System76 takes a crack at the Linux Desktop, support for the Apple M1 is headed to kernel 5.13, ARCH gets a fancy new installer, and a Pie powered webcam made of nightmares.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
08:13 System76 Cosmic
13:23 M1 support in Kernel 5.13
15:43 MXLinux is popular?
20:08 Arch guilded installer
23:48 Open-source Pinephone modem
26:53 Xscreensaver 6.0
30:58 Self hosted watch party
34:53 Vulkan video
40:33 Eye in your Pi
- Can I still open a terminal?
- The CEO of System76 Carl Richell tweeted this yesterday when asked about which version of GNOME will be used:
- “3.38 for the 21.04 release then 40 for 21.10. The COSMIC UX is the same for both underlying GNOME versions.”
- They have a dock and that’s beating the new Gnome right there.
- They are…gasp…listening to people. The Gnome devs could learn a lot from that approach.
- It feels like a step back for GNOME, then again it’s that step back that has made Cinnamon, Pantheon, and Deepin get as popular as they have.
- Nothing like putting back features the GNOME project has dropped over the years.
- Heck, Ubuntu uses GNOME but it comes with 3 or 4 extensions pre-loaded out of the box.
- System76 says that over 56% of Pop!_OS users surveyed say they use Dash to Dock or Dash to Panel, so that functionality will be included in the settings menu desktop tab.
- Basic boot is best boot.
- It’s in next-gen if you’re looking for it.
- The framework has been set.
- Way to go Hector Martin! This is exciting news :-D
MXLinux <3
- In this post Jack Wallen examines why MXLinux is the most downloaded Linux distribution on Distrowatch.
- He describes MXLinux as having a clean desktop with the perfect balance of simplicity and ease of use for the new user, combined with a very configurable desktop for us veterans.
- And that desktop is XFCE, which is one of the most stable, user friendly and configurable desktops that we at LWDW use and love.
- MXLinux is one of my favorite distros to install on my older 32 bit machines.
- It is based on one of my all time favs, the Debian based antiX.
- It’s not the most downloaded, it’s the #1 on Distrowatch.
- That’s like saying I’m the best Robocraft player because I got a lot of “Best Player” and “Best Looking” votes at the end of a match.
- That poor XFCE, what have you done to my boy!?
- Yeah, nothing against the author but Distrowatch does not equal most downloaded desktop distro.
- It measures the popularity of that distro’s page on distrowatch.com.
- For the two people not running Manjaro.
- My favorite Arch based distro is EndeavourOS, which uses the easy to use and beautiful Calamares installer GUI.
- This is a step above from the classic Slackware and Debian command line installers.
- That is huge!
- Completely open firmware for a 3G/4G modem and it almost works as intended.
- There’s still some issues with waking it from sleep.
- And the ADSP frequency divider still needs proprietary firmware.
- Does the unlock prompt still look straight out of the 90s?
- Because whenever I install something XFCE and that starts before I can purge it, I always think that could use a refresh.
- GL Matrix is still my favorite Linux screensaver, though
- XScreenSaver 6.00 has been released with lots of major updates.
- There has been a major refactoring of the XScreenSaver daemon, the component of the XScreenSaver suite that provides screen locking on X11 systems.
- For improved security the daemon has been divided into three programs: xscreensaver, xscreensaver-gfx and xscreensaver-auth.
- The unlock dialog now has user-selectable color schemes, so you can make it look prettier.
- XScreenSaver uses XFreeType for fonts now.
- And it uses EGL instead of GLX when available.
- Setting up video viewing parties has been all the rage since the pandemic.
- I have noticed people on Twitter using Local Party and I have been invited to several Star Trek viewing parties with this app.
- Impressive since it’s only a month old.
- I don’t want to npm just to find out if this is Windows only.
- Eh?
- I cloned the git and pulled it up in a browser, seems to work.
- The catch for this is all parties need to have the same video file.
- It will be so nice to have an open standard for bare metal video acceleration, that isn’t proprietary, and isn’t locked down to specific hardware.
- H.265-encode extension is currently in development now, and VP9 decode and AV1 decode/encode extensions to follow in a future release.
- That’s a long post but it does describe what the new extensions all do.
- No VP9 encoding?
Slice of Pi
- Ok, this is for real and is very creepy!
- But despite that I can see a practical application for it in human interaction.
- This is Eyecam, an anthropomorphic webcam shaped like a human eye, that can see, blink, look around and observe you.
- Eyecam is a design prototype exploring the potential futures of sensing devices.
- The control of the eye movements is made with an Arduino Nano, and it is connected to a computer via a Raspberry Pi Zero.
- This eye webcam looks like a security nightmare, as well as a visual nightmare!
