● 09.04.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 04/09/2023: Distro Watch Examines Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 and LibreArts Weekly is Ready

Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week was a bit slow in news and releases, but we got a new stable Firefox update, new major Nitrux, Emmabuntüs Debian Edition, and Armbian releases, as well as a new GNU Linux-libre release for software freedom lovers.

• On top of that, I show you how to install the latest Linux 6.5 kernel on Ubuntu and how to enable thumbnails for AVIF images in Nautilus. Below, you can read this week’s hottest news and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for September 3rd, 2023.

Audiocasts/Shows

• While chaos is brewing in SUSE and Red Hat land, Canonical stays the course and doubles down on the Linux desktop. Plus, our thoughts on the kernel team GPL-blocking NVIDIA.

• **harfbuzz** , **hicolor-icon-theme** , **hunspell** , **hyphen** from the

• **l** software series of Slackware.

• shasum -a256=ca1910a612e77798c323df8ee64aed22dd2179d92a71ea65d8c00511c59b203c

Instructionals/Technical

• If you’ve switched to Linux, and you are wondering if you can run Steam and play Steam games on your Linux machine..yes you can!

• All you have to do is Install Steam, download the game you like, and play it.

• Wine, the popular software library to running Windows apps on Linux and macOS, announced a new development release one day ago.

• RPM or Red Hat Package Manager is a free, open-source package management system.

• The RPM package management system is written in C and Perl programming languages for Linux operating systems.

• It is used in many other distributions, such as Fedora, AlmaLinux, CentOS, and OracleLinux. The Red Hat distributions are Debian and Ubuntu.

• Installing RPM packages on Ubuntu 22.04 can be done in two different ways. It is a very easy process that may take a couple of minutes. Let’s get started!

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• With every GNOME upgrade, some extensions break; that’s not new. But, with GNOME 45, every extension will break

• And why is that? Let me tell you more about it.

• With every upgrade, there is always a technical improvement or change.

• And, GNOME 45 comes with pretty exciting changes, except this one.

• Back in December 2020 I wrote up my personal Must-Have GNOME extensions. It’s been nearly three years, two job changes, and a few Ubuntu upgrades, so I thought I’d take another look.

• This used to crash a lot for me, to the point I’d go and look for it in the panel and it was missing. I figured if I don’t realise it’s gone, I probably don’t need it that much. Also, GNOME shell volume control has changed a bit over the last few years. It’s pretty easy to switch device now in the menu.

• Long time, no release.

• When I last blogged about GNOME Crosswords, I had a design plan to improve the editing API. It’s been a busy summer since then. The crosswords team rewrote large chunks of code to implement and use this new API: [...]

• This year, I was invited by Sonny Piers to be a co-mentor for the GNOME Foundation, working on platform demos for Workbench. I already contribute a lot of entry-level documentation and help a lot of contributors, so this felt like a good step in a direction I’ve been heading for a while.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• While many rolling release distributions constantly chase after the latest technologies, themes, and cutting edge packages, PCLinuxOS is unusual in that it has a strongly conservative approach. The distribution does provide up to date packages, but it feels like a lot of effort has been put into keeping the distribution stable and running smoothly via older approaches. PCLinuxOS doesn’t move with the latest trends. This is a project which doesn’t enable a lot of visual effects, doesn’t leap on newer technologies, doesn’t attempt to package every new desktop that comes along. It’s still running SysV init (instead of systemd), it’s still using an X11 session for Plasma instead of Wayland, it still offers MATE over GNOME, and it is still using the Synaptic package manager over more modern software centres like Discover.

• In short, despite the regular flow of updated packages flowing into the distribution’s repositories, not much seems to be changing with PCLinuxOS. It’s reluctant to adopt new ways of doing things, like portable packages and welcome windows, and advanced filesystems. Most of the tools, approaches, and system administration modules still look and behave the same way they did ten years ago.

• This might appeal to a lot of users, particularly ones who were getting started with Linux around the time PCLinuxOS reached the top of the DistroWatch page hit ranking charts, nearly 20 years ago. People who have been comfortable with Linux for a long time and don’t feel the urge to roll with the times will probably enjoy this distribution a lot. There is a strong sense when using PCLinuxOS that if something isn’t broke, then they don’t fix it.

• However, on the other side of that coin, there are some tools and approaches which have become so commonplace these days that it feels odd to not see them included in this distribution. It feels odd to be missing so many manual pages (though not all of them), it feels a bit strange to be manually adding and troubleshooting Flatpak at this point, it feels a bit alien to not have access to sudo (or doas) on a modern Linux distribution. PCLinuxOS is unusually static for a rolling release, to the point I was able to copy/paste some of the paragraphs in this review from a previous article I wrote about the distribution over four years ago.

• Basically, for the past decade, PCLinuxOS has been upgrading its packages to keep up with upstream, but it doesn’t appear to have tried anything new or introduced any custom tools. This probably appeals to existing PCLinuxOS users as they can continue to feel comfortable, but it is a project unlikely to draw new users who expect to have access to certain modern tools or resources.

New Releases

• antiX, renowned for being a lightweight, systemd-free desktop Linux distribution tailored for aging hardware, has just unveiled antiX 23, the latest iteration of its impressive distro.

• The key highlight? It’s now based on Debian 12 “Bookworm”.

BSD

• Software upgrades have become the norm today for all desktops and servers. Updates to consumer operating systems (Linux or Windows or Mac) are very frequent due to ever-evolving CVEs and fixes. Thus, it’s rare to find a server that has been running continuously for a decade.

• Yet, such a remarkable feat has recently come to light, and it involves an unexpected champion: NetBSD.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The team at the Sparklers: We Are The Makers YouTube channel uses a Raspberry Pi for their virtual painting program.

• A common problem in parsing is that you want to find all identifiers (e.g., variable names, function names) in a document quickly. There are typically some fixed rules. For example, it is common to allow ASCII letters and digits as well as characters like ‘_’ in the identifier, but to forbid some characters at the beginning of the identifier (such as digits). E.g., ab123 is an identifier but 123ab might not be.

• With the Dock, your little, relatively underpowered laptop was hoovered up into a beige plastic maw to make it into an average-sized, somewhat less underpowered desktop. But you got slots and ports and the ability to use it like a desktop computer — two computers in one! — and that was crucial because without any Dock, even the smaller Mini and MicroDocks, you had hardly any ports at all (MacBook Air has entered the chat). Docking was so important that Apple even intentionally gimped the 2300 by keeping the 100MHz 603e on a 32-bit bus to maintain Dock compatibility. Yet because Duos were irrepressibly cute, they turned up in many other TV shows and even movies, most notoriously Hackers: [...]

• Doing anything that requires measurements in nanometers is pretty difficult, and seems like it would require some pretty sophisticated equipment. But when the task at hand is growing oxide layers on silicon chips in preparation for making your own integrated circuits, it turns out that the old Mark 1 eyeball is all you need.

• These days, we live in a post-Dick Tracy world, where you can make a phone call with your fancy wristwatch, and lots more besides. [akashv44] has gone a simpler route, designing their own from scratch with a bare PCB design.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• This is a comparatively short recap, because there haven’t been all that many changes and releases. Highlights: new features in Inkscape and FreeCAD, new releases of BlenderBIM and libwacom, cool new stuff in Ardour.

• The Swatches dock UI has been recently updated by Mike Kowalski.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• A major update to the phenomenally popular Paprius icon set for Linux desktops is now available. Papirus’ September 2023 update adds a bunch of new and updated glyphs, including redesigned icons for LibreOffice that riff on the suite’s own recent icon revamp. Among the newly added apps supported in Paprius v20230901: Additional file/document types are catered for as of this update, with .hwp, .Julia, and .vue among them.

Programming/Development

• rio was the first R package I uploaded to CRAN. And actually, I had my first experience with the back then not-so-friendly CRAN team. I was accused by a CRAN team member for wasting his time 1. But after many back-and-forth e-mails and uploads, the first version of rio, v0.1.1, was released on CRAN on 2013-08-28 at 14:02 CEST. That’s right: that was exactly ten years ago today.

• I used rio in my own PhD research for quickly save and load data. But I did not find rio to be widely used in 2013-2014. There was no development for almost a year (as there was no need, rio worked well enough for my research), until I received an e-mail from Dr Thomas J. Leeper (now research scientist at Facebook Meta) in 2015 saying he updated the package to support more formats (excel, json, etc.) and asking how should he proceed with contributing to the package. At the time, I was busy with my own PhD research (plus million other research projects and services). He even offered to me to uptake the maintainership of rio. I agreed and then the rest is history.

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