LWDW 357: PineTab 2 and XFCE 4.18

XFCE 4.18 is out! OBS adds support for WebRTC, Pine64 talks about the PineTab 2, and no Raspi 5 in 2023.

Listen:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:27 Holiday schedule
06:17 XFCE 4.18 is here!
11:43 Pine64 Tab 2
19:38 WebRTC in OBS
34:08 No Pi 5 in 2023

XFCE 4.18

https://www.xfce.org/about/tour418

After almost two years of work Xfce 4.18 is ready for production.
XFCE updates can be hard to spot since the team designs for functionality, not design for the sake of design.
The big OMG bit for 4.18 is updates to Thunar.
It’s now possible to enable an image preview sidebar.
This is kinda neat if you don’t want to do the zoom all method.
There is a newly editable toolbar that lets you add and reorder toolbar icons based on your needs.
Thunar 4.18 includes recursive search.
It is now possible to undo basic file operations and to redo them.
Undo and Redo can be used for ‘move’, ‘rename’, ‘trash’, ‘link’ and ‘create’ operations.
Setting default applications no longer takes eleventy steps!
I ran into that nightmare when Chromium decided to take over all images.
The compositor now supports adaptive vsync with GLX.
If you’re using Debian testing you can install it right now.
Oh sweet! One of my favorite updates is simple but solves an annoying problem, you can now change the font style and size in the Xfce clock applet!
There are four clock layouts: date only, time only, date and time & time and date.
The Xfce4 Panel length is now configured in pixels rather than percentages, as before.
There is a new “keep panel above windows” option.
- This allows maximised app windows to fill the area behind the panel rather than maximise its bottom or top edge to sit flush against it.
Thunar has a new bookmark menu in the sidebar.
And has a new split view option for easily dragging and dropping.

PineTab2

https://www.pine64.org/2022/12/15/december-update-merry-christmas-and-happy-new-pinetab/

The fine folks at Pine64 are working on a new open source tablet estimated to be available after the Chinese New Year, and priced extremely affordable like their other Pine64 hardware.
The PineTab2 is going to be much more powerful than the original PineTab, which suffered from the hardware shortages from the pandemic.
These are the current specs, but the PineTab2 is still experimental and these specs may change:
- It features the RK3566, a modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU and supports up-to 8GB of RAM.
- A tempered glass 10’1 IPS screen with modern and reasonably thin bezels.
- The PineTab2 has two USB-C ports, one of which is USB 3.0 and the other is intended for charging, but also has USB 2.0 speeds.
- Micro HDMI port for video output.
- A front-facing 2MPx camera and a rear-facing 5MPx one.
- It has a metal chassis that is very sturdy while also being easy to disassemble for upgrades, maintenance and repair.
- To make the device end-user serviceable Pine64 has made the PineTab2’s guts modular.
- Including the camera modules, the daughter-board, the battery and USB keyboard connector can all be replaced in under 5 minutes.
And like the original PineTab, the PineTab2 will have a keyboard, which doubles up as a protective carry cover.
But for the PineTab2 the keyboard WILL be included by default.
If there is a Linux OS that is both convergent and mobile and goes to desktop mode when you open up the keyboard case, this could be a game changer.
And it would sure be nice to do show notes on!
Dev units available soon.
4/8 GB options.
No mention of screen resolution.
Prototypes will be available at FOSDEM early next year.
The original PineTab’s death was, in some part, a choice to allocate resources to secure PinePhone’s availability throughout late 2020 and early 2021.

OBS WebRTC

https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/7926

It might not look like it now but this is going to be huge for streamers.
Yeah, most people don’t want to spend the time hacking up their own Jitsi server.
WebRTC OBS users could share their video without needing a video server over p2p.
This means low latency collaboration with no backend required.
WebRTC is flexible in what codecs it supports so users could use H265 and AV1.
Sub second latency.
Right now the plugin only supports output so you could use it as an alternative to RTMP if your service supports it.
This is under heavy development but I can see some fun uses for it.
In the future you could send and receive AV directly between hosts removing the need for external applications or services.
Or stream to multiple services.
This has currently been tested on Linux and Mac with locally run broadcast-box as well as remotely hosted WHIP endpoints.
This is cool: OBS could experiment with broadcasting multiple scenes at once, and viewers could then switch between scenes or different views in the same game.
It integrates a lot of the features used in vdo.ninja for OBS that I use every week for podcasting.