Debian At 30 and No More Distro Hopping! – LWDW388

Debian celebrates the big 3-0, Window Maker gets its first release in three years, measuring audio latency on Linux, and a homebrew Gothberry Pi.

Listen:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:33 Blink-o-tron keyboards
04:01 Broadcast capture cards
03:34 AJA Kona and OBS
05:50 Debian at 30
08:05 Using Debian in the studio
15:15 Window Maker lives!
18:32 Who uses Window Maker?
21:58 No more distro hopping
22:33 Linux and audio latency
28:22 Gothberry Pi

Debian turns 30 today!

https://twitter.com/debian/status/1689399168169869313?s=20

Debian, Linux’s foundational OS, turns 30 years old today, August 16th, 2023!
DebianDay parties are taking place in Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal, Turkey, South Africa and in more countries around the world.
DebianDay is celebrated each year on August 16th, but this one is special because Debian’s 30th birthday is today!
Debian was founded by Ian Murdock who first announced it on August 16, 1993, and he initially called the system “the Debian Linux Release”.
Although the first release came out on September 15, 1993.
I started using Debian in October of 1993, and had been using Slackware Linux when it came out that same year in July.
I have been using Debian installed on literally hundreds of machines, both new, old and vintage in my computer collection, because it supports almost every architecture of computer I own!
I was using Debian with the Window Maker desktop when I first started doing LWDW over 5 years ago.
Last month Slackware hit the big 3-0 and another old timer joined the club.
I run Debian day in, day out.
Why? Because it stays out of my way and gets work done.
You get a solid platform to build on with 2/4 years of support.

Window Maker 0.96.0 (Beastwick)

https://www.osnews.com/story/136611/window-maker-0-96-0-released/

https://www.windowmaker.org/news/

And speaking of running Window Maker, my favorite free and open source window manager for the X Window System that I am using right now, has a new release, Window Maker 0.96.0!
It has been over 3 years since the last release, and there are some cool new features for the NeXTSTEP inspired X window manager:
- Window Maker now supports hot corners, so you can send your mouse to a corner of your display and have it execute a command.
  - In WPrefs, “Hot Corner Shortcut Preferences” can be used for configuration or by manually adding a “HotCorners” key and value to “YES” in the ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker file.
- And for taking screenshots there are new keyboard shortcuts you can configure in WPrefs “Keyboard Shortcut Preferences” tab, including “Capture a portion of the screen”, “Capture a window” or “Capture the entire screen”.
- Improvements for full screen applications.
- Also, there is a new option added for keeping the dock on the primary display head.
I love installing Dockapps on Window Maker for viewing hardware stats, clocks, sound mixers . . .
In fact dockapps are the original inspiration for desktop widgets.
Thank you Beastwick for posting this news in Discord chat.

Measuring round-trip latency in Linux

https://linuxgamecast.com/2023/08/measuring-round-trip-latency-on-linux/

What is round-trip latency?
Audio go in, computer go brr, audio come out.
For 90% of you it really does not matter.
For my fellow 10% crew, well, it’s really really important.
We need to monitor live audio post effects.
Be it vocals or MIDI keyboards, latency can mess you up.
Did I mention it includes benchmarks?

Slice of Pi

Blackberry Pi

https://zxmake.dev/2023/08/05/blackberry-pi/

Goth Raspberry.
Welcome to the TSAs worst nightmare.
PAcked with a Pi 0, blackberry keypad, and Raspberry pi camera NoIR.
Even has a Spectrum inspired case for good measure.
And a nice touch, the GPIOs are directly accessible from the top of the lcd screen for easier connection.
I love that it looks like a Speccy and a Blackberry merged into one.
It is a SpeccBerry!