Season 1 - Episode 7: DEspicable

Desktop environments. Do not dry clean.

Discussion

Red Hat was bought by IBM for \$34 billion. Hopefully Fedora, Gnome, Centos and other Red Hat supported projects won’t be hurt by this. We are still smarting from the Oracle Sun acquisition.

Canonical published some stats collected by their installer (via OMG! Ubuntu!). No concrete numbers, only percentages. Trusting Canonical with stats collection.

Ubuntu Mate is now available for the GPD Pocket2. Now in correct resolution and the right way up. Download from here. The device reminds us of something…

Mozilla is gonna trial partnership with Proton VPN to help us keep safe online (via Joey Falon). Good source of income for the browser maker. Proton are known for their email service. Secure, reliable and easy-to-use VPN is good for all of us.

Solus posted about the current situation of the project. The first post was followed by the second one and by an open letter from Ikey Doherty after the recording of this episode. Looks like Solus braved the stormy seas and is sailing into calmer waters with a good crew on board. Transparency is important and the bus factor is something to be aware of.

There might be a new Linux based phone next year! The folks at Pine64 are hoping to offer us a Plasma Mobile based alternative to the horrors of Android and iOS. It should be much cheaper than the Librem 5. We yearn for a phone that is not restricted by the vendor, so 2019 might be the year of decent mobiles. In the mean time LineageOS and Replicant might help, if you happen to have the right device for it.

The amount of Windows games avaiable on Linux through Proton is over 2,600, according to ProtonDB - a great source of information, if you want to know what games work and how well. You can log in with your Steam account and check the games you own too. Similar to the Wine Application Database. Fair play to Valve for hugely contributing to gaming on Linux! Let’s spread the word about how awesome our OS is these days. Related technologies: DXVK, Vulkan and DirectX

Desktop environments: Check them out on YouTube:

KDE
Gnome
Gnome on Ubuntu
LXQT
Mate
XFCE (4.12 is current, 4.13 dev branch, 4.14 will be the GTK3 release)
Budgie
Cinnamon
Elementary OS
Window managers.
KDE timeline with screenshots.
Why some people love Cinnamon.
LXQT landed in Lubuntu 18.10. replacing LXDE. They are keeping the 32bit builds when most others have dropped them.
Use compositors for desktop effects, if you have the resources. Meanwhile Gnome is doing its own thing - who needs legacy icons anyway? The extension has been unmaintained for a year now. They might even do away with shell themes.
Gnome’s ploughing forward makes people spin off their own GTK based desktops:
Cinnamon,
Budgie,
Mate,
Pantheon.
Ubuntu uses their own implementation of Gnome, go to Fedora for the stock experience. What do we want from a destkop environments? Use XFCE if stability is your thing.
Elementary OS’s Design Philosophy.
Adwaita is not popular here.

Linux boners:

Mike: Termux
Shane: LMMS, Ardour, Reaper, PulseAudio, ALSA
Conor: Thunderbird, ProtonMail IMAP bridge, K-9 Mail, Kmail, Mailspring, OfflineIMAP, Mutt, Alpine, Claws Mail

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Disclaimer

May contain mature references

Attribution

The music for this podcast was sampled from Bust This Bust That - Professor Kliq which was released under the CC BY NC SA License.