LINUX Unplugged

A problem that just kept getting worse and worse. What it was, and why it led us to "check in" on EndeavourOS.

Plus some important community news, handy picks, feedback, and more!

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• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
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• Cast Your Nominations for the 2020 Tuxies — Nominate your favorite projects (the term used loosely here) and devices for the 2020 Tuxies.
• ZaReason is Done. The Store is Closed. — As many have noticed, our product line has been getting smaller and our tech support has been slowing down to a crawl. Unfortunately, the pandemic has been the final KO blow. It has hit our little town hard and we have not been able to recover from it. As of Tuesday, 11/24/20 17:00 EST ZaReason is no longer in business.
• Hector Martin on Twitter — Help make Linux on Apple Silicon Macs a reality! Patreon is up! I’m pausing billing until I get $4k/mo of commitment, so you won’t be charged until there is enough momentum to make the project viable.
• marcan is creating Linux for Apple Silicon Macs | Patreon
• OpenZFS 2.0 Released With Unified FreeBSD/Linux Support, Many New Features — OpenZFS 2.0 has been officially released! OpenZFS 2.0 marks a major step forward for open-source ZFS file-system support for what started out as ZFSOnLinux but is now OpenZFS with unified FreeBSD and Linux support.
• GNOME 40 Mutter Moves Input Work To A Separate Thread — An exciting addition for GNOME 40 is that the Mutter compositor will be punting the input work off to a separate CPU thread.
• GNOME Circle Officially Announced For Letting More Apps/Libraries “Join GNOME” — GNOME Circle is effectively lowering the barrier for allowing new applications and libraries to become part of the GNOME project.
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
• EndeavourOS — A terminal-centric distro with a dynamic and friendly community in its core.
• Feedback: Linode Linux Surprise
• Feedback: Black Friday?
• Feedback: What RF Ear Buds Does Chris Use?
• Amazon.com: Corsair Void RGB Elite Wireless Premium Gaming Headset with 7.1 Surround Sound
• Feedback: Pro1 X Smartphone
• Pro1 X Smartphone Functionality, Choice & Control | Indiegogo — A keyboard smartphone purposely designed for functionality, running Android, Lineage or Ubuntu.
• Pick: Haruna Video Player — A Qt/QML video player built on top of libmpv.
• Pick: gallery-dl — gallery-dl is a command-line program to download image-galleries and -collections from several image hosting sites. It is a cross-platform tool with many configuration options and powerful filenaming capabilities.

We have the coolest new retro tool of the year, that will turn you into a Linux powered spy.

Plus the changes coming to Fedora, and what GNOME is focusing on next year.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• A Cloud Guru: Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Rust Watch: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive — Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed.
• Ruffle — Flash Player emulator written in the Rust programming language
• Ubuntu Web Remix Wants to Be a Chrome OS Alternative, Beta Available Now - 9to5Linux — Ubuntu Web Remix uses Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, offers support for Web apps, and you can also install regular Linux applications from Ubuntu’s software repositories.
• FydeOS beta brings Chromium OS to the PineBook Pro (Android app support too) - Liliputing — The developers say they plan to add support for more ARM-based systems in the future.
• We’re Building the Future of GNOME — Our plans for 2021 are even more ambitious and involve sustaining our ongoing work while building up new initiatives and support for the growing GNOME project and community.
• GNOME Foundation Planning For More Initiatives In 2021 - Phoronix
• Fedora’s i3 team is working on an official Fedora Spin for Fedora 34 : Fedora
• i3 Kickstart files :: Fedora Docs Site
• Fedora 34 to Introduce KDE Plasma Spin for 64-bit ARM - debugpoint.com — The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved the recent proposal to provide a Fedora 34 KDE Plasma Spin for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) architecture.
• Fedora 34 Might Try To Use PipeWire By Default To Replace PulseAudio/JACK - Phoronix — For a while now Fedora has offered PipeWire packages but not yet used by default when it comes to audio handling. A pending change proposal for Fedora 34 would now route all audio through PipeWire rather than the existing JACK and PulseAudio.
• PulseAudio 14.0 Released With Better USB Gaming Headset Support — PulseAudio 14.0 comes with many changes compared to PulseAudio 13.0 that shipped all the way back in September of 2019.
• PulseAudio 14.0 Release Notes
• ASUS Offers First Motherboard Firmware Update Via LVFS+Fwupd For Linux Users - Phoronix — The ASUS P11C-C-4L is an EATX motherboard for the Intel Xeon E platform.
• fwupd 1.5.2 – Technical Blog of Richard Hughes — A plugin for the Pinebook Pro laptop has been added, although it needs further work from PINE64 before it will work correctly.
• Jasem’s Ekosphere: KStars v3.5.0 is Released — This release marks a significant milestone for KStars with the integration of StellarSolver, the Cross Platform Sextractor and Astrometry.net-Based Internal Astrometric Solver.
• Wave-share — Serverless, peer-to-peer, local file sharing through sound.
• Wave-share on GitHub — A proof-of-concept for WebRTC signaling using sound. Works with all devices that have microphone + speakers. Runs in the browser.
• Feedback: Eric’s Wonderful Workstation
• Feedback: Container Host Choices
• Feedback: Podify
• Pick: podify — Create podcasts from anything youtube-dl can handle.
• Pick: Dev Fonts
• Hear Audio From NASA's Perseverance As It Travels Through Deep Space | NASA — A microphone aboard NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has recorded the sounds of the spacecraft as it hurtles through interplanetary space.
• Perseverance Rover’s Interplanetary Sounds by NASA

We review the Dell Precision 5750, a born and bred MacBook killer that runs Linux.

Plus a nasty reminder of how closely Apple monitors its users, and their fatal flaw that we think is outrageous.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• New device puts music in your head — no headphones required
• Greg K-H at Linux app Summit 2020: What Linux kernel developers wish application developers would do better — In this talk, a Linux kernel developer gets to complain how his normal "test case" i.e. userspace code, could do better when it comes to a whole range of different things that have been learned over time by maintaining a stable interface to the kernel for 20+ years.
• Linux App Summit 2020 Videos Now Available From Steam/Valve To GNOME Circle - Phoronix
• Seattle GNU/Linux Conference
• Why Linux: Your Mac Isn’t Yours — On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
• macOS Big Sur launch appears to cause temporary slowdown in even non-Big Sur Macs | Ars Technica
• Apple apps on macOS Big Sur bypass firewall and VPN connections
• Macs are a privacy nightmare – OSnews
• Application Trust is Hard, but Apple does it Well — Security Embedded — It comes down to an argument of trust - do you trust Apple, acting in their best interests, is sufficiently aligned with your best interests too? Or do you believe they're a malevolent entity? It's not feasible for an individual to maintain the list of trustworthy or untrustworthy parties that Apple does.
• Does Apple really log every app you run? A technical look – Jacopo Jannone - blog
• Not all bad news for Arm Macs Tho, might be able to bless Linux kernels — On arm64 macs, there's no all-security-checks-are-off mode. You can however bless your unsigned kernels through kmutil, which adds their hashes to the Secure Boot policy, allowing you to boot them.
• Longhorn on Twitter — So how will you boot third-party operating systems on arm64 Macs? You might have seen that pongoOS has been getting a ton of work in the recent past, and even more is coming. This work will allow us to support pongoOS as a second-stage bootloader for Apple Silicon-based Macs.
• patrick wardle on Twitter — In Big Sur Apple decided to exempt many of its apps from being routed thru the frameworks they now require 3rd-party firewalls to use (LuLu, Little Snitch, etc.) 🧐 Q: Could this be (ab)used by malware to also bypass such firewalls? 🤔 A: Apparently yes, and trivially so 😬😱😭
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
• Precision 5750 17 Inch Mobile Workstation Laptop with AI & VR | Dell USA — The first thin and light 17-inch mobile workstation is also the smartest. Featuring Dell Optimizer for Precision with AI, the latest Intel® Core™ or Xeon® processors and NVIDIA® graphics. Starting at $2,139.00
• Dell vs Ryzen desktop
• ChrisLAS Workstation vs Ryzenbox
• Three way shoot out Ryzen vs Dell vs Chris Wks
• AI Benchmark Alpha Benchmark - OpenBenchmarking.org
• Ryzen 3600 Single/Multithreaded And RAM Tests Performance - OpenBenchmarking.org
• Pick: Yacht — a container management UI with a focus on templates and 1-click deployments.
• Lutris 0.5.8 Release

We round up our favorite tweaks to the desktop, and apps that make it great.

Plus some highlights from Arch Conf, and our reaction to Mint finally fixing their Chromium problem.

Special Guest: Drew DeVore.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• A Cloud Guru: Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Arch Conf 2020 Videos
• media.ccc.de - Arch Linux: Past, Present and Future
• Project X - Pure Open-Source Coreboot Support On AMD Zen - Phoronix — Project X is about "eXcising binary blobs from the x86 part of Zen CPUs."
• OSFC 2020 - Open Source Firmware Conference
• Linux Mint pre-loads Chromium and Brings New IPTV Player — The package is available Linux Mint repository as “chromium” which you can install using standard “apt-get” or via the package manager. This is pure native Chromium and not a snap version.
• Monthly News – October 2020 – The Linux Mint Blog
• LINUX Unplugged 360: The Hard Work of Hardware
• Starlink Beta Has Outperformed Most Internet in the US
• SpaceX Starlink users provide first impressions and unboxing pictures | Ars Technica — New speed-test data collected by Ookla and published by PCMag last week found average Starlink download speeds of 79.5Mbps and average upload speeds of 13.8Mbps in October
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
• profile-sync-daemon — Symlinks and syncs browser profile dirs to RAM thus reducing HDD/SDD calls and speeding-up browsers.
• GPU-Viewer — A front-end to glxinfo, vulkaninfo, clinfo and es2_info.
• Ivan Molodetskikh: Video Trimmer — Video Trimmer cuts out a fragment of a video given the start and end timestamps. The video is never re-encoded, so the process is very fast and does not reduce the video quality.
• junegunn/fzf — A command-line fuzzy finder
• Fish shell — fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for Linux, macOS, and the rest of the family.
• cxreg/smartcd — Alter your bash (or zsh) environment as you cd.
• wting/autojump — A cd command that learns - easily navigate directories from the command line.
• gsamokovarov/jump — Jump helps you navigate faster by learning your habits.
• muammar/mkchromecast — Cast macOS and Linux Audio/Video to your Google Cast and Sonos Devices
• xat/castnow — commandline chromecast player
• xat/dlnacast — Cast local media to your TV through UPnP/DLNA
• skorokithakis/catt — Cast All The Things allows you to send videos from many, many online sources to your Chromecast.
• tridactyl — A Vim-like interface for Firefox, inspired by Vimperator/Pentadactyl
• philc/vimium — The hacker's browser.

Why we think the new Raspberry Pi 400 is just the beginning.

And we chat with the CTO of the Uno Platform, a new way to bring native apps to Linux.

Chapters:

Special Guest: Jérôme Laban.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• A Cloud Guru: Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Happy birthday VIM! — 29 years ago the very first version of Vim was built and distributed.
• vim-mario: Mario on Vim
• Meet the Raspberry Pi 400, a $70 Linux PC Hiding Inside a Keyboard - OMG! Ubuntu! — At the heart of the Raspberry Pi 400 is a 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A72. This quad-core chip is similar to last year’s Raspberry Pi 4 but clocked to run slightly faster.
• The Raspberry Pi 400 - Teardown and Review | Jeff Geerling
• Collabora expect their Linux Kernel work for Windows game emulation in Kernel 5.11 | GamingOnLinux — One of the key points that Gabriel Krisman Bertazi went over is their work on system call emulation, which is now required because DRM and anti-cheat tech "are issuing system calls directly from the Windows game code and that bypasses Wine."
• GNOME 40 Desktop Environment Slated for Release on March 24th, 2021 — Only three development milestones will be published in six months, an alpha, a beta and a Release Candidate.
• Uno Platform — The first and only UI Platform for single-codebase applications for Windows, WebAssembly, iOS, macOS, Android and Linux.
• Uno Platform 3.1 Released
• The Windows Calculator on Linux with Uno Platform | Ubuntu — The good folks in the Uno Platform community have ported the open-source Windows Calculator to Linux. The calculator is published in the snapstore and can be downloaded right away.
• Porting Windows Calculator
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
• Feedback: Falling for Fedora
• Feedback: First Time Fedora User
• Feedback: Distro Debate
• Pick: NewsFlash — A modern feed reader designed for the GNOME desktop.
• Miniflux is a minimalist and opinionated feed reader.

Fedora 33 is a bold release, and we’ve put it through the wringer. We tell you what’s great, and what you should know before diving in.

Plus our thoughts on the bigger problem exposed by the youtube-dl takedown.

Chapters:

Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Neal Gompa.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• A Cloud Guru: Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• XFS File-System With Linux 5.10 Punts Year 2038 Problem To The Year 2486 - Phoronix
• Linux 5.10 Is The Next LTS Kernel - Phoronix
• Thorsten ‘the Linux kernel logger’ Leemhuis on Twitter — #Linux 5.10 will be the next Longterm (aka LTS) #kernel (and thus supported for at least two years, but in the end it often are six). That’s what @gregkh said a few minutes ago in a “Ask the Expert Session” on #OSSummit Europe
• System76 Blog: What’s New in Pop!_OS 20.10
• A Look At The Performance Improvements With System76 Pop!_OS 20.10 - Phoronix
• YouTube-DL Removed From GitHub After DMCA Notice
• GitHub took down popular YouTube downloader — so devs made more copies
• 1Password for Linux beta is now open 🎊 🐧 🎊 | 1Password
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
• Unfilter.show
• Fedora 33 is officially here!
• Fedora 33 Review: What’s New and How to Upgrade | FOSS Linux
• Fedora 33 Released With Workstation Using Btrfs By Default - Phoronix
• Fedora 33 To Stick With systemd-resolved Following Last Minute Concerns - Phoronix
• Contribute at the Fedora Test Week for Kernel 5.9 - Fedora Magazine
• Feedback: System76 Disclosure
• Feedback: Open Source Support
• Feedback: FreeIPA
• Pick: annie — Fast, simple and clean video downloader.

We put the new Ubuntu 20.10 to the test, and chat with System76's Mechanical Engineer to get the secrets of the new Thelio Mega.

Plus some important community news, feedback, picks, and more.

Chapters:

Special Guests: Lindsey Cross and Philip Muller.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• A Cloud Guru: Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Microsoft Edge Insider
• Introducing Microsoft Edge preview builds for Linux - Microsoft Edge Blog — Today’s release supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE distributions.
• System76 unleash a quad-GPU Linux monster with the ‘Thelio Mega’ — System76 say that the Thelio Mega is the world's smallest quad-GPU workstation primarily made for deep learning and scientific computing.
• Thelio Mega - System76
• NVIDIA Doesn’t Expect To Have Linux 5.9 Driver Support For Another Month — Linux Kernel 5.9+ is incompatible with current and previous NVIDIA Linux GPU drivers. We advise customers to defer updating to Linux Kernel 5.9+ until mid-November when an NVIDIA Linux GPU driver update with Kernel 5.9+ support is expected to be available.
• You may want to avoid Linux Kernel 5.9 if you want fully supported NVIDIA drivers
• Frogging-Family/nvidia-all: Nvidia driver 450 to 396 series AIO installer
• PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition | PINE64 — This community edition will ship in a custom presentation box designed by Manjaro’s development team, and the PinePhone itself will feature a sleek-looking Manjaro logo on the back-cover.
• Manjaro ARM Alpha1 with Lomiri (PinePhone) - ARM / Releases - Manjaro Linux Forum
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
• Unfilter.show
• Unplugged Core Contributors
• Ubuntu 20.10 Release Date & New Features (Updated) - OMG! Ubuntu! — Desktop lead Martin Wimpress has teased full Ubuntu desktop support for the Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB), much to the delight of the Raspberry Pi fan base.
• Linux 5.8 Released, This is What’s New - OMG! Ubuntu!
• GNOME 3.38 Release Notes
• Groovy Gorilla Release Notes
• Ubuntu To Try Again In Switching IPTables To Use Nftables Backend - Phoronix
• Ubuntu 20.10 Adding Active Directory Support To The Installer - Phoronix — The Ubiquity installer user interface allows specifying the domain, administrator, and password as well as a test for the domain.
• Feedback: ESXi Arm Fling
• Pick: badblocks — badblocks is a program to test storage devices for bad blocks.

We're reminded that you can't judge a distro by its screenshots. We use Pop!_OS for a few weeks and share our embarrassing discovery.

Plus our thoughts on the new Plasma release, a super handy pick, and more.

Chapters:

Special Guest: Neal Gompa.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• A Cloud Guru: This course is designed to be a deep dive into the topic of systemd, the most widely used service management scheme in Linux today.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Linux_5.9 - Linux Kernel Newbies
• Plasma 5.20 — One absolutely massive release!
• ESXi on Arm Fling is LIVE! — The ESXi-Arm Fling supports a number of different Arm platforms ranging from a traditional Datacenter form-factor to both Near and Far Edge systems including the highly requested Raspberry Pi.
• ESXi Arm Edition | VMware Flings
• Great News for Nebula
• Nebula for iOS and Android is now available | Defined Networking — In February of this year, Nate and I left Slack to start a company together, Defined Networking, Inc., to focus on Nebula full-time.
• Mobile Nebula on the App Store
• LUP 329: Flat Network Truthers
• The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% Of The Linux Kernel — With Linux 5.9, it comes in at 2.16 million lines of code plus another 247k lines of code comments and another 109k blank lines.
• AMD Graphics Driver Hacker News Thread
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
• Pop!_OS by System76
• Unplugged Core Contributors
• Manjaro ARM 20.10 released!
• Feedback: TLP Magic
• Feedback: Chromebooks and Education
• PIck: autotier — A passthrough FUSE filesystem that intelligently moves files between storage tiers based on the frequency of use, file age, and tier fullness.
• AntennaPod 2.0.1 Changelog

Our secrets for a low-cost bulletproof Nextcloud server that we figured out the hard way. We take you into the "server garage" and share our lessons learned.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Drew DeVore.

Sponsored By:

• A Cloud Guru: Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs.
• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• KDE Begins Landing “Breeze Evolution” Refresh For Default Theme - Phoronix

We embrace new tools to upgrade your backup game, securely move files around the network, and debunk the idea that Windows will ever be based on Linux.

Chapters:

Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, and Neal Gompa.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• A Cloud Guru: Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 20 Million Downloads from the LVFS — Technical Blog of Richard Hughes