Podcast Season 4 Episode 6
Podcast RSS feeds: Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
Title: Gnihilism
In this episode: Microsoft Windows and Canonical’s Ubuntu hold hands. There’s an XScreensaver scandal at Debian. Convergence has nearly converged with reality and WhatsApp is now super-secure. Plus Finds and Vox Populi.
What’s in the show:
- News:
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Microsoft and Canonical have create WINE-antimatter by allowing you to ‘apt-get install’ many Ubuntu packages on Windows 10. Debian has got into a debate with the developer of XScreensaver, Jamie Zawinski, who would like Debian to stop shipping his project. Canonical’s long-promised convergence device is now available for pre-order. Linux is now running (unofficially) on Sony’s PlayStation 4, if you’re got an old firmware version and WhatsApp now has full end-to-end encryption.
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- Finds of the Fortnight:
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- <Stilvoid> I’ve rediscovered my love for love, as in love2d.org. Oh and I discovered docker-compose v2 which has some nifty new features over v1 🙂
- <Devilment> Just been updating a few RPM-based systems, which use delta-RPMs. Great for saving on bandwidth, but is a tecnology that would have been more useful in the days of dial-up.
- <einonm> Studio Ghibli of much animation fame have open sourced a big peice of software used for many of their films – OpenToonz. Also my 3yo daughter loved spotting all the penguins in the competition issue a few months ago. Can we have more hidden penguins please? She’s been dissapointed by lack of penguins in the issues since 😛
- Andrew:
- OpenToonz does indeed look very good.
- Ben:
- A new peer-to-peer decentralised shopping system called OpenBazaar.
- Mike:
- Putting a space before a command in Bash won’t add it to the command history.
- Record video to compact cassette – in 1987, thanks to Fisher-Price PXL-2000.
- Graham:
- Hugo’s comment on our previous podcast.
- The EFF and Amnesty International say Encryption is a Human Rights Issue.
- Check your internet connection from the command line with speedtest-cli.
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- Vocalise your Neurons
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If you want Mike to read out your neurons next time, email your thoughts to mike@linuxvoice.com.
- Voice of the Masses:
Presenters: Ben Everard, Andrew Gregory, Graham Morrison and Mike Saunders.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (50MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (70MB)
Download the smaller yet even more awesome Opus file (20MB)
Duration: 57:20
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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About The Author
Graham Morrison
A free software advocate and writer since the late 1990s, Graham is a lapsed KDE contributor and author of the Meeq MIDI step sequencer. @degville on Twitter.
Completely guessing, but…
I’m wondering if MS are trying to transition away from NT
End goal of having “Windows” as a custom layer over a base *nix system.
They must be panicking about all the “get school-kids coding” stuff that’s going on
Raspberry Pi, Arduino, The BBC Micro:bit, etc.
In a few year’s time, there’s going to be wave-after-wave of school leavers who have grown up with the *nix CLI
Why, when you have that, would you be interested in Windows?
I think MS maybe see that, and are therefore moving away from NT and towards *nix themselves.
I think Microsoft have certainly taken an interest in this. Of the three platforms you mention (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, The BBC Micro:bit) MS are involved in two (the Pi and the Micro:bit). While I’m not sure many people actually use Windows IoT on the Pi, they’re certainly there for all press events and are trying hard to get Windows associated with the Pi. They also own Minecraft which is massively popular with school aged children.
I’m not sure where they’re going, but they’re investing quite a lot in trying to win the hearts and minds of youngsters.
I would seriously like to see Adobe Creative Suite ported to Linux, especially Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, rather than having to run them in a Windows VM.
Bash on Windows is an interesting development and I am skeptical of Microsoft’s intent, especially considering their history of deceit and dirty tactics. A blog from TechRights.org affirmed this point of view. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about it. http://techrights.org/2016/03/10/charm-offensives-distract/
On the one hand I think the collapse of their empire is one prime reason with IoT/servers dominated by Linux, netbooks dominated by Chrome OS, browsers dominated by Chrome/Firefox, messaging/social dominated by Facebook/Google, gaming dominated by Playstation/Steam and phones dominated by Android/iOS. They try to leverage their business marketshare, but even there companies are moving to largely floss-based cloud applications. Hence Microsoft is forced to make moves like cooperate in cross platform media codecs, run Linux instances on Azure and support Bash on Windows. On the other hand it is of course a calculating move to keep as much developers on the Windows platform and distract them from the unholy Facebook-style privacy mess that is Windows 10.
After playing around with quite a few distro’s, the specific developments I would like to see are:
* Broad acceptance of a skill-tree based OS installers beyond the one from Antergos, where you can easily select your preferred components and software. I would much rather see a world where distributions are a thing of the past and the OS is much more plug-and-play capable.
* An easy way for package managers to do slow base OS updates, but regular user software updates.
* Much more focus on users software development instead of just another library. Were are the serious equivalents of XYplorer, Renamer, Foxit, Mediamonkey, Syncback, etc, etc, etc.
* OS virtualization with graphics pass-through without needing a second graphics card, especially to solve the Office/CreativeSuite/gaming issue.
* A serious serious effort to bring Linux distributions to phones with proper QML-based touch-friendly applications.
Euro Truck Simulator is on Linux, doesn’t like fullscreen
Fullscreen works fine.