Rust powered core utils for Debian! Kubuntu Focus M2 launches with 30x series GPUs, Ubuntu flutters, and why are Linux desktops so boring? All this, plus your emails.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:11 Boring Linux desktops
15:21 Ubuntu Flutter
19:11 Kubuntu Focus M2
22:19 Debian core utils in Rust
25:29 Kernel 5.12-rc1 whoopsie
30:14 GL Image Reader
36:54 Raspberry Pi mosquitoes laser killer
39:59 Emails
- This is another great article by Jack Wallen, who writes that the Linux desktop is boring again, and that is actually a good thing!
- Yes, once upon a time the Linux desktop had to be flashy to draw people’s attention, ala Afterstep and the desktop spinning 3D cube on GNOME!
- Now the Linux desktop is boring, ala GNOME and the like, but that is a good thing because they work and have matured.
- One of the reasons I like to back up my configs and customizations from the Window Maker and Fluxbox X window managers is that I can make them look pretty again quickly.
- So they aren’t boring and I can relive the classic days of beautiful Linux desktops!
- If you spend more time working vs poking around on your desktop you will find that productivity increases.
- Someone should tell this guy about XFCE.
- You want boring? Oh babby, it can bring it.
- If you want some hipster modifications install Enlightenment and have at.
- It takes a specific kind of person to willingly use GNOME and within that niche there’s a sub-niche of people who not only tolerate but appreciate how much control it doesn’t give you.
- We need people like Jack Wallen, variety is the spice of life after all.
- XFCE would give you too many customization options, that’s not what GNOME users look for.
- Let’s hope that Google won’t deprecate this product and let it “flutter” away ;-)
- Flutter seems to be pretty much the only reason why Dart continues to exist.
- It has what installers crave.
- Anything over Electron.
- “We [Canonical] not only enabled Flutter for Linux we also worked with the Flutter team to publish the Flutter SDK as a Snap on the Snap Store, the app store for Linux,”
- Stahp!
- Stop trying to make snaps on the desktop a thing.
- If you keep pushing this down people’s throats, people are going to start pushing back harder.
- You’re making flutter your go to framework, awesome!
- Stop forcing snaps.
- The Kubuntu Focus M2 laptop is the first Linux powered laptop to offer the Nvidia RTX 30 series GPUs: 2060, 2070 and 2080.
- The base model with a Core i7-10875H CPU, the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 250GB SSD is nicely priced at $1,795.
- Oh, a 144 Hz display.
- And you can have 4 of them, allegedly.
- YOLO spec clocks in at $4535.
- The Intel CPU and that price isn’t really appealing to me.
- For $1400 you only get 8GB or RAM and a 250GB SSD.
- That’s… that’s not a good proposition.
- That configuration should be $999, at most.
- But we do live in the era of scalpers.
- Good opportunity to not just reimplement the GNU coreutils but to actually rethink them.
- Significantly bigger than the C version.
- Rust: 73MB
- C: 17M
- No size optimization has been done but there are plenty of ways to do it.
- The developer Sylvestre was looking for a project to learn Rust during the various COVID lockdowns. And he found a great one.
- Improving on the GNU core is very good!
- Don’t really care what it’s built on, just glad to be able to remove the GNU prefix requirement.
- Swapy no worky ;-)
- I default to setting up a swap partition for every distro I install.
- Dumping the RAM contents which would normally go into swap directly onto sectors of your HDD or SSD is full filesystem corruption level-bad.
- This is especially relevant for Ubuntu users, since swap files are the default, but applies to anyone who has a swap file and is feeling particularly adventurous.
- Basically, there’s a reason RCs are not recommended for production.
- But that was a particularly bad oopsie.
- We also talked about ScreenTranslator last October, but gImagereader is easier to use.
- I remember the days when OCR software used to be expensive and clunky, and now we have so many great open source options that work well!
- It’s a front-end for Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine.
- Originally developed at HP and open-sourced in 2006.
- Don’t forget to install the language packs.
Slice of Pi
- OpenCV library and an object search by color contrast on one of the most low-cost hardware devices in the single-board computer market — RaspberryPI3 (not even RaspberryPI4).
- Working on a pocket version.
- Lasers can blind you.
- Yay! Fire hazard!
- I want that so much, but I know for a fact that I’d blind myself or start a fire by lasering a mosquito that landed on one of Nory’s drawings.
- This is another great Raspberry Pi project that can save lives by killing mosquitoes that spread deadly diseases.
- And it is priced right for use in third world countries.
Feedback
- Nory has made it especially clear she doesn’t like the clickies on keyboards.
- So can’t have Blue switches or crap switches with red plungers but blue-style actuators.
