to work by using some newer version that is even less official than what they previously had.
  • The current 20.45 release has problems on both Blender and Resolve.
  • AMD cleared up the verbiage because some people were under the impression they cared. 
  • AMDGPU-Pro drivers have been a dumpster-fire on Linux since forever. 
  • While Blackmagic supports openCL they have a strict “good luck /w that” policy when it comes to AMD on Linux. 

 

Intel CUDA

  • Oooh, wouldn’t it be nice to have ALUDA, or CUDA for AMD GPUs!
  • Like it or not, NVidia won the GPU compute standard.
    • They were dumping millions into development while everyone was noming the glue sticks. 
  • Briefly overtaken by the OG bitcoin but even Ethereum uses CUDA.
  • “But why are you talking about crypto-currency?” Why do you think the second release comes out now? Who do you think the devs are targeting with this?
  • Their objective may not be to enable better mining on Intel, but it sure helps if they have a ravenous userbase looking to make it work.
  • Performance can be close to the performance of similarly written OpenCL code.
  • Gen9 and newer (Skylake and newer) which are supported by Intel Level 0.
  • Very incomplete proof of concept.
  • Not working on AMD but don’t rule it out. 

 

Extending RHEL to open-source orgs

  • RedHat is listening to the community and is going to be more forthcoming with all of their offerings:
    • “We frequently provide no-cost access to RHEL to these groups, but the process isn’t as formalized, consistent, accessible or transparent as we’d like it to be . . . “
  • This falls under the things that should have been ready at the announcement. 

 

Blender 2.92 (mfoxdogg)

  • Wow!  Blender 2.29 has been released with lots of great new features!
  • Now you can manipulate your meshes using a new node-based editor.
  • And the ability to create your own custom modifier in the GUI without having to write your own script to create one.
  • And, this is one of my favs, being able to copy modifier settings from one object to the next like you can in Maya and 3DSMax.
  • Also, Grease Pencil strokes can now be edited like bezier curves!
  • + updates to sculpting, faster Cycles rendering, better compositing with Eevee, new physics simulation methods and so much more!

 

Firefox 86

  • Firefox 86 has been released with several new cool features.
  • This stable release of Firefox includes the ability to watch multiple videos in picture-in-picture mode.
  • So now you can multitask and watch several YouTube videos at once!
  • Screen reader improvements for greater accessibility for those of us who are visually challenged, or you just want to rest your eyes!
  • Strict mode is an unfortunate necessity due to web-developers running wild for years on end with little to no supervision
  • Unfortunately, I was already using everything strict mode does, with added ad-blocking, cookie annoyance blocking, and DNS HTTP since it was introduced a bit back.
  • Still, this is a good option to have a click away.

 

Saving Plasma 

  • Very good way to automate setting your preferred theme, wallpaper, and settings without having to manually copy .kde, .config/plasma*, and .local/share/plasma*
  • It’s so nice to have a quick and easy way to backup your KDE settings, especially after spending  hours configuring and customizing the desktop.
  • It has a K in the name. 
  • No dependencies. 
  • Makes me think KDE needs to be nuked & paved rather often. 
    • That is usually the easiest way to undo a big screw up.
  • And those screw ups will inevitably happen since KDE gives you tons of options.
  • Also, this allows you to change between several different layouts you set up and saved with a single command.
  • That’s the neatest use of Konsave.

Slice of Pi

Hot Pi 

  • Both the cherry on top and the slap across the face is that the GUI frontend app runs on iOS.
  • Though if you have the chops to pull this off, you can make your own app to run anywhere, including the PinePhone.

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