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hey everyone this is Nick and I moved this video to today instead of yesterday to avoid an avalanche of people trying to spot an April's Fool's joke although in retrospect it would probably have meant a lot more common so maybe that was a mistake anyway this week we have the beta for Ubuntu 223.04 and all of its variants including a brand new one that was accepted this week we have vast improvements to the Linux mobile operating systems like Ubuntu touch and plasma mobile and we have Italy blocking chat GPT but not for the reasons you might think and I also included this segue to today's sponsor for exactly the reasons you might think thanks to linode for sponsoring this video Leonard is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own next Cloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation on line and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games like pie hole pie hole is a DNS sinkhole that filters out requests to add serving domains basically it lets you block ads and improve Network performance it lets you actively monitor every DNS request made on your network and block requests as they come in and you can deploy it in one click only nodes so you can ensure I stay poor and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below so Ubuntu 223.04 lunar Lobster got its Beta release it includes gnome 44 the Linux kernel version 6.2 and finally the brand new installer written in flutter that looks a bit better than the previous one but doesn't support ZFS installs and it should still be faster to complete an install than the previous installer now for those who want ZFS there will be a legacy ISO with the old one Ubuntu 223.04 is also the first release to have the official Unity cinnamon and edubuntu variants all other variants also got their beta though with their latest respective desktop environments and the same internals as the regular gnome bass to Ubuntu so they will get the latest system D Mesa drivers and more as per features Ubuntu 23.04 will get mostly white grown 44 added so background apps refined Quick Settings better Window Manager performance and Waylon support thumbnails in the file picker revamped settings and a few new configuration options for disabling Mouse acceleration or overlay scroll bars in terms of Ubuntu specific features the dock should now show unread notification counters on app icons the tiling assistant extension should be installed by default Ubuntu software now should show categories for SNAP apps and there are a few tweaks to the default theme and icons although nothing that will jump at you and of course I'll have a dedicated video on Ubuntu 23.04 and all of its variants when it releases and that's gonna start to be pretty very time consuming because the number of variants just starts ballooning up now speaking of Ubuntu flavors another one gained official status after Ubuntu Unity it's now Ubuntu Cinnamon's turn the variant has been officially accepted as a flavor which means they meet the pretty tough criteria canonical set like signing the Ubuntu code of conduct having a large enough Community having one or more developers to upload packages on Launchpad and generally following ubuntu's goals and release process it also means Ubuntu cinnamon won't be able to provide flat back pre-installed like every other Ubuntu flavor and you might ask what's the difference with Linux Mint since it's also Ubuntu based and it uses cinnamon by default and the main differences are in the use of snap where mint does not ship that by default and actually has a pretty hostile stance towards the format and in the various utilities that main ships with that are mostly replaced by Ubuntu Utilities in Ubuntu cinnamon plus the yaru theme and icons and also Ubuntu cinnamon will get newer packages and kernel versions and drivers since it follows the release cycle of Ubuntu with a new version every 6 months compared to Linux Mint that sticks to an LTS release until the next one is out so if you really like Ubuntu but you would prefer to use the cinnamon desktop then this thing is now officially supported that's good and if you prefer the mint utilities themes and general approach to packaging then this won't sway you the first Ubuntu touch over-the-air update based on Ubuntu 20.04 is now out it might seem like an old base but it's the result of more than a year of work to Port Ubuntu touch from 16.04 to 20.04 and it's currently only available for the fairphone 4 the pixel 3A and Vodafone devices Plus android phones running Android 9 or later it uses lomiri which is a fork of unity 8 and it now uses system D ayatana indicators and way Droid which is interesting because it might make Ubuntu touch a more viable option for people who need to actually use their smartphones as more than just phones x-wayland integration has been improved the operating system also supports spin codes up to 12 digits it supports USBC PD and the web browser now has Hardware accelerated video decoding with up to 2K video playback the camera app can read barcodes the messaging app lets you zoom in conversations with a pinch gesture and you can add notes and a URL for contacts you'll also find plenty of bug fixes and performance improvements if you already run Ubuntu touch you should be able to update it in place using the stable Channel and while the waydroid implementation seems to still have a few problems here and there it's still a major step forward because if you couple that with F Droid or the Aurora store which has virtually everything that's in the play store then Ubuntu touch becomes a pretty valuable operating system for everyone now in other Linux phone news plasma mobile has a new progress report now they improve the brightness slider to avoid it jumping around when sliding quickly the task switcher is now handled by K win instead of the shell which should result in better performance and there's a new quick setting to manage Network hotspots but most work has gone into the applications themselves the audio tube music player received a lot of work and design improvements plus some memory usage reduction the contacts app now uses mobile forms to be easier to use the Ariana eBook reader can now open files directly from the file manager tokodon the Mastodon client now handles links to activity Pub resources the message composer will preview the message you're replying to and notifications can now be filtered neochat The Matrix client now supports inline message editing and it has a new simpler menu and more video controls when playing videos plasma tube the YouTube client now has rounded thumbnails and the login workflow for your Google account has been revamped calendar with a K because it's a KD app now supports setting reminders at custom times and casts the podcast player which also starts with OK can now be closed to the system tray and lets you search for episodes and you might think system tray on a mobile Linux operating system and that's because these applications are all adaptive they resize for mobile phones and for desktop which means you can run them all right now today on your plasma desktop or even on your ground desktop if you want Italy blocked chat GPT on Friday but not because they think AI poses a threat to society by disseminating false information presented with the highest of confidence simply because it doesn't respect user data and might present answers and content that is not suitable for the user's age as they don't verify that they say that chat GPT experienced a breach that exposed user conversations and payment information which which is already pretty bad and that there is no legal basis to justify the mass collection of personal data to train those algorithms they also said that since there's no way for the users to verify their age when using chat GPT it exposes miners to unsuitable answers and as such the program was banned they gave open AI 20 days to respond to how they would address these concerns and they will incur a penalty of 20 million euros if they don't which is probably not that much but could still hurt open AI might have gotten a lot of funding but it's not big tech level in terms of money and I mean these are not my personal concerns with chat GPT the fact that it blatantly presents misinformation as the right thing and will defend it to its death even if you prove to it that it's wrong and the fact that it's no longer open source are way more worrying to me but I guess this might also help stop it in its tracks at least in one country Enterprise Linux might not be as secure as one might think apparently specifically sentos in this this case Google's Project zero which is a security team whose job is to discover flaws in their own products but also in other pieces of software they found that some Linux Kernel Security fixes are not backported to certain Enterprise Linux distributions one example is sentos stream 9 which uses the Linux kernel 5.15 it's a supported version so in theory it should have access to all security fixes but it looks like it's not the case Google's Project zero reported three vulnerabilities to send to us with their usual 90 days waiting period before these are publicly disclosed and red hat accepted these fixes attributed them vulnerability numbers of cve numbers but they didn't fix them in time these three vulnerabilities range from low to moderate severity and lead to privileged escalation system crashes and more and so now all these vulnerabilities are public and can be exploited by attackers while they are not fixed in older versions of the Linux kernel distributed by Centos stream 9. and what's more the current waiting period of 90 days might be shrunk in the future which means that companies like red hat will have even less time in the future to address these issues before they're publicly disclosed and it's not a great look for Centos 90 days is ample time to either apply fixes that already exist to your older Linux kernel versions or to fix them yourself even if they are not super high severity it's it just doesn't look good valve announced that steam won't run on older Windows versions anymore starting January the 1st 2024 Windows 7 8 and 8.1 will be ditched as it seems that steam uses an embedded version of Chrome which doesn't support these operating systems anymore steam will also require updates that are only available on Windows 10 and 11. now apparently the last holdouts for Microsoft's Legacy operating systems don't represent much market share at 1.9 percent of steam users still higher than Linux users but these will have no choice other than upgrading their computers to the latest Microsoft Os or moving to another platform like Linux it's a decision that makes sense as you can't keep supporting operating systems that aren't supported by the very company that developed them but it also means that some game compatibility might be lost as not all titles run well on Windows 10 or 11 but they do on Windows 7 for example and honestly if you still use Windows 7 or 8 just don't unless your computer lives in a completely isolated box where you never bring any new file from the Internet or from another computer on it then it's not safe it's not supported you should not use these systems now will most or at least some of these users move to Linux instead of buying a new PC or updating to Windows 10 or 11 which they obviously do not want if they still use Windows 7 or 8 will have to say but I would be surprised if we didn't see a small market share boost for Linux due to this and let's complete this video with the gaming news first the AMD drivers will soon get a fix to avoid eating up so much memory developer Mike blumenkans discovered that the radv driver was using way too much memory for example up to three gigs for DOTA 2. apparently mostly to store shaders in memory and it seems like a new Vulcan extension is responsible the fix results in an 85 reduction in memory utilization which means you can expect better gaming performance soon on AMD gpus dolphin the GameCube and Wii Emulator is coming to steam you'll be able to install it in one click although it won't provide any bios files or any ROMs you'll still have to provide these to avoid any potential legal issue it should be in early access by the end of 2023 so it's still a ways off and it was never that tricky to install in the first place but I guess it will make it easier to use on devices like the steam deck and if you were planning to play The Last of Us remake on Steam deck well it looks like it's not a great experience you'll have to wait for about an hour on the main menu for the shaders to compile and it fails the ram completely after a while resulting in a full system crash and reboot it seems the game is poorly optimized on PC in general as a lot of Windows users also report issues with performance and crashes and so this breaks the streak of Great PC ports from PlayStation Studios from Spider-Man God of War Horizon all were Stellar PC boards that worked really really well and had tons of options and The Last of Us is just completely broken apparently but fortunately they still have time to fix it in the future just like we still have time to talk about today's sponsor if you need a new computer to run Linux stop buying devices from Windows manufacturers and then acting all surprised when they just don't work all that well buy something that supports Linux out of the box and remove all that hassle tuxedo has a big range of computers from laptops to Knox to desktops from affordable devices to really high-end super powerful workstations or gaming laptops they are all super configurable before purchase you can select from a variety of popular distributions to come pre-installed on them and all the laptops are openable repairable and upgradable for at least the battery the SSD and the RAM and sometimes even the wireless card so if you need a new computer and you plan to rent Linux on it click the link in the description below and look look at the devices from tuxedo they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really really enjoyed the channel and you want to support it there are tons of links in the description of this video to let you do so from liberape patreon YouTube memberships super thanks PayPal you decide you know what to do so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign 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hey everyone this is Nick and using Linux to get actual work done is a reality I already explored how I used it for my day job as a product owner back when I used Elementary OS and then back when I used KDE but now it's time to show how I use gnome to get worked out so we'll look at my desktop my laptop the applications I use what I actually do with them and this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tux care and if you have instances running Ubuntu 18.04 you're probably aware that it's going end of life at the end of April 2023 your options are basically to rush a migration or to stay on an end-of-life release with all the security risks this creates or you can subscribe to talk scares extended lifecycle support you just run one script and you'll keep getting security updates for your 18.04 instances including for the kernel Apache PHP openss python and a lot more without any tooling changes plus 24 7 support in case you run into an issue so if you want to take your time to plan your migration from 18.04 to a newer release of Ubuntu check the link in the description below and get started and of course let's start with what I actually do on Linux like actual work so these days I don't do any project management anymore at least not for a company I use Linux to create three videos per week and two audio podcasts per week one for patrons and YouTube members and the other is the Linux and open source News podcast the link is in the description oh and I also write the occasional article from my website although I will freely admit that I do not do that as often as I should I also answer tons of email I do video conferencing when I appear on other people's podcasts or when I need to talk with sponsors and I also do all my web browsing invoicing taxes research new sifting personal Computing and gaming on Linux and these days for me it all happens on gnome on Fedora to be precise and for that I use two devices a desktop and a laptop so let's start with with the laptop because this is where things take shape before I turn them into videos on my desktop so I mainly use two laptops the first one is a slim book executive 16 and the second is a tuxedo Stellaris 15. they both serve the same purpose and run the same fedorag gnome with the exact same layout and configurations although the Stellaris is also my steam console often plugged into my TV they both have a core i7 12700h they both have 16 gigs of RAM and while the slim book has an RTX 3050 TI this Stellaris has a 3060 and they both have 1440p screens so basically when I'm at home I use the Stellaris because it has more horsepower and when I'm on the move I use the slim book executive 16 which is way more portable and lighter so both laptops run Fedora genome using Weyland with a few extensions first is the all-important app indicator support I hate tray icons they look bad and they're bad add solution for background apps but there's no replacement just yet and since stuff like next Cloud Synology drive warpinator and more use these well I added the relevant extension I also prefer my notifications to appear on the right of the screen instead of in the Middle where they block stuff out so I added the notification Banner reloaded extension to make them appear on the top right corner of the screen I also use the Quick Settings tweaker extension to add media controls various application audio levels and notifications right inside the Quick Settings menu so everything is in the same place it's easier to hit with a mouse where you can just fling it to the top right and click to get what you want finally I also have the Privacy Quick Settings menu to disable the mic and webcam when I don't use them I have Js connect to transfer files from my phone to my computer and I have light and dark theme switcher to have an easier toggle that actually switches all applications to dark mode even if they don't support it explicitly and to manage all of these extensions I use the app called extension manager which lets you browse update install monitor configure every single genome extension check for compatibility it's just a fantastic tool if you need to add extensions together and on top of that I installed the libid Vita gtk3 theme so apps that haven't been ported to gtk4 still look like the rest of my desktop as much as possible but what do I actually do on these laptops well first is writing my scripts to do that I use the iota's node application it's the gnome app it's super simple and it plugs into next Cloud so all my nodes are shared between devices it's very simple markdown with very few options you just have a blank canvas to write stuff which is exactly what I want notes are synced to my phone for easy reference when I actually record the videos and to my desktop where I can make adjustments if needed to research scripts I use Firefox as my web browser with the next Cloud passwords extension to sync those between devices now the Firefox account would also do that and I do use that account to sync bookmarks and history between devices as well but I do prefer having my passwords locally hosted on my own next Cloud instance my laptops are also where I do most of my email and for that I use Geary a gnome app that looks super simple but does everything I needed to it's fast it's stable it handles folders although you can't create them there unfortunately and it looks like it's a part of my desktop plus it can run in the background so you don't have to have it open all the time although I do have it open all the time I'm an old person and I like my windows being visible I also handle all my to-do lists on my laptops and for that I use Endeavor another nice gnome app that uses next cloud and The Gnome online accounts to pull your next Cloud tasks and sync to it I have my tle tasks list where I make notes of everything I need to do during the week and a few other task list for ideas and personal things Endeavor doesn't support tags unfortunately and recurring tasks aren't supported by next Cloud which is also an issue but apart from that it works great and these tasks are synced to my phone using Apple reminders boo I know using iOS okay well when I used Android I use the open tasks app with devx 5 to sync stuff from nexcloud because Google doesn't support that natively for some reason I also use the next Cloud desktop client to sync all my files between devices Auto Import all my photos and videos from my phone and generally have access to everything I need I also have the Synology Drive client which has no official Fedora version but there's a copper repo that packages it and it lets me sync all my files and photos automatically to my Synology Nas as an additional backup and finally I have the occasional use for the game which despite its stupid name is actually pretty wonderful once you understand how it works works and only office my main office suite of choice which again is plugged into my next cloud storage now let's see how I use gnome's workflow to get work done if we can consider YouTube as work I make heavy use of the split screen feature I just drag iota's to the left side of the screen and my web browser to the right and I can write my notes while I research things I don't need more than split screen tiling on a laptop I used to really enjoy The papower Styling features but even on the 16 inch screen it just makes windows way too tiny to be actually useful speaking of which I run both laptops at their native 1440p resolution but I do scale the phones by a factor of 1.15 and I use gnome tweaks to do that when writing an email I'll do the same in the pop-out window from Geary and what I'm actually looking at on the other side whether it's an invoice a website a calendar event various notes whatever I also make heavy use of the activities view by using the touchpad gesture three fingers up on the touchpad brings the overview and then I can just select a window or open a new one from the bottom dock or using the keyboard and I always have my email on a separate virtual desktop which I switched to using touchpad gestures as well so on my laptops the workflow is super simple there's nothing weird or complex in here just touch pad gestures and split screen and two different virtual desktops now let's move on to my desktop computer I use a tower that came with Linux pre installed it served me perfectly for about three years now and it has a ryzen 7 5800x an RTX 3070 and 32 gigs of RAM it's plugged into an LG curved Ultra wide monitor at 1440p and I use a Logitech MX Master S3 as my mouse plus some generic Logitech speakers and my keyboard is the Cheapo slim book RGB keyboard which I should not like as much as I do but I don't know why there's something really cool about it like it's fake mechanical rubber membrane thingy and it's really cheaply built but it's good that desktop runs Fedora 37 and the volcano might be good but I also add the exact same extensions as on my laptop to have the same experience on all devices I also never added the minimize or maximize buttons they're really not needed for maximizing I just drag a window to the top of the screen and minimizing is completely useless to my workflow if I don't want an app window I close it and if I want to keep it without closing it I'll just move it to another virtual desktop so this desktop computer is where I do most of my work video editing podcast recording and also not work but gaming so once my scripts are written on the laptop I record them using my camera on an SD card and I copy the footage over to my desktop using a nice little dongle and Nautilus then I use DaVinci Resolve to do the actual editing it's not open source unfortunately but it's just so much more stable so much faster and it has way more plugins and tools than any fast tool I used that I just cannot see myself moving back to Caden live or something else anytime soon which is also why I stick to Nvidia gpus because resolve on Linux only works on Nvidia everything else is super hacky unstable or virtually impossible to do and my Nvidia experience on Linux has been completely Flawless whether it's on my hybrid graphics laptops on Wayland or my desktop I had no issues whatsoever zero so I'll make a dedicated video about this specific Topic in the future so when I'm editing if I need an illustration like a screenshot I'll just use the Firefox screenshot tool to capture parts of a web page all the whole web page entirely if I need to record my screen I use OBS it's a great app and with NVM support on Nvidia it uses barely any resources which means I can run it while I have resolve open without any issues if I need to quickly download a meme video or one of my own that I didn't backup I use tubeconverter a cool app that lets you download either the audio or the video or both from popular video websites all my virtual machine needs are handled using gnome boxes which has great performance is super easy to set up and even lets you download isos directly I upload my videos using Firefox it's my main browser also with the next Cloud passwords installed all my thumbnails are done using again fantastic program if you know how to use it there's a learning curve but once you understand it it's just great to record podcasts I use audacity with a Blue Yeti microphone that program is ugly as Sin and it's been involved in a few controversies about data collection which means I should probably move to one of their more private Forks but I didn't take the time to do so yet it works just right I just record the Audio I do some noise removal I apply your compressor I normalize the audio so it sounds a bit better and that's about it and of course I also use Endeavor there for task management I use iotas to access my notes to enter the time codes for any videos as I'm editing them and I use Geary for email there as well I try to keep my setups between devices as consistent as possible because my weird brain just cannot handle inconsistency and also it's just better for muscle memory in terms of workflow I have DaVinci Resolve open on its own virtual desktop so I have all the space I need to edit I also have a file manager window floating somewhere on the same desktop to be able to move files around and add them to the project I'm working on I also always have Geary open on a second virtual desktop generally tiled with a Firefox window on the other side for quick access when I need to record something I open OBS on another virtual desktop and I record there so I can only have the thing I want to show and no other window in the background and since I only published 1080p videos because anything higher is completely useless because most of you watch on a phone and you won't be able to tell the difference on their screens well it also means that on my ultra wide I can just tuck the OBS window to the side and when I edit the video I just crop it out because yeah it's 1440p so I can just zoom in and keep 1080p to be nice and crisp same goes for recording podcasts audacity is tiled to one side and my notes app to the other so I can have it at all times as a reference I use the keyboard a lot on my desktop with the Super Key being used to open the activities View or a double tap of the super key to access the app launcher I use super plus left or super plus right to dial a window and super plus alt plus any Arrow key to move to another workspace when I need to quickly move a window to the next workspace I use super alt shift and an arrow key and I also use the super key to drag Windows around or super plus middle click to quickly resize a floating window now this last shortcut is insanely useful just hold a Super Key and your mouse wheel and just drag from anywhere to resize a window you don't need to aim for the window border it is so useful now it is a simpler workflow than the one I used on KDE because back then I juggled a product owner job and making videos which meant I used activities to separate the two now that I only do content creation I don't need that feature as much and so I'm happy with just virtual desktops and of course there are a few extras around all of this all my invoicing and accounting is done through a web app called zervent which I access using Firefox I also have an 8 terabyte external hard drive plugged into my desktop that serves as my file storage for all my old video projects so I can reuse a bit of footage here and there I often use KDE connect to transfer photos and videos quickly from my phone to my computers and I also use warpinator a fantastic app that lets you send files from one computer to the other over the local network especially when I'm reviewing devices and I don't want to set up next Cloud on these and for listening to music since I subscribe to YouTube premium to avoid having ads on my TV I use YTM desktop as my client it's basically the web app but integrated with the media controls and with a tray icon so it's a bit more useful it's all pretty simple but I hope it gives you a few ideas for some extensions for some programs to get work done and also how to use gnome super simple workflow but very productive to your advantage just like I'm gonna use this segue to today's sponsor to my advantage so okay you've moved to Linux you use Linux regularly and you plan to keep using it and your computer is due for an upgrade well don't look at Windows devices and pray and hope that your favorite this row will work on them buy something from tuxedo today's sponsor tuxedo makes laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box and when you buy one you know that Linux will run great on it because the components have been picked specifically for that they have a big range of devices that should serve every price point and every need whether you need a laptop a desktop a Nook something very simple or something super powerful something for gaming or not they have everything all of their devices are very configurable before purchase and all their laptops are also openable repairable and upgradable so if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments and if you really like the channel and you want to support it well there are plenty of links in the description down below we've got Libra pay patreon YouTube membership super thanks whatever else you know how to do this so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and today I have my very first system 76 laptop review I covered a lot of Linux manufacturers over the years including tuxedo slim book STAR labs and more but it's the first time I could get my hands on a system 76 laptop so this one is the Pangolin which is their everyday 15 inch Ultrabook with great battery life and pretty good performance so let's see what this thing can do and who today's sponsor is thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video if you want to develop your online presence you need a website and with Squarespace it's really really easy there you're all in one solution for building designing and running your very own website whether you're looking for a simple blog a portfolio or even an online shop they have pre-built themes and layouts that you can customize thoroughly and they have tons of modules to add the features you need and they can even help you book a domain name in a few clicks and design your own logo if you need help get getting started so if you want to start building your own online presence head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description below and you'll get 10 of your first purchase so what does a system 76 laptop look like well the Pangolin looks like your standard 15-inch Ultrabook it's pretty thin at 0.71 inches or 1.8 centimeters and it weighs 1.79 kilos or almost 4 pounds it's 16 by 9 with a 15.6 inches screen and it's made of aluminum the chassis is all matte black with the only plastic elements being the screen bezel the hinge guards and the ventilation Grille at the back it looks really sleek and understated and the only thing I don't like in the design is the fact that the black surface is sort of a fingerprint magnet it's not horrible but it will definitely retain a few smudges the only visible branding is on the lid with a wide system 76 logo and that's it and contrary to other manufacturers like slim book or tuxedo you can't get your own logo engraved on this one it's a system 76 laptop and it's gonna say system 76 on it the aluminum chassis is robust with minimal deck Flags around the hinge or the Palm rests and a bit more give in the middle of the keyboard but it's nothing out of the ordinary the hinge might look a bit puny but it feels solid as well you can lift it with one finger and it has a good amount of resistance and it doesn't wobble too much the laptop is also pretty modular you can open it easily with 11 screws but if access to the storage is the only thing you want then it's just one screw there's a dedicated little trap door at the bottom to easily swap drives only the battery wireless card and storage are accessible the ram seems soldered so yeah the Pangolin is a good looking laptop it's solid it's user serviceable apart from the ram but we'll see in a minute why that isn't really a problem and yeah it feels like a good Ultrabook the only problem is its name sounds like Benedict Cumberbatch trying to say the word penguin crested Penguins okay what's inside this thing well the only CPU you can get is the ryzen 7 6800u an 8 core 16 threads chip that goes up to 4.7 gigahertz it's paired with the integrated Radeon 680m which sounds like a dedicated GPU but is in fact integrated with the CPU you can also only get it with 32 gigs of RAM it's the default configuration and there's nothing lower or higher in terms of storage you get a minimum of a 250 gig pcie 4 nvme SSD and you can spec that up to 16 terabytes of pcie 4 SSD it comes with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 and you can either get it with pop Os 22.04 or Ubuntu 222.04 out of the box although any distro should run well on this thing it's a pretty powerful build the CPU is very competent and with 32 gigs of RAM even if you can't upgrade it yourself it should be future proof for the whole lifetime of this device and I must say it's nice to finally get laptops that don't ship with the default 8 gigs which for today is definitely not enough and okay now you can tell me that your laptop only has 500 megabytes of RAM and that it's been running perfectly fine go ahead write it in the comments and get it over with the display is 15.6 inches and only 1080p which might be a bit low on a 15 inch device I kind of like 1440p for that size but 1080p isn't bad or anything it's 144hz refresh rate which means it's smooth in daily use and at that default setting it still manages to get pretty good battery life thanks to the 70 watt hour battery that it ships with now for an Ultrabook this thing has a lot of holes in it ports I mean it's useful holes mostly so on the left you get the barrel charger an HDMI 2.0 Port two USB 3.2 Gen 2 type A ports One USB 3.2 Gen 2 type c Port that supports DisplayPort 1.4 and also supports charging the device although the included pretty small power brick doesn't come with a USBC cable for charging or a USBC port for that matter you can buy a 65 watt charger that comes with the USBC cable if you prefer but it's 2023 and I guess if the barrel charger isn't mandatory to deliver enough juice to keep the device charging then you should probably all get rid of it and just provide USBC everywhere now you also get a headphone jack and interestingly a physical full kill switch for the webcam complete with a little led to let you know when the camera is off on the right you have another type a USB 3.2 Gen 2 a full-size SD card reader which is nice a pop out gigabit Ethernet port and that little Kensington lock to keep your laptop attached to your desk that's really good I O for an Ultrabook three USB ports one USBC one HDMI plus ethernet would I have preferred a second USBC on the other side instead of a regular type A sure but it's still not bad OK let's move on to the performance before we take a look at the rest of that thing the ryzen 7 6800u is a pretty powerful CPU on geekbench 6 it got a single core score of 2002 and a multi-core score of 8662 so it's on par with a core i7 12700 and generally it's doing better in single core performance definitely more than what you'll need for this form factor in terms of Graphics the integrated Radeon 680m can deliver a surprisingly good performance running the usual shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark at the native 1080P and medium settings it got 30 FPS on average and on low settings it managed an average of 42. this game is notoriously badly optimized and generally it really struggles on integrated gpus especially on the Intel side where even with an XC Graphics it's rare that you'll reach 30 FPS at low settings so yeah it's better it's still not incredible and you're not going to do AAA gaming on this thing but it can definitely run some graphics intensive programs as per thermals at idle the CPU ran at around 34 to 38 degrees Celsius and under loads during gameplay it never went past 91 and the fan noise is definitely audible but manageable it will never scream at you and while it's typically high pitched like most laptops it's not horrible now for the battery life with the display at 144hz in balanced mode running YouTube videos in the loop on Firefox it lasted for 7 hours when putting it in battery saving mode with the display running at 60 hertz it lasted for eight and a half hours that's pretty good it will definitely hold for a full day of work because if you have a normal workload that doesn't involve video decoding from the internet in a loop you'll probably get a little bit more than the numbers that I benchmarked here the Pangolin comes with a chicklet style keyboard it's backlit with just one single color no RGB here and only two levels of brightness but it's definitely enough to make it legible in the dark it comes with a numpad but it's pretty squished with keys at about two-thirds of the usual size and it also means they didn't Center the trackpad which I do not like the keyboard itself is nice to use it might not seem like it because it's recessed into chassis but key travel is good the stroke is precise and the keys are large and nice it lacks a bit of bounce back for my taste but it's not a mushy keyboard by any means and it comes with a Super Key of course which okay I definitely prefer over any sort of cartoony tux logo or icon super just looks better it's more descriptive it's just a better option the sound of the keyboard follows the theme of this laptop it's also understated it's not too clicky and it will not annoy people around you as per the touchpad it's a decent size it's very smooth and while it's not centered which always annoys me it works really well with pop os's gestures The Click is solid and doesn't rattle at all and the sound is satisfying the only issue is with the two button spaces at the bottom they don't seem to react to tap to click which can lead to some missed inputs and the power button might look like a fingerprint reader but it's not or at least there was no way for me to configure It On Pop OS and I would really like for once to have a laptop that comes with Linux and has a fingerprint reader typing passwords that so 2010 the webcam is 720p and it's just not good it feels like it's super stuttery and while it seems to compensate for backlight better than others I tried it's still a potato cam only serviceable for very basic video calls where you don't care how you look the microphone is above average first it's well tuned out of the box something no other manufacturer seems to do so the default gain is actually one you'd want to use and it doesn't saturate or Peak second it doesn't pick up that much on the keyboard sounds or the trackpad which is pretty cool so yeah it sucks that the webcam is bad because the microphone you might actually want to use in day-to-day calls as per the speakers they get pretty loud but at max volume they will definitely start vibrating the chassis and you'll hear that sort of rattly sound apart from that they do have a bit of bass and they don't sound too tinny they're good enough basically they're laptop speakers but don't run them at max volume foreign and of course we can't not talk about pop OS because system 76 creates this distro and this laptop and they have a few nice integrated things in there first you get that nice recovery partition that you can update so you always have a nice thing to fall back to in case of a problem but you also have a support tab in the settings with the ability to create a support ticket right from there create your log files in one click access documentation and more and popos runs extremely smoothly on this laptop like buttery smooth it's never been a choppy distro or anything but I also never saw it running that nicely and no it's not just the high refresh rate of the screen because I already ran pop OS on another laptop that has the same refresh rate and it just did not feel as smooth now of course Papa OS is now getting a bit long in the tooth with the current version being popos 22.04 and yeah it's not extremely up to date but it also comes with flat pack and flat Hub out of the the box so you can install most apps at a recent version anyways so who is this laptop for well the base price is 12.99 US Dollars and for that you get an aluminum chassis a 144hz screen although admittedly only 1080p a very good CPU and GPU combo 32 gigs of RAM and 250 gigs of SSD and I'd say it's a decent price it amounts to 1200 Euros at today's rates and this device feels geared towards professionals the understated black look the solid Port selection the good battery life it's an all-rounder it doesn't excel at anything specifically but it's a good choice for everything now compared to devices from other Linux manufacturers let's be honest it all depends on where you live in Europe tuxedo and slim book will be cheaper because shipping costs will be lower and if you live somewhere in North or South America then system 76 will be the less expensive option until one of them has distribution sent centers all across the globe you're basically Bound by shipping rates still the Pangolin is a good laptop it's so no nonsense solid Workhorse it's their mid-range 15 inch it's a good device and you can't really go wrong with it so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video for some reason you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to support it there are plenty of links down in the description for patreon Libra pay PayPal YouTube memberships whatever you know how to do this so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and oh boy do we have a lot to talk about this week because we have framework announcing a new 16-inch laptop with replaceable gpus and a ton of expansion slots we have a big big update to next Cloud including Ai and a SharePoint competitor and we have Twitter announcing that they will open source their algorithm at the end of March and we also have weyland's screen sharing fixed everywhere including on Discord we have AMD fsr3 and gnome 44 and this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenote lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so framework the company that makes the ultra repairable and modular framework laptop announced a few things this week now first let's get this out of the way there are new 13's gen Intel boards and new AMD ones with the 7000 series CPUs so you can upgrade your current laptop without buying a new one you can reuse the old board in another device as a mini desktop for example but what's way more interesting is the announcement of the framework 16. a brand new device that will have upgradable Graphics as in you can swap in some dedicated GPU modules at the back of the device it will also have 6 expansion slots more than the 13-inch model with its only four slots and it will also have hot swappable keyboard modules with the ability to add a numpad on the fly on the right or the left or to remove the touchpad to the center or the side and they will even offer keyboard options with a Super Key instead of a Windows logo and it will also have that all-important PCI port at the back to connect all the replaceable gpus but also other peripherals like for example more batteries we don't know which GPU they will use how you will be able to Source them but it's a very interesting concept that I really hope that they can achieve they are also open sourcing a bunch of parts of the laptop like the firmware for the keyboard the input modules the expansion Bay modules for the gpus and other PCI peripherals or even the expansion cards designed so basically anyone will be able to contribute modules gpus or other expansion modules to framework laptops and I really really love what they're doing and I truly hope that they can achieve this vision and I also truly hope that Linux will be a first class citizen on this device because it sounds like a complete dream to me like being able to have enormous battery life with an additional module at back when I just need to write stuff or when I'm moving around and being able to swap that for a full GPU when I want to game when I'm plugged in or when I want to do video editing that would be absolutely wonderful now nextcloud announced some more good stuff with the release of next Cloud Hub 4 and the main focus is as it seems customary now for everything the main focus is on AI they implemented what they called intelligent features with a smart picker which is basically a context menu that works across applications and lets you use AI in your daily workflow by just clicking that context menu entry now it includes for example text to speech using whisper which just lets you type using your voice it also lets you generate images on the Fly using Dali 2 and stable diffusion if you run that last one on premises they also include the chat gpt3 to generate new text in documents all the values Office Suite they support the smart picker will also let you share tasks next Cloud tables map locations Collective Pages spiritual videos Mastered on accounts they will let you translate with next Cloud translate which is a new tool based on deep ell they also introduce the new tables app which is an alternative to SharePoint it lets you track data building data structures and it lets you create small applications without any code any development and you can connect these small apps to other next Cloud components next cloud files also got the ability to name older file versions nextcloud talk lets you create breakout rooms which are smaller offshoots of main conversations to split up large meetings or virtual learning environments and you can also Now record your next Cloud talks calls the mail app got support for shared mailboxes and S mime support plus new text templates next layout office now supports end-to-end encryption with support for uploading files to an end-to-end encrypted folder and sharing end-to-end encrypted documents the text editor Now tracks collaborative editing with multiple cursors in real time and they also improved performance a lot specifically for next Cloud talk with reduced loading times reduced Servo load and reduce notification delays they say it's up to 99 faster and of course depending on how you installed nexcloud on your server you might already have the update or not for example I use the snap and so I'm probably going to have to wait for around the month for it to be available but I can't wait to play around with the new tables app to try and build some small dashboards and some small apps for myself I think it will be really cool and I'm also interested in these AI features because they brand them as ethical AI but they seem to use the exact same AI that everybody else does which is definitely not ethical in any single way so I'm gonna look into that now if you remember back when Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Twitter he also said he wanted to make the recommendation algorithm open source and up until now this has not materialized but it looks like it will before the end of the month at least partially musk tweeted that all the code used to recommend tweets will be open on March 31st and he said prepare to be disappointed to someone asking him to open source Twitter which could mean that either the code isn't great or that it will just be a small part of it that gets opened or that it just doesn't hide anything weird and so everyone will be disappointed because it's just based on likes and retweets no details were provided on the license the code will be released under or where it will be accessible or the rights users will have to reuse it share it or modify it and we all also don't know if they will allow contributions to it this is still an interesting move because it looked like Twitter was going more towards a closed Source route with them shutting down access to their API and killing the whole ecosystem of apps and useful Bots that used it they said they wanted to make that API accessible for a fee but this hasn't materialized either so it will be interesting to see where that code lands will it be more on the free software side where it can be reused and shared or will it just be open source as in you can look at it but you can't really touch it all that much we'll have to see and I'm also sure we'll get plenty of deep Dives looking into what and how Twitter recommends tweets to its users and I'm sure plenty of people will find something to be offended by politically or otherwise now one of the biggest hurdles of Weyland just disappeared and that's screen sharing while screen sharing from apps that run natively under Weyland works like a charm apps that depend on an X server running with X Weyland generally have issues like Discord for example in that they don't see any Wayland window as shareable they can only share other x-wayland applications which is definitely not ideal thankfully a group of developers have tackled this issue with something called X Weyland Video Bridge this thing just makes Wayland Windows visible in the window picker for screen sharing from x-wayland applications it is as secure as screen sharing under Weyland is using portals and it's getting its data through pipe wire of course any other X application will be able to Snoop on the contents of what you're sharing just like they can on X11 there's no way to bypass that really performance seems excellent with negligible latency and no extra CPU usage and the good news is you can already run it right now the bridge is available as a flat pack only for now because it depends on the newer library that hasn't been released or packaged yet and that the flat pack can include you will need to run the bridge in the background though with a simple command line that you can set to auto start and everything should work well after that now it's still in Alpha and it's unclear if it will remain a separate tool or be part of a desktop environment or distro in the future but it is great news nonetheless so if your only remaining complained with Wayland was screen sharing from apps like Discord well you don't have any complaints anymore give it a shot and let me know down there in the comments how well it works now this week we also saw the release of gnome 44 with a bunch of quality of life improvements the quick settings are now more legible and descriptive they can now handle background apps in a first step to try and replace notification tray icons but it's just not there yet the file manager can now show thumbnails in the file picker gnome software has a toggle to let you view free and open source apps only you can disable the overlay scroll bars or the mouse pointer acceleration and the settings got a bunch of redesigned Pages for accessibility Mouse and touchpad or sound preferences you can also now configure wireguard vpns and share your Wi-Fi password through a QR code Epiphany was ported to gtk4 and received a bunch of performance improvements and most core gnome apps received some small updates as well now of course this is just a very quick overview of everything that changed if you want to go into more detail about all of this I have a dedicated video you probably already watched it if you're interested in gloam and if you haven't it's linked in the description and in the card right there there's a new vulnerability on Android that concerns users who like to take screenshots and share them to summarize using the native cropping features on Google pixels but also other Android phones a lot of the data of the original image was kept in the PNG file and easy to recover it just didn't delete the information that the crop removed but kept large portions of it which means if you used it to share cropped screenshots of personal info or sensible data anyone might be able to see everything you thought was cropped out the vulnerability has been patched in March's update for Android fortunately but all screenshots cropped before that can still be uncropped and this thing got the adorably impossible to pronounce nickname of acropolyps and it affects Google pixel users but also some non-pixel Android phones and some custom Android ROMs some sharing Services would remove the compressed or unused data from the images but for example Discord doesn't it only seems to affect PNG screenshots not jpegs and the issue appeared in Android 10 so a long while back and what's worse is the issue has been fixed since the end of January on Google's side but they didn't release the fix until March and what's even worse if you're using Windows 10 or 11's Snipping Tool it has the same issue on PNG screenshots the issue has just been fixed on Windows 11 but it still isn't on Windows 10 as I'm recording this so if you like to share a lot of screenshots that you usually redact by cropping them it might be time to go and delete them from virtually everywhere you share them especially Discord because anyone could just uncrop them and yeah that's bad and let's finish this with some gaming news first there's a new change planned for the AMD driver for Linux that should improve the experience on recent AMD apus starting with the van Gogh architecture which notably is used by the steam deck there's a new interface for adjusting and setting thermal throttling which lets temperatures be read in Milli degrees Celsius so it means systems will be able to adjust throttling a lot more precisely and squeeze every bit of performance they can out of the chips wine 8.4 was also released this week with the initial steps for the Wayland driver that will enable proton and wine to run Windows games as native Wayland apps and get more performance out of it it also includes fixes for thief for hard Truck 2 King of the Road for the Amazon games client whatever that is for Spore for crisis 2 maximum Edition or Starcraft remastered and finally AMD unveiled a few things about fsr3 their super sampling technology that lets you run games at lower resolutions while looking good on higher res display they're introducing interpolated frames that apparently lets them get a two times frame rate boost basically by automatically generating frames in between the ones that are actually rendered so basically the game could run at 30 FPS and be rendered at 30 FPS but appear to run at 60 thanks to every other frame being guessed by the algorithm now of course this introduces latency as these frames are not real in the sense that they don't reflect what you're actually doing they're just created automatically to fill in the gaps and increase the frame rate fsr3 is open source as is the new Fidelity FX SDK that gives developers easy ways to integrate this technology and of course this might be really really cool on Lower powered laptops and handhelds like the steam deck yeah you saw that one coming you could run the game at 30 FPS but it would feel like 60 and it would give you a way better experience using less power and having more battery life sounds pretty good like this segue to today's sponsor if you're looking to replace your main computer maybe it's time to stop looking at devices made by Windows manufacturers and time to look at devices made specifically to run Linux from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and they make laptops and desktop that ship with Linux out of the box out of a selection of popular distros they have a big range that should have something for every price point and every need whether you need a laptop a desktop an affordable one or super powerful one a workstation or gaming device they have everything and all of their laptops are openable upgradeable and repairable with the battery the SSD and the ram all being user serviceable and sometimes even the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card so if you need a new device you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel and you want to support it well there are plenty of links in the description below for PayPal Libera pay YouTube memberships patreon super things whatever Plus myself you know what to do they're all down there so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I already talked about the Googled Android ROMs in the past specifically with Slash e but this one was a very opinionated ROM with its own design and its own approach on how to do Android and its launcher so today it's time to look at another D Googled Android ROM but this time way closer to vanilla and it's called yode OS so let's look at what it brings to the table how it compares to other D Google drums and how smooth this segue to today's sponsor is thanks to protonmail for sponsoring this video protonmail is an encrypted email service based in Switzerland that is laser focused on protecting your privacy and you probably already know that big Tech like Gmail with its 2 billion users makes most of their money by harvesting all the data they can about you including your emails to build a profile about you and Target you with ads well protonmail believes that your email belongs to you it protects you from email trackers ads spam fishing and provides all the features you need to quickly manage your email and subscribe from newsletters manage your calendar and more it has nothing to hide all its apps are open source and audited by Security Experts and it was invented by scientists at the CERN while World Wide Web was invented and protonmail uses end-to-end encryption which means that not even proton can read your email you can use it on any device from anywhere and you can sign up for free forever and you'll get a free VPN calendar and secure cloud storage at the same time you can upgrade anytime if you want more features and storage if you're tired of being tracked everywhere even in your inbox and you want to break free from Big Tech click the link in the description below and give protonmail a try so your day OS written with an accent on the last e because it's French we French love 2D Google things apparently your day is Android but with all Google software removed it uses lineage OS as a base but adds a built-in ad and tracker blocker that runs at all times locally on the device the replace the default apps with privacy focused ones and they use F Droid and the Aurora store to provide you with applications so on paper it's exactly the same goals and base AS Slash e except that yode actually wants to give you Android web slash e gives you something closer to iOS your day sells brand new smartphones and refurbished ones that come with their OS pre-installed or you can always install it yourself although they don't officially support a lot of phones right now with about 29 devices having installation instructions on their website here they provided me with a review unit that I have to send back after I'm done with it it's a pixel 5 from Google and on paper it so phone I could see myself using day to day right size decent cameras good performance High refresh rate screen Zone paper it's a phone I could see myself using and since it didn't die on me during the trial period I guess it's three of the various manufacturing problems Google encountered on this device well not completely free as we'll see later now let's look at how the ROM works the first setup is just the exact same as you might be used to on any vanilla or close to vanilla Android ROM it lets you pick your Wi-Fi network your language enable notifications and location and set up a fingerprint to unlock the device you can also restore a previous backup or just use the phone as is after that you get a Spartan first run screen that lets you select your pre-installed applications find out more about the yode tracker blocker and send us an information about the project the ability to remove pre-installed apps is actually pretty cool you don't have to do that after the first setup and nothing is out of bounds you can remove anything so no one can accuse your the OS of being bloatware you get a list of categories and you can just uncheck the apps you don't want or don't need which is nice it also comes with micro G the open source implementation of Google Play services and if you don't want that you can also uncheck it I'll keep it there to test how well it works now the ROM itself will be super familiar if you've ever used the pixel or a very stock Android ROM on the pixel 5 your day OS 4 was pre-installed and it's based on Android 13. so it's pretty much up to date the latest security update was on January the 5th 2023 which doesn't seem quite up to date yet no further updates were available in the built-in updater tool the yode team told me that they provide security updates every two months for the stable Channel and every month for beta testers because they want to make sure that they test that everything works right before publishing a new release the default experience is as close to stock as can be you have either the three button layout of Android or the much better gestures a dock of apps at the bottom an app drawer by swiping up and a few preset widgets like search weather and a few app shortcuts for the yode tracker blocker yode related news app stores and settings it also uses the material U interface and I know it's a controversial opinion but I just don't like it the contrast is bad it just looks unappealing everything is way too big with too much padding I just don't like it bring back Hollow you cowards The Experience here is all super smooth and fast to use at least on the pixel 5. there are no slowdowns and I didn't notice any crashes or bugs while using it either which is to be expected as it's pretty much stock Android with even less stuff running in the background so it should perform even better than a pixel with its default ROM in terms of apps yodex ships with a Firefox based browser by default which is a Bose Telemetry trackers and enables alternative search engines right out of the box like Quant Brave ecosia start page and multiple search instances Quant is the default here which isn't all that good since its results can be pretty hit or miss the default email client is pretty easy privacy or pep it's a simple email client with an easy interface that adds end-to-end encryption capabilities to any mail account and it's open source and tracker free for maps you get magic Earth which is also open source and uses openstreetmap it has everything you might need including directions offline maps and points of interest it's not the most beautiful looking app ever but it's fast and easy to use the keyboard is open board which is again open source and I'll stop saying that now because all pre-installed apps are open source so that keyboard is based on the Android open source project one and doesn't use any Google services either it's a good keyboard with plenty of options to make it look and feel however you want the camera app is open camera which while very powerful has a terrible user interface and looks really bad it also doesn't have all the built-in post-processing features that most phones default camera apps will apply which means your photos and videos will definitely not look as good using it as they would on the default draw now that's an issue for all alternative camera apps and all Android ROMs that use them you will never get as good a result result as with the default camera application that gets shipped by your manufacturer finally you get the usual Android open source project calendar calculator Gallery music app phone dialer PDF viewer and you get Carnet for note taking which is a clone of Google keep that can be synced with next Cloud if you want the app selection is decent and is on par with what you would expect from a d Google fully open source Android ROM I still prefer the selection on slash e because they went out of their way to Fork various apps unify the user interface make them look coherent where here is just a set of mismatched apps but you can replace anything with anything else if you prefer so it's not really an issue now let's talk about the main draw of hyode os how it handles privacy first yode is as de-googled as lineage OS they base their work on that and they don't remove anything more than lineage does well they defer is how they handle trackers and ads yode comes with the tracker blocker built in this thing works using a man in the middle attack style the OS intercepts all Communications and requests that go out of your phone and blocks everything that's part of its block lists and these block lists are collaboratively sourced and include a lot of Adblock and tracker blocker related things now don't worry all of this happens locally on the device nothing is sent to a yode server or third party or anything obviously it's kind of the point the system is based on energized protection which is an open source project licensed under the MIT license to complement this there's a pre-installed app that lets you check how many requests you've blocked to how many recipients you can see the list of applications and how many blocked requests they made so you can get an indication of the apps that are actively trying to track you and you can even see a map with the various countries your phone communicated with how much data was sent and to which server it's a very very neat feature it means that you will not get any tracker or any ads running on anything I saw Zero ads during my experience with the phone even inside of applications that will usually display them speaking of applications your day OS relies on two app stores you get F Droid for all your open source app needs and you get the Aurora store if you don't know what that is it's a very complete store that has basically everything the Google Play store has but that you can access without a Google account you also can log in using your Google account and access your downloaded apps library on Google Play although it kinda defeats the purpose of using a d Googled Android ROM I guess installing apps works very well I encountered zero problems here where you will have issues these running apps that depend on Google services I tried installing the YouTube app and even though I had added my Google account to the account settings using micro G YouTube never opened it crashed instantly other Google Apps got me the same experience like the YouTube studio app stuff like Google Maps or Google photos worked but were unable to use the already added Google account in micro G after reaching out to the yode team they told me they have identified the the issue which seemed to be that yode OS wasn't identified as Android correctly by Google which made Google services dependent apps crash or fail to load accounts the issue is fixed in the beta and will be patched in the next OTA release and of course you're probably not using a d Googled Android ROM to run Google applications but if what you need is tracking blocking and ad blocking capabilities out of the box and you still need to run the occasional Google Reliant application then yet OS was not a seamless experience if I compare that to my previous experience with Slash e that specific ROM let me run any Google app I wanted remembered my Google account and the micro G Services implementation seem to work just better now interestingly stuff like my banking app worked immediately on your day letting me use the phone as my secure device to authenticate purchases online something that is usually blocked because the device doesn't pass safety net checks here it all worked perfectly for me so how well does yodeos compare to other D Googled Android ROMs well compared to lineage OS it adds all these tracker and ad blocking capabilities you could probably replicate that yourself on lineage but at least here it's set up right out of the box it gets updated with your system and you get a nice little app to check how well it's working and how much data you've saved compared to something like slash e the comparison is a lot more interesting because both ROMs don't really try to do the same thing slash e has more advanced privacy features with the ability to scramble your location at the Press of a button and more complete privacy controls but slash e also deviates a lot from stock Android with their own launcher their own Forks of Open Source apps and generally an experience that will not appeal to everyone now here again you could use slash e and replace the default launcher in apps with other Alternatives but here you get stock Android out of the box without anything specific to do well these ROMs diverges in terms of flexibility I had a better experience with slashy in terms of installing and using applications that need micro G to work on your day even after logging in with a Google account I couldn't access a lot of apps that need Google services and sure it will be fixed soon and it's probably a fluke right at the bad time but for now judging on my own experience your day just wasn't as smooth and yodes support a lot less phones than slash e which itself supports a lot less phones than lineage OS so I guess it all depends on what you're looking for here if you want absolute stock and don't want to have to change the launcher or the default apps and you don't plan to use any app that requires the Play services then here they might be a good fit it's definitely worth a try over lineage although with the limited selection of devices if you're a Google pixel owner you'll probably be better served by graphino as if what you want is something that is more refined and will give you more flexibility in terms of applications than something like slash e will have a more usable setup with a better micro G implementation at least until the yode OS team fixes the issues and releases an update also to be noticed my review unit came with very very noticeable OLED burning I had some brown traces of the top bar and of some app UI elements on the top of the screen of the phone as I'm sure you'll be able to tell watching the video now the team told me that it was an error in quality checks and that they offered to replace it immediately but since I wasn't going to keep the device anyway it was just a review unit and it was a bit late I just decided to record everything on this one now for my personal use case slash e is still the better option because I need the YouTube studio app to handle my channel and I would rather use the YouTube app than use the website I also actually like the design and launcher of Slash e and I've never been a fan of material U and the pixel launcher and I definitely plan to move back to slash e once they support the Galaxy S21 yode OS is an interesting ROM and the team was really quick to answer any questions and assure me that the problems I encountered would be fixed but as of now what I tried isn't as smooth as my experiences with lineage Os or slash e it's definitely not bad but it still needs a little bit of work to be more smooth polished and refined unlike this segue to today's sponsor which is as smooth as can be if your computer is due for a replacement and you want to install Linux on it stop looking at Windows devices devices made to run Windows click the link in the description below instead and get yourself a device that was made to run Linux tuxedo makes laptops and desktops that were made specifically for that purpose and they have a big range of devices that should cover every price point and every need whether you're looking for a small affordable laptop a super high-end workstation Tower Nook whatever you need they have it all devices are super configurable all laptops are openable repairable upgradable including the SSD the ram the battery and even sometimes the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card so if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching I hope you enjoyed the video if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can always dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really really enjoy the channel where there are plenty of links in the description below to support it like PayPal YouTube memberships super things or patreon or anything else you know what to do so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and oh boy do we have a lot to talk about this week because we have framework announcing a new 16-inch laptop with replaceable gpus and a ton of expansion slots we have a big big update to next Cloud including Ai and a SharePoint competitor and we have Twitter announcing that they will open source their algorithm at the end of March and we also have weyland's screen sharing fixed everywhere including on Discord we have AMD fsr3 and gnome 44 and this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenote lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so framework the company that makes the ultra repairable and modular framework laptop announced a few things this week now first let's get this out of the way there are new 13's gen Intel boards and new AMD ones with the 7000 series CPUs so you can upgrade your current laptop without buying a new one you can reuse the old board in another device as a mini desktop for example but what's way more interesting is the announcement of the framework 16. a brand new device that will have upgradable Graphics as in you can swap in some dedicated GPU modules at the back of the device it will also have 6 expansion slots more than the 13-inch model with its only four slots and it will also have hot swappable keyboard modules with the ability to add a numpad on the fly on the right or the left or to remove the touchpad to the center or the side and they will even offer keyboard options with a Super Key instead of a Windows logo and it will also have that all-important PCI port at the back to connect all the replaceable gpus but also other peripherals like for example more batteries we don't know which GPU they will use how you will be able to Source them but it's a very interesting concept that I really hope that they can achieve they are also open sourcing a bunch of parts of the laptop like the firmware for the keyboard the input modules the expansion Bay modules for the gpus and other PCI peripherals or even the expansion cards designed so basically anyone will be able to contribute modules gpus or other expansion modules to framework laptops and I really really love what they're doing and I truly hope that they can achieve this vision and I also truly hope that Linux will be a first class citizen on this device because it sounds like a complete dream to me like being able to have enormous battery life with an additional module at back when I just need to write stuff or when I'm moving around and being able to swap that for a full GPU when I want to game when I'm plugged in or when I want to do video editing that would be absolutely wonderful now nextcloud announced some more good stuff with the release of next Cloud Hub 4 and the main focus is as it seems customary now for everything the main focus is on AI they implemented what they called intelligent features with a smart picker which is basically a context menu that works across applications and lets you use AI in your daily workflow by just clicking that context menu entry now it includes for example text to speech using whisper which just lets you type using your voice it also lets you generate images on the Fly using Dali 2 and stable diffusion if you run that last one on premises they also include the chat gpt3 to generate new text in documents all the values Office Suite they support the smart picker will also let you share tasks next Cloud tables map locations Collective Pages spiritual videos Mastered on accounts they will let you translate with next Cloud translate which is a new tool based on deep ell they also introduce the new tables app which is an alternative to SharePoint it lets you track data building data structures and it lets you create small applications without any code any development and you can connect these small apps to other next Cloud components next cloud files also got the ability to name older file versions nextcloud talk lets you create breakout rooms which are smaller offshoots of main conversations to split up large meetings or virtual learning environments and you can also Now record your next Cloud talks calls the mail app got support for shared mailboxes and S mime support plus new text templates next layout office now supports end-to-end encryption with support for uploading files to an end-to-end encrypted folder and sharing end-to-end encrypted documents the text editor Now tracks collaborative editing with multiple cursors in real time and they also improved performance a lot specifically for next Cloud talk with reduced loading times reduced Servo load and reduce notification delays they say it's up to 99 faster and of course depending on how you installed nexcloud on your server you might already have the update or not for example I use the snap and so I'm probably going to have to wait for around the month for it to be available but I can't wait to play around with the new tables app to try and build some small dashboards and some small apps for myself I think it will be really cool and I'm also interested in these AI features because they brand them as ethical AI but they seem to use the exact same AI that everybody else does which is definitely not ethical in any single way so I'm gonna look into that now if you remember back when Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Twitter he also said he wanted to make the recommendation algorithm open source and up until now this has not materialized but it looks like it will before the end of the month at least partially musk tweeted that all the code used to recommend tweets will be open on March 31st and he said prepare to be disappointed to someone asking him to open source Twitter which could mean that either the code isn't great or that it will just be a small part of it that gets opened or that it just doesn't hide anything weird and so everyone will be disappointed because it's just based on likes and retweets no details were provided on the license the code will be released under or where it will be accessible or the rights users will have to reuse it share it or modify it and we all also don't know if they will allow contributions to it this is still an interesting move because it looked like Twitter was going more towards a closed Source route with them shutting down access to their API and killing the whole ecosystem of apps and useful Bots that used it they said they wanted to make that API accessible for a fee but this hasn't materialized either so it will be interesting to see where that code lands will it be more on the free software side where it can be reused and shared or will it just be open source as in you can look at it but you can't really touch it all that much we'll have to see and I'm also sure we'll get plenty of deep Dives looking into what and how Twitter recommends tweets to its users and I'm sure plenty of people will find something to be offended by politically or otherwise now one of the biggest hurdles of Weyland just disappeared and that's screen sharing while screen sharing from apps that run natively under Weyland works like a charm apps that depend on an X server running with X Weyland generally have issues like Discord for example in that they don't see any Wayland window as shareable they can only share other x-wayland applications which is definitely not ideal thankfully a group of developers have tackled this issue with something called X Weyland Video Bridge this thing just makes Wayland Windows visible in the window picker for screen sharing from x-wayland applications it is as secure as screen sharing under Weyland is using portals and it's getting its data through pipe wire of course any other X application will be able to Snoop on the contents of what you're sharing just like they can on X11 there's no way to bypass that really performance seems excellent with negligible latency and no extra CPU usage and the good news is you can already run it right now the bridge is available as a flat pack only for now because it depends on the newer library that hasn't been released or packaged yet and that the flat pack can include you will need to run the bridge in the background though with a simple command line that you can set to auto start and everything should work well after that now it's still in Alpha and it's unclear if it will remain a separate tool or be part of a desktop environment or distro in the future but it is great news nonetheless so if your only remaining complained with Wayland was screen sharing from apps like Discord well you don't have any complaints anymore give it a shot and let me know down there in the comments how well it works now this week we also saw the release of gnome 44 with a bunch of quality of life improvements the quick settings are now more legible and descriptive they can now handle background apps in a first step to try and replace notification tray icons but it's just not there yet the file manager can now show thumbnails in the file picker gnome software has a toggle to let you view free and open source apps only you can disable the overlay scroll bars or the mouse pointer acceleration and the settings got a bunch of redesigned Pages for accessibility Mouse and touchpad or sound preferences you can also now configure wireguard vpns and share your Wi-Fi password through a QR code Epiphany was ported to gtk4 and received a bunch of performance improvements and most core gnome apps received some small updates as well now of course this is just a very quick overview of everything that changed if you want to go into more detail about all of this I have a dedicated video you probably already watched it if you're interested in gloam and if you haven't it's linked in the description and in the card right there there's a new vulnerability on Android that concerns users who like to take screenshots and share them to summarize using the native cropping features on Google pixels but also other Android phones a lot of the data of the original image was kept in the PNG file and easy to recover it just didn't delete the information that the crop removed but kept large portions of it which means if you used it to share cropped screenshots of personal info or sensible data anyone might be able to see everything you thought was cropped out the vulnerability has been patched in March's update for Android fortunately but all screenshots cropped before that can still be uncropped and this thing got the adorably impossible to pronounce nickname of acropolyps and it affects Google pixel users but also some non-pixel Android phones and some custom Android ROMs some sharing Services would remove the compressed or unused data from the images but for example Discord doesn't it only seems to affect PNG screenshots not jpegs and the issue appeared in Android 10 so a long while back and what's worse is the issue has been fixed since the end of January on Google's side but they didn't release the fix until March and what's even worse if you're using Windows 10 or 11's Snipping Tool it has the same issue on PNG screenshots the issue has just been fixed on Windows 11 but it still isn't on Windows 10 as I'm recording this so if you like to share a lot of screenshots that you usually redact by cropping them it might be time to go and delete them from virtually everywhere you share them especially Discord because anyone could just uncrop them and yeah that's bad and let's finish this with some gaming news first there's a new change planned for the AMD driver for Linux that should improve the experience on recent AMD apus starting with the van Gogh architecture which notably is used by the steam deck there's a new interface for adjusting and setting thermal throttling which lets temperatures be read in Milli degrees Celsius so it means systems will be able to adjust throttling a lot more precisely and squeeze every bit of performance they can out of the chips wine 8.4 was also released this week with the initial steps for the Wayland driver that will enable proton and wine to run Windows games as native Wayland apps and get more performance out of it it also includes fixes for thief for hard Truck 2 King of the Road for the Amazon games client whatever that is for Spore for crisis 2 maximum Edition or Starcraft remastered and finally AMD unveiled a few things about fsr3 their super sampling technology that lets you run games at lower resolutions while looking good on higher res display they're introducing interpolated frames that apparently lets them get a two times frame rate boost basically by automatically generating frames in between the ones that are actually rendered so basically the game could run at 30 FPS and be rendered at 30 FPS but appear to run at 60 thanks to every other frame being guessed by the algorithm now of course this introduces latency as these frames are not real in the sense that they don't reflect what you're actually doing they're just created automatically to fill in the gaps and increase the frame rate fsr3 is open source as is the new Fidelity FX SDK that gives developers easy ways to integrate this technology and of course this might be really really cool on Lower powered laptops and handhelds like the steam deck yeah you saw that one coming you could run the game at 30 FPS but it would feel like 60 and it would give you a way better experience using less power and having more battery life sounds pretty good like this segue to today's sponsor if you're looking to replace your main computer maybe it's time to stop looking at devices made by Windows manufacturers and time to look at devices made specifically to run Linux from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and they make laptops and desktop that ship with Linux out of the box out of a selection of popular distros they have a big range that should have something for every price point and every need whether you need a laptop a desktop an affordable one or super powerful one a workstation or gaming device they have everything and all of their laptops are openable upgradeable and repairable with the battery the SSD and the ram all being user serviceable and sometimes even the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card so if you need a new device you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel and you want to support it well there are plenty of links in the description below for PayPal Libera pay YouTube memberships patreon super things whatever Plus myself you know what to do they're all down there so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I already talked about the Googled Android ROMs in the past specifically with Slash e but this one was a very opinionated ROM with its own design and its own approach on how to do Android and its launcher so today it's time to look at another D Googled Android ROM but this time way closer to vanilla and it's called yode OS so let's look at what it brings to the table how it compares to other D Google drums and how smooth this segue to today's sponsor is thanks to protonmail for sponsoring this video protonmail is an encrypted email service based in Switzerland that is laser focused on protecting your privacy and you probably already know that big Tech like Gmail with its 2 billion users makes most of their money by harvesting all the data they can about you including your emails to build a profile about you and Target you with ads well protonmail believes that your email belongs to you it protects you from email trackers ads spam fishing and provides all the features you need to quickly manage your email and subscribe from newsletters manage your calendar and more it has nothing to hide all its apps are open source and audited by Security Experts and it was invented by scientists at the CERN while World Wide Web was invented and protonmail uses end-to-end encryption which means that not even proton can read your email you can use it on any device from anywhere and you can sign up for free forever and you'll get a free VPN calendar and secure cloud storage at the same time you can upgrade anytime if you want more features and storage if you're tired of being tracked everywhere even in your inbox and you want to break free from Big Tech click the link in the description below and give protonmail a try so your day OS written with an accent on the last e because it's French we French love 2D Google things apparently your day is Android but with all Google software removed it uses lineage OS as a base but adds a built-in ad and tracker blocker that runs at all times locally on the device the replace the default apps with privacy focused ones and they use F Droid and the Aurora store to provide you with applications so on paper it's exactly the same goals and base AS Slash e except that yode actually wants to give you Android web slash e gives you something closer to iOS your day sells brand new smartphones and refurbished ones that come with their OS pre-installed or you can always install it yourself although they don't officially support a lot of phones right now with about 29 devices having installation instructions on their website here they provided me with a review unit that I have to send back after I'm done with it it's a pixel 5 from Google and on paper it so phone I could see myself using day to day right size decent cameras good performance High refresh rate screen Zone paper it's a phone I could see myself using and since it didn't die on me during the trial period I guess it's three of the various manufacturing problems Google encountered on this device well not completely free as we'll see later now let's look at how the ROM works the first setup is just the exact same as you might be used to on any vanilla or close to vanilla Android ROM it lets you pick your Wi-Fi network your language enable notifications and location and set up a fingerprint to unlock the device you can also restore a previous backup or just use the phone as is after that you get a Spartan first run screen that lets you select your pre-installed applications find out more about the yode tracker blocker and send us an information about the project the ability to remove pre-installed apps is actually pretty cool you don't have to do that after the first setup and nothing is out of bounds you can remove anything so no one can accuse your the OS of being bloatware you get a list of categories and you can just uncheck the apps you don't want or don't need which is nice it also comes with micro G the open source implementation of Google Play services and if you don't want that you can also uncheck it I'll keep it there to test how well it works now the ROM itself will be super familiar if you've ever used the pixel or a very stock Android ROM on the pixel 5 your day OS 4 was pre-installed and it's based on Android 13. so it's pretty much up to date the latest security update was on January the 5th 2023 which doesn't seem quite up to date yet no further updates were available in the built-in updater tool the yode team told me that they provide security updates every two months for the stable Channel and every month for beta testers because they want to make sure that they test that everything works right before publishing a new release the default experience is as close to stock as can be you have either the three button layout of Android or the much better gestures a dock of apps at the bottom an app drawer by swiping up and a few preset widgets like search weather and a few app shortcuts for the yode tracker blocker yode related news app stores and settings it also uses the material U interface and I know it's a controversial opinion but I just don't like it the contrast is bad it just looks unappealing everything is way too big with too much padding I just don't like it bring back Hollow you cowards The Experience here is all super smooth and fast to use at least on the pixel 5. there are no slowdowns and I didn't notice any crashes or bugs while using it either which is to be expected as it's pretty much stock Android with even less stuff running in the background so it should perform even better than a pixel with its default ROM in terms of apps yodex ships with a Firefox based browser by default which is a Bose Telemetry trackers and enables alternative search engines right out of the box like Quant Brave ecosia start page and multiple search instances Quant is the default here which isn't all that good since its results can be pretty hit or miss the default email client is pretty easy privacy or pep it's a simple email client with an easy interface that adds end-to-end encryption capabilities to any mail account and it's open source and tracker free for maps you get magic Earth which is also open source and uses openstreetmap it has everything you might need including directions offline maps and points of interest it's not the most beautiful looking app ever but it's fast and easy to use the keyboard is open board which is again open source and I'll stop saying that now because all pre-installed apps are open source so that keyboard is based on the Android open source project one and doesn't use any Google services either it's a good keyboard with plenty of options to make it look and feel however you want the camera app is open camera which while very powerful has a terrible user interface and looks really bad it also doesn't have all the built-in post-processing features that most phones default camera apps will apply which means your photos and videos will definitely not look as good using it as they would on the default draw now that's an issue for all alternative camera apps and all Android ROMs that use them you will never get as good a result result as with the default camera application that gets shipped by your manufacturer finally you get the usual Android open source project calendar calculator Gallery music app phone dialer PDF viewer and you get Carnet for note taking which is a clone of Google keep that can be synced with next Cloud if you want the app selection is decent and is on par with what you would expect from a d Google fully open source Android ROM I still prefer the selection on slash e because they went out of their way to Fork various apps unify the user interface make them look coherent where here is just a set of mismatched apps but you can replace anything with anything else if you prefer so it's not really an issue now let's talk about the main draw of hyode os how it handles privacy first yode is as de-googled as lineage OS they base their work on that and they don't remove anything more than lineage does well they defer is how they handle trackers and ads yode comes with the tracker blocker built in this thing works using a man in the middle attack style the OS intercepts all Communications and requests that go out of your phone and blocks everything that's part of its block lists and these block lists are collaboratively sourced and include a lot of Adblock and tracker blocker related things now don't worry all of this happens locally on the device nothing is sent to a yode server or third party or anything obviously it's kind of the point the system is based on energized protection which is an open source project licensed under the MIT license to complement this there's a pre-installed app that lets you check how many requests you've blocked to how many recipients you can see the list of applications and how many blocked requests they made so you can get an indication of the apps that are actively trying to track you and you can even see a map with the various countries your phone communicated with how much data was sent and to which server it's a very very neat feature it means that you will not get any tracker or any ads running on anything I saw Zero ads during my experience with the phone even inside of applications that will usually display them speaking of applications your day OS relies on two app stores you get F Droid for all your open source app needs and you get the Aurora store if you don't know what that is it's a very complete store that has basically everything the Google Play store has but that you can access without a Google account you also can log in using your Google account and access your downloaded apps library on Google Play although it kinda defeats the purpose of using a d Googled Android ROM I guess installing apps works very well I encountered zero problems here where you will have issues these running apps that depend on Google services I tried installing the YouTube app and even though I had added my Google account to the account settings using micro G YouTube never opened it crashed instantly other Google Apps got me the same experience like the YouTube studio app stuff like Google Maps or Google photos worked but were unable to use the already added Google account in micro G after reaching out to the yode team they told me they have identified the the issue which seemed to be that yode OS wasn't identified as Android correctly by Google which made Google services dependent apps crash or fail to load accounts the issue is fixed in the beta and will be patched in the next OTA release and of course you're probably not using a d Googled Android ROM to run Google applications but if what you need is tracking blocking and ad blocking capabilities out of the box and you still need to run the occasional Google Reliant application then yet OS was not a seamless experience if I compare that to my previous experience with Slash e that specific ROM let me run any Google app I wanted remembered my Google account and the micro G Services implementation seem to work just better now interestingly stuff like my banking app worked immediately on your day letting me use the phone as my secure device to authenticate purchases online something that is usually blocked because the device doesn't pass safety net checks here it all worked perfectly for me so how well does yodeos compare to other D Googled Android ROMs well compared to lineage OS it adds all these tracker and ad blocking capabilities you could probably replicate that yourself on lineage but at least here it's set up right out of the box it gets updated with your system and you get a nice little app to check how well it's working and how much data you've saved compared to something like slash e the comparison is a lot more interesting because both ROMs don't really try to do the same thing slash e has more advanced privacy features with the ability to scramble your location at the Press of a button and more complete privacy controls but slash e also deviates a lot from stock Android with their own launcher their own Forks of Open Source apps and generally an experience that will not appeal to everyone now here again you could use slash e and replace the default launcher in apps with other Alternatives but here you get stock Android out of the box without anything specific to do well these ROMs diverges in terms of flexibility I had a better experience with slashy in terms of installing and using applications that need micro G to work on your day even after logging in with a Google account I couldn't access a lot of apps that need Google services and sure it will be fixed soon and it's probably a fluke right at the bad time but for now judging on my own experience your day just wasn't as smooth and yodes support a lot less phones than slash e which itself supports a lot less phones than lineage OS so I guess it all depends on what you're looking for here if you want absolute stock and don't want to have to change the launcher or the default apps and you don't plan to use any app that requires the Play services then here they might be a good fit it's definitely worth a try over lineage although with the limited selection of devices if you're a Google pixel owner you'll probably be better served by graphino as if what you want is something that is more refined and will give you more flexibility in terms of applications than something like slash e will have a more usable setup with a better micro G implementation at least until the yode OS team fixes the issues and releases an update also to be noticed my review unit came with very very noticeable OLED burning I had some brown traces of the top bar and of some app UI elements on the top of the screen of the phone as I'm sure you'll be able to tell watching the video now the team told me that it was an error in quality checks and that they offered to replace it immediately but since I wasn't going to keep the device anyway it was just a review unit and it was a bit late I just decided to record everything on this one now for my personal use case slash e is still the better option because I need the YouTube studio app to handle my channel and I would rather use the YouTube app than use the website I also actually like the design and launcher of Slash e and I've never been a fan of material U and the pixel launcher and I definitely plan to move back to slash e once they support the Galaxy S21 yode OS is an interesting ROM and the team was really quick to answer any questions and assure me that the problems I encountered would be fixed but as of now what I tried isn't as smooth as my experiences with lineage Os or slash e it's definitely not bad but it still needs a little bit of work to be more smooth polished and refined unlike this segue to today's sponsor which is as smooth as can be if your computer is due for a replacement and you want to install Linux on it stop looking at Windows devices devices made to run Windows click the link in the description below instead and get yourself a device that was made to run Linux tuxedo makes laptops and desktops that were made specifically for that purpose and they have a big range of devices that should cover every price point and every need whether you're looking for a small affordable laptop a super high-end workstation Tower Nook whatever you need they have it all devices are super configurable all laptops are openable repairable upgradable including the SSD the ram the battery and even sometimes the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card so if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching I hope you enjoyed the video if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can always dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really really enjoy the channel where there are plenty of links in the description below to support it like PayPal YouTube memberships super things or patreon or anything else you know what to do so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
warning in this video I'll pronounce gnome like you're supposed to with a hard G no not no yes that's how you're supposed to pronounce it hey everyone this is Nick and if I didn't get the dates completely wrong gnome 44 should release tomorrow or it's probably already out by the time you're watching this and while it's not a revolution or anything it does go into a pretty interesting direction to finally address some issues people had with this desktop so let's take a look at everything new you'll get once your distro gives you the update and let's take a look at this brand new Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by savings portmaster portmaster is an all-in-one tool to easily take your privacy to the next level and it's a tool I use myself on all of my Linux devices portmaster lets you automatically block all trackers and malware in every application you run on your computer not just your web browser but everything you run you it's easy to use with defaults already in place that lets you just set it and forget it but if you like to configure every Rule and every app you also can fordmaster is completely free and open source and also free of charge as it's funded by users that subscribe to the SPN a super powered VPN that gives you multiple identities for every connection of every application so if you want to easily improve the privacy of your system whatever the Linux distro you use or even on Windows click the link in the description below and download the portmaster for free so let's begin with gnome shell the desktop interface itself the first big addition is support for background applications gnome doesn't have a system tray by default and so apps that ran in the background without a window were always pretty annoying to use unless you added an extension Chrome 44 moves to try and add support back for these applications without using a system tray what you'll get now is a section in the Quick Settings menu called background apps it will only appear if you have any of these apps running and it just lists what is currently open and lets you close these applications and that's it this is a good addition but it won't replace your app indicators extension just yet because while it shows you what is running in the background it doesn't let you interact with them at all you don't get a context menu and you can't even raise a window for these apps by clicking on them tray icons usually let you perform actions by clicking on these little ugly buggers and here you don't have that and I really truly hope that they can bring support for just clicking on a background app and opening it or right clicking it or having a drop down menu somewhere to have the same exact functionality as tray icons because these three icons are horrible they are disjointed they are incoherent their context menu never look the same they have colors or symbolic icons they just look awful and having something better integrated with the system would be awesome but those background apps as they are implemented right now are just not a replacement another change in the gnome shell is the Quick Settings they were introduced in Chrome 43 and while they are very useful they were also incomplete which is what ground 44 fixes first the Bluetooth setting is now fully functional it lets you expand it and see all the devices you previously paired with and you can connect to them in one click you won't see new devices that you never paired with and you could already add that feature back with an extension but it's good to have it natively all Quick Settings toggles also received a bit of a UI lifting previously the name of the toggle changed to reflect what it was connected to or the setting it was currently using for example the Wi-Fi toggle just had the name of the Wi-Fi network now these toggles are split with two lines of text the first one is the name of the feature and the second one is the setting or the thing you're connected to it's much better much simpler to understand and it even manages to look better with more text so good other model changes include the ability to click on the speaker icon in the quick settings to mute or unmute your computer and they also replace the icon for screenshots to better reflect what that feature does the window manager slash compositor called matter also received a bunch of changes like removing the Legacy opengl driver support dropping the final remnants of gtk3 adding an experimental option for enabling HDR modes implementing the Weyland fractional scaling protocol so fractional scaling can be native and not blurry and generally improving Wayland compatibility all around there is still no triple buffer optimization out of the box which is something Ubuntu adds that makes gnome way smoother Without Really increasing latency between a click or a movement and an action and I don't understand why gnome doesn't ship it by default just yet I don't see any drawbacks to it but it's not there now let's talk about applications first is the file manager Nautilus it gained back the ability to expand folders in the list view something it had lost in the move to gtk4 as there was just no time to re-implement that so now it's a real list view that lets you navigate like in a directory tree at least if you enable that in the preferences you can also now right click on a tab and get new actions like closing all the currently open tabs reopening a closed one and moving a tab to a new window something you could already do by dragging the Tab out of the current window and you can still do that fortunately Nautilus will also let you directly create an image file anywhere when you've copied an image from another app or when you have just taken a screenshot the clipboard will be able to pick it up and paste it in the file manager as an image file another big change in file management is the image preview in the file picker for the past 10 years or so the basic file picker in Gnome did not let you see thumbnails for files which sucked big time whatever it was that blocked this from being developed it's now gone and you can finally have a grid of icons in the file picker so you can see which image looks like what before selecting it and that seems like a ridiculous feature not to have than it was but now it's finally there but I will not give the gnome developers props for this because come on it's so basic konam web is also getting better with drone 44 as it's finally been ported to gtk4 which means it now looks like the other libid Vita apps on gnome it now uses a newer version of webkit's gtk implementation with a new webgl implementation and webgl2 support and a bunch of performance improvements and Bug fixes and on the interface side of things Epiphany now moved to the libid Vita about window it lets you open the preferences by pressing Ctrl plus comma you can duplicate a tab by middle clicking on the refresh button and it now supposedly has access to the brand new tab grid that lets you see thumbnails for all your open tabs to access them in a more visual way although using the nightly version I did not get that button when I had more tabs than could fit in the window I just got the usual overflow menu and not the visual tab grid but I'm really waiting for though is finished support for web extensions including ad blockers and tracker blockers which are still not supported right now gnome software didn't see many changes this time around with just a new toggle to only display free and open source software and filter out the apps using a proprietary license gnome console the new simple terminal app introduced in the previous genome release also got access to the visual visual tab grid to switch between tabs and it looks great The Gnome weather gained a new smooth temperature curve and a flatter toolbar that merges with the windows content and gnome contacts now lets you share a contact by generating a QR code so people can just scan it and add the contact to their contacts list you know Maps gained back keyboard navigation in the search results and they started work on a vector tile style that uses the gnome color palette so Maps will look better than their default openstreetmap style once that style is finished and finally gnomebox has got a redesigned VM creation window that should be faster to use and easier to understand here again nothing is absolutely revolutionary but it's all quality of life changes and the porting work to gtk4 and libid Vita seems basically complete apart from gnome boxes which still looks like it's gtk3 so it means that developers are now free to focus on features and refinements and improvements for the next releases and of course the settings got a bunch of changes as well first it's not really a setting but the lock screen got a redesigned gun is the dark gray drab background of the user list now you get a nice blurred wallpaper in the background that reflects the wallpaper of the selected user user icons are now much bigger they're more visible and the font size of the clock is also bigger it just looks better all in all less clinical less drabits it's just prettier the network panel in the settings got support for wireguard vpns letting you toggle it on or off letting you create update or delete connections and peers the Wi-Fi panel now lets you share Wi-Fi network passwords in the form of a QR code as well to avoid giving away the password itself or just to avoid having to type Ultra lengthy and complicated sequences of numbers and letters the accessibility panel was also reorganized and split into multiple pages instead of having one long page of settings split into categories they are still categorized by function like seeing hearing typing and the like and they gained a new option to disable the overlay scroll bars so these scroll bars are always visible instead of appearing when you get close to them with your mouse something I'm sure that a lot of users that don't have a disability will also want to turn off The Mouse and the touchpad settings were completely redesigned with a better layout and better explanations of the various options and some nice animations were added to explain the difference between natural scrolling and traditional scrolling or two finger scrolling or Edge scrolling on a touchpad you also finally get the option to disable Mouse pointer acceleration again something a lot of people have been asking for and now you can do it although it is named pointer assistance and they had to implement a small clickable tooltip to explain what it is which makes it feel a little over designed to be honest the about panel in the settings now shows the kernel version and the device firmware revision the sound panel was reorganized and has a new volume level window to let you change the volume of various applications individually something that was already possible but was in line with the main audio settings page the alert Chooser has been redesigned as well moving away from the split combo button and the sound test window has been improved as well so here it's just refinements all around and bringing a more coherent and visually interesting experience but also adding a bunch of stuff that people were asking for and that's the theme of this release it's a refined over gnome 43 it polishes the various ideas that have been implemented in the previous release and it tidies up the look and feel of the core apps by finishing the porting efforts to gtk4 but there's also an interesting Direction which is that gnome seems to be adding back features that people have been asking for for years whether it's an equivalent to the notification tray or at least the first steps towards one it's Mass acceleration its overlay scroll bars its thumbnails in the file picker these things were in limbo for about 10 years and now gnome is finally adding them back so it feels that they finally found their footing and they are now ready to basically answer the user's demands or at least select user demands and I really like this direction I don't want gnome to turn into another KDE or even to have the breadth of options that cinnamon has because that is not its purpose or its Vision but these small quality of life options were necessary and I'm glad that they are now moving back to add these small touches here and there so let's hope it's not a fluke and it actually reflects a will to better serve gnome users by adding carefully considered and carefully designed options and features to the desktop I would really like that and I would really like to tell you about our sponsor if your computer is due for a replacement and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at devices made by Windows manufacturers that might or might not run Linux well you might have a ton of work to do to make them run just buy something from tuxedo from the link in the description below they make laptops and desktops that run Linux out of the box and their range is big enough that they should fit every price point and every need and all their devices are openable repairable upgradable they have plenty of customization options at purchase and you know they will just run Linux really well because the hardware has been picked specifically for that so if you need a new computer and you want to run Linux on it just click the link in the description below and give tuxedo devices a shot they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can always click that dislike button and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoyed the channel there are plenty of links down there to help support it from PayPal patreon YouTube membership super thanks there's something for everyone so if you want to you know where to go in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
warning in this video I'll pronounce gnome like you're supposed to with a hard G no not no yes that's how you're supposed to pronounce it hey everyone this is Nick and if I didn't get the dates completely wrong gnome 44 should release tomorrow or it's probably already out by the time you're watching this and while it's not a revolution or anything it does go into a pretty interesting direction to finally address some issues people had with this desktop so let's take a look at everything new you'll get once your distro gives you the update and let's take a look at this brand new Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by savings portmaster portmaster is an all-in-one tool to easily take your privacy to the next level and it's a tool I use myself on all of my Linux devices portmaster lets you automatically block all trackers and malware in every application you run on your computer not just your web browser but everything you run you it's easy to use with defaults already in place that lets you just set it and forget it but if you like to configure every Rule and every app you also can fordmaster is completely free and open source and also free of charge as it's funded by users that subscribe to the SPN a super powered VPN that gives you multiple identities for every connection of every application so if you want to easily improve the privacy of your system whatever the Linux distro you use or even on Windows click the link in the description below and download the portmaster for free so let's begin with gnome shell the desktop interface itself the first big addition is support for background applications gnome doesn't have a system tray by default and so apps that ran in the background without a window were always pretty annoying to use unless you added an extension Chrome 44 moves to try and add support back for these applications without using a system tray what you'll get now is a section in the Quick Settings menu called background apps it will only appear if you have any of these apps running and it just lists what is currently open and lets you close these applications and that's it this is a good addition but it won't replace your app indicators extension just yet because while it shows you what is running in the background it doesn't let you interact with them at all you don't get a context menu and you can't even raise a window for these apps by clicking on them tray icons usually let you perform actions by clicking on these little ugly buggers and here you don't have that and I really truly hope that they can bring support for just clicking on a background app and opening it or right clicking it or having a drop down menu somewhere to have the same exact functionality as tray icons because these three icons are horrible they are disjointed they are incoherent their context menu never look the same they have colors or symbolic icons they just look awful and having something better integrated with the system would be awesome but those background apps as they are implemented right now are just not a replacement another change in the gnome shell is the Quick Settings they were introduced in Chrome 43 and while they are very useful they were also incomplete which is what ground 44 fixes first the Bluetooth setting is now fully functional it lets you expand it and see all the devices you previously paired with and you can connect to them in one click you won't see new devices that you never paired with and you could already add that feature back with an extension but it's good to have it natively all Quick Settings toggles also received a bit of a UI lifting previously the name of the toggle changed to reflect what it was connected to or the setting it was currently using for example the Wi-Fi toggle just had the name of the Wi-Fi network now these toggles are split with two lines of text the first one is the name of the feature and the second one is the setting or the thing you're connected to it's much better much simpler to understand and it even manages to look better with more text so good other model changes include the ability to click on the speaker icon in the quick settings to mute or unmute your computer and they also replace the icon for screenshots to better reflect what that feature does the window manager slash compositor called matter also received a bunch of changes like removing the Legacy opengl driver support dropping the final remnants of gtk3 adding an experimental option for enabling HDR modes implementing the Weyland fractional scaling protocol so fractional scaling can be native and not blurry and generally improving Wayland compatibility all around there is still no triple buffer optimization out of the box which is something Ubuntu adds that makes gnome way smoother Without Really increasing latency between a click or a movement and an action and I don't understand why gnome doesn't ship it by default just yet I don't see any drawbacks to it but it's not there now let's talk about applications first is the file manager Nautilus it gained back the ability to expand folders in the list view something it had lost in the move to gtk4 as there was just no time to re-implement that so now it's a real list view that lets you navigate like in a directory tree at least if you enable that in the preferences you can also now right click on a tab and get new actions like closing all the currently open tabs reopening a closed one and moving a tab to a new window something you could already do by dragging the Tab out of the current window and you can still do that fortunately Nautilus will also let you directly create an image file anywhere when you've copied an image from another app or when you have just taken a screenshot the clipboard will be able to pick it up and paste it in the file manager as an image file another big change in file management is the image preview in the file picker for the past 10 years or so the basic file picker in Gnome did not let you see thumbnails for files which sucked big time whatever it was that blocked this from being developed it's now gone and you can finally have a grid of icons in the file picker so you can see which image looks like what before selecting it and that seems like a ridiculous feature not to have than it was but now it's finally there but I will not give the gnome developers props for this because come on it's so basic konam web is also getting better with drone 44 as it's finally been ported to gtk4 which means it now looks like the other libid Vita apps on gnome it now uses a newer version of webkit's gtk implementation with a new webgl implementation and webgl2 support and a bunch of performance improvements and Bug fixes and on the interface side of things Epiphany now moved to the libid Vita about window it lets you open the preferences by pressing Ctrl plus comma you can duplicate a tab by middle clicking on the refresh button and it now supposedly has access to the brand new tab grid that lets you see thumbnails for all your open tabs to access them in a more visual way although using the nightly version I did not get that button when I had more tabs than could fit in the window I just got the usual overflow menu and not the visual tab grid but I'm really waiting for though is finished support for web extensions including ad blockers and tracker blockers which are still not supported right now gnome software didn't see many changes this time around with just a new toggle to only display free and open source software and filter out the apps using a proprietary license gnome console the new simple terminal app introduced in the previous genome release also got access to the visual visual tab grid to switch between tabs and it looks great The Gnome weather gained a new smooth temperature curve and a flatter toolbar that merges with the windows content and gnome contacts now lets you share a contact by generating a QR code so people can just scan it and add the contact to their contacts list you know Maps gained back keyboard navigation in the search results and they started work on a vector tile style that uses the gnome color palette so Maps will look better than their default openstreetmap style once that style is finished and finally gnomebox has got a redesigned VM creation window that should be faster to use and easier to understand here again nothing is absolutely revolutionary but it's all quality of life changes and the porting work to gtk4 and libid Vita seems basically complete apart from gnome boxes which still looks like it's gtk3 so it means that developers are now free to focus on features and refinements and improvements for the next releases and of course the settings got a bunch of changes as well first it's not really a setting but the lock screen got a redesigned gun is the dark gray drab background of the user list now you get a nice blurred wallpaper in the background that reflects the wallpaper of the selected user user icons are now much bigger they're more visible and the font size of the clock is also bigger it just looks better all in all less clinical less drabits it's just prettier the network panel in the settings got support for wireguard vpns letting you toggle it on or off letting you create update or delete connections and peers the Wi-Fi panel now lets you share Wi-Fi network passwords in the form of a QR code as well to avoid giving away the password itself or just to avoid having to type Ultra lengthy and complicated sequences of numbers and letters the accessibility panel was also reorganized and split into multiple pages instead of having one long page of settings split into categories they are still categorized by function like seeing hearing typing and the like and they gained a new option to disable the overlay scroll bars so these scroll bars are always visible instead of appearing when you get close to them with your mouse something I'm sure that a lot of users that don't have a disability will also want to turn off The Mouse and the touchpad settings were completely redesigned with a better layout and better explanations of the various options and some nice animations were added to explain the difference between natural scrolling and traditional scrolling or two finger scrolling or Edge scrolling on a touchpad you also finally get the option to disable Mouse pointer acceleration again something a lot of people have been asking for and now you can do it although it is named pointer assistance and they had to implement a small clickable tooltip to explain what it is which makes it feel a little over designed to be honest the about panel in the settings now shows the kernel version and the device firmware revision the sound panel was reorganized and has a new volume level window to let you change the volume of various applications individually something that was already possible but was in line with the main audio settings page the alert Chooser has been redesigned as well moving away from the split combo button and the sound test window has been improved as well so here it's just refinements all around and bringing a more coherent and visually interesting experience but also adding a bunch of stuff that people were asking for and that's the theme of this release it's a refined over gnome 43 it polishes the various ideas that have been implemented in the previous release and it tidies up the look and feel of the core apps by finishing the porting efforts to gtk4 but there's also an interesting Direction which is that gnome seems to be adding back features that people have been asking for for years whether it's an equivalent to the notification tray or at least the first steps towards one it's Mass acceleration its overlay scroll bars its thumbnails in the file picker these things were in limbo for about 10 years and now gnome is finally adding them back so it feels that they finally found their footing and they are now ready to basically answer the user's demands or at least select user demands and I really like this direction I don't want gnome to turn into another KDE or even to have the breadth of options that cinnamon has because that is not its purpose or its Vision but these small quality of life options were necessary and I'm glad that they are now moving back to add these small touches here and there so let's hope it's not a fluke and it actually reflects a will to better serve gnome users by adding carefully considered and carefully designed options and features to the desktop I would really like that and I would really like to tell you about our sponsor if your computer is due for a replacement and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at devices made by Windows manufacturers that might or might not run Linux well you might have a ton of work to do to make them run just buy something from tuxedo from the link in the description below they make laptops and desktops that run Linux out of the box and their range is big enough that they should fit every price point and every need and all their devices are openable repairable upgradable they have plenty of customization options at purchase and you know they will just run Linux really well because the hardware has been picked specifically for that so if you need a new computer and you want to run Linux on it just click the link in the description below and give tuxedo devices a shot they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can always click that dislike button and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoyed the channel there are plenty of links down there to help support it from PayPal patreon YouTube membership super thanks there's something for everyone so if you want to you know where to go in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and as flat pack and flat hop grow to become one of the default ways of installing software on Linux people seem to have many worries about this specific application repository with flat Hub looking to add payments donations and even subscriptions with user accounts does that mean there's a risk they could become an evil corporation that has a monopoly on Linux apps and end up hurting Linux in the long run well let's discuss right after this message from today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and if you have instances running Ubuntu 18.04 you're probably aware that it's going end of life at the end of April 2023 your options are basically to rush a migration or to stay on an end-of-life release with all the security risks this creates or you can subscribe to talk scares extended lifecycle support you just run one script and you'll keep getting security updates for your 18.04 instances including for the kernel Apache PHP openssl python and a lot more without any tooling changes plus 24 7 support in case you run into an issue so if you want to take your time to plan your migration from 18.04 to a newer release of Ubuntu check the link in the description below and get started okay first let's look at the things that make people worry about this happening because for most of you flat Hub is probably just an innocuous way to get software packaged as flat pack so first flat Hub isn't just an app repo it's the flat pack app repo flat pack doesn't force you to use one single repository you can create your own to distribute your own applications and you can add repos also called remotes to your own system a few examples of those are elementaries remote that can owns all the Elementary apps you can find in their App Center or you have a fedora remote that contains a subset of apps from Flat Hub curated by Fedora flat Hub though is the biggest repository for flatback applications to the point that in most people's opinions shipping flat pack by default on a distro without flat Hub enabled makes no sense Elementary OS doesn't ship flat hot mostly because they want to teach people that other repos are available and giving them the biggest one right then and there would make this discovery very unlikely Fedora decided not to use flat Hub because they can't control what's on it and they don't want to display apps that might be illegal copyrighted or patented in their default experience although it seems that they might be changing their opinion on that because in Fedora 38 you will be able to enable flat Hub in just one click but all of this is normal it's a third-party repo for flat back apps that distros don't control it's okay if they don't want to to use it what is starting to worry people is the direction flat Hub is going they want to add payments donations and subscriptions so users can adequately compensate Developers for their work and on paper that's pretty awesome right finally a simple unified way to donate or contribute to the applications you use without having to look online and add your payment details to a ton of different websites it sounds good right well yes and no because it creates a few issues that people are worried about notably the user account thing the power it would give flat Hub over other ways of Distributing software and the whole commercial company approach so let's look at all these problems now to handle payments flat Hub needs to implement user accounts at the very least they need to have accounts for developers so they can publish their applications in their own name and collect the money they make from these sales or donations and they also need these accounts to help developers verify that they really own the apps they claim to because on flat Hub anyone can upload anything I could re-upload Library office right then and there and try to collect money from it even though I don't own the application legally the license might allow me to do that but ethically that would be pretty crappy so this verification process is already done in the beta version of flat Hub developers are already able to confirm that they own the domain of the app and the GitHub or gitlab repo so they can get that verified badge and users in the beta version can already see which apps are official and distributed by the developers and which apps are distributed by third parties or aren't just yet verified with these accounts developers will be able to set a price or just collect donations and even set up subscriptions in the future user accounts are also in the cards to handle user payments and some people seem to think that these user accounts might be an issue because you're basically centralizing user data Linux user data in a single place and I can understand the worry here but these accounts don't have to have personal information if payment is handled by a third-party solution as it's planned with stripe then that account could basically just be a login and a password and that's it and let's not forget that these accounts will probably be optional if you don't want to use them because you don't trust them you probably will never have to use a user account just to download free applications from Flat Hub so it's not that big of an issue in my opinion now the more worrying aspect would be the power flat Hub could gain if flat hub's payment solution works well and developers start actually making decent money from it then it means they will be more motivated to use flat Hub as a platform to distribute their applications this could lead to software being centralized on Linux with developers ignoring other packaging formats and other repos and flat Hub becoming the only App Store on Linux but this does not seem very likely at all first let's not forget that applications on flat Hub are 99 free and open source software even if the developer decides to only use flat hub from now on you still have the source code available distros can still package the applications like they do right now people can still create package builds for the Aur or unofficial app Images none of this is going away because developers would prefer using flat Hub all this other official packaging work is already been done by distros and individuals right now this would not change second flat hobby is open source all the code for that platform is open and they don't seem to plan to change that either which means that anyone who wants to set up a competitor remote that also offers payments and donations could do so reusing the code from Flat Hub even if developers moved on mass to Flat Hub you would still have plenty of other easy to setup remotes for applications distributed via flat pack there is no competitive Advantage when using open source software everyone has access to the same code the only barrier would be infrastructure basically the servers and distributions already have that in Spades to distribute their isos and if a big enough distro wanted to set up a flat Hub competitor I don't think developers would ignore it third let's assume flat Hub does become a fully centralized remote slash App Store that everyone starts using and that no competition remains or is developed how would that be a problem centralization is only an issue if it ends up limiting what users can do and preventing them from moving away from that centralized solution it's only a problem when it makes it impossible for you to do what you would like when there's an abuse of power basically in this case what you'd like to do is installing applications with every single distro in the world moving to Flat Hub as a unified App Store how would users be prevented from doing anything and the answer is they wouldn't because as I said flat Hub mostly distributes free and open source apps the code has to be available for anyone to see modify and redistribute and even if no one else does it you the user still can and if flat Hub started abusing that potential dominant position then there would be zero barriers to creating a competitor or using something else developers could still go back to the existing distribution methods of today distros could go back to maintaining packages users could still compile the code centralization is only a problem when it creates lockdown when you cannot Escape it and it forces you to use it flat Hub becoming the de facto way of installing software would not create that there would be zero barriers to use something else and let's not forget that most people don't get their apps from the flat Hub website they get them from their app stores gnome software Min software manager discover and all the others even the command line for this payment solution to be remotely successful it needs to be accessible using the flat package manager either through the command line or through the graphical app stores if you can't pay directly in Gnome software or discover then this feature teacher just does not matter users won't see it and users won't use it which gives another argument against flat Hub becoming Pure Evil the minute they start doing something weird with the money or the licenses or the applications you can be sure that gnome and KDE and all other desktop environments will ship a hotfix that disables all payment support in their stores in that sense you could even say that the payment solution flat Hub is working on will be decentralized because it won't just depend on flat Hub it will also depend on the distributions and the desktops to decide if they want to implement it and how this is a big stop Gap to prevent anything weird happening now of course flat Hub will have to create some form of legal entity to handle payments money and user or developer data if collecting that is required somehow and if you've been hanging out in the Linux or open source Community for while you probably know that companies and money are now Jokes Aside what's to stop flat half from creating a corporation and then change licenses on their work once developers are hooked and start charging High margins on what users pay and basically get fat off the back of Linux users and open source Developers well first that would mean you basically have zero trust in Gnome or KDE because the governance of flat Hub is being set up by people from gnome and KDE and some people from flath Hub and to the people who think that gnome and red hat controller of this it's some form of grand plan no stop shut up Red Hat has no stake in flat Hub they don't even ship it in their own distribution there are zero people from Red Hat in the flat Hub committee and it will even be spun off The Gnome Foundation to limit the risks second if flat Hub ever turned into some kind of apple or Microsoft clone do you really think they would still get the funding they need to run flat hop can only fund this payment processing work thanks to Grants from various open source focused institutions like the endless Foundation they're actually looking for more of these grants to complete the work if they started acting against the interests of the open source Community these grounds would stop immediately and they would have no money to continue operations because let's be realistic they currently have 700 000 downloads per day if we're generous and we say that one out of a thousand of these downloads would generate one dollar that's seven hundred dollars per day let's imagine they take a big cut of 30 percent like Apple or Google do and that leaves them with 210 dollars per day that's a whopping sixty three hundred dollars per month barely enough to pay a full-time developer and taxes even if they doubled these figures or even if they multiplied them by 10 that's hardly enough money to justify an evil plan to dominate Linux app distribution with these kinds of numbers this feature is going to be a nice to have for developers but it's never going to be something that everyone relies upon that completely change changes the landscape of Linux app distribution so basically flat hop cannot turn evil or greedy the minute they do they lose funding they lose developers and they lose users it's simply impossible for them to decide to go commercial or evil now of course there are still questions about this process how will it be implemented by desktops and graphical app stores well personal information be collected and for what purpose which payment methods will be accepted and in which countries how does this gel with already existing Payment Solutions like on the Elementor IOS app center which form will the legal entity take will there be a commission on payments or is the money going directly to the developer once Payment Processing fees from stripe are paid will this payment system be part of flat pack or exclusive to Flat Hub all these questions and more need to be answered before people can fully trust into that transition to handling money but I think it's very clear that it's basically impossible for an open source project like flat Hub to turn into an evil greedy Corporation overnight or even at all and sure you never know governance of a project might turn sour without warning in the future but at that point there will be zero barriers for people to create a competitor for users to move away from developers to move away there's basically no lockdown so centralization isn't an issue at all and at that point everyone will be able to move back to the already existing packaging and distributing solutions that we already enjoy today and that will still be alive and well once flat Hub added payments just like this segue to today's sponsor is also alive and well if your computer is due for an upgrade stop looking at Windows devices stuff that has been crafted to run Windows look at computers designed to run Linux from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point whether you want a laptop an Ultrabook a gaming device or Tower or a knock they have everything every device is highly configurable at purchase it will run Linux like a dream and you can even open them repair them and upgrade them especially in the laptops where you can change the SSD the RAM and even the battery so if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development head over to the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it the dislike button also sort of works and you can also tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel and you want to support what I do there are plenty of links in the description below for my social network works the other things I do PayPal patreon YouTube membership super things everything is down there you'll figure it out so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see you in the next one bye foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and it's time for the best kind of news the lyrics and open source news it's not necessarily always the best news or the worst news but it's the best kind so this week we have Docker Hub basically kicking out open source organizations and deleting their images from the platform we have Ubuntu and Debian being fed up with python package managers and they are distro destroying powers and we have the Beta release of Fedora 38 with all its gnome 44 goodness but that's not all we also have open Souza apparently gaining popularity like crazy we have the Thunderbird Android client and we have this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenod lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so it looks like there's trouble with Docker Hub every user that created an organization on Docker Hub received an email telling them their organization would be deleted if they didn't upgrade to a paid team plan and that deletion includes all Docker images that they have linked to that organization this is obviously an issue and it predominantly affects open source organizations that use this to distribute Docker images to users or use them internally the main problem is that paid plans are 420 US dollars per year which isn't something all projects can afford and this system was also used by a lot of Open Source projects going as far back as 2016 because while Docker has an open source program that would let open source organizations avoid this transition to a paid plan this program is apparently completely out of touch and only allows personal projects worked on in people's spare time or projects that completely belong to an open source Foundation which basically ignores 99 of how fast Dev is being done these days another issue is that these organization accounts when terminated might also become available to be claimed by someone else which means malicious actors could just jump in Pay create malicious Docker images and distribute them using the name of a popular project that no no longer exists on Docker Hub apparently the CTO of Docker said that they won't let anyone reuse the names of projects that are terminated but it's an informal commitment on Twitter which is not reassuring and of course Docker is a startup company they need to make money but this move basically pulls the rug under the feet of any open source project that makes just even the tiniest amount of money through sponsors donations or sales of services so your options are basically to move to another service to distribute container images or at least to recreate a personal account using the same name as the organization that has been deleted so no malicious actor can squat on that name Fedora 38 beta is now available in a lot of various variants the one that will interest most people is Fedora workstation being the desktop distro but they also have the server beta a version for The Internet of Things a version for cloud and a minimal version called core OS plus all the spins are also available for plasma xfc lxd lxqt matte cinnamon sway I3 and a lot more of course the Highlight here is gnome 44 with background app support refined Quick Settings an improved lock screen and better accessibility settings the other main change in Fedora is that enabling third-party repos will enable flat Hub in its entirety not just the Fedora subset that they added before all packages were updated in the repos and they are now built with frame pointers which should let developers profile their application's performance way more easily on Fedora packages are also now built with stricter compiler flags that should prevent buffer overflow and the package manager now uses a sequoia based open pgp parser instead of its own implementation so it should be easier to maintain and it should be more secure and so of course you can already download it from the link in the description below if you want to test it out I know I will if only to tesconom 44 to write my review of that new version for next week the next Debian and Ubuntu releases will very likely not let you use pip anymore unless it's in a virtual environment and they also won't let you install python outside of what the distro provides the rationale here is that it's too easy to break the existing python installation done using your regular package manager by using pip whether you use it to install Python and its various modules as root or as the user so Debian 12 and Ubuntu 223.04 will very likely adopt a new proposal titled pep 668 which while it sounds like a Star Wars Order meant to kill Jedis is in fact a python enhancement proposal and it will Mark the python base environments as externally managed and it won't allow regular pip install use for users and administrators by default Fedora 38 also has a proposal to do the same although it has not been accepted just yet this change can still be rolled back but it looks like it's gonna go through and it leaves users with a few Alternatives still first using the already installed python on your system and using your package manager like apt to install modules to it second you can use pip X which does the same thing as pip but creates an isolated environment that won't mess up your system installation or you can force the use of regular pip by using the brake system packages option when using it and some people might see that as an intrusion on the freedom of how they use their distro including the freedom to break it but honestly since Debian package management tends to be broken by anything and everything and python is so crucial to how Ubuntu and Debian run these days I think it's a good thing if you like your Debian packages then you should use these to install python modules not an external python package manager and if you argument is that Debian versions are too old in Ubuntu or Debian well then that's kind of the point of the Debian packages and that's why other installation methods have been created it looks like opensooza is growing a lot in terms of popularity it's always been one of the big old distros but it never gets that much coverage and I'm guilty of that as well well it looks like users are still giving it a shot more and more in fact as the numbers of downloads has near doubled since June 2022 at least four open to the leap the more traditional release of the distro as Tumbleweed which is their rolling release model stayed very stable in terms of download numbers the conjecture seems to be that people using Ubuntu are getting tired of the unpopular moves to destroy spooling like preventing flavors from adding flat back out of the box or focusing on Snap packages when people don't really like those but as people want something that is still backed by your company plus some stability and simplicity they turn to open Souza which fits this model perfectly and I can't say if that conjecture is true or not but the download numbers don't lie open Souza is definitely growing in popularity which means that it might be time I finally gave it another shot because the last time I tried it I think novel was still the owner of that distro the KDE team is still hard at work on making sure plasma 6 is the best Wayland experience possible as they fixed a lot of issues that could affect the plasma Whelan session and a lot of these will also make it to KD 5.27 in the next update these fixes include improving the robustness of screen Arrangements in multi-monitor setups that might have the same edid values there's improved scaling for gtk apps on Plasma on Weyland they fixed a crash of plasma when the window title was super long and screen record and task manager thumbnails are now fixed for NVIDIA users on Wayland as well on top of that they improve the welcome screen for the arc archive manager to let you reopen recent files create a new archive or open one in just one click ocular's toolbar has been revamped a bit and shows The View mode button by default and the info center app now has a better sidebar with flattened categories instead of having to dig through subcategories and going in and out of those and most of these changes will make it 2kd plasma 5.27 through a point release or through KDE gear when it comes to the application update which is pretty cool you don't have to wait for plasma 6 to enjoy all of that as per gnome they now have added editable shortcuts to gnome Builder so if you develop gnome apps you can now personalize your workflow which is pretty nice and the modified shortcuts will also appear in the menus they also released a new version of libid Vita the library that lets developers build apps that look and feel like gnome apps there's a new component called advita Banner which serves the same purpose as the gtk info bars these little blue banners that can appear underneath the header bars there's also a new tab overview widget that lets you switch tabs on mobile by showing them visually in a grid that adapts to the screen size of course this can also be used in desktop apps and console already uses it and Epiphany will soon as well to accompany this they also have a tab button that has a counter to show the number of open tabs all libid Vita widgets now have improved accessibility and they are smaller fixes to various widgets on top of that tube converter the app that lets you download videos and audio files from popular websites is now completely Rewritten in c-sharp and you can now use it to download playlists dinaro the personal finance manager now lets you change the currency for certain accounts it lets you add a password to protect the PDFs it can export and it can import qif and ofx files and I love seeing these updates to libid Vita because they really make it feel like a super polished way of making applications you might not like the fact that it kind of killed theming for a lot of applications on Chrome but you can't deny that it boosted the application ecosystem in a way we had never seen before we even have more complex applications like gnome Builder or dinaro when gnome usually was just simple one-purpose apps Thunderbird shared more progress on their Android application if you remember they're actually working with the K9 male developer to turn that app into Thunderbird for Android and they now have a new full-time developer to help with that work they started with a redesign of the message view with a new header and a new details pane that will give you more info on the email you're currently viewing this should ship in the next table release of canine mail the message list also receives some changes with better text alignment and white space and click areas that are now larger to Star messages and for the contact images so it should be way easier to just select a message without opening it you also get a way to change the density of The View with a Compact default or relaxed mode which is nice because the compact one is way too crowded in my opinion these changes are already available in the beta version of canine mail and will make it into the stable version after they collect some user feedback and it looks like the development process is super open as well where they only commit to these UI changes when enough users have given them a shot and tried them out which is pretty cool I really like what Thunderbird is doing right now and let's finish this with the gaming news if you were waiting for the steam deck to go down in price before you went for one well now's the time with the latest Steam Sale the deck sees a 10 price cut probably temporarily this discount applies in all regions where the device is sold and this means the entry level device is now 377 euros and that's the one I would recommend you get plus a nice big SD card for storage since the loading speed and the performance difference between the emmc storage the SSD or the SD card are super negligible I'd recommend you just go for the cheaper option and add an SD card in it I think it makes more sense financially and existing steam deck owners also got a new update version 3.4.6 which is a pretty small one but fixes issues with Forza Horizon 5 war long Fallen Dynasty and it also makes Ray tracing available in do maternal and it fixes graphical corruption in Resident Evil 4 remake basically it's just a graphics driver update to Mesa 23.1 but it's still nice and there's also the Lan transfer of your games from one computer running steam to another which means you don't have to re-download all your games on all your computers using your data caps or just taking way longer than just copy it through the local network I can't wait to test that out to actually play some games on devices I have to review and I also can't wait to tell you about our sponsor if your computer is due for a full replacement and you plan to run Linux on it maybe it's time to stop looking at computers made by Windows manufacturers and actually start looking at computers that are made by Linux manufacturers like today's sponsor tuxedo they have a big range of devices that run Linux out of the box the hardware has been specifically picked to run well with Linux and they should suit every price point and every need whether you need a small affordable laptop a Nook a tower a work station a gaming laptop they have everything all the devices are very customizable and configurable with plenty of options and you can even have your own keyboard layout your own logo on your device and all the laptops are openable repairable and upgradable including the SSD the ram the battery and even sometimes the wireless card so if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development well click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well that dislike button is still there and you can also tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel there are plenty of links in the description to help you support it from PayPal patreon YouTube memberships super thanks whatever my social networks you get to pick so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see you in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and it's time for the best kind of news the lyrics and open source news it's not necessarily always the best news or the worst news but it's the best kind so this week we have Docker Hub basically kicking out open source organizations and deleting their images from the platform we have Ubuntu and Debian being fed up with python package managers and they are distro destroying powers and we have the Beta release of Fedora 38 with all its gnome 44 goodness but that's not all we also have open Souza apparently gaining popularity like crazy we have the Thunderbird Android client and we have this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenod lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so it looks like there's trouble with Docker Hub every user that created an organization on Docker Hub received an email telling them their organization would be deleted if they didn't upgrade to a paid team plan and that deletion includes all Docker images that they have linked to that organization this is obviously an issue and it predominantly affects open source organizations that use this to distribute Docker images to users or use them internally the main problem is that paid plans are 420 US dollars per year which isn't something all projects can afford and this system was also used by a lot of Open Source projects going as far back as 2016 because while Docker has an open source program that would let open source organizations avoid this transition to a paid plan this program is apparently completely out of touch and only allows personal projects worked on in people's spare time or projects that completely belong to an open source Foundation which basically ignores 99 of how fast Dev is being done these days another issue is that these organization accounts when terminated might also become available to be claimed by someone else which means malicious actors could just jump in Pay create malicious Docker images and distribute them using the name of a popular project that no no longer exists on Docker Hub apparently the CTO of Docker said that they won't let anyone reuse the names of projects that are terminated but it's an informal commitment on Twitter which is not reassuring and of course Docker is a startup company they need to make money but this move basically pulls the rug under the feet of any open source project that makes just even the tiniest amount of money through sponsors donations or sales of services so your options are basically to move to another service to distribute container images or at least to recreate a personal account using the same name as the organization that has been deleted so no malicious actor can squat on that name Fedora 38 beta is now available in a lot of various variants the one that will interest most people is Fedora workstation being the desktop distro but they also have the server beta a version for The Internet of Things a version for cloud and a minimal version called core OS plus all the spins are also available for plasma xfc lxd lxqt matte cinnamon sway I3 and a lot more of course the Highlight here is gnome 44 with background app support refined Quick Settings an improved lock screen and better accessibility settings the other main change in Fedora is that enabling third-party repos will enable flat Hub in its entirety not just the Fedora subset that they added before all packages were updated in the repos and they are now built with frame pointers which should let developers profile their application's performance way more easily on Fedora packages are also now built with stricter compiler flags that should prevent buffer overflow and the package manager now uses a sequoia based open pgp parser instead of its own implementation so it should be easier to maintain and it should be more secure and so of course you can already download it from the link in the description below if you want to test it out I know I will if only to tesconom 44 to write my review of that new version for next week the next Debian and Ubuntu releases will very likely not let you use pip anymore unless it's in a virtual environment and they also won't let you install python outside of what the distro provides the rationale here is that it's too easy to break the existing python installation done using your regular package manager by using pip whether you use it to install Python and its various modules as root or as the user so Debian 12 and Ubuntu 223.04 will very likely adopt a new proposal titled pep 668 which while it sounds like a Star Wars Order meant to kill Jedis is in fact a python enhancement proposal and it will Mark the python base environments as externally managed and it won't allow regular pip install use for users and administrators by default Fedora 38 also has a proposal to do the same although it has not been accepted just yet this change can still be rolled back but it looks like it's gonna go through and it leaves users with a few Alternatives still first using the already installed python on your system and using your package manager like apt to install modules to it second you can use pip X which does the same thing as pip but creates an isolated environment that won't mess up your system installation or you can force the use of regular pip by using the brake system packages option when using it and some people might see that as an intrusion on the freedom of how they use their distro including the freedom to break it but honestly since Debian package management tends to be broken by anything and everything and python is so crucial to how Ubuntu and Debian run these days I think it's a good thing if you like your Debian packages then you should use these to install python modules not an external python package manager and if you argument is that Debian versions are too old in Ubuntu or Debian well then that's kind of the point of the Debian packages and that's why other installation methods have been created it looks like opensooza is growing a lot in terms of popularity it's always been one of the big old distros but it never gets that much coverage and I'm guilty of that as well well it looks like users are still giving it a shot more and more in fact as the numbers of downloads has near doubled since June 2022 at least four open to the leap the more traditional release of the distro as Tumbleweed which is their rolling release model stayed very stable in terms of download numbers the conjecture seems to be that people using Ubuntu are getting tired of the unpopular moves to destroy spooling like preventing flavors from adding flat back out of the box or focusing on Snap packages when people don't really like those but as people want something that is still backed by your company plus some stability and simplicity they turn to open Souza which fits this model perfectly and I can't say if that conjecture is true or not but the download numbers don't lie open Souza is definitely growing in popularity which means that it might be time I finally gave it another shot because the last time I tried it I think novel was still the owner of that distro the KDE team is still hard at work on making sure plasma 6 is the best Wayland experience possible as they fixed a lot of issues that could affect the plasma Whelan session and a lot of these will also make it to KD 5.27 in the next update these fixes include improving the robustness of screen Arrangements in multi-monitor setups that might have the same edid values there's improved scaling for gtk apps on Plasma on Weyland they fixed a crash of plasma when the window title was super long and screen record and task manager thumbnails are now fixed for NVIDIA users on Wayland as well on top of that they improve the welcome screen for the arc archive manager to let you reopen recent files create a new archive or open one in just one click ocular's toolbar has been revamped a bit and shows The View mode button by default and the info center app now has a better sidebar with flattened categories instead of having to dig through subcategories and going in and out of those and most of these changes will make it 2kd plasma 5.27 through a point release or through KDE gear when it comes to the application update which is pretty cool you don't have to wait for plasma 6 to enjoy all of that as per gnome they now have added editable shortcuts to gnome Builder so if you develop gnome apps you can now personalize your workflow which is pretty nice and the modified shortcuts will also appear in the menus they also released a new version of libid Vita the library that lets developers build apps that look and feel like gnome apps there's a new component called advita Banner which serves the same purpose as the gtk info bars these little blue banners that can appear underneath the header bars there's also a new tab overview widget that lets you switch tabs on mobile by showing them visually in a grid that adapts to the screen size of course this can also be used in desktop apps and console already uses it and Epiphany will soon as well to accompany this they also have a tab button that has a counter to show the number of open tabs all libid Vita widgets now have improved accessibility and they are smaller fixes to various widgets on top of that tube converter the app that lets you download videos and audio files from popular websites is now completely Rewritten in c-sharp and you can now use it to download playlists dinaro the personal finance manager now lets you change the currency for certain accounts it lets you add a password to protect the PDFs it can export and it can import qif and ofx files and I love seeing these updates to libid Vita because they really make it feel like a super polished way of making applications you might not like the fact that it kind of killed theming for a lot of applications on Chrome but you can't deny that it boosted the application ecosystem in a way we had never seen before we even have more complex applications like gnome Builder or dinaro when gnome usually was just simple one-purpose apps Thunderbird shared more progress on their Android application if you remember they're actually working with the K9 male developer to turn that app into Thunderbird for Android and they now have a new full-time developer to help with that work they started with a redesign of the message view with a new header and a new details pane that will give you more info on the email you're currently viewing this should ship in the next table release of canine mail the message list also receives some changes with better text alignment and white space and click areas that are now larger to Star messages and for the contact images so it should be way easier to just select a message without opening it you also get a way to change the density of The View with a Compact default or relaxed mode which is nice because the compact one is way too crowded in my opinion these changes are already available in the beta version of canine mail and will make it into the stable version after they collect some user feedback and it looks like the development process is super open as well where they only commit to these UI changes when enough users have given them a shot and tried them out which is pretty cool I really like what Thunderbird is doing right now and let's finish this with the gaming news if you were waiting for the steam deck to go down in price before you went for one well now's the time with the latest Steam Sale the deck sees a 10 price cut probably temporarily this discount applies in all regions where the device is sold and this means the entry level device is now 377 euros and that's the one I would recommend you get plus a nice big SD card for storage since the loading speed and the performance difference between the emmc storage the SSD or the SD card are super negligible I'd recommend you just go for the cheaper option and add an SD card in it I think it makes more sense financially and existing steam deck owners also got a new update version 3.4.6 which is a pretty small one but fixes issues with Forza Horizon 5 war long Fallen Dynasty and it also makes Ray tracing available in do maternal and it fixes graphical corruption in Resident Evil 4 remake basically it's just a graphics driver update to Mesa 23.1 but it's still nice and there's also the Lan transfer of your games from one computer running steam to another which means you don't have to re-download all your games on all your computers using your data caps or just taking way longer than just copy it through the local network I can't wait to test that out to actually play some games on devices I have to review and I also can't wait to tell you about our sponsor if your computer is due for a full replacement and you plan to run Linux on it maybe it's time to stop looking at computers made by Windows manufacturers and actually start looking at computers that are made by Linux manufacturers like today's sponsor tuxedo they have a big range of devices that run Linux out of the box the hardware has been specifically picked to run well with Linux and they should suit every price point and every need whether you need a small affordable laptop a Nook a tower a work station a gaming laptop they have everything all the devices are very customizable and configurable with plenty of options and you can even have your own keyboard layout your own logo on your device and all the laptops are openable repairable and upgradable including the SSD the ram the battery and even sometimes the wireless card so if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development well click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well that dislike button is still there and you can also tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel there are plenty of links in the description to help you support it from PayPal patreon YouTube memberships super thanks whatever my social networks you get to pick so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see you in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and as flat pack and flat hop grow to become one of the default ways of installing software on Linux people seem to have many worries about this specific application repository with flat Hub looking to add payments donations and even subscriptions with user accounts does that mean there's a risk they could become an evil corporation that has a monopoly on Linux apps and end up hurting Linux in the long run well let's discuss right after this message from today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and if you have instances running Ubuntu 18.04 you're probably aware that it's going end of life at the end of April 2023 your options are basically to rush a migration or to stay on an end-of-life release with all the security risks this creates or you can subscribe to talk scares extended lifecycle support you just run one script and you'll keep getting security updates for your 18.04 instances including for the kernel Apache PHP openssl python and a lot more without any tooling changes plus 24 7 support in case you run into an issue so if you want to take your time to plan your migration from 18.04 to a newer release of Ubuntu check the link in the description below and get started okay first let's look at the things that make people worry about this happening because for most of you flat Hub is probably just an innocuous way to get software packaged as flat pack so first flat Hub isn't just an app repo it's the flat pack app repo flat pack doesn't force you to use one single repository you can create your own to distribute your own applications and you can add repos also called remotes to your own system a few examples of those are elementaries remote that can owns all the Elementary apps you can find in their App Center or you have a fedora remote that contains a subset of apps from Flat Hub curated by Fedora flat Hub though is the biggest repository for flatback applications to the point that in most people's opinions shipping flat pack by default on a distro without flat Hub enabled makes no sense Elementary OS doesn't ship flat hot mostly because they want to teach people that other repos are available and giving them the biggest one right then and there would make this discovery very unlikely Fedora decided not to use flat Hub because they can't control what's on it and they don't want to display apps that might be illegal copyrighted or patented in their default experience although it seems that they might be changing their opinion on that because in Fedora 38 you will be able to enable flat Hub in just one click but all of this is normal it's a third-party repo for flat back apps that distros don't control it's okay if they don't want to to use it what is starting to worry people is the direction flat Hub is going they want to add payments donations and subscriptions so users can adequately compensate Developers for their work and on paper that's pretty awesome right finally a simple unified way to donate or contribute to the applications you use without having to look online and add your payment details to a ton of different websites it sounds good right well yes and no because it creates a few issues that people are worried about notably the user account thing the power it would give flat Hub over other ways of Distributing software and the whole commercial company approach so let's look at all these problems now to handle payments flat Hub needs to implement user accounts at the very least they need to have accounts for developers so they can publish their applications in their own name and collect the money they make from these sales or donations and they also need these accounts to help developers verify that they really own the apps they claim to because on flat Hub anyone can upload anything I could re-upload Library office right then and there and try to collect money from it even though I don't own the application legally the license might allow me to do that but ethically that would be pretty crappy so this verification process is already done in the beta version of flat Hub developers are already able to confirm that they own the domain of the app and the GitHub or gitlab repo so they can get that verified badge and users in the beta version can already see which apps are official and distributed by the developers and which apps are distributed by third parties or aren't just yet verified with these accounts developers will be able to set a price or just collect donations and even set up subscriptions in the future user accounts are also in the cards to handle user payments and some people seem to think that these user accounts might be an issue because you're basically centralizing user data Linux user data in a single place and I can understand the worry here but these accounts don't have to have personal information if payment is handled by a third-party solution as it's planned with stripe then that account could basically just be a login and a password and that's it and let's not forget that these accounts will probably be optional if you don't want to use them because you don't trust them you probably will never have to use a user account just to download free applications from Flat Hub so it's not that big of an issue in my opinion now the more worrying aspect would be the power flat Hub could gain if flat hub's payment solution works well and developers start actually making decent money from it then it means they will be more motivated to use flat Hub as a platform to distribute their applications this could lead to software being centralized on Linux with developers ignoring other packaging formats and other repos and flat Hub becoming the only App Store on Linux but this does not seem very likely at all first let's not forget that applications on flat Hub are 99 free and open source software even if the developer decides to only use flat hub from now on you still have the source code available distros can still package the applications like they do right now people can still create package builds for the Aur or unofficial app Images none of this is going away because developers would prefer using flat Hub all this other official packaging work is already been done by distros and individuals right now this would not change second flat hobby is open source all the code for that platform is open and they don't seem to plan to change that either which means that anyone who wants to set up a competitor remote that also offers payments and donations could do so reusing the code from Flat Hub even if developers moved on mass to Flat Hub you would still have plenty of other easy to setup remotes for applications distributed via flat pack there is no competitive Advantage when using open source software everyone has access to the same code the only barrier would be infrastructure basically the servers and distributions already have that in Spades to distribute their isos and if a big enough distro wanted to set up a flat Hub competitor I don't think developers would ignore it third let's assume flat Hub does become a fully centralized remote slash App Store that everyone starts using and that no competition remains or is developed how would that be a problem centralization is only an issue if it ends up limiting what users can do and preventing them from moving away from that centralized solution it's only a problem when it makes it impossible for you to do what you would like when there's an abuse of power basically in this case what you'd like to do is installing applications with every single distro in the world moving to Flat Hub as a unified App Store how would users be prevented from doing anything and the answer is they wouldn't because as I said flat Hub mostly distributes free and open source apps the code has to be available for anyone to see modify and redistribute and even if no one else does it you the user still can and if flat Hub started abusing that potential dominant position then there would be zero barriers to creating a competitor or using something else developers could still go back to the existing distribution methods of today distros could go back to maintaining packages users could still compile the code centralization is only a problem when it creates lockdown when you cannot Escape it and it forces you to use it flat Hub becoming the de facto way of installing software would not create that there would be zero barriers to use something else and let's not forget that most people don't get their apps from the flat Hub website they get them from their app stores gnome software Min software manager discover and all the others even the command line for this payment solution to be remotely successful it needs to be accessible using the flat package manager either through the command line or through the graphical app stores if you can't pay directly in Gnome software or discover then this feature teacher just does not matter users won't see it and users won't use it which gives another argument against flat Hub becoming Pure Evil the minute they start doing something weird with the money or the licenses or the applications you can be sure that gnome and KDE and all other desktop environments will ship a hotfix that disables all payment support in their stores in that sense you could even say that the payment solution flat Hub is working on will be decentralized because it won't just depend on flat Hub it will also depend on the distributions and the desktops to decide if they want to implement it and how this is a big stop Gap to prevent anything weird happening now of course flat Hub will have to create some form of legal entity to handle payments money and user or developer data if collecting that is required somehow and if you've been hanging out in the Linux or open source Community for while you probably know that companies and money are now Jokes Aside what's to stop flat half from creating a corporation and then change licenses on their work once developers are hooked and start charging High margins on what users pay and basically get fat off the back of Linux users and open source Developers well first that would mean you basically have zero trust in Gnome or KDE because the governance of flat Hub is being set up by people from gnome and KDE and some people from flath Hub and to the people who think that gnome and red hat controller of this it's some form of grand plan no stop shut up Red Hat has no stake in flat Hub they don't even ship it in their own distribution there are zero people from Red Hat in the flat Hub committee and it will even be spun off The Gnome Foundation to limit the risks second if flat Hub ever turned into some kind of apple or Microsoft clone do you really think they would still get the funding they need to run flat hop can only fund this payment processing work thanks to Grants from various open source focused institutions like the endless Foundation they're actually looking for more of these grants to complete the work if they started acting against the interests of the open source Community these grounds would stop immediately and they would have no money to continue operations because let's be realistic they currently have 700 000 downloads per day if we're generous and we say that one out of a thousand of these downloads would generate one dollar that's seven hundred dollars per day let's imagine they take a big cut of 30 percent like Apple or Google do and that leaves them with 210 dollars per day that's a whopping sixty three hundred dollars per month barely enough to pay a full-time developer and taxes even if they doubled these figures or even if they multiplied them by 10 that's hardly enough money to justify an evil plan to dominate Linux app distribution with these kinds of numbers this feature is going to be a nice to have for developers but it's never going to be something that everyone relies upon that completely change changes the landscape of Linux app distribution so basically flat hop cannot turn evil or greedy the minute they do they lose funding they lose developers and they lose users it's simply impossible for them to decide to go commercial or evil now of course there are still questions about this process how will it be implemented by desktops and graphical app stores well personal information be collected and for what purpose which payment methods will be accepted and in which countries how does this gel with already existing Payment Solutions like on the Elementor IOS app center which form will the legal entity take will there be a commission on payments or is the money going directly to the developer once Payment Processing fees from stripe are paid will this payment system be part of flat pack or exclusive to Flat Hub all these questions and more need to be answered before people can fully trust into that transition to handling money but I think it's very clear that it's basically impossible for an open source project like flat Hub to turn into an evil greedy Corporation overnight or even at all and sure you never know governance of a project might turn sour without warning in the future but at that point there will be zero barriers for people to create a competitor for users to move away from developers to move away there's basically no lockdown so centralization isn't an issue at all and at that point everyone will be able to move back to the already existing packaging and distributing solutions that we already enjoy today and that will still be alive and well once flat Hub added payments just like this segue to today's sponsor is also alive and well if your computer is due for an upgrade stop looking at Windows devices stuff that has been crafted to run Windows look at computers designed to run Linux from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point whether you want a laptop an Ultrabook a gaming device or Tower or a knock they have everything every device is highly configurable at purchase it will run Linux like a dream and you can even open them repair them and upgrade them especially in the laptops where you can change the SSD the RAM and even the battery so if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development head over to the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it the dislike button also sort of works and you can also tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel and you want to support what I do there are plenty of links in the description below for my social network works the other things I do PayPal patreon YouTube membership super things everything is down there you'll figure it out so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see you in the next one bye foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and as you might be able to hear my voice is a bit shot because I've been sick with something that mighto might not be coveted for the past week so bear with me for this one thing should be much better in the next video in any case this week we have meta announcing a competitor to Twitter but that would integrate with the activity Pub standard and so would work with the fedivers we have a road map for flat Hub in 2023 and we have duck duck goes succumbing to the Sirens of AI search just like I succumbed to the Sirens of this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and you probably all know about it but if you don't Squarespace is going to be your all-in-one solution to build your website and everything around it even if you don't have any technical knowledge you can just pick from any of Squarespace templates and you can customize every single one of them with the various elements that will be displayed the colors and the general look and feel and if you want to go beyond a simple website or a simple blog they have tons of modules that you can attach like for example a complete store complete with online payment or a members only area or a video gallery and if you don't have a logo yet or you don't know how to grab your domain name then Squarespace can help you with that as well they will let you book that domain name in a few clicks and have a logo creation tool to help you get started so if you want to develop your online presence head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description below and you'll get 10 of your first purchase for no real understandable reason meta is seeing Twitter as a competitor first they introduce their own version of Twitter blue called meta verified letting people pay 12 bucks a month for the privilege of a blue check mark and support while retaining all the ads and the data mining but now they actually want to apply their usual strategy which is just copying the competitor and see if they can kill it so they're working on a dedicated application for people to post text based updates just like Twitter what's more interesting is that it would be decentralized the app is code name p92 which probably will not be the final name and it would let users log in using their Instagram account and the project is actually led by the person who runs Instagram while we don't know much about what they are planning p92 would apparently be compatible with the activity Pub standard which means it would be interoperable with Mastodon and other fediverse applications as they put it the minimum viable product would let users broadcast posts to people on other servers features would include embedded links in posts verification badges images and video sharing and following people and liking posts so yeah it's basically Twitter or Mastodon but by meta and of course it will share data across other meta platforms so expect the usual amount of profiling and data mining on this one as well and this is interesting because if it's not the usual failure of meta trying to copy something then giving up after a year then it might mean a start to a desiloing of these social networks by giantech companies now I would never use that application for all the money in the world because stay off my data suck but for people who are afraid of Mastodon or don't understand it correctly it might prove to be a first step in the fedivers might be interesting DuckDuckGo doesn't want to be left behind in the current AI arms race and they announced this week an AI powered summarization feature called duck assist in the same vein as Google's Bard AI or what Microsoft introduced in bing with chat GPT DuckDuckGo uses chat GPT Technologies as well as well as some from anthropic a startup founded by X open AI employees they combine this technology with their own indexing of Wikipedia and the Britannia encyclopedia to provide quick summaries in the search results apparently Wikipedia is 99 of the sources they will use though so yeah mostly Wikipedia summaries this new feature is in beta and it's only available in their applications and browser extensions not from the web search engine but it will be rolled out to everyone in the coming weeks you don't need to log in to access it although you will need to speak English as it's the only language it supports currently the goal with this is to help users get a direct answer from the search engine to reduce the time spending scrolling on the website to get to the small nugget of information you're looking for and these summaries will only appear when DuckDuckGo thinks it's actually useful in regards to the user's query it will still let people know that the answer is automated but it's been designed to only appear when the answer has a very high probability of being correct which is more than what we can say about being solution for example the company still recognizes that the answers will not be right a hundred percent of the time which is a big problem with these kind of tools because if you're looking for a small summary in your search engine you're probably never going to look past that answer and if it's not 100 correct then you're taking home a fake answer and we know how most people use the internet they read the headline and they take that as fact they will read the summary and take that as fact as well I talked about flat hubs quest for adding payments last week and this week they have an updated blog post outlining their roadmap for 2023. it's still written by Robert McQueen the CEO of endless OS and the president of the gnome board they focus on how they want to evolve flat hub from a build service to an app store on what the economic barriers to making the app ecosystem grow are and on the various challenges that they're facing flat Hub currently has 2 000 apps with 700 000 downloads a day which represents 88 terabytes of data per day which is huge they say that flat pack has solved the difficulty of app developers to actually distribute and let people discover their work something that was basically impossible for them to do in the traditional distros choose the packages they include approach in terms of what they've been working on they concluded the first series of features in flat hub's web app to let users and developers create accounts if they want to to let users pay currently only using stripe and to let developers verify that they own a specific application so they can set a price for their work they also worked on setting up a legal entity as this is apparently needed to ensure that they can handle payments and donations they haven't landed on the right structure yet though so we'll have to wait to see which form the company takes and to complement this and probably to reassure people they're working on a governance model that will ensure transparency and they set up a group of people from gnome from Katy and from Flat Hub to work on setting up a board that will make the decisions in the open they also managed to get a hundred thousand US dollars in funding in 2023 and they're hoping to reach 250 000 at the end of the year to ensure that they can develop everything that's needed and they can recruit more full-time employees flat Hub will also be launching their redesign soon as well as a series of focus groups to let the community Express their concerns or their enthusiasm and judging from last week's comments on the news video when I talked about flat habiting payment a lot of you are concerned that flat Hub going commercial might turn into a big Monopoly and might stifle development of applications and might make other packaging formats completely non-variable and this is absolutely not what I think will happen and I will have a video about this in a few days on the channel so stay tuned for that with the release of Elementary OS 7 that left me a bit underwhelmed their semi-roading release model is still kicking in with regular updates to the desktop and its applications first the file manager got a new app menu in the header bar letting people discover more features that were hidden in a context menu this menu will let you zoom in and out or change the icon size enable double click or single click to navigate change the Sorting options show the hidden files and more you could already do all of these of course but now it should be easier to discover the network indicator got a big redesign showing all available Network options as circular buttons instead of toggles it will also show the various vpns you configured earlier so you can toggle them on or off more easily airplane mode is also now just a click away and will be toggled with a middle click on the network indicator they also fixed a bunch of issues in window management to get smoother animations and better performance they fixed issues with the window shadows and they fixed a problem that meant you could close your windows accidentally when using three finger gestures and finally they also added the flat pack repair feature to the App Center which fixes issues where it would tell you that certain runtimes couldn't be installed you will also get a message when everything is up to date in the updates tab complete with the time their last check for update this doesn't solve any of the deeper problems I personally have with Elementary iOS but it's still super cool to see them going at it improving things even without having a big release they are just going to ship those kind of updates every month until Elementary OS 7 is end of life which is great now on The Gnome side we have gnome Builder now letting you choose a preferred flat pack installation to use when installing new sdks we have the elastic app that lets you customize your animations inside of gtk4 applications this app is joining gnome Circle we have a new simple libadviter application called sticky notes that lets you just jot down notes with formatting and colors we have more updates to live cap option which is the app that provides real-time automatic subtitles in English and we have a big update to tube converter which sees a better written in C sharp the app should download stuff way faster now it should crash less often and there's a Windows version now as well the UI also saw a few changes to be more legible fosh the mobile shell saw a new release as well with a new plugin to configure the emergency preferences on the lock screen and the settings menu was updated visually to look more in line with current gnome dinaro the personal finance manager got a new icon which looks much better a few ux improvements and updated translations oh and there's more with Loop the new image viewer now having its brand new image decoder that opens support for color profiles animated images and viewing svgs telegram the telegram client now has support for gifts and for viewing message replies plus you can edit and reply to specific messages you can compose messages using markdown you have a contacts window to view your saved contacts and performance has been greatly improved and finally Pano The Gnome shell extension that gives you a visual clipboard manager has received gnome 44 support you can now Mark items in the clipboard as favorites it supports emojis you can customize how it looks you can filter history by item type and more plenty of good stuff this week and the ones I really want to check out personally are dinaro and Pano because they look like they would fit into my workflow really well and they would make me make a budget again which I stopped making and it's bad now on the KDE plasma fronts they now have ported the master branch of plasma to q6 so the work for plasma 6 is progressing nicely as it can already be run today if you feel adventurous it also looks like they've implemented more resilience for KDE applications on Weyland when the compositor crashes it will no longer take all applications down with it anymore which is pretty good in terms of new features they're adding an option to change the visual intensity of the outline that appears around Breeze windows or they will even let you disable this outline they are considering backboarding this to plasma 5.27 as well KD devs also removed the open with dialog meant for portal using apps when it was used by non portal using apps since that new dialog doesn't have all the features of the old one just yet they fixed the breeze gtk theme so linked buttons should look better in gtk applications notifications will be sorted chronologically in the history pop-up and they improved how window sizes and positions are remembered for multi-screen setups important bug fixes include correctly supporting Nvidia suspend and resume with external displays not being disabled anymore or icons and texts no longer missing after resuming from suspend plus there's a bunch of fixes for kwin and the Weyland session for now it looks like plasma 6 is more of an evolution on top of plasma 5 with the biggest change being the move to q6 with the performance improvements that it brings but I still can't wait to see what they will bring in the final version now I reported last week on the fact that the HP Dev 1 will be discontinued something that was announced in a laconic statement from HP just saying that they have sold out and nothing more this led to inevitable speculation from everyone myself included people assumed that the initial run was very small that it took about a year to sell and that it was a failure well it looks like that's not the case at all as a few people close to the project told me they could not tell me anything about the future of Linux devices at HP but they said that the dev1 sold well and according to expectations the plan was to produce a run of limited size and that run sold out so basically it's a Communications problem HP was super vague which led to people speculating widely as they are bound to do they could have just said something along these lines we're very happy about the interest around the HP dev1 we sold the first initial run we don't plan to make any more of this specific device but we will look at what we learned producing the HP dev1 to see if we can better serve the Linux community in the future you're done you conveyed success instead of failure you left the door open if you ever want to make a successor device whatever they want to do and if you don't want to make one you never said you were going to make one so you're not engaged either HP you should hire someone to communicate especially with the open source and Linux Community you need to be super clear and transparent it's a community based on the exchange of ideas and information and we will definitely read between the lines so write a clear communique instead of just saying sold out okay let's finish this with the gaming news first wine got a new release version 8.3 this one brings support for the low fragmentation Heap support for smart cards and they also now bundle the zydes library by default these all being features that I must admit I have zero understanding of wine 8.3 also fixes 29 bugs including for Path of Exile sacred escape from tarkov or Saints Row the Third and valve confirmed this week that they're not planning to release a next-gen steam deck for a few years as they put it a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in Horsepower won't be for a few years and here again communication is important because this wording doesn't mean there won't be more marginal Hardware revisions or small bumps in Horsepower or just changes in other areas of the device they're apparently very very happy with the first year of the steam deck and it seems that 42 percent of the people who bought one are spending the majority of their steam gaming time on it preferring it to their other devices personally I think the steam deck is good enough right now I don't really think it's necessary to have a steam deck 2 in a year or in two years that thing was never meant to run every single new AAA title that comes out it can already run 8 000 games that should be enough for most people what I'd like to see is a new semi next gen let's let's say your steam deck Plus or steam deck Pro device that will have an OLED screen and a better battery life or on the opposite end a steam deck mini way more portable and easier to carry around with you and speaking of portable and easy to carry around how about we look at today's sponsor's devices if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at devices from manufacturers that ship windows out of the box click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box and all the hardware has been picked specifically to run Linux they have a big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point and each device has plenty of configuration options that you can set before your purchase from Ram SSD CPU GPU even your logo on the lid the keyboard layout you can pick everything and all of their laptops are openable repairable and upgradable with at least the SSD the RAM and the battery so if you're in the market for a new computer check the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good now thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always click that dislike button and also tell me why in the comments it's more polite this way and if you really enjoyed the channel and what I do well there are plenty of flings down below for my social accounts for my PayPal for my patreon for my YouTube memberships for super thanks you'll find a way to help the channel grow so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you're confused by all the packaging formats available on Linux you've come to the right place with flat packs snaps app Images regular packages the Aur the source code Linux has more ways to install a program than any other operating system in the world and while it gives you complete Freedom it also means you can be completely lost so let's explain these packaging formats what they do what Their advantages are and what their drawbacks are and let's also unpack this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to track so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster so let's start with the good old packages the dabs and the RPMs the main ones are Debian packages used by Debian Ubuntu and all Ubuntu derivatives and RPMs which originated in red hat but are now also used by Fedora Santos open Souza and others these packages aren't like exes or msis on windows they're meant to be installed from a package manager they're contained in repositories that your distribution has set up or that you can add yourself when you use your package manager or your app store it displays one element an application or library but what it will install is packages either just one or multiple ones that the application needs to run it is in short much more practical than the traditional Windows wizard with its 10 next buttons you have to click and the crap web that is pre-checked that you have to dodge before you install your program in terms of advantages these packages are all separate which means that each package contains either one application or one Library you only install what is needed nothing more this also means they tend to use less space as time goes on since the libraries are shared between applications you don't have to install yet another copy of the same Library when you install a new app second they are maintained and tested by your distribution which means they should all work well without any issues and they probably don't contain malware packages from third-party repos or that you install manually might not be as safe though third they are all based on a dependency system applications declare which other packages they need to run if these packages are already installed they will use them and if they are not they will be installed automatically but there are a bunch of disadvantages to using these packages the first one is security you install each package as a super user which means you grant the package all the rights to do whatever it wants to your system as it's being installed if it comes from an unknown source you might be installing malware without knowing it and giving it full access to your system second they can create dependency help since all libraries are shared on your system it means that all packages need to use the same version of a library there's only one on your system that every app uses so if you install an older package that depends on an older version or a newer package that depends on a newer version you might completely break your system by replacing the current Library by a version your other applications can't understand and can't use and third for developers these packages simply suck these packages need to be made for each architecture like x86 and arm and for 32-bit and 64-bit and for all the currently supported versions of a distribution and for all distributions which means you can end up having to create tens of packages for one application and that is why most packages that distributions provide are maintained and packaged by themselves because developers just could not be bothered to support all of that mess and that was the main reason why flat packs were invented this packaging format is different from the good old devs and RPMs in that it packaged the application and everything it needs to run in a single bundle if the application depends on a lot of libraries that are commonly used by other applications it can also not package that itself and install what is called a runtime instead for example installing a KDE app through flat pack will install the KD runtime and the next time you install another KD app it will reuse that KD runtime so it's not installed twice now flat packs are only meant for graphical applications they aren't a way to distribute libraries or command line apps flat packs are generally hosted on flat Hub which is the biggest repository of flat pack apps but there are others like Elementary's repo all the one Fedora uses for now you can install them graphically with gnome software or discover or Elementary's app center and more or you can use the command line to install them in terms of advantages flat packs are more secure than regular packages they're installed as a regular user which means the application doesn't have admin privileges over your system when it's being installed and it just can't install crap that will run at the system level or affect your system files they can also use a Sandbox which means the app is limited to its own environment and runtime and can't access everything it depends on a permission system that you can configure just like on your smartphone not all developers implement it well and it is not perfect but it's still better than the security level of good old Debian and RPM packages an imperfect sandbox is better than no sandbox at all another Advantage is for app developers flat packs run on any distribution that has flat pack installed which is basically all of them apart from Ubuntu and its various official flavors packaging once allows the developer to distribute to every distribution which is a huge Time Saver it also means as a user you're not dependent on your distro for updates you can get the new versions of your app as soon as the developer has published them well with packages distributions tend to never ship feature updates to the applications in their repos for a specific version and the last Advantage is no dependency hell if you want to install an old application it and it won't mess up your system or your other applications but it also comes with drawbacks of course because if not it would be way too easy to pick a packaging format and stick to it flat packs tend to use more space if you stick to recent applications from the same desktop environment for example all gnome apps or all KDE apps then it won't be a problem they will share the runtime and that's it you're just installing the app afterwards but if you mix and match applications a lot and you install older applications that depend on all the versions of libraries then you will install a lot of runtimes and these can add up over time using more space on your disk if you have a large SSD or hard drive this will never get to be a problem but if you're very constrained it could be another problem is that flat packs can't fully replace packages they are only for graphical programs you can't install just a library for your whole system or command line tool or Servo utility there are not designed for it and they don't plan on supporting that either and finally flat pack apps might not follow your custom theme you can install themes from Flat Hub that applications can follow and you can force apps to follow these themes but if the theme isn't installed through flat pack and enforced manually chances are your app will just look like what the developer intended and not like the rest of your system still even with these draw bags flat pack is being adopted by virtually every single distribution out there except for Ubuntu because Ubuntu has their own competitor to Flat pack and it's called Snap you can install them on Ubuntu and all of its derivatives and other distros also added support out of the box like Manjaro most distros will be able to install the snap D package that lets you install snaps afterwards snap packages follow the same model as flat packs there are build ones distribute everywhere thing that lets developers make only one package instead of making packages for every distro now snaps differ from Flat packs in a few key ways though first they are Auto updated they will automatically update to the latest version when it's available it can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you like Snaps are also containerized which means they have their own file system separated from the rest of your computer so they can't do anything too weird to your system and as with flat packs it's not perfect but it's still an added security layer over the base security of good old packages and RPMs basically anything is better in terms of security than these packages snaps also lets you test future releases in advance with channels you can for example install a snap from the beta Channel or an edge channel to test the very latest and greatest and of course they have issues as well while the packaging format is open source the server component isn't which means you cannot create your own repo of snap applications you have to use the Snap Store from canonical and you cannot see the code behind it to check if it doesn't do anything weird Snaps are also very slow to open at first start when you boot your computer and start a Snap app it will take noticeably longer to open than an application installed through other methods they also tend to clutter your disks because they will Mount their own file systems as a disk drive so if you regularly look at Mount points you will see a bunch of disks you don't know that are your snap applications snaps also generally don't support your custom themes some themes will be applied some won't it's a bit of a gamble snaps do have the advantage of supporting command line utilities and some server tools for example my own nexcloud server runs using the snap because instead of installing all the libraries that I needed a database configuring a user installing next Cloud putting the files in the right place I just typed sudo snap install nexcloud and everything was set up for me instantly and I could just use it now let's move on to app Images if you've ever used Mac OS you will be familiar with this format they are basically an all-in-one bundle that packages the application and all its libraries in a single file no shared runtimes here no dependencies the app is just one bundle that you run by double clicking on it these can be downloaded from various applications websites or from App image Hub which lists a lot of them not the biggest fan of the design of this website though it does not Inspire the greatest of confidence if you use the Windows store on early Windows phones you'll get the same Vibe here with a bunch of applications that look like also ran with weird icons and clearly unofficial packages in terms of advantages app Images are very portable you can just copy the app on a disk and paste it on another system and it will run as long as it has lib fuse installed on it which is most distributions they also won't create any dependency health because they're completely independent they do not share any component with any other application app Images can be sandboxed but not a lot of them are so they generally are less secure than flat packs and snaps they're also a package once run everywhere format which means developers can just make one app image and expect it to work everywhere unless it's Ubuntu because they broke app image support in their latest release you can fix that easily yourself but still with them preventing the installation of flat pack on their own official flavors and breaking app image is it a coincidence I think not now as always there are problems with app images as well app Images don't integrate with your system at all they have every chance to not follow your system theme and they will not create entries in your menu either unless you also install an app image helper that will scan specific folders for new app images and create these entries automatically they also use more space than any other packaging format since each application packages everything they will create duplicates of everything nothing is shared among them app Images also really depend on the trust you put in the person who packaged it they are not installed through a packet manager or through flat pack and snap you just run them as is if someone puts something Shady in the application you will run it and it has no additional protection layer now granted that's also true if you install a flat pack a snap or a package that been packaged by a third-party developer and not by the original developer of the application next is the Aur this is a term you might have seen a lot and it means Arch user repository it's available on Arch Linux and other arch-based distros like Manjaro although it might not be enabled out of the box the Aur is simply a big repository of applications and libraries packaged by individuals they are generally not official and not supported by the distro or the original developer although some can be its main advantage is that it has virtually everything any library or application commercial or not any theme icon theme you can find it in the air you are even drivers it will be a very rare occurrence when something isn't in there back when I use Manjaro I basically only use the Aur to install stuff on my system and if you're wondering why I don't use Manjaro anymore I have a video somewhere in the corner and in the link in the description below the Aur doesn't host packages as we discussed instead it hosts packaged builds which are scripts that will make the package these scripts will download the necessary components compile them into an archive and install that for you this means that installing something might take a bit longer than just installing a regular package a snap or a flat pack and it also means that unless you read the package build scripts yourself you completely trust an individual with the security of your system packages are checked by trusted users that have been part of the Aur project for a while but you still have to trust that they actually reviewed the package you install another issue is that these packages don't necessarily take into consideration other packages or stuff you might have installed from the original Arch Community repo which means you might very well break your system if you installed too many things from the Aur as you might end up with mismatched versions of libraries and apps that can't understand each other the Aur is a great very complete source of software for Arch and archbase districts but it expects you to be a bit more literate and a bit more careful with what you install you are supposed to go read the package below scripts to make sure that it doesn't do anything stupid to your system and you're supposed to know if what you install is compatible with what you already installed or not it basically expects you to know more you can just click install blindly and expect everything to work there is no one best package format yet on Linux they all have advantages and drawbacks depending on how you like to use your system personally I prefer a combination of the good old packages for all the systems libraries and command line utilities and all my graphical applications are installed through flat pack because I get all the updates and they just work there are also other ways to get software like compiling it on Gen 2 or downloading the source code and compiling it yourself and some apps will have a portable archive with a binary file you can run but mostly chances are you will interact with packages flat packs snaps app images or the Aur so I hope this made the topic less confusing but if you're still confused or if you still don't know what to use the general rule of thumb is use what your distro provides it doesn't matter in the end what matters is the application you installed so if your distro provides snaps install snaps if your distro provides flat X install flat packs what matters is the application not the package format but what really matters is this segue to today's sponsor if your computer is due for a replacement why not give a shot to a Linux manufacturer like today's sponsor tuxedo compared to buying a Windows device you just know that it will run Linux because the hardware has been specifically picked for it and you know that they contributed to linux's development to driver support and to making sure that more Hardware is supported they have a big big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point all the devices are upgradable repairable and openable and they have plenty of configuration options that purchase to make sure that it really suits your needs so if you need a new computer and you want to install Linux on it click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they're really good so thanks everyone for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notification chance to write a comment and if you dislike the video it's probably because you don't like flat packs but you can still tell me why in the comments and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to help me make more of these videos you can click any of the links in the description below patreon YouTube membership super thanks PayPal it's all there so thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and as you might be able to hear my voice is a bit shot because I've been sick with something that mighto might not be coveted for the past week so bear with me for this one thing should be much better in the next video in any case this week we have meta announcing a competitor to Twitter but that would integrate with the activity Pub standard and so would work with the fedivers we have a road map for flat Hub in 2023 and we have duck duck goes succumbing to the Sirens of AI search just like I succumbed to the Sirens of this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and you probably all know about it but if you don't Squarespace is going to be your all-in-one solution to build your website and everything around it even if you don't have any technical knowledge you can just pick from any of Squarespace templates and you can customize every single one of them with the various elements that will be displayed the colors and the general look and feel and if you want to go beyond a simple website or a simple blog they have tons of modules that you can attach like for example a complete store complete with online payment or a members only area or a video gallery and if you don't have a logo yet or you don't know how to grab your domain name then Squarespace can help you with that as well they will let you book that domain name in a few clicks and have a logo creation tool to help you get started so if you want to develop your online presence head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description below and you'll get 10 of your first purchase for no real understandable reason meta is seeing Twitter as a competitor first they introduce their own version of Twitter blue called meta verified letting people pay 12 bucks a month for the privilege of a blue check mark and support while retaining all the ads and the data mining but now they actually want to apply their usual strategy which is just copying the competitor and see if they can kill it so they're working on a dedicated application for people to post text based updates just like Twitter what's more interesting is that it would be decentralized the app is code name p92 which probably will not be the final name and it would let users log in using their Instagram account and the project is actually led by the person who runs Instagram while we don't know much about what they are planning p92 would apparently be compatible with the activity Pub standard which means it would be interoperable with Mastodon and other fediverse applications as they put it the minimum viable product would let users broadcast posts to people on other servers features would include embedded links in posts verification badges images and video sharing and following people and liking posts so yeah it's basically Twitter or Mastodon but by meta and of course it will share data across other meta platforms so expect the usual amount of profiling and data mining on this one as well and this is interesting because if it's not the usual failure of meta trying to copy something then giving up after a year then it might mean a start to a desiloing of these social networks by giantech companies now I would never use that application for all the money in the world because stay off my data suck but for people who are afraid of Mastodon or don't understand it correctly it might prove to be a first step in the fedivers might be interesting DuckDuckGo doesn't want to be left behind in the current AI arms race and they announced this week an AI powered summarization feature called duck assist in the same vein as Google's Bard AI or what Microsoft introduced in bing with chat GPT DuckDuckGo uses chat GPT Technologies as well as well as some from anthropic a startup founded by X open AI employees they combine this technology with their own indexing of Wikipedia and the Britannia encyclopedia to provide quick summaries in the search results apparently Wikipedia is 99 of the sources they will use though so yeah mostly Wikipedia summaries this new feature is in beta and it's only available in their applications and browser extensions not from the web search engine but it will be rolled out to everyone in the coming weeks you don't need to log in to access it although you will need to speak English as it's the only language it supports currently the goal with this is to help users get a direct answer from the search engine to reduce the time spending scrolling on the website to get to the small nugget of information you're looking for and these summaries will only appear when DuckDuckGo thinks it's actually useful in regards to the user's query it will still let people know that the answer is automated but it's been designed to only appear when the answer has a very high probability of being correct which is more than what we can say about being solution for example the company still recognizes that the answers will not be right a hundred percent of the time which is a big problem with these kind of tools because if you're looking for a small summary in your search engine you're probably never going to look past that answer and if it's not 100 correct then you're taking home a fake answer and we know how most people use the internet they read the headline and they take that as fact they will read the summary and take that as fact as well I talked about flat hubs quest for adding payments last week and this week they have an updated blog post outlining their roadmap for 2023. it's still written by Robert McQueen the CEO of endless OS and the president of the gnome board they focus on how they want to evolve flat hub from a build service to an app store on what the economic barriers to making the app ecosystem grow are and on the various challenges that they're facing flat Hub currently has 2 000 apps with 700 000 downloads a day which represents 88 terabytes of data per day which is huge they say that flat pack has solved the difficulty of app developers to actually distribute and let people discover their work something that was basically impossible for them to do in the traditional distros choose the packages they include approach in terms of what they've been working on they concluded the first series of features in flat hub's web app to let users and developers create accounts if they want to to let users pay currently only using stripe and to let developers verify that they own a specific application so they can set a price for their work they also worked on setting up a legal entity as this is apparently needed to ensure that they can handle payments and donations they haven't landed on the right structure yet though so we'll have to wait to see which form the company takes and to complement this and probably to reassure people they're working on a governance model that will ensure transparency and they set up a group of people from gnome from Katy and from Flat Hub to work on setting up a board that will make the decisions in the open they also managed to get a hundred thousand US dollars in funding in 2023 and they're hoping to reach 250 000 at the end of the year to ensure that they can develop everything that's needed and they can recruit more full-time employees flat Hub will also be launching their redesign soon as well as a series of focus groups to let the community Express their concerns or their enthusiasm and judging from last week's comments on the news video when I talked about flat habiting payment a lot of you are concerned that flat Hub going commercial might turn into a big Monopoly and might stifle development of applications and might make other packaging formats completely non-variable and this is absolutely not what I think will happen and I will have a video about this in a few days on the channel so stay tuned for that with the release of Elementary OS 7 that left me a bit underwhelmed their semi-roading release model is still kicking in with regular updates to the desktop and its applications first the file manager got a new app menu in the header bar letting people discover more features that were hidden in a context menu this menu will let you zoom in and out or change the icon size enable double click or single click to navigate change the Sorting options show the hidden files and more you could already do all of these of course but now it should be easier to discover the network indicator got a big redesign showing all available Network options as circular buttons instead of toggles it will also show the various vpns you configured earlier so you can toggle them on or off more easily airplane mode is also now just a click away and will be toggled with a middle click on the network indicator they also fixed a bunch of issues in window management to get smoother animations and better performance they fixed issues with the window shadows and they fixed a problem that meant you could close your windows accidentally when using three finger gestures and finally they also added the flat pack repair feature to the App Center which fixes issues where it would tell you that certain runtimes couldn't be installed you will also get a message when everything is up to date in the updates tab complete with the time their last check for update this doesn't solve any of the deeper problems I personally have with Elementary iOS but it's still super cool to see them going at it improving things even without having a big release they are just going to ship those kind of updates every month until Elementary OS 7 is end of life which is great now on The Gnome side we have gnome Builder now letting you choose a preferred flat pack installation to use when installing new sdks we have the elastic app that lets you customize your animations inside of gtk4 applications this app is joining gnome Circle we have a new simple libadviter application called sticky notes that lets you just jot down notes with formatting and colors we have more updates to live cap option which is the app that provides real-time automatic subtitles in English and we have a big update to tube converter which sees a better written in C sharp the app should download stuff way faster now it should crash less often and there's a Windows version now as well the UI also saw a few changes to be more legible fosh the mobile shell saw a new release as well with a new plugin to configure the emergency preferences on the lock screen and the settings menu was updated visually to look more in line with current gnome dinaro the personal finance manager got a new icon which looks much better a few ux improvements and updated translations oh and there's more with Loop the new image viewer now having its brand new image decoder that opens support for color profiles animated images and viewing svgs telegram the telegram client now has support for gifts and for viewing message replies plus you can edit and reply to specific messages you can compose messages using markdown you have a contacts window to view your saved contacts and performance has been greatly improved and finally Pano The Gnome shell extension that gives you a visual clipboard manager has received gnome 44 support you can now Mark items in the clipboard as favorites it supports emojis you can customize how it looks you can filter history by item type and more plenty of good stuff this week and the ones I really want to check out personally are dinaro and Pano because they look like they would fit into my workflow really well and they would make me make a budget again which I stopped making and it's bad now on the KDE plasma fronts they now have ported the master branch of plasma to q6 so the work for plasma 6 is progressing nicely as it can already be run today if you feel adventurous it also looks like they've implemented more resilience for KDE applications on Weyland when the compositor crashes it will no longer take all applications down with it anymore which is pretty good in terms of new features they're adding an option to change the visual intensity of the outline that appears around Breeze windows or they will even let you disable this outline they are considering backboarding this to plasma 5.27 as well KD devs also removed the open with dialog meant for portal using apps when it was used by non portal using apps since that new dialog doesn't have all the features of the old one just yet they fixed the breeze gtk theme so linked buttons should look better in gtk applications notifications will be sorted chronologically in the history pop-up and they improved how window sizes and positions are remembered for multi-screen setups important bug fixes include correctly supporting Nvidia suspend and resume with external displays not being disabled anymore or icons and texts no longer missing after resuming from suspend plus there's a bunch of fixes for kwin and the Weyland session for now it looks like plasma 6 is more of an evolution on top of plasma 5 with the biggest change being the move to q6 with the performance improvements that it brings but I still can't wait to see what they will bring in the final version now I reported last week on the fact that the HP Dev 1 will be discontinued something that was announced in a laconic statement from HP just saying that they have sold out and nothing more this led to inevitable speculation from everyone myself included people assumed that the initial run was very small that it took about a year to sell and that it was a failure well it looks like that's not the case at all as a few people close to the project told me they could not tell me anything about the future of Linux devices at HP but they said that the dev1 sold well and according to expectations the plan was to produce a run of limited size and that run sold out so basically it's a Communications problem HP was super vague which led to people speculating widely as they are bound to do they could have just said something along these lines we're very happy about the interest around the HP dev1 we sold the first initial run we don't plan to make any more of this specific device but we will look at what we learned producing the HP dev1 to see if we can better serve the Linux community in the future you're done you conveyed success instead of failure you left the door open if you ever want to make a successor device whatever they want to do and if you don't want to make one you never said you were going to make one so you're not engaged either HP you should hire someone to communicate especially with the open source and Linux Community you need to be super clear and transparent it's a community based on the exchange of ideas and information and we will definitely read between the lines so write a clear communique instead of just saying sold out okay let's finish this with the gaming news first wine got a new release version 8.3 this one brings support for the low fragmentation Heap support for smart cards and they also now bundle the zydes library by default these all being features that I must admit I have zero understanding of wine 8.3 also fixes 29 bugs including for Path of Exile sacred escape from tarkov or Saints Row the Third and valve confirmed this week that they're not planning to release a next-gen steam deck for a few years as they put it a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in Horsepower won't be for a few years and here again communication is important because this wording doesn't mean there won't be more marginal Hardware revisions or small bumps in Horsepower or just changes in other areas of the device they're apparently very very happy with the first year of the steam deck and it seems that 42 percent of the people who bought one are spending the majority of their steam gaming time on it preferring it to their other devices personally I think the steam deck is good enough right now I don't really think it's necessary to have a steam deck 2 in a year or in two years that thing was never meant to run every single new AAA title that comes out it can already run 8 000 games that should be enough for most people what I'd like to see is a new semi next gen let's let's say your steam deck Plus or steam deck Pro device that will have an OLED screen and a better battery life or on the opposite end a steam deck mini way more portable and easier to carry around with you and speaking of portable and easy to carry around how about we look at today's sponsor's devices if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at devices from manufacturers that ship windows out of the box click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box and all the hardware has been picked specifically to run Linux they have a big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point and each device has plenty of configuration options that you can set before your purchase from Ram SSD CPU GPU even your logo on the lid the keyboard layout you can pick everything and all of their laptops are openable repairable and upgradable with at least the SSD the RAM and the battery so if you're in the market for a new computer check the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good now thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always click that dislike button and also tell me why in the comments it's more polite this way and if you really enjoyed the channel and what I do well there are plenty of flings down below for my social accounts for my PayPal for my patreon for my YouTube memberships for super thanks you'll find a way to help the channel grow so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and Linux based operating systems are the most used in the entire world Linux dominates the server Market with about 96 of the first 1 million servers running Linux it dominates the smartphone market with about 85 percent of smartphones running on Linux based operating system namely Android and it dominates the desktop well maybe not that one not yet anyway but before Linux there was Unix it's a unit system a very very popular operating system that dominated in research Academy and multiple companies and the server space as well so how did we go from a big range of commercial Unix offerings that dominated the world to Linux erasing basically everything and how did we go from this introduction to this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nexcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so what was or is UNIX well a eunuch is a man who's got certain body parts room oh wait no sorry we're talking about Unix not you nux so Unix was developed in the mid-1960s by the MIT Bell labs and general electronic at the time it was called Unix with a CS at the end not an X it was the follow-up to multix which was another operating system very complex to use very heavy Unix stands for uniplexed information and Computing service and it was a single task system written in assembly before it moved to c over time it gained a bunch of features like multitasking multi-user capabilities and networking and it really took off because it became very portable being written in C meant that Unix was way more portable than most other operating systems that were available at the time and at the time it was a very important thing because you didn't just have x86 and arm you had up to 16 different processor architectures at some point supported by Unix and with that portability Unix conquered the world s from the owner none other than atnt and I talk about Unix in the past but it still exists today mainly in Solaris previously owned by Sun but now by Oracle and there are other less ran options all these systems were born out of the open source code that was published before Unix became fully commercial and that open source code also sprouted another Branch a little thing you might know as BSD yeah BSD is UNIX although they do not use any of the original Unix code nowadays apart from BSD most other Unix systems are now proprietary and generally limited to Industry Finance or health related companies they are also generally sold with the hardware they run on and it still has its advantages like stability and security seeing as there is very little malware developed for Unix so how did we go from Unix everywhere to Linux ate my launch you probably all know that Linux was developed by Linus store volts well he was a student in Helsinki he enjoyed Unix but at that point the system had become proprietary and so couldn't be tailored to his needs as a pet project he created his own kernel that was basically a Minix clone itself a Unix clone which tovaults wanted to modify to run on 32-bit systems and the rest is history he opened up the source code finished the first version in 91 and then a full operating system was built on top of that kernel thanks to the new tools developed by the free software Foundation of Richard stallman and this little hobby project became the foundation of the most used operating system in the world dominating 99 of the various niches that Unix used to occupy interestingly while Linux doesn't share any code with Unix the kernel absolutely behaves like it the general architecture and philosophy of the system is incredibly similar on purpose it's built with small programs that do one task well and that can talk to each other through the use of pipes to pass the output of a program to another Linux is also posix compliant posix being a standard that was created because so many Unix variants were popping up that it was necessary to ensure they all worked in a similar way and were compatible with each other so you could say that Linux is the spiritual successor to Unix and you might wonder how a hobby project developed as open source managed to replace a commercial company-backed already installed system and the reasons are many at first Unix couldn't be commercialized as a product because atnt had entered an agreement with other companies saying that they wouldn't try and sell computer software that meant Unix was a hobby project for them it was sold for the cost of shipping and printing the tapes yes tapes not drives not disks not floppy disks tapes you receive the source code as is and patching options were limited it which meant most people who bought Unix bought it to maintain it and fix it themselves which led to many companies creating their own versions of Unix and sharing the source code with one another the agreement atnt had ended though and this meant that they could now start selling Unix as a product as could other companies and at the time it was seen more as a way to sell expensive Hardware giant mainframes that came with Unix to have something to run on them the money wasn't the hardware not the software and it still kinda is today look at Apple they're enormous margins aren't made on the software they're made on the hardware they sell and the software is just a gateway to attract you to buy the product and also a way to collect all your personal data Gap with the ability to commercialize Unix came a huge competitive market with each company that had developed and maintained their own Unix version realizing there was money to be made by selling that and stopping the flow of Open Source Code between the various Unix variants every Unix version started to diverge from each other and to behave differently which killed one of the big advantages of Unix it was the standard you learned at University and that you kept using because you knew it and so the first problem appeared with expensive hardware and multiple potentially incompatible variants of Unix to choose from universities decided that Unix might not be a viable option and so Berkeley based themselves of the code of Unix to create BSD and have their own version of Unix that they could run they could open up and share without hemorrhaging cash now at some point companies realized that this was a problem and decided to try and standardize things to avoid risking Unix becoming completely irrelevant that's when posix was finally adopted as the standard after a bunch of other standards were proposed discussed denied it was a mess all these systems and this competition is referred to as the Unix Wars all vendors wanted to be the standard there were legal battles of Plenty and it made the Unix landscape a confusing mess for potential customers who do you buy from is it safe from litigation what are the differences and what are the advantages if you think choosing a Linux distro is confusing try doing the same between multiple commercial offerings that come on multiple thousands of dollars mainframes as a company the business decision is impossible to make and it turned Unix into a bad word it made it impossible to Market which really hurt it in the long run also at that point personal computers were really starting to take off in the late 80s and early 90s and Microsoft just dominated that space with Windows which meant customers were not as familiar with Unix as they once were Unix also was really only your way to sell mainframes and big computers stuff that ran on risk chips at the time Intel's x86 was a very limited it architecture it had poor performance compared to risk CPUs and it was only suitable to be produced on mass cheaply for the end user but with these sales Intel and then AMD were able to fund the development of better chips which in turn outgrew the risk chips that Unix depended on to be sold and at that point why would you rack your brain and try to pick from a variant of Unix that might be safe for litigation might be sold on the exact computer that you need running a risk chip when you could just buy any big computer with an x86 CPU that has now caught up in terms of performance and just slap an open source operating system without any license fees on it the choice was easy and Commercial Unix basically died but why did people use Linux and not BSD BSD had existed for longer it was a known quantity and it worked in the same way as Unix as what companies were used to the gist of it is legal battles BSD was slowly moving away from code used in the original system 5 which atnt held the rights to they had redeveloped all the utilities and finalized removing all atnt files in 1991. in the net 2 release of BSD atnt then sued Berkeley software design arguing they had breached unix's license contract that their code infringed on copyright and that it diluted the Unix trademark and so BSD was ordered to completely stop Distributing all their software until the case was resolved which would take about two years which meant that the project was stopped in their track for a long time but apparently not enough time to create a decent logo this also meant that companies steered clear of BSD because it its future was uncertain and you probably did not want to take the legal risks to use something that was under legal threats this left the field wide open for Linux to be developed and adopted instead of the expensive commercial Unix packages that had the OS and the hardware bundled and Torvalds even stated that if BSD had been available at the time he would probably never have developed Linux in the first place and so that's why Linux dominates in all the spaces Unix used to occupy Unix became too big for its own good and completely not understandable for consumers it was also very expensive and any other alternative was just under legal threats and so completely unsafe to use by companies and so companies and universities flocked to that Unix compatible kernel and operating system instead of bothering with commercial Unix now this doesn't mean that Unix is dead it lives on in all the BSD distributions and in Mac OS and iOS both being based on a BSD kernel it also found a spiritual successor in Linux which follows the Unix principles to the letter and is posix compliant there are still commercial versions of Unix being sold the main one being Sons Solaris available to everyone and also sold within big mainframes and Unix left a rich Heritage in two days operating systems they invented the man command to access manual pages although should we really thank them for that I mean those things are completely legible the posix standard also only exists thanks to the Unix Wars pipes you can use in the Linux command line interface were invented for Unix why which led to the creation of Vim was also a Unix tool Unix isn't dead it's just transcended to another plane of existence it's more of a guiding Foundation or inspiration than a commercial social product nowadays and when you think about it Linux almost didn't exist if BSD was ensued if 88 and T didn't have this weird agreement that precluded them from selling Unix right when they developed it or if the x86 architecture had never taken off and had been a bus for companies we might all be using a Unix variant instead of Linux but as it happened Linux just ate Unix and it was delicious like this Segway to today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new computer and your plan is to run Linux on it you should probably stop looking at Windows devices and buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they are based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point all their devices are openable upgradeable repairable and they have plenty of customization options when you buy them to change the CPU the ram the the SSD the GPU you can even customize the logo on the lid of your laptop or the keyboard layout that you want they have a ton of choice so if you want to replace your computer and you want to ensure that it has the best Linux compatibility you can have click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoyed the channel there are plenty of links down there to support it from PayPal to patreon to YouTube memberships whatever you want it's down there if you want in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and Linux based operating systems are the most used in the entire world Linux dominates the server Market with about 96 of the first 1 million servers running Linux it dominates the smartphone market with about 85 percent of smartphones running on Linux based operating system namely Android and it dominates the desktop well maybe not that one not yet anyway but before Linux there was Unix it's a unit system a very very popular operating system that dominated in research Academy and multiple companies and the server space as well so how did we go from a big range of commercial Unix offerings that dominated the world to Linux erasing basically everything and how did we go from this introduction to this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nexcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so what was or is UNIX well a eunuch is a man who's got certain body parts room oh wait no sorry we're talking about Unix not you nux so Unix was developed in the mid-1960s by the MIT Bell labs and general electronic at the time it was called Unix with a CS at the end not an X it was the follow-up to multix which was another operating system very complex to use very heavy Unix stands for uniplexed information and Computing service and it was a single task system written in assembly before it moved to c over time it gained a bunch of features like multitasking multi-user capabilities and networking and it really took off because it became very portable being written in C meant that Unix was way more portable than most other operating systems that were available at the time and at the time it was a very important thing because you didn't just have x86 and arm you had up to 16 different processor architectures at some point supported by Unix and with that portability Unix conquered the world s from the owner none other than atnt and I talk about Unix in the past but it still exists today mainly in Solaris previously owned by Sun but now by Oracle and there are other less ran options all these systems were born out of the open source code that was published before Unix became fully commercial and that open source code also sprouted another Branch a little thing you might know as BSD yeah BSD is UNIX although they do not use any of the original Unix code nowadays apart from BSD most other Unix systems are now proprietary and generally limited to Industry Finance or health related companies they are also generally sold with the hardware they run on and it still has its advantages like stability and security seeing as there is very little malware developed for Unix so how did we go from Unix everywhere to Linux ate my launch you probably all know that Linux was developed by Linus store volts well he was a student in Helsinki he enjoyed Unix but at that point the system had become proprietary and so couldn't be tailored to his needs as a pet project he created his own kernel that was basically a Minix clone itself a Unix clone which tovaults wanted to modify to run on 32-bit systems and the rest is history he opened up the source code finished the first version in 91 and then a full operating system was built on top of that kernel thanks to the new tools developed by the free software Foundation of Richard stallman and this little hobby project became the foundation of the most used operating system in the world dominating 99 of the various niches that Unix used to occupy interestingly while Linux doesn't share any code with Unix the kernel absolutely behaves like it the general architecture and philosophy of the system is incredibly similar on purpose it's built with small programs that do one task well and that can talk to each other through the use of pipes to pass the output of a program to another Linux is also posix compliant posix being a standard that was created because so many Unix variants were popping up that it was necessary to ensure they all worked in a similar way and were compatible with each other so you could say that Linux is the spiritual successor to Unix and you might wonder how a hobby project developed as open source managed to replace a commercial company-backed already installed system and the reasons are many at first Unix couldn't be commercialized as a product because atnt had entered an agreement with other companies saying that they wouldn't try and sell computer software that meant Unix was a hobby project for them it was sold for the cost of shipping and printing the tapes yes tapes not drives not disks not floppy disks tapes you receive the source code as is and patching options were limited it which meant most people who bought Unix bought it to maintain it and fix it themselves which led to many companies creating their own versions of Unix and sharing the source code with one another the agreement atnt had ended though and this meant that they could now start selling Unix as a product as could other companies and at the time it was seen more as a way to sell expensive Hardware giant mainframes that came with Unix to have something to run on them the money wasn't the hardware not the software and it still kinda is today look at Apple they're enormous margins aren't made on the software they're made on the hardware they sell and the software is just a gateway to attract you to buy the product and also a way to collect all your personal data Gap with the ability to commercialize Unix came a huge competitive market with each company that had developed and maintained their own Unix version realizing there was money to be made by selling that and stopping the flow of Open Source Code between the various Unix variants every Unix version started to diverge from each other and to behave differently which killed one of the big advantages of Unix it was the standard you learned at University and that you kept using because you knew it and so the first problem appeared with expensive hardware and multiple potentially incompatible variants of Unix to choose from universities decided that Unix might not be a viable option and so Berkeley based themselves of the code of Unix to create BSD and have their own version of Unix that they could run they could open up and share without hemorrhaging cash now at some point companies realized that this was a problem and decided to try and standardize things to avoid risking Unix becoming completely irrelevant that's when posix was finally adopted as the standard after a bunch of other standards were proposed discussed denied it was a mess all these systems and this competition is referred to as the Unix Wars all vendors wanted to be the standard there were legal battles of Plenty and it made the Unix landscape a confusing mess for potential customers who do you buy from is it safe from litigation what are the differences and what are the advantages if you think choosing a Linux distro is confusing try doing the same between multiple commercial offerings that come on multiple thousands of dollars mainframes as a company the business decision is impossible to make and it turned Unix into a bad word it made it impossible to Market which really hurt it in the long run also at that point personal computers were really starting to take off in the late 80s and early 90s and Microsoft just dominated that space with Windows which meant customers were not as familiar with Unix as they once were Unix also was really only your way to sell mainframes and big computers stuff that ran on risk chips at the time Intel's x86 was a very limited it architecture it had poor performance compared to risk CPUs and it was only suitable to be produced on mass cheaply for the end user but with these sales Intel and then AMD were able to fund the development of better chips which in turn outgrew the risk chips that Unix depended on to be sold and at that point why would you rack your brain and try to pick from a variant of Unix that might be safe for litigation might be sold on the exact computer that you need running a risk chip when you could just buy any big computer with an x86 CPU that has now caught up in terms of performance and just slap an open source operating system without any license fees on it the choice was easy and Commercial Unix basically died but why did people use Linux and not BSD BSD had existed for longer it was a known quantity and it worked in the same way as Unix as what companies were used to the gist of it is legal battles BSD was slowly moving away from code used in the original system 5 which atnt held the rights to they had redeveloped all the utilities and finalized removing all atnt files in 1991. in the net 2 release of BSD atnt then sued Berkeley software design arguing they had breached unix's license contract that their code infringed on copyright and that it diluted the Unix trademark and so BSD was ordered to completely stop Distributing all their software until the case was resolved which would take about two years which meant that the project was stopped in their track for a long time but apparently not enough time to create a decent logo this also meant that companies steered clear of BSD because it its future was uncertain and you probably did not want to take the legal risks to use something that was under legal threats this left the field wide open for Linux to be developed and adopted instead of the expensive commercial Unix packages that had the OS and the hardware bundled and Torvalds even stated that if BSD had been available at the time he would probably never have developed Linux in the first place and so that's why Linux dominates in all the spaces Unix used to occupy Unix became too big for its own good and completely not understandable for consumers it was also very expensive and any other alternative was just under legal threats and so completely unsafe to use by companies and so companies and universities flocked to that Unix compatible kernel and operating system instead of bothering with commercial Unix now this doesn't mean that Unix is dead it lives on in all the BSD distributions and in Mac OS and iOS both being based on a BSD kernel it also found a spiritual successor in Linux which follows the Unix principles to the letter and is posix compliant there are still commercial versions of Unix being sold the main one being Sons Solaris available to everyone and also sold within big mainframes and Unix left a rich Heritage in two days operating systems they invented the man command to access manual pages although should we really thank them for that I mean those things are completely legible the posix standard also only exists thanks to the Unix Wars pipes you can use in the Linux command line interface were invented for Unix why which led to the creation of Vim was also a Unix tool Unix isn't dead it's just transcended to another plane of existence it's more of a guiding Foundation or inspiration than a commercial social product nowadays and when you think about it Linux almost didn't exist if BSD was ensued if 88 and T didn't have this weird agreement that precluded them from selling Unix right when they developed it or if the x86 architecture had never taken off and had been a bus for companies we might all be using a Unix variant instead of Linux but as it happened Linux just ate Unix and it was delicious like this Segway to today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new computer and your plan is to run Linux on it you should probably stop looking at Windows devices and buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they are based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point all their devices are openable upgradeable repairable and they have plenty of customization options when you buy them to change the CPU the ram the the SSD the GPU you can even customize the logo on the lid of your laptop or the keyboard layout that you want they have a ton of choice so if you want to replace your computer and you want to ensure that it has the best Linux compatibility you can have click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoyed the channel there are plenty of links down there to support it from PayPal to patreon to YouTube memberships whatever you want it's down there if you want in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you're confused by all the packaging formats available on Linux you've come to the right place with flat packs snaps app Images regular packages the Aur the source code Linux has more ways to install a program than any other operating system in the world and while it gives you complete Freedom it also means you can be completely lost so let's explain these packaging formats what they do what Their advantages are and what their drawbacks are and let's also unpack this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to track so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster so let's start with the good old packages the dabs and the RPMs the main ones are Debian packages used by Debian Ubuntu and all Ubuntu derivatives and RPMs which originated in red hat but are now also used by Fedora Santos open Souza and others these packages aren't like exes or msis on windows they're meant to be installed from a package manager they're contained in repositories that your distribution has set up or that you can add yourself when you use your package manager or your app store it displays one element an application or library but what it will install is packages either just one or multiple ones that the application needs to run it is in short much more practical than the traditional Windows wizard with its 10 next buttons you have to click and the crap web that is pre-checked that you have to dodge before you install your program in terms of advantages these packages are all separate which means that each package contains either one application or one Library you only install what is needed nothing more this also means they tend to use less space as time goes on since the libraries are shared between applications you don't have to install yet another copy of the same Library when you install a new app second they are maintained and tested by your distribution which means they should all work well without any issues and they probably don't contain malware packages from third-party repos or that you install manually might not be as safe though third they are all based on a dependency system applications declare which other packages they need to run if these packages are already installed they will use them and if they are not they will be installed automatically but there are a bunch of disadvantages to using these packages the first one is security you install each package as a super user which means you grant the package all the rights to do whatever it wants to your system as it's being installed if it comes from an unknown source you might be installing malware without knowing it and giving it full access to your system second they can create dependency help since all libraries are shared on your system it means that all packages need to use the same version of a library there's only one on your system that every app uses so if you install an older package that depends on an older version or a newer package that depends on a newer version you might completely break your system by replacing the current Library by a version your other applications can't understand and can't use and third for developers these packages simply suck these packages need to be made for each architecture like x86 and arm and for 32-bit and 64-bit and for all the currently supported versions of a distribution and for all distributions which means you can end up having to create tens of packages for one application and that is why most packages that distributions provide are maintained and packaged by themselves because developers just could not be bothered to support all of that mess and that was the main reason why flat packs were invented this packaging format is different from the good old devs and RPMs in that it packaged the application and everything it needs to run in a single bundle if the application depends on a lot of libraries that are commonly used by other applications it can also not package that itself and install what is called a runtime instead for example installing a KDE app through flat pack will install the KD runtime and the next time you install another KD app it will reuse that KD runtime so it's not installed twice now flat packs are only meant for graphical applications they aren't a way to distribute libraries or command line apps flat packs are generally hosted on flat Hub which is the biggest repository of flat pack apps but there are others like Elementary's repo all the one Fedora uses for now you can install them graphically with gnome software or discover or Elementary's app center and more or you can use the command line to install them in terms of advantages flat packs are more secure than regular packages they're installed as a regular user which means the application doesn't have admin privileges over your system when it's being installed and it just can't install crap that will run at the system level or affect your system files they can also use a Sandbox which means the app is limited to its own environment and runtime and can't access everything it depends on a permission system that you can configure just like on your smartphone not all developers implement it well and it is not perfect but it's still better than the security level of good old Debian and RPM packages an imperfect sandbox is better than no sandbox at all another Advantage is for app developers flat packs run on any distribution that has flat pack installed which is basically all of them apart from Ubuntu and its various official flavors packaging once allows the developer to distribute to every distribution which is a huge Time Saver it also means as a user you're not dependent on your distro for updates you can get the new versions of your app as soon as the developer has published them well with packages distributions tend to never ship feature updates to the applications in their repos for a specific version and the last Advantage is no dependency hell if you want to install an old application it and it won't mess up your system or your other applications but it also comes with drawbacks of course because if not it would be way too easy to pick a packaging format and stick to it flat packs tend to use more space if you stick to recent applications from the same desktop environment for example all gnome apps or all KDE apps then it won't be a problem they will share the runtime and that's it you're just installing the app afterwards but if you mix and match applications a lot and you install older applications that depend on all the versions of libraries then you will install a lot of runtimes and these can add up over time using more space on your disk if you have a large SSD or hard drive this will never get to be a problem but if you're very constrained it could be another problem is that flat packs can't fully replace packages they are only for graphical programs you can't install just a library for your whole system or command line tool or Servo utility there are not designed for it and they don't plan on supporting that either and finally flat pack apps might not follow your custom theme you can install themes from Flat Hub that applications can follow and you can force apps to follow these themes but if the theme isn't installed through flat pack and enforced manually chances are your app will just look like what the developer intended and not like the rest of your system still even with these draw bags flat pack is being adopted by virtually every single distribution out there except for Ubuntu because Ubuntu has their own competitor to Flat pack and it's called Snap you can install them on Ubuntu and all of its derivatives and other distros also added support out of the box like Manjaro most distros will be able to install the snap D package that lets you install snaps afterwards snap packages follow the same model as flat packs there are build ones distribute everywhere thing that lets developers make only one package instead of making packages for every distro now snaps differ from Flat packs in a few key ways though first they are Auto updated they will automatically update to the latest version when it's available it can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you like Snaps are also containerized which means they have their own file system separated from the rest of your computer so they can't do anything too weird to your system and as with flat packs it's not perfect but it's still an added security layer over the base security of good old packages and RPMs basically anything is better in terms of security than these packages snaps also lets you test future releases in advance with channels you can for example install a snap from the beta Channel or an edge channel to test the very latest and greatest and of course they have issues as well while the packaging format is open source the server component isn't which means you cannot create your own repo of snap applications you have to use the Snap Store from canonical and you cannot see the code behind it to check if it doesn't do anything weird Snaps are also very slow to open at first start when you boot your computer and start a Snap app it will take noticeably longer to open than an application installed through other methods they also tend to clutter your disks because they will Mount their own file systems as a disk drive so if you regularly look at Mount points you will see a bunch of disks you don't know that are your snap applications snaps also generally don't support your custom themes some themes will be applied some won't it's a bit of a gamble snaps do have the advantage of supporting command line utilities and some server tools for example my own nexcloud server runs using the snap because instead of installing all the libraries that I needed a database configuring a user installing next Cloud putting the files in the right place I just typed sudo snap install nexcloud and everything was set up for me instantly and I could just use it now let's move on to app Images if you've ever used Mac OS you will be familiar with this format they are basically an all-in-one bundle that packages the application and all its libraries in a single file no shared runtimes here no dependencies the app is just one bundle that you run by double clicking on it these can be downloaded from various applications websites or from App image Hub which lists a lot of them not the biggest fan of the design of this website though it does not Inspire the greatest of confidence if you use the Windows store on early Windows phones you'll get the same Vibe here with a bunch of applications that look like also ran with weird icons and clearly unofficial packages in terms of advantages app Images are very portable you can just copy the app on a disk and paste it on another system and it will run as long as it has lib fuse installed on it which is most distributions they also won't create any dependency health because they're completely independent they do not share any component with any other application app Images can be sandboxed but not a lot of them are so they generally are less secure than flat packs and snaps they're also a package once run everywhere format which means developers can just make one app image and expect it to work everywhere unless it's Ubuntu because they broke app image support in their latest release you can fix that easily yourself but still with them preventing the installation of flat pack on their own official flavors and breaking app image is it a coincidence I think not now as always there are problems with app images as well app Images don't integrate with your system at all they have every chance to not follow your system theme and they will not create entries in your menu either unless you also install an app image helper that will scan specific folders for new app images and create these entries automatically they also use more space than any other packaging format since each application packages everything they will create duplicates of everything nothing is shared among them app Images also really depend on the trust you put in the person who packaged it they are not installed through a packet manager or through flat pack and snap you just run them as is if someone puts something Shady in the application you will run it and it has no additional protection layer now granted that's also true if you install a flat pack a snap or a package that been packaged by a third-party developer and not by the original developer of the application next is the Aur this is a term you might have seen a lot and it means Arch user repository it's available on Arch Linux and other arch-based distros like Manjaro although it might not be enabled out of the box the Aur is simply a big repository of applications and libraries packaged by individuals they are generally not official and not supported by the distro or the original developer although some can be its main advantage is that it has virtually everything any library or application commercial or not any theme icon theme you can find it in the air you are even drivers it will be a very rare occurrence when something isn't in there back when I use Manjaro I basically only use the Aur to install stuff on my system and if you're wondering why I don't use Manjaro anymore I have a video somewhere in the corner and in the link in the description below the Aur doesn't host packages as we discussed instead it hosts packaged builds which are scripts that will make the package these scripts will download the necessary components compile them into an archive and install that for you this means that installing something might take a bit longer than just installing a regular package a snap or a flat pack and it also means that unless you read the package build scripts yourself you completely trust an individual with the security of your system packages are checked by trusted users that have been part of the Aur project for a while but you still have to trust that they actually reviewed the package you install another issue is that these packages don't necessarily take into consideration other packages or stuff you might have installed from the original Arch Community repo which means you might very well break your system if you installed too many things from the Aur as you might end up with mismatched versions of libraries and apps that can't understand each other the Aur is a great very complete source of software for Arch and archbase districts but it expects you to be a bit more literate and a bit more careful with what you install you are supposed to go read the package below scripts to make sure that it doesn't do anything stupid to your system and you're supposed to know if what you install is compatible with what you already installed or not it basically expects you to know more you can just click install blindly and expect everything to work there is no one best package format yet on Linux they all have advantages and drawbacks depending on how you like to use your system personally I prefer a combination of the good old packages for all the systems libraries and command line utilities and all my graphical applications are installed through flat pack because I get all the updates and they just work there are also other ways to get software like compiling it on Gen 2 or downloading the source code and compiling it yourself and some apps will have a portable archive with a binary file you can run but mostly chances are you will interact with packages flat packs snaps app images or the Aur so I hope this made the topic less confusing but if you're still confused or if you still don't know what to use the general rule of thumb is use what your distro provides it doesn't matter in the end what matters is the application you installed so if your distro provides snaps install snaps if your distro provides flat X install flat packs what matters is the application not the package format but what really matters is this segue to today's sponsor if your computer is due for a replacement why not give a shot to a Linux manufacturer like today's sponsor tuxedo compared to buying a Windows device you just know that it will run Linux because the hardware has been specifically picked for it and you know that they contributed to linux's development to driver support and to making sure that more Hardware is supported they have a big big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point all the devices are upgradable repairable and openable and they have plenty of configuration options that purchase to make sure that it really suits your needs so if you need a new computer and you want to install Linux on it click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they're really good so thanks everyone for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notification chance to write a comment and if you dislike the video it's probably because you don't like flat packs but you can still tell me why in the comments and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to help me make more of these videos you can click any of the links in the description below patreon YouTube membership super thanks PayPal it's all there so thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I just came back home from my holiday I'm a bit sunburned and a bit woozy from the flight home but I'm not about to let you go through a full week without your healthy dose of Linux and open source news so this week we have people from Getty from Debian and from gnome pushing for funding for flat Hub to add payment support in the app store we have proof that most corporate companies are using open source software very wrong and we have the unfortunate demise of the HP dev1 and probably the end of hp's Linux efforts so let's look at that let's look at the other news and let's look at this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and you probably already know about Alma Linux the replacement to Centos it's free of charge it's managed by the community and it's backed financially by tax care well if you plan to run Alma Linux in production environments or if you already do now you can get commercial support from tax care as well with Alma care you get 16 years of support for Alma Linux with security updates and new hardware support so your Fleet is more stable maintenance costs are reduced and your Hardware can be used longer you will also get a dedicated repo for all Alpha Linux packages so you get updates faster it also includes live patching support so you can keep your kernel up to date without rebooting your systems and with zero downtime and of course you get commercial support for a wide range of packages like ansible kubernetes Maria DB and MySQL containers and more basically if you want to deploy Alma Linux in commercial production environments you need all my care and you can learn all about it by clicking the link in the description there's a proposal being made for flat Hub to add payments donations and subscription options to the platform it's been submitted by Robert McQueen the CEO of endless OS and the president of of The Gnome board but it also seems to be endorsed by people from KDE gnome and Debian as well this proposal seeks to get appropriate funding from the plain text group an initiative developed by Schmidt Futures founded by the ex-ceo of Google Eric Schmidt they're seeking a hundred thousand dollars to fund the work and the rationale here is to help remove the barriers for open source application funding by adding easier ways for people to contribute to the applications that they use the proposal has been here a while dating back to November 2022 and accepted for consideration in the plain text group's GitHub repository now flat Hub is already moving towards that goal as they are working to add donations and payments on flat Hub through stride and they are also working on a way for developers to verify that they own the apps they publish so users know they would be contributing to the official project and not to any third-party package and of course you will always get some people clamoring against such a move because there's always been that notion that going commercial is bad somehow but here we're talking about flat Hub a community controlled non-profit not about a corporate entity seeking to profit off of Open Source work and personally I am all for it if I could have a simple way to donate to to library office to every single app that I use through the app store without having to use 10 different payment platforms or support platforms of donation platforms I would absolutely do it especially if it comes with a list of all the apps I already bought on flat Hub on any other distro so I can reinstall them in one click that would be great but more generally it would also mean that it's way easier for app developers to gather a little bit of money to fund the continued work on those applications and it might also attract other Developers for applications that are commercial and sold and just cannot really be distributed that well on Linux right now looks like companies are using open source software wrong as Recent research showed that 84 of commercial and proprietary code bases show at least one known open source vulnerability 48 of these code bases also showed a high risk vulnerability staying unpatched in the 2023 edition of synopsis as open source security and risk analysis they base themselves on audits of code bases involved in mergers and Acquisitions for a total of almost 1500 code bases that they looked at for vulnerabilities and open source licensing compliance the number of Open Source vulnerabilities apparently Rose by four percent since 2021 and free and open source code is literally everywhere making up to 73 of the total code for companies in Aerospace Aviation Automotive or transportation and 63 of that code contain vulnerabilities and do know that this isn't because open source code is insecure 91 of the code bases had vulnerabilities because they used outdated versions of Open Source components with patches available but unapplied apparently this is because most teams might think that upgrading to a newer version would take too much time or create other problems and so they prefer leaving a vulnerability in instead of actually updating the various free and open source components that they use a strategy that is generally not the good one but a very common one as anyone who worked in web dev or just development in general can attest to try to take a full development Sprint just to work on maintenance upgrading components and removing technological debt no one's ever going to grant you that in most companies you might remember the HP dev1 a pretty great laptop made in collaboration with HP and system 76 running pop OS out of the box with Hardware picked and tuned specifically to run Linux and even some work being upstreamed in AMD drivers and or Linux kernel I reviewed it and found it a great option for people who want to think bad experience without getting a ThinkPad itself and it's questionable approach to design well it looks like ThinkPad owners will be able to just laugh and keep their laptops as HP cammed the project the HP dev1 is now discontinued and will not see a second iteration although at least the company will support existing models all the way through January 2026 or at least three years from the purchase date it seems obvious now why the product failed only being sold with a qwerty keyboard and only being sold in the US never seeing a release for any other country now they also never really advertised it it was never really on their own website and they kept it so close to the ThinkPad template that probably the only real Target was us ThinkPad users which will always prefer using a ThinkPad still it's sad to see HP fail to put enough backing behind the product as Dell for example has been selling their XPS line with Linux pre-in styled for about 10 years now and they seem to do all right with these devices it really shows that a company needs to put its full backing and needs to commit to a product if they wanted to succeed now they probably will just think no one wants Linux but they just didn't want that product where you sold it how you sold it that's it if people don't know it exists it's just never gonna sell and it sucks because the people I talked to at the time at system 76 and HP were very enthusiastic and very proud of the device and yeah I just guess corporate was not having any of it and just wanted to take zero risks whatsoever with the release of the Linux kernel 6.2 and the included support for M1 chips from Apple many people myself included started seeing a future where any distro would run perfectly on this shiny new Apple devices but it looks like that celebration was premature as the developers from azaki Linux explained in a long thread on Twitter and Mastodon the gist of it is that support for the main chip is just the start and that many other components of these devices still don't have Mainline support in the Linux kernel for example all the input devices like the touchpad and the keyboards aren't functional yet and to even have a useful system with an M1 Mac you would need a kernel combined with a 16k page size which most distros do not do right now if they even have an arm build they still said that their goal is indeed to have all that work upstreamed in the kernel when it's ready and to have all distros working well out of the box with the mainline kernel but for now and for the foreseeable future you will need to run azahi or at least their kernel to have a usable system they're also apparently working with certain distros already to help them ship arm builds that run well on these new Macs and they will have something to announce in the near future in the meantime mayakulpa for being too enthusiastic about this last week now still the azahi team is doing excellent work and the way they've been able to just reverse engineer everything on these laptops up to Beta quality in just two years is very very nice now in Gnome land this week there's some good news about the gnome Circle program reaching its 50th accepted app now as a reminder circle is a program that showcases apps designed for Gnome and that follow all interface design and accessibility guidelines of the project it's basically a list of all the unofficial non-core gnome apps that will still look perfectly right on your gnome desktop recently added apps include chess clock comiku which is a manga reader or eyedropper a Color Picker and color palette generator other apps with cool updates include pcapp backup now letting you enable presets to exclude folders from your backups and adding excluding rules based on regular Expressions plus the ability to manually delete certain archives and more automated help to mount USB drives and use them as backup devices gjs the JavaScript engine that powers gnome shell and various gnome apps also received some work with new methods and more integration with glib so developers have access to more power with that engine the gnomebox has got a new virtual machine creation dialog that's simpler and More in line with gnome's human interface guidelines gnome Builder can now start an application with the GDK inspector active and also got a revamped messages panel to make troubleshooting your app easier elastic a graphical Editor to tweak the parameters of gdk4 and libid Vita animations inside of applications is also now available on flat Hub and Bottles got a new update as well with a revamped new bottle interface and various UI and icon changes to make the app easier to use and understand a lot of other applications also made progress like dinaro the personal finance manager fractal The Matrix client login manager settings tube converter and more it really seems that every week there are new gnome apps and the existing ones are getting better and better so I thought the gnome team is getting better at compiling all the progress reports from developers or there is just a lot of interest in developing gnome applications I don't think I've seen that app ecosystem being so alive the pine64 is already planning a revision of their Pine tab the second model will Embark either four gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of emmc storage or 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage still emmc it's priced higher than the previous model with the entry level one going for 159 US Dollars and the larger capacity one costing 209 compared to the 99 price tag of the original all versions do include a detachable keyboard for that price though so it still looks like a decent deal the CPU will be a rock chip rk3566 compared to the all-winner 64 in the first model which means each of the four GPU cores now goes up to 1.8 gigahertz and the Mali GPU also got a noticeable bump but it still won't be a speed demon by any means as with most Pine 64 products it will still sport a 10.1 inch IPS touchscreen but it will move to a USB 3 Type C port on top of a USB 2 type c compared to the originals USB 2 type A and micro USB it will still be user serviceable and of course it will run Linux apparently with an Arch Linux build for arm and KDE out of the box they will be available to order in April unless something goes wrong and as with all 0.64 devices they are more meant for developers to have a good solid Hardware base to start developing their applications on arm or on touch screens or smartphones then for the general public but enthusiasts can still buy them and have a nice shiny little toy that they can bring with them and seeing that most Linux tablet projects seem to fail or falter with the latest one the fight tabs seemingly being dead in the water with no one getting confirmation for pre-orders or anything then maybe it's better to rely on an underpowered device made by a company that's actually known to deliver the products that they announced and let's finish this with the gaming news as Weyland slowly becomes the default on multiple distributions and most of the work of the main desktop environments is done to support Weyland there's one last holdout which is gaming currently every game ran with proton or wine runs an X server on top of Weyland with the performance penalty it implies this might finally change though as the Weyland driver for wine is getting closer there's a new merger request that that would mean the first parts of that support could make it into wine namely the whale and Driver itself and it will also prepare the build tools to handle Weyland protocol files it is definitely not ready yet but the second part will include basic display support so it could move fast once the first parts are accepted and this would probably mean higher gaming performance as well not just on Weyland specifically but also compared to x.org as well and compositors tend to use newer apis much better and be way faster to draw things on screen the steam deck has now passed 8 000 games supported on the device with almost 3 000 verified titles that should run without any issues and about 5 000 playable titles that will also run very well but might not be perfectly suited to a small display or a controller the number of new titles being added to the list doesn't seem to really stole or slow down which is good although as time goes by more games are put in the playable category than in the verified one still the steam deck is truly a little Marvel and I can't wait to see where they're taking that product line next because it seems to have sold very very well so I would be surprised if there wasn't a revision in the future maybe with a more powerful AMD CPU that might also be more battery efficient and with 8 000 games it's probably now the handheld console that got the most games ever in the entire world which is pretty cool pretty cool like this Segway to today's sponsor if you're due for a computer replacement and your plan is to run Linux on it you should probably stop looking at Windows devices and trying to make Linux work on it and you should probably just buy any computer from tuxedo which are designed specifically to run Linux they are based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and and they have a big range of devices that should have something for every need and for every price point whether you need a laptop a desktop a simple stable affordable one or a very powerful tower or laptop they have everything all their devices have a lot of customization options to really tailor it to your needs and they're also all upgradable and repairable including the battery the SSD and the ram so if you need a new computer you want to support linux's development and you want to run Linux on your device buy something that was made to run Linux from the link in the description below they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well that's not possible but if you didn't you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to support what I do there are plenty of links down there for YouTube memberships patreon PayPal and whatever else super thanks or whatever is on YouTube you can click them to see if you want to help support what I do so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I just came back home from my holiday I'm a bit sunburned and a bit woozy from the flight home but I'm not about to let you go through a full week without your healthy dose of Linux and open source news so this week we have people from Getty from Debian and from gnome pushing for funding for flat Hub to add payment support in the app store we have proof that most corporate companies are using open source software very wrong and we have the unfortunate demise of the HP dev1 and probably the end of hp's Linux efforts so let's look at that let's look at the other news and let's look at this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and you probably already know about Alma Linux the replacement to Centos it's free of charge it's managed by the community and it's backed financially by tax care well if you plan to run Alma Linux in production environments or if you already do now you can get commercial support from tax care as well with Alma care you get 16 years of support for Alma Linux with security updates and new hardware support so your Fleet is more stable maintenance costs are reduced and your Hardware can be used longer you will also get a dedicated repo for all Alpha Linux packages so you get updates faster it also includes live patching support so you can keep your kernel up to date without rebooting your systems and with zero downtime and of course you get commercial support for a wide range of packages like ansible kubernetes Maria DB and MySQL containers and more basically if you want to deploy Alma Linux in commercial production environments you need all my care and you can learn all about it by clicking the link in the description there's a proposal being made for flat Hub to add payments donations and subscription options to the platform it's been submitted by Robert McQueen the CEO of endless OS and the president of of The Gnome board but it also seems to be endorsed by people from KDE gnome and Debian as well this proposal seeks to get appropriate funding from the plain text group an initiative developed by Schmidt Futures founded by the ex-ceo of Google Eric Schmidt they're seeking a hundred thousand dollars to fund the work and the rationale here is to help remove the barriers for open source application funding by adding easier ways for people to contribute to the applications that they use the proposal has been here a while dating back to November 2022 and accepted for consideration in the plain text group's GitHub repository now flat Hub is already moving towards that goal as they are working to add donations and payments on flat Hub through stride and they are also working on a way for developers to verify that they own the apps they publish so users know they would be contributing to the official project and not to any third-party package and of course you will always get some people clamoring against such a move because there's always been that notion that going commercial is bad somehow but here we're talking about flat Hub a community controlled non-profit not about a corporate entity seeking to profit off of Open Source work and personally I am all for it if I could have a simple way to donate to to library office to every single app that I use through the app store without having to use 10 different payment platforms or support platforms of donation platforms I would absolutely do it especially if it comes with a list of all the apps I already bought on flat Hub on any other distro so I can reinstall them in one click that would be great but more generally it would also mean that it's way easier for app developers to gather a little bit of money to fund the continued work on those applications and it might also attract other Developers for applications that are commercial and sold and just cannot really be distributed that well on Linux right now looks like companies are using open source software wrong as Recent research showed that 84 of commercial and proprietary code bases show at least one known open source vulnerability 48 of these code bases also showed a high risk vulnerability staying unpatched in the 2023 edition of synopsis as open source security and risk analysis they base themselves on audits of code bases involved in mergers and Acquisitions for a total of almost 1500 code bases that they looked at for vulnerabilities and open source licensing compliance the number of Open Source vulnerabilities apparently Rose by four percent since 2021 and free and open source code is literally everywhere making up to 73 of the total code for companies in Aerospace Aviation Automotive or transportation and 63 of that code contain vulnerabilities and do know that this isn't because open source code is insecure 91 of the code bases had vulnerabilities because they used outdated versions of Open Source components with patches available but unapplied apparently this is because most teams might think that upgrading to a newer version would take too much time or create other problems and so they prefer leaving a vulnerability in instead of actually updating the various free and open source components that they use a strategy that is generally not the good one but a very common one as anyone who worked in web dev or just development in general can attest to try to take a full development Sprint just to work on maintenance upgrading components and removing technological debt no one's ever going to grant you that in most companies you might remember the HP dev1 a pretty great laptop made in collaboration with HP and system 76 running pop OS out of the box with Hardware picked and tuned specifically to run Linux and even some work being upstreamed in AMD drivers and or Linux kernel I reviewed it and found it a great option for people who want to think bad experience without getting a ThinkPad itself and it's questionable approach to design well it looks like ThinkPad owners will be able to just laugh and keep their laptops as HP cammed the project the HP dev1 is now discontinued and will not see a second iteration although at least the company will support existing models all the way through January 2026 or at least three years from the purchase date it seems obvious now why the product failed only being sold with a qwerty keyboard and only being sold in the US never seeing a release for any other country now they also never really advertised it it was never really on their own website and they kept it so close to the ThinkPad template that probably the only real Target was us ThinkPad users which will always prefer using a ThinkPad still it's sad to see HP fail to put enough backing behind the product as Dell for example has been selling their XPS line with Linux pre-in styled for about 10 years now and they seem to do all right with these devices it really shows that a company needs to put its full backing and needs to commit to a product if they wanted to succeed now they probably will just think no one wants Linux but they just didn't want that product where you sold it how you sold it that's it if people don't know it exists it's just never gonna sell and it sucks because the people I talked to at the time at system 76 and HP were very enthusiastic and very proud of the device and yeah I just guess corporate was not having any of it and just wanted to take zero risks whatsoever with the release of the Linux kernel 6.2 and the included support for M1 chips from Apple many people myself included started seeing a future where any distro would run perfectly on this shiny new Apple devices but it looks like that celebration was premature as the developers from azaki Linux explained in a long thread on Twitter and Mastodon the gist of it is that support for the main chip is just the start and that many other components of these devices still don't have Mainline support in the Linux kernel for example all the input devices like the touchpad and the keyboards aren't functional yet and to even have a useful system with an M1 Mac you would need a kernel combined with a 16k page size which most distros do not do right now if they even have an arm build they still said that their goal is indeed to have all that work upstreamed in the kernel when it's ready and to have all distros working well out of the box with the mainline kernel but for now and for the foreseeable future you will need to run azahi or at least their kernel to have a usable system they're also apparently working with certain distros already to help them ship arm builds that run well on these new Macs and they will have something to announce in the near future in the meantime mayakulpa for being too enthusiastic about this last week now still the azahi team is doing excellent work and the way they've been able to just reverse engineer everything on these laptops up to Beta quality in just two years is very very nice now in Gnome land this week there's some good news about the gnome Circle program reaching its 50th accepted app now as a reminder circle is a program that showcases apps designed for Gnome and that follow all interface design and accessibility guidelines of the project it's basically a list of all the unofficial non-core gnome apps that will still look perfectly right on your gnome desktop recently added apps include chess clock comiku which is a manga reader or eyedropper a Color Picker and color palette generator other apps with cool updates include pcapp backup now letting you enable presets to exclude folders from your backups and adding excluding rules based on regular Expressions plus the ability to manually delete certain archives and more automated help to mount USB drives and use them as backup devices gjs the JavaScript engine that powers gnome shell and various gnome apps also received some work with new methods and more integration with glib so developers have access to more power with that engine the gnomebox has got a new virtual machine creation dialog that's simpler and More in line with gnome's human interface guidelines gnome Builder can now start an application with the GDK inspector active and also got a revamped messages panel to make troubleshooting your app easier elastic a graphical Editor to tweak the parameters of gdk4 and libid Vita animations inside of applications is also now available on flat Hub and Bottles got a new update as well with a revamped new bottle interface and various UI and icon changes to make the app easier to use and understand a lot of other applications also made progress like dinaro the personal finance manager fractal The Matrix client login manager settings tube converter and more it really seems that every week there are new gnome apps and the existing ones are getting better and better so I thought the gnome team is getting better at compiling all the progress reports from developers or there is just a lot of interest in developing gnome applications I don't think I've seen that app ecosystem being so alive the pine64 is already planning a revision of their Pine tab the second model will Embark either four gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of emmc storage or 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage still emmc it's priced higher than the previous model with the entry level one going for 159 US Dollars and the larger capacity one costing 209 compared to the 99 price tag of the original all versions do include a detachable keyboard for that price though so it still looks like a decent deal the CPU will be a rock chip rk3566 compared to the all-winner 64 in the first model which means each of the four GPU cores now goes up to 1.8 gigahertz and the Mali GPU also got a noticeable bump but it still won't be a speed demon by any means as with most Pine 64 products it will still sport a 10.1 inch IPS touchscreen but it will move to a USB 3 Type C port on top of a USB 2 type c compared to the originals USB 2 type A and micro USB it will still be user serviceable and of course it will run Linux apparently with an Arch Linux build for arm and KDE out of the box they will be available to order in April unless something goes wrong and as with all 0.64 devices they are more meant for developers to have a good solid Hardware base to start developing their applications on arm or on touch screens or smartphones then for the general public but enthusiasts can still buy them and have a nice shiny little toy that they can bring with them and seeing that most Linux tablet projects seem to fail or falter with the latest one the fight tabs seemingly being dead in the water with no one getting confirmation for pre-orders or anything then maybe it's better to rely on an underpowered device made by a company that's actually known to deliver the products that they announced and let's finish this with the gaming news as Weyland slowly becomes the default on multiple distributions and most of the work of the main desktop environments is done to support Weyland there's one last holdout which is gaming currently every game ran with proton or wine runs an X server on top of Weyland with the performance penalty it implies this might finally change though as the Weyland driver for wine is getting closer there's a new merger request that that would mean the first parts of that support could make it into wine namely the whale and Driver itself and it will also prepare the build tools to handle Weyland protocol files it is definitely not ready yet but the second part will include basic display support so it could move fast once the first parts are accepted and this would probably mean higher gaming performance as well not just on Weyland specifically but also compared to x.org as well and compositors tend to use newer apis much better and be way faster to draw things on screen the steam deck has now passed 8 000 games supported on the device with almost 3 000 verified titles that should run without any issues and about 5 000 playable titles that will also run very well but might not be perfectly suited to a small display or a controller the number of new titles being added to the list doesn't seem to really stole or slow down which is good although as time goes by more games are put in the playable category than in the verified one still the steam deck is truly a little Marvel and I can't wait to see where they're taking that product line next because it seems to have sold very very well so I would be surprised if there wasn't a revision in the future maybe with a more powerful AMD CPU that might also be more battery efficient and with 8 000 games it's probably now the handheld console that got the most games ever in the entire world which is pretty cool pretty cool like this Segway to today's sponsor if you're due for a computer replacement and your plan is to run Linux on it you should probably stop looking at Windows devices and trying to make Linux work on it and you should probably just buy any computer from tuxedo which are designed specifically to run Linux they are based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and and they have a big range of devices that should have something for every need and for every price point whether you need a laptop a desktop a simple stable affordable one or a very powerful tower or laptop they have everything all their devices have a lot of customization options to really tailor it to your needs and they're also all upgradable and repairable including the battery the SSD and the ram so if you need a new computer you want to support linux's development and you want to run Linux on your device buy something that was made to run Linux from the link in the description below they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well that's not possible but if you didn't you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to support what I do there are plenty of links down there for YouTube memberships patreon PayPal and whatever else super thanks or whatever is on YouTube you can click them to see if you want to help support what I do so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you follow the Twitter acquisition Saga you might have seen that Elon Musk has plans to turn Twitter into the everything app now whether you like what musk is doing with Twitter or not that's not the point of the video the point is that this everything app vision is a freaking nightmare for every potential user whether it's coming from Twitter or from anybody else so let's talk about this and see why no one should want Twitter or any other app for that matter become the everything app and let's also talk about the everything Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and you probably already know about Alma Linux the replacement to Centos it's free of charge it's managed by the community and it's backed financially by tax care well if you plan to run Alma Linux in production environments or if you already do now you can get commercial support from tax care as well with Alma care you get 16 years of support for Alma Linux with security updates and new hardware support so your Fleet is more stable maintenance costs are reduced and your Hardware can be used longer you will also get a dedicated repo for all Alpha Linux packages so you get updates faster it also includes live patching support so you can keep your kernel up to date without rebooting your systems and with zero downtime and of course you get commercial support for a wide range of packages like ansible kubernetes Maria DB and MySQL contain winners and more basically if you want to deploy Alma Linux in commercial production environments you need all my care and you can learn all about it by clicking the link in the description so what is an everything app well Elon Musk has shown a few slides of the vision he has for Twitter the first one is advertising as entertainment which should immediately be a red flag because advertising isn't entertainment it's a way to make you buy products but more seriously this is a slight deck for the company so it's meant to incite enthusiasm for the vision inside of Twitter and advertising is what makes Twitter money so it's logical to want to improve ads on Twitter so they are perceived less negatively now the real features though are the following video and crypto direct messages long form tweets the blue verified program and payments that Twitter 2.0 vision is relatively simple it's having one single app where people companies and creators can exchange short messages articles videos direct messages that would be encrypted and also payments plus a way to control who is who using the verified program which hasn't been a complete success for now now it would mean that there's a big incentive to use Twitter for all of these things because as a Creator why would I use different platforms for my videos my articles and my social posts if I can use my Twitter following for everything I wouldn't have to rebuild an audience on multiple platforms especially if I can monetize all these things on Twitter directly as a general user I can just follow the people I like in one single place no need to use 10 apps to see everything and since I'm already there for the videos and articles and tweets why not also use the DMS in here to talk to my friends instead of using a separate app and at that point the payment feature makes sense if everyone I talk to is in there I can send them money directly without using another account in another app and since I set up a payment method why not use Twitter to pay in real life as well and on paper it's kinda cool as a vision and instead of having tens of apps and services and trying to remember which does what and who is where and how you can talk to somebody or follow somebody you have one app a One-Stop shop for every of these needs of course it only works if everyone jumps on board if you still have more than half of your contacts that are not using Twitter and that are using other fragmented applications here and there then you're not likely to jump onto Twitter to do everything but let's assume it works out though there are some big big problems with that Vision the first issue is control if everyone uses Twitter for their social network needs for their videos payments article reading day-to-day messaging then Twitter controls major parts of the internet they control Communications with all your DMs and group conversations and all the day-to-day background noise that is social media they control monetary exchanges between people and between people in various stores or websites and they control the content people watch and read with articles and videos and their own algorithm one company should not have that amount of control over what people see or do on the internet hey wait a minute how is that different from what Apple Google or Microsoft are doing right now well the big difference is that with these companies you can mix and match the services you use you can use an iPhone but not use Apple pay without it being a hindrance you can use Chrome and Google search but access your news through any other website than Google news without a problem the difference is that these companies offer an ecosystem of services they're all connected they all work better if you use them all together but they are not wrapped in a single access point even Android and iOS aren't limiting you in setting default apps nowadays if all your services are inside of a single application then you cannot mix and match when your mom asks you on Twitter to give her some money once again because she overspent on micro transactions in Candy Crush then the give Mom some money button cannot be mapped to another payment service than the one Twitter will use when your little cousin Billy tries to coerce you into playing card Warzone by saying that he banged your mom which you just sent money to then the tell Billy to Naf off button cannot be remapped to another application then Twitter's DMS this means that if you want to use another service you have to close Twitter open another app find the contact you want to interact with tap on it and do the action you want you would have zero integration with the application everyone basically lives in the rest of the day which would be Twitter and that kind of friction would mean that people just use the default which is what Twitter would provide that's the main difference today's friction when leaving an ecosystem comes from setting the default once the friction from the everything app would be changing that default every single time you want to repeat that same action and of course there's another problem a privacy problem yeah since everything you do is in one single application this also means your profile in this specific app is incredibly big and valuable to advertisers imagine this gold mine Twitter would know which companies you follow what you liked who you talk to what article you read which videos you watched which contacts you talked to the most what you talk about with these contacts who you sent money to what you buy online or even in Real Life currently no company has that amount of data even Google is missing the social media part sure they know that you went to Facebook they know you clicked that link but they don't know which terrible Boomer meme you shared with your grandma and that's precisely why your company might want to build the everything app to have the biggest profiles on people especially since people would be heavily motivated to be verified since Twitter basically said that once Twitter blue is live for everyone if you don't have it you don't exist in the eyes of the algorithm with a bunch of verified customers that willingly confirmed who they are in real life the data is even more valuable and this nice big juicy profile is definitely a privacy nightmare you would have zero control over what you share and zero ability to replace some of these services with ones that are private because Twitter will not let you plug in some other services instead of the ones they provide it's not an OS it's an app oh but things don't stop there because now there's also a security issue with that amount of data available on so many people Twitter becomes the prime target of choice for hackers now sure Twitter wants to encrypt the DMS but no encryption is invulnerable and the rest of the data might still be accessible even if it's not credit card numbers they could access the information users supplied to be verified they could access payment history on websites to try and do some phishing or if we're not talking about hackers trying to make a profit but hackers trying to launch some disinformation campaigns just knowing what certain people watch and at which time might be enough for them to increase their reach and bombard people with false information propaganda and more and then there's the law because if a government decides that they want access to all of their citizens data then Twitter becomes the Prime Choice for them and they will be compelled to give that information to the government of the country they operate in which means that now your government knows everything about every single one of their citizens which depending on your religious beliefs your political orientations your sexual orientations your ethnicity might be a very very big problem so by now it should be clear that the everything up is pretty undesirable but I can see a big sentence coming up if you don't like it just don't use it except the world doesn't work like that because if everyone else uses Twitter as their all-in-one communication social entertainment and payment solution then if I want to be part of their lives I also have to use it if I don't I'm excluded from everything if everyone uses Twitter for everything then the expectation is that you also do and if you don't then you're excluded from their social lives so it's not as simple as just don't use it but fortunately this Vision will probably never happen because the elephant in the room is WeChat WeChat is the everything app for China WeChat lets you well chat in text and video form but it also lets you pay post articles and lock them behind paywalls it lets you create your own store online it lets you collaborate with other people you work with it has video channels live streams translation a search engine shipment tracking and more but WeChat managed to lock people into their application because at the time when it introduced these features China did not have an alternative in place for these features which meant that WeChat solved a problem for Chinese users Twitter becoming an everything app doesn't solve any problems people have everything this new vision offers is already available and the other options are already very popular YouTube Tick Tock and twitch already Corner the video and streaming Market chat features are already completely split up between WhatsApp Facebook Messenger iMessage and more articles and long form content go completely against the very basic purpose of Twitter which is sharing small messages and people who want a personal social network for their family and friends use Facebook or SnapChat or Instagram and payments are already either handled by your bank Apple pay Google pay Samsung pay there is no need here for another all-in-one option so fortunately the Twitter 2.0 vision is very unlikely to end up being the everything app that everyone else uses because while some people will find it convenient to have everything in the same place a lot of people will just never abandon what they already know use and like just to move on to the Twitter alternative just because they have a Twitter account the incentive is not there Facebook tried it they added anything and everything they could think of or that they could steal from someone else stories filters polls games articles payments store events notes places photos video streaming podcasts Facebook tried again and again to be the everything app Twitter 2.0 is nothing new it's what Facebook has been trying to accomplish since its creation but it never worked because by the time Facebook implemented these features people were already used to other websites and other applications offering the same feature and just because they had a Facebook account didn't mean that they would switch entirely to the Facebook offering instead and fortunately for Twitter it's probably going to go the same way but in the end the only real way to make sure that this Vision doesn't happen is to not use the features as they appear on Twitter just like this segue to today's sponsor appeared out of nowhere if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at Windows computers click the link in the description below you'll be taken to tuxedo's website which is a company that ships worldwide and has devices that have been picked and built specifically to run Linux the hardware is specifically selected because it's compatible with Linux so you remove a ton of the headache and honestly they have so many choices and price points that they should have something that answers your needs from the smallest more affordable laptop to the biggest Ultrabook or workstation Tower they have it they have plenty of customization options you can open the laptops up and the desktops and repair them and upgrade them and you can pick your own custom keyboard layout to be engraved on the keys of your laptop or your own custom logo or no logo at all on your computer so if you need a new computer you plan to run Linux on it click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment and if you didn't like the video when you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you like what I do and you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath the video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both of them get access to a weekly podcast exclusive podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll come so if you're interested both links are down there in the description in the meantime thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you follow the Twitter acquisition Saga you might have seen that Elon Musk has plans to turn Twitter into the everything app now whether you like what musk is doing with Twitter or not that's not the point of the video the point is that this everything app vision is a freaking nightmare for every potential user whether it's coming from Twitter or from anybody else so let's talk about this and see why no one should want Twitter or any other app for that matter become the everything app and let's also talk about the everything Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and you probably already know about Alma Linux the replacement to Centos it's free of charge it's managed by the community and it's backed financially by tax care well if you plan to run Alma Linux in production environments or if you already do now you can get commercial support from tax care as well with Alma care you get 16 years of support for Alma Linux with security updates and new hardware support so your Fleet is more stable maintenance costs are reduced and your Hardware can be used longer you will also get a dedicated repo for all Alpha Linux packages so you get updates faster it also includes live patching support so you can keep your kernel up to date without rebooting your systems and with zero downtime and of course you get commercial support for a wide range of packages like ansible kubernetes Maria DB and MySQL contain winners and more basically if you want to deploy Alma Linux in commercial production environments you need all my care and you can learn all about it by clicking the link in the description so what is an everything app well Elon Musk has shown a few slides of the vision he has for Twitter the first one is advertising as entertainment which should immediately be a red flag because advertising isn't entertainment it's a way to make you buy products but more seriously this is a slight deck for the company so it's meant to incite enthusiasm for the vision inside of Twitter and advertising is what makes Twitter money so it's logical to want to improve ads on Twitter so they are perceived less negatively now the real features though are the following video and crypto direct messages long form tweets the blue verified program and payments that Twitter 2.0 vision is relatively simple it's having one single app where people companies and creators can exchange short messages articles videos direct messages that would be encrypted and also payments plus a way to control who is who using the verified program which hasn't been a complete success for now now it would mean that there's a big incentive to use Twitter for all of these things because as a Creator why would I use different platforms for my videos my articles and my social posts if I can use my Twitter following for everything I wouldn't have to rebuild an audience on multiple platforms especially if I can monetize all these things on Twitter directly as a general user I can just follow the people I like in one single place no need to use 10 apps to see everything and since I'm already there for the videos and articles and tweets why not also use the DMS in here to talk to my friends instead of using a separate app and at that point the payment feature makes sense if everyone I talk to is in there I can send them money directly without using another account in another app and since I set up a payment method why not use Twitter to pay in real life as well and on paper it's kinda cool as a vision and instead of having tens of apps and services and trying to remember which does what and who is where and how you can talk to somebody or follow somebody you have one app a One-Stop shop for every of these needs of course it only works if everyone jumps on board if you still have more than half of your contacts that are not using Twitter and that are using other fragmented applications here and there then you're not likely to jump onto Twitter to do everything but let's assume it works out though there are some big big problems with that Vision the first issue is control if everyone uses Twitter for their social network needs for their videos payments article reading day-to-day messaging then Twitter controls major parts of the internet they control Communications with all your DMs and group conversations and all the day-to-day background noise that is social media they control monetary exchanges between people and between people in various stores or websites and they control the content people watch and read with articles and videos and their own algorithm one company should not have that amount of control over what people see or do on the internet hey wait a minute how is that different from what Apple Google or Microsoft are doing right now well the big difference is that with these companies you can mix and match the services you use you can use an iPhone but not use Apple pay without it being a hindrance you can use Chrome and Google search but access your news through any other website than Google news without a problem the difference is that these companies offer an ecosystem of services they're all connected they all work better if you use them all together but they are not wrapped in a single access point even Android and iOS aren't limiting you in setting default apps nowadays if all your services are inside of a single application then you cannot mix and match when your mom asks you on Twitter to give her some money once again because she overspent on micro transactions in Candy Crush then the give Mom some money button cannot be mapped to another payment service than the one Twitter will use when your little cousin Billy tries to coerce you into playing card Warzone by saying that he banged your mom which you just sent money to then the tell Billy to Naf off button cannot be remapped to another application then Twitter's DMS this means that if you want to use another service you have to close Twitter open another app find the contact you want to interact with tap on it and do the action you want you would have zero integration with the application everyone basically lives in the rest of the day which would be Twitter and that kind of friction would mean that people just use the default which is what Twitter would provide that's the main difference today's friction when leaving an ecosystem comes from setting the default once the friction from the everything app would be changing that default every single time you want to repeat that same action and of course there's another problem a privacy problem yeah since everything you do is in one single application this also means your profile in this specific app is incredibly big and valuable to advertisers imagine this gold mine Twitter would know which companies you follow what you liked who you talk to what article you read which videos you watched which contacts you talked to the most what you talk about with these contacts who you sent money to what you buy online or even in Real Life currently no company has that amount of data even Google is missing the social media part sure they know that you went to Facebook they know you clicked that link but they don't know which terrible Boomer meme you shared with your grandma and that's precisely why your company might want to build the everything app to have the biggest profiles on people especially since people would be heavily motivated to be verified since Twitter basically said that once Twitter blue is live for everyone if you don't have it you don't exist in the eyes of the algorithm with a bunch of verified customers that willingly confirmed who they are in real life the data is even more valuable and this nice big juicy profile is definitely a privacy nightmare you would have zero control over what you share and zero ability to replace some of these services with ones that are private because Twitter will not let you plug in some other services instead of the ones they provide it's not an OS it's an app oh but things don't stop there because now there's also a security issue with that amount of data available on so many people Twitter becomes the prime target of choice for hackers now sure Twitter wants to encrypt the DMS but no encryption is invulnerable and the rest of the data might still be accessible even if it's not credit card numbers they could access the information users supplied to be verified they could access payment history on websites to try and do some phishing or if we're not talking about hackers trying to make a profit but hackers trying to launch some disinformation campaigns just knowing what certain people watch and at which time might be enough for them to increase their reach and bombard people with false information propaganda and more and then there's the law because if a government decides that they want access to all of their citizens data then Twitter becomes the Prime Choice for them and they will be compelled to give that information to the government of the country they operate in which means that now your government knows everything about every single one of their citizens which depending on your religious beliefs your political orientations your sexual orientations your ethnicity might be a very very big problem so by now it should be clear that the everything up is pretty undesirable but I can see a big sentence coming up if you don't like it just don't use it except the world doesn't work like that because if everyone else uses Twitter as their all-in-one communication social entertainment and payment solution then if I want to be part of their lives I also have to use it if I don't I'm excluded from everything if everyone uses Twitter for everything then the expectation is that you also do and if you don't then you're excluded from their social lives so it's not as simple as just don't use it but fortunately this Vision will probably never happen because the elephant in the room is WeChat WeChat is the everything app for China WeChat lets you well chat in text and video form but it also lets you pay post articles and lock them behind paywalls it lets you create your own store online it lets you collaborate with other people you work with it has video channels live streams translation a search engine shipment tracking and more but WeChat managed to lock people into their application because at the time when it introduced these features China did not have an alternative in place for these features which meant that WeChat solved a problem for Chinese users Twitter becoming an everything app doesn't solve any problems people have everything this new vision offers is already available and the other options are already very popular YouTube Tick Tock and twitch already Corner the video and streaming Market chat features are already completely split up between WhatsApp Facebook Messenger iMessage and more articles and long form content go completely against the very basic purpose of Twitter which is sharing small messages and people who want a personal social network for their family and friends use Facebook or SnapChat or Instagram and payments are already either handled by your bank Apple pay Google pay Samsung pay there is no need here for another all-in-one option so fortunately the Twitter 2.0 vision is very unlikely to end up being the everything app that everyone else uses because while some people will find it convenient to have everything in the same place a lot of people will just never abandon what they already know use and like just to move on to the Twitter alternative just because they have a Twitter account the incentive is not there Facebook tried it they added anything and everything they could think of or that they could steal from someone else stories filters polls games articles payments store events notes places photos video streaming podcasts Facebook tried again and again to be the everything app Twitter 2.0 is nothing new it's what Facebook has been trying to accomplish since its creation but it never worked because by the time Facebook implemented these features people were already used to other websites and other applications offering the same feature and just because they had a Facebook account didn't mean that they would switch entirely to the Facebook offering instead and fortunately for Twitter it's probably going to go the same way but in the end the only real way to make sure that this Vision doesn't happen is to not use the features as they appear on Twitter just like this segue to today's sponsor appeared out of nowhere if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at Windows computers click the link in the description below you'll be taken to tuxedo's website which is a company that ships worldwide and has devices that have been picked and built specifically to run Linux the hardware is specifically selected because it's compatible with Linux so you remove a ton of the headache and honestly they have so many choices and price points that they should have something that answers your needs from the smallest more affordable laptop to the biggest Ultrabook or workstation Tower they have it they have plenty of customization options you can open the laptops up and the desktops and repair them and upgrade them and you can pick your own custom keyboard layout to be engraved on the keys of your laptop or your own custom logo or no logo at all on your computer so if you need a new computer you plan to run Linux on it click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment and if you didn't like the video when you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you like what I do and you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath the video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both of them get access to a weekly podcast exclusive podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll come so if you're interested both links are down there in the description in the meantime thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and I'm finalizing this news video at the same time as I'm finalizing my bag for my holiday starting tonight don't worry you'll still get a video next week and it's a good one now about the Linux open source and privacy news this week we have Ubuntu making a very controversial move against flat pack in their official Ubuntu flavors we have Microsoft doubling down on anti-consumer features and we have the release of gnome 44's first beta with a ton of refinement to the desktop experience so let's take a look right after I tell you everything about today's sponsor which is a very cool open source project this video is sponsored by Chasm and more specifically they are open source VNC server called Chasm VNC this thing is a game changer if you want to connect remotely to a desktop to a server or to an application it uses less bandwidth it has higher frame rates and better quality than traditional VNC tools thanks to a better compression algorithm it lets you copy and paste seamlessly between devices it has improved security over the base VNC protocol and it's very configurable and best of all you don't need any client software you can use it straight from your web browser from anywhere it has packages for a wide variety of distros it works on arm and it supports GPU acceleration as well if you need to connect remotely to one of your computers give Chasm VNC a try I don't think you can get a smoother experience the links are in the description below looks like Ubuntu really does not want flat packs to be the standard as they announced that the official Ubuntu flavors will not in fact be allowed to ship flat pack by default the argument here is that Ubuntu flavors must represent the Ubuntu ecosystem and have a common core experience which apparently includes using snaps many flavors had an announced that they would add flat pack support by default in their upcoming releases 23.04 but this will not happen canonical stated that in an Ideal World users experience a single way to install software clearly mistaking the packaging format for the app that lets you install packages and conveniently ignoring that the vast majority of Linux distributions have embraced flat pack instead of canonical's packaging format the other rational is that users expect this packaging format to be supported and maintained by the community and the district they use so out of the box no official Ubuntu flavor will be allowed to ship flat pack pre-installed and enabled in the graphical App Store although that decision doesn't affect Ubuntu derivative distros that aren't using the official Ubuntu branding like Elementary OS mint zorin and a lot of others users will still be able to install flat pack from the command line and keep using it if they want and users who already had flat pack installed on their systems won't see it being removed either as all flavors have enabled a specific migration to let this package remain even if it had been pre-installed by the flavor itself previously and at best it's a bone-headed moves while I really like flat packs on servers because they're really useful on the desktop they are objectively worse than flat facts they are slower they take more space they clutter your Mount points and they are not as well integrated with the systems and the portals and Wayland as flat packs are and let's not forget that flavors are Community maintained and should definitely have the right to pre-install whatever they want including a competitor to snaps Microsoft doubled down on their anti-consumer moves with two new let's call them features the first one is introduced in Windows 11. you know that Windows 11 has some arbitrary requirements for running the system not only support for TPM chips and using a relatively recent CPU even though it would run fine on systems without these as proven by just a few registry tweaks that let you install the OS and run it perfectly well now it seems but windows will still annoy users who manage to bypass the restrictions by adding a watermark on your desktop telling you system requirements aren't met just like you would get a watermark if you didn't activate Windows with a license key now of course people already found a way to remove that message thankfully and on top of that it seems Microsoft wants to push Edge even more to their users as it will now inject ads on other websites when using Edge visiting the Google Chrome website for example apparently Nets you a nice giant Banner on top of the page showcasing certain Microsoft Edge features they also state that edge provides the same experience as Chrome with the added Trust of Microsoft which is insanely funny seeing as both companies are now pretty much in the spyware business it's still just an experiment it seems that not everyone will see the banner but when your web browser starts intentionally messing up the web experience you have to start worrying and yeah it's windows and it has nothing to do with Linux open source or privacy but I still think it's important to showcase the horrible decisions these big companies make just to show people that there are alternatives out there and of course it's also always funny as a Linux user to see these features being added to Windows 11 when we run perfectly fine systems that will never get this kind of crap the better for Gnome 44 is now out you can try it out using gnome OS The distrogue Gnome builds for specific testing purposes so what can we expect in this new release first it's the Quick Settings they've been revamped a lot with the Bluetooth toggle now letting you connect to devices you previously paired your computer with instead of just being an on and off switch all toggles also gained more descriptive text to better separate the list feature that lets you see performance modes Wi-Fi networks and more and the toggle itself that turns these features on or off the speaker icon in the Quick Settings is now clickable to turn volume off and keyboard navigation has been improved the screenshot icon got a new icon and there's a new background app section that will appear if you have applications active but that don't currently have a window it's basically their tray icon replacement it will only show up if you have background apps running but it doesn't give you access to a menu like a tray icon would so I don't think it will satisfy people who use the app indicator extension for example implementing that menu shouldn't be extremely hard though so maybe we'll see that in the future on top of that the file manager finally got icon view in the file picker which means you can now have image thumbnails when choosing a file and the list view gained back the ability to expand folders the lock screen was also revamped and looks nicer with your wallpaper blurred in the background and bigger user icons genome now supports wireguard vpns and can share Wi-Fi networks using a QR code the accessibility panel has been revamped there are animations in the mouse settings to show how natural scrolling works the about panel now shows the kernel version and for more information as well and various apps were improved including gnome web console Maps or boxes it looks like an evolutionary release that builds on top of what gnome 43 already introduced and I'm fine with that I will absolutely give it a proper test next month I think it releases on March the 22nd so expect a video at that point there's something going on with Solus the showcase distro for the budgie desktop environment their website forum and Bug tracker went down on January the 19th and it's still currently unavailable at the time I'm writing this script fortunately it just seems to be an issue with the website and the distro is fine according to the technical lead of the project it's just a DNS mask issue that took down the servers and this didn't create any data loss either all the package repos are still available and users of Solace can still keep running their distros without any issues although you will have to resort to Alternative download websites to get an ISO if you want one so do check the md5 checksums to ensure what you're downloading is really the official ISO still it raises the question first it's been a long while since the website has been down and it is not a good look for the project that it couldn't get everything back up in more than a month the team posted a little roadmap on Reddit letting people know they plan on fixing the issue and then that they will release an updated ISO and they also detailed the future plans for the distro probably to reassure people that operations will resume using include support for secure boots a new package manager called Seoul flat pack and snap integration in their software Center and moving to pipe wire as the default let's hope they can finally solve this issue Solus is a pretty cool distro and one of the few ones that actually builds Linux from scratch they don't base themselves off of another distribution now let's talk about privacy as Mozilla looked into Google's Play Store's privacy labels basically these little things that tell you if apps share information and with who and it looks like these labels are somewhat false and misleading for example it is stated in the Play Store that Twitter or Tick Tock doesn't share personal data with third parties while the Privacy policies of these applications explicitly say that yes they do send data to advertisers internet service providers and other companies Mozilla found that in 80 percent of the apps they reviewed the labels were false judging from what the actual privacy policy of the application was saying they compared labels and privacy policies for the 20 most popular paid apps on the Play store and the 20 most popular free apps which admittedly is a relatively small sample and should only Encompass apps from the biggest companies apps that have false or misleading labels include Minecraft Twitter Facebook YouTube Gmail Google Maps WhatsApp or Instagram other apps like various popular games had labels that more accurately reflected what the application actually collects still the conclusion remains you cannot trust the Privacy labels that Google puts in place and why should you they're the ones selling the ads most applications display to their users or they're the ones collecting the data from the applications so it is in their interest for you to download these applications and thus in their interest to make the apps look like they are more private than what they actually are could you see Google placing a warning saying invade your privacy on their own applications in the Play Store of course they wouldn't now Mozilla called for Apple and Google to work on a shared standard across app stores so users are more informed about privacy but I don't think Mozilla has the power to actually make that happen so for now it all relies on you the user to add actually read the privacy policy and decide for yourself which apps you actually want to use based on that the Linux kernel version 6.2 has been released and while it's not an LTS it should bring a lot of cool new things for us Linux users first it has out of the box support for Intel Arc gpus and it also brings support for Intel's on-demand driver that lets people purchase DLC for their Xeon CPUs and unlock more power Skylake CPUs should get better performance with an improved mitigation feature for red bleed a vulnerability on these chips but the headline is probably support for Apple M1 Pro Max and Ultra straight in the mainline kernel which means it should be easier to run any Distribution on M1 Max instead of having to use azahi or their kernel the NTFS driver was updated to hide dot files that Linux might create something that will make browsing an NTFS partition that you access on Linux and windows my much much cleaner on the window side and it's now possible to enable case insensitive folders and files as well DualShock 4S are also Now supported by the PlayStation hid driver even though I thought they already worked fine on Linux the 1X player handheld now has support for their fans and sensors and there's early support for RDX 3000 gpus in the Nuvo driver on top of plenty of improvements for file systems like better FS squash FS or xfat plus the base of the work for supporting Wi-Fi 7 support for USB 4 Wake On connect or disconnect and support for 4K 60hz displays on a Raspberry Pi as always you can compile it yourself or you can wait for your distro to package it which should happen relatively quickly if your distro isn't an LTS or an LTS kernel and let's finish this with the gaming news first is box 64 box 86. These are nice little compatibility layers to run x80 E6 apps on arm which is cooling itself but what is cooler is that they can now run the full Linux team client on arm computers that's really nice because it means that it could open the gates of Linux gaming on not only stuff like Pine Books Raspberry Pi's and the like but also on Apple M1 and M2 Max in the future of course it will still need to support proton and dxvk and all these little translation layers but being able to run Steam is already pretty awesome and it might mean you could get dedicated handheld gaming devices running power sipping arm CPUs in the future as well a pretty cool feature coming to steam in the near future is already available in beta and that's downloading games from your other local computers from your local network instead of redownloading them from the internet this is pretty cool as it means you could download a game on your deck way faster if it's already installed on your regular gaming PC it also means testing new hardware for me will be way faster as I won't have to re-download games on each device anymore with way faster downloads from my local network valve also says that this beta improved the performance for NVIDIA gpus and the new Big Picture Mode although gaming on Linux says that they didn't notice any Improvement on their end and it might actually have been worse the Mesa drivers version 23 are also now available they improve Ray tracing and support for Vulcan on AMD gpus they fix an issue in Rise of the Tomb Raider they improve support for KD's Wayland session and they include a lot of new Vulcan and opengl extensions you can download and compile it yourself or you can wait for your distro to ship the packages which is always the better strategy if you value your system stability and I'm really looking forward to be able to install my games from one of my PCS to the other because sure I could use an external USB drive to store a game's library that I move around but for testing purposes this does not give you the same performance as the actual SSD in the device so it's gonna shave off probably three or four hours of waiting time for every single Hardware review that I do which is awesome and speaking of reviews how about we review this Segway to today's sponsor I would give it a 7 out of 10. if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at devices made to run Windows click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they make laptops and desktops that run Linux out of the box the hardware has been picked specifically because it runs well on Linux and they have a big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point from the small affordable Ultrabooks to the biggest high-end workstations or gaming laptops they ship to most countries in the world and all of their laptops are openable and repairable and upgradable including the battery the SSD the RAM and sometimes even the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card so if you need a new computer and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why down there as well and if you really enjoy what I do and you want to support the channel there are plenty of links in the description below for PayPal for patreon for YouTube memberships for super thanks just take a look and choose what tickles your fancy so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and this is probably the most powerful laptop you can get with Linux pre-installed and one of the most powerful laptops period it's got the specs the build quality the looks a real mechanical keyboard a high refresh rate screen a giant touchpad and of course it runs Linux so let's take a look at this monster right after we take a look at this monster Segway to today's sponsor thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and you probably already have heard about them but if you haven't all you have to know is that if you need a website they're gonna be your all-in-one solution Squarespace lets you build any type of website from a personal portfolio to a blog or a full Digital Store complete with online payment and they have tons of templates that you can even customize fully to represent your brand or identity you can even enrich the website with a bunch of modules like a members only area or video gallery and if you need help booking a domain name to let people access your website or even if you just need a logo Squarespace has tools for that as well so head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description below and you'll get 10 of your first purchase okay so let's begin with the form factor and the build quality there's no two ways about it this is a big device it has a 17 inch screen and it's really 17 inches not the usual 17.3 or 18 inches that you often find in big laptops it's also 16x10 which should please a lot of people and all in all compared to other laptops of the same size it doesn't feel that huge here it is compared to my executive 16 from slim book and while it is wider it's not by much for an additional full inch of display of course it is not an Ultrabook an ultra thin device and it doesn't try to be the goal is to have desktop class performance in a portable form factor so it weighs 2.8 kilos and it's 38 centimeters wide 27 centimeters deep and 2.7 centimeters thick if you have to Lug your laptop around in your backpack all day that's a laptop that your back will definitely feel it is built like a tank as well with the chassis made of aluminum this time and not the usual magnesium alloy which isn't bad but not as rigid this one has literally no flex no band no creaking whatsoever it feels extremely solid and premium it also resists fingerprints really well thanks to a soft touch coating on the inside of the laptop which feels really good almost rubberized in a way but without feeling like plastic and with great thickness comes great power as the saying goes right because this laptop is so thick it can accommodate a really powerful cooling solution with two tall fans and plenty of space for airflow which means that it tends to stay a lot quieter under load than most thin and light laptops and since you have all the tools pre-installed to change the performance settings you can either run it at max power and use all the cooling available or you can run it at something closer to what a thin and light laptop would be like and get a very quiet experience and on top of that tall fans tend to produce a less high-pitched whiny noise than smaller flat fans in ultra thin laptops so even when the fan is running the noise isn't as annoying as it might be in another form factor and of course as with all tuxedo laptops you're free to open it and here you can access and replace the two m.2 SSD slots the ram the wireless card and the battery as well which is screwed in and not glued so yeah it's a very very big laptop very well built but very big but I can't hold that against it because it's basically its purpose okay but with all that torque of power what is actually inside the laptop for starters the CPU is the AMD ryzen 9 6900 HX it's an 8 core 16 threads 4.9 gigahertz processor that's basically the most powerful you can get in a laptop right now from AMD the 7000 series has been announced but it's really not widely available yet all models come with at least 16 gigs of RAM and an RTX 370 TI with 8 gigs of dedicated Ram you also get at least 250 gigs of pcie 3 solid-state storage and a 2560 by 1600 16x10 display that goes up to 240 hertz it also comes with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 but that's not enough to make it the most powerful Linux laptop ever right so yeah you can spec this thing up it can accommodate up to 64 gigs of 4 800 megahertz Ram up to 4 terabytes of pcie4 storage and more importantly either an RTX 3080 or 3080 TI and all cards run at their maximum total Graphics power Allowed by Nvidia which means they are not throttled in any way if you want to let the device run at max power you also get a 99 watt hour battery which is the maximum you'll be able to carry around in the device if you want to take it with you on a plane for example my review unit came with 32 gigs of RAM and the RTX 3080 TI and it comes in any color you want as long as it's black now let's talk about the performance because that's the main draw of this laptop get it draw like power draw first the CPU I ran geekbench 6 and it gave me scores of 2121 in single core and 10 219 in multi-core this is among the highest multi-core score I got on any device that I ever touched Intel still has the edge in single core with the 12th gen i7 reaching 2500 but the raw performance is definitely higher on the AMD side for multi-core so yeah that ryzen 9 6900 HX is a monster it will handle anything you might ever want to do on a laptop as per gaming I ran the usual shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark at high settings add the native resolution of 2560 by 1600 and it got me an average of 101 FPS when cranking all the settings to the Max still at the native resolution it still managed to reach 97 FPS and if you don't mind 1080p for higher frame rates at the higher settings and the game rendered at 1080p the Stellaris 17 got an extremely comfortable 110 FPS this thing will let you gain no doubt about it but I don't think there ever was any doubt about that whether you like AAA titles or Indie titles you'll run everything at Max settings at the native resolution and get 60 FPS no problem I also ran the unigene heaven Benchmark at the native resolution at high settings and got a score of 2715 and an average FPS of 107 with a minimum of 11 and a maximum of 162. it was a bit lower than expected but that Benchmark uses opengl and the CPU and the GPU weren't maxed out at all by The Benchmark so I guess I need to find something that is upper class more powerful than unigin heaven to test these new devices it also gave me an idea about thermals at 75 degrees under heavy load which isn't bad at all and it also gave me a peek at the fan noise which in Max performance mode was really decent and now not too loud it also probably means that some fan curved tweaking might allow the fan to run slower while allowing the laptop to go up to 80 or 85 degrees and this brings us to The Tuxedo Aquarius an external water cooling solution you can add to this laptop it's optional though it's a nicely designed little package you actually plug it in using the laptop's power brick and it then passes that power through to the laptop with a barrel Jack which means you can leave that thing on your desk and you don't have to mess with tons of cables it uses distilled water that you just pour in the small opening on the top and it connects to the laptop using the dedicated 2 ports at the back you then use the tuxedo Control Center app to connect to it through Bluetooth and you get a few settings like you can tweak the fan speed of the Aquarius or the RGB patterns on it I re-ran the shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark at the native resolution and the highest possible settings with the Aquarius attached and I got an average of 101 FPS so a four percent improvement over using the laptop by itself and sure with that accessory the laptop will run cooler for longer play sessions But You're basically trading the fan noise of the device for the fan noise of the Aquarius which is still pretty loud so for that 17-inch model fully specked I don't think it really makes that much of a difference but maybe for the 15 inch which is thinner it might be more useful since the water cooling will be more efficient than the fan inside when you're done using the water cooling system you can just disconnect from the control center and you have a small attachment that lets you drain the water from the laptop before transporting it somewhere else and I will admit seeing water come out of the back of your laptop is not an experience that is very reassuring I mean I know it's designed for it but you still have to be very careful so no water runs inside of one of the ports that is next to it that's not something I'm super comfortable with personally now let's talk about battery life with its 99 watt hour battery running in Nvidia on demand mode with the display at 50 brightness Wi-Fi being used to play YouTube videos in a loop in Firefox the laptop lasted for 8 hours and 12 minutes if you switch to using intel only you'll get about an hour of battery life and of course if you play games or do GPU intensive workflows using the dedicated GPU you can expect more around three to four hours maximum it's not bad and it's definitely more than enough for this use case after all with this device you're not going to be using it as a laptop most of the time it's gonna sit on your desk basically as a desktop replacement but it's nice to know that when you carry it around it is able to last for relatively long time before shutting down now let's talk about the keyboard the Stellaris 17 being the thick boy that it is has ample room to use a nice mechanical keyboard and that's what they're doing here while the Stellaris 15 uses an opto mechanical keyboard which felt nice but didn't have that clicky feel this one uses Cherry MX ultra low profile switches the key travel is really good at 1.8 millimeters and the click happens at 0.8 millimeters which means you don't have to press the key very far to actually actuate the switch it's a full keyboard as well with a nice numpad which I love but I know some people really don't like now what's more interesting is that some of the keys aren't using mechanical switches notably the function keys and the whole numpad they're using membrane switches instead which feels right for these keys and of course the elephant in the room is the noise this keyboard is super loud some of you might love it but if you work near other people you're going to drive them insane with that kind of noise and Tuxedo is aware that it's an acquired taste because the next model of the Stellar 17 will have the option to use membrane switches if you prefer still it is a really good keyboard the keys are a bit small for my taste and the review unit came with a German quartz layout which I just cannot get used to although you can get virtually any layout you want here and the clicky noise is definitely not for me but I can't deny it's a very pleasant typing experience if you wear earplugs now as per the touchpad well you can see it right it's humongous it's also thankfully centered and it's covered in glass so it's really smooth it feels very precise and using it with tap to click feels great now it is a dive board mechanism so obviously you cannot click everywhere on it it has to be in the bottom half of the touchpad and the sound it makes it satisfy buying and doesn't rattle so great inputs if you like clicky keyboards the stroke feels good but the sound is just way too loud and now I realize that this phrase taken out of context might sound pretty weird now what about the display well as I said it's 16 by 10 17 inches and it goes up to 240 hertz refresh rate which for once the innards of the laptop might actually be able to use in certain games the display is g-sync compatible to avoid any screen tearing issues that might happen on Linux with Nvidia and it's decently bright at 380 nits although it is definitely not the brightest panel I've ever seen it also has full ice RGB coverage viewing angles are great but it's hard to find panels that don't have that characteristic nowadays and the resolution is 2560 by 1600 which means that you might even be able to use it without any scaling seeing that it's relatively big in terms of ports you get a decent selection on the left you get the usual Kensington lock a USB a 3.2 gen 2x1 port a Microsoft input and a headphone jack on the right you get an SD card reader and two USB a 3.2 gen 1 Port and on the back you have a port for the Aquarius external water cooling solution a USBC 3.2 gen 2x1 Port an HDMI 2.1 port a gigabit Ethernet port and a barrel Jack now for the downsides there's only one USB C port and that's not super futile proof I would have liked at least a second one there's no Thunderbolts but it's an AMD based laptop and you very rarely get Thunderbolt on AMD laptops and I think that for the size gigabit Ethernet could have been replaced by 2.5 gigs and of course the barrel charger is an annoyance it's really big it's attached to a huge power brick but I guess with that kind of laptop charging through USBC was just not an option let's finish with the mic speakers and webcam the microphone is decent but nothing to write home about you'll want to run it at about 25 five percent volume to avoid picking up on internal sounds and it definitely will pick up the sound of your touchpad and of the keys the speakers get really really loud but they don't distort or sound tinny at all they have a good amount of bass and they will completely fill the room when you're listening to music or watching a show or movie although the sound lags definition a bit [Music] as per the webcam well it's 1080P and it can produce good results with decent lighting but it's still a bit grainy even in natural light it is just a small Notch above the usual potato cam see what I did there Notch webcam okay I'll shut up now and of course we have to talk about the price this laptop in its base configuration goes for 2700 Euros taxes included if you want the same model as my review unit with 32 gigs of RAM and the RTX 3080 TI then you'll have to pay a bit more than 3 500 euros again taxes included and that's not a price everyone can afford I personally can't even with that sweet sweet YouTube money it is a very Niche laptop it's meant for people who rarely carry their devices around but for whom a desktop still wouldn't cut it and for that specific crowd it is probably the best Linux laptop you could get with a fantastic keyboard insane build quality good display good touchpad and an absolute performance monster if you're on a budget though this will stay on aspirational device and if you just need a desktop computer well the same specs will probably cost you a lot less than this still it's really good to see super high-end laptops come with Linux out of the box so if you have the cache and you want the most powerful Linux gaming laptop or workstation you can get well there's a link to the website in the description below and if like me you can only dream of being able to own such a device well you can maybe re-watch the video or just keep drooling over the specs goodbye you giant chungus I'll miss you so thanks everyone for watching the video If you enjoyed it don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications or to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike the video and tell me why down there and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to support what I do well there are plenty of links in the description below for patreon PayPal super thanks YouTube memberships if you want to you decide so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I'm finalizing this news video at the same time as I'm finalizing my bag for my holiday starting tonight don't worry you'll still get a video next week and it's a good one now about the Linux open source and privacy news this week we have Ubuntu making a very controversial move against flat pack in their official Ubuntu flavors we have Microsoft doubling down on anti-consumer features and we have the release of gnome 44's first beta with a ton of refinement to the desktop experience so let's take a look right after I tell you everything about today's sponsor which is a very cool open source project this video is sponsored by Chasm and more specifically they are open source VNC server called Chasm VNC this thing is a game changer if you want to connect remotely to a desktop to a server or to an application it uses less bandwidth it has higher frame rates and better quality than traditional VNC tools thanks to a better compression algorithm it lets you copy and paste seamlessly between devices it has improved security over the base VNC protocol and it's very configurable and best of all you don't need any client software you can use it straight from your web browser from anywhere it has packages for a wide variety of distros it works on arm and it supports GPU acceleration as well if you need to connect remotely to one of your computers give Chasm VNC a try I don't think you can get a smoother experience the links are in the description below looks like Ubuntu really does not want flat packs to be the standard as they announced that the official Ubuntu flavors will not in fact be allowed to ship flat pack by default the argument here is that Ubuntu flavors must represent the Ubuntu ecosystem and have a common core experience which apparently includes using snaps many flavors had an announced that they would add flat pack support by default in their upcoming releases 23.04 but this will not happen canonical stated that in an Ideal World users experience a single way to install software clearly mistaking the packaging format for the app that lets you install packages and conveniently ignoring that the vast majority of Linux distributions have embraced flat pack instead of canonical's packaging format the other rational is that users expect this packaging format to be supported and maintained by the community and the district they use so out of the box no official Ubuntu flavor will be allowed to ship flat pack pre-installed and enabled in the graphical App Store although that decision doesn't affect Ubuntu derivative distros that aren't using the official Ubuntu branding like Elementary OS mint zorin and a lot of others users will still be able to install flat pack from the command line and keep using it if they want and users who already had flat pack installed on their systems won't see it being removed either as all flavors have enabled a specific migration to let this package remain even if it had been pre-installed by the flavor itself previously and at best it's a bone-headed moves while I really like flat packs on servers because they're really useful on the desktop they are objectively worse than flat facts they are slower they take more space they clutter your Mount points and they are not as well integrated with the systems and the portals and Wayland as flat packs are and let's not forget that flavors are Community maintained and should definitely have the right to pre-install whatever they want including a competitor to snaps Microsoft doubled down on their anti-consumer moves with two new let's call them features the first one is introduced in Windows 11. you know that Windows 11 has some arbitrary requirements for running the system not only support for TPM chips and using a relatively recent CPU even though it would run fine on systems without these as proven by just a few registry tweaks that let you install the OS and run it perfectly well now it seems but windows will still annoy users who manage to bypass the restrictions by adding a watermark on your desktop telling you system requirements aren't met just like you would get a watermark if you didn't activate Windows with a license key now of course people already found a way to remove that message thankfully and on top of that it seems Microsoft wants to push Edge even more to their users as it will now inject ads on other websites when using Edge visiting the Google Chrome website for example apparently Nets you a nice giant Banner on top of the page showcasing certain Microsoft Edge features they also state that edge provides the same experience as Chrome with the added Trust of Microsoft which is insanely funny seeing as both companies are now pretty much in the spyware business it's still just an experiment it seems that not everyone will see the banner but when your web browser starts intentionally messing up the web experience you have to start worrying and yeah it's windows and it has nothing to do with Linux open source or privacy but I still think it's important to showcase the horrible decisions these big companies make just to show people that there are alternatives out there and of course it's also always funny as a Linux user to see these features being added to Windows 11 when we run perfectly fine systems that will never get this kind of crap the better for Gnome 44 is now out you can try it out using gnome OS The distrogue Gnome builds for specific testing purposes so what can we expect in this new release first it's the Quick Settings they've been revamped a lot with the Bluetooth toggle now letting you connect to devices you previously paired your computer with instead of just being an on and off switch all toggles also gained more descriptive text to better separate the list feature that lets you see performance modes Wi-Fi networks and more and the toggle itself that turns these features on or off the speaker icon in the Quick Settings is now clickable to turn volume off and keyboard navigation has been improved the screenshot icon got a new icon and there's a new background app section that will appear if you have applications active but that don't currently have a window it's basically their tray icon replacement it will only show up if you have background apps running but it doesn't give you access to a menu like a tray icon would so I don't think it will satisfy people who use the app indicator extension for example implementing that menu shouldn't be extremely hard though so maybe we'll see that in the future on top of that the file manager finally got icon view in the file picker which means you can now have image thumbnails when choosing a file and the list view gained back the ability to expand folders the lock screen was also revamped and looks nicer with your wallpaper blurred in the background and bigger user icons genome now supports wireguard vpns and can share Wi-Fi networks using a QR code the accessibility panel has been revamped there are animations in the mouse settings to show how natural scrolling works the about panel now shows the kernel version and for more information as well and various apps were improved including gnome web console Maps or boxes it looks like an evolutionary release that builds on top of what gnome 43 already introduced and I'm fine with that I will absolutely give it a proper test next month I think it releases on March the 22nd so expect a video at that point there's something going on with Solus the showcase distro for the budgie desktop environment their website forum and Bug tracker went down on January the 19th and it's still currently unavailable at the time I'm writing this script fortunately it just seems to be an issue with the website and the distro is fine according to the technical lead of the project it's just a DNS mask issue that took down the servers and this didn't create any data loss either all the package repos are still available and users of Solace can still keep running their distros without any issues although you will have to resort to Alternative download websites to get an ISO if you want one so do check the md5 checksums to ensure what you're downloading is really the official ISO still it raises the question first it's been a long while since the website has been down and it is not a good look for the project that it couldn't get everything back up in more than a month the team posted a little roadmap on Reddit letting people know they plan on fixing the issue and then that they will release an updated ISO and they also detailed the future plans for the distro probably to reassure people that operations will resume using include support for secure boots a new package manager called Seoul flat pack and snap integration in their software Center and moving to pipe wire as the default let's hope they can finally solve this issue Solus is a pretty cool distro and one of the few ones that actually builds Linux from scratch they don't base themselves off of another distribution now let's talk about privacy as Mozilla looked into Google's Play Store's privacy labels basically these little things that tell you if apps share information and with who and it looks like these labels are somewhat false and misleading for example it is stated in the Play Store that Twitter or Tick Tock doesn't share personal data with third parties while the Privacy policies of these applications explicitly say that yes they do send data to advertisers internet service providers and other companies Mozilla found that in 80 percent of the apps they reviewed the labels were false judging from what the actual privacy policy of the application was saying they compared labels and privacy policies for the 20 most popular paid apps on the Play store and the 20 most popular free apps which admittedly is a relatively small sample and should only Encompass apps from the biggest companies apps that have false or misleading labels include Minecraft Twitter Facebook YouTube Gmail Google Maps WhatsApp or Instagram other apps like various popular games had labels that more accurately reflected what the application actually collects still the conclusion remains you cannot trust the Privacy labels that Google puts in place and why should you they're the ones selling the ads most applications display to their users or they're the ones collecting the data from the applications so it is in their interest for you to download these applications and thus in their interest to make the apps look like they are more private than what they actually are could you see Google placing a warning saying invade your privacy on their own applications in the Play Store of course they wouldn't now Mozilla called for Apple and Google to work on a shared standard across app stores so users are more informed about privacy but I don't think Mozilla has the power to actually make that happen so for now it all relies on you the user to add actually read the privacy policy and decide for yourself which apps you actually want to use based on that the Linux kernel version 6.2 has been released and while it's not an LTS it should bring a lot of cool new things for us Linux users first it has out of the box support for Intel Arc gpus and it also brings support for Intel's on-demand driver that lets people purchase DLC for their Xeon CPUs and unlock more power Skylake CPUs should get better performance with an improved mitigation feature for red bleed a vulnerability on these chips but the headline is probably support for Apple M1 Pro Max and Ultra straight in the mainline kernel which means it should be easier to run any Distribution on M1 Max instead of having to use azahi or their kernel the NTFS driver was updated to hide dot files that Linux might create something that will make browsing an NTFS partition that you access on Linux and windows my much much cleaner on the window side and it's now possible to enable case insensitive folders and files as well DualShock 4S are also Now supported by the PlayStation hid driver even though I thought they already worked fine on Linux the 1X player handheld now has support for their fans and sensors and there's early support for RDX 3000 gpus in the Nuvo driver on top of plenty of improvements for file systems like better FS squash FS or xfat plus the base of the work for supporting Wi-Fi 7 support for USB 4 Wake On connect or disconnect and support for 4K 60hz displays on a Raspberry Pi as always you can compile it yourself or you can wait for your distro to package it which should happen relatively quickly if your distro isn't an LTS or an LTS kernel and let's finish this with the gaming news first is box 64 box 86. These are nice little compatibility layers to run x80 E6 apps on arm which is cooling itself but what is cooler is that they can now run the full Linux team client on arm computers that's really nice because it means that it could open the gates of Linux gaming on not only stuff like Pine Books Raspberry Pi's and the like but also on Apple M1 and M2 Max in the future of course it will still need to support proton and dxvk and all these little translation layers but being able to run Steam is already pretty awesome and it might mean you could get dedicated handheld gaming devices running power sipping arm CPUs in the future as well a pretty cool feature coming to steam in the near future is already available in beta and that's downloading games from your other local computers from your local network instead of redownloading them from the internet this is pretty cool as it means you could download a game on your deck way faster if it's already installed on your regular gaming PC it also means testing new hardware for me will be way faster as I won't have to re-download games on each device anymore with way faster downloads from my local network valve also says that this beta improved the performance for NVIDIA gpus and the new Big Picture Mode although gaming on Linux says that they didn't notice any Improvement on their end and it might actually have been worse the Mesa drivers version 23 are also now available they improve Ray tracing and support for Vulcan on AMD gpus they fix an issue in Rise of the Tomb Raider they improve support for KD's Wayland session and they include a lot of new Vulcan and opengl extensions you can download and compile it yourself or you can wait for your distro to ship the packages which is always the better strategy if you value your system stability and I'm really looking forward to be able to install my games from one of my PCS to the other because sure I could use an external USB drive to store a game's library that I move around but for testing purposes this does not give you the same performance as the actual SSD in the device so it's gonna shave off probably three or four hours of waiting time for every single Hardware review that I do which is awesome and speaking of reviews how about we review this Segway to today's sponsor I would give it a 7 out of 10. if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at devices made to run Windows click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they make laptops and desktops that run Linux out of the box the hardware has been picked specifically because it runs well on Linux and they have a big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point from the small affordable Ultrabooks to the biggest high-end workstations or gaming laptops they ship to most countries in the world and all of their laptops are openable and repairable and upgradable including the battery the SSD the RAM and sometimes even the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card so if you need a new computer and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why down there as well and if you really enjoy what I do and you want to support the channel there are plenty of links in the description below for PayPal for patreon for YouTube memberships for super thanks just take a look and choose what tickles your fancy so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and whether you're a Linux user or Windows user chances are you've already heard a ton of preconceived notions about these systems like Windows uses more resources Linux is faster or linux's battery life sucks and these claims are all pretty subjective being dependent on your hardware and your use case but still we can probably have a more informed opinion by running actual tests on actual hardware and that's what we're gonna do here so sit back grab a cup of your favorite beverage and we're gonna look at virtually everything battery life disk speeds GPU power CPU power resource consumption thermals everything including this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to try so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster okay let's begin at what Hardware I'll be running all these tests on I'll use my tuxedo Stellaris 15. it's a laptop that came with Linux out of the box but runs Windows just as well what matters is what's inside this thing runs a beefy Intel Core i7 12700h it also has 16 gigabytes of RAM and one terabyte of SSD it also has an RTX 3060 inside which yes it is NVIDIA but that's also a good way to test driver support between operating systems and hybrid graphics as well which will be the default mode it will run on for all tests it has a 1440p screen that can run at 60hz or 240 and I'll be using 60 because 240 just makes no sense for these tests and I will also run everything at the native resolution without any scaling the device will be plugged in and charged for all Tash test so it can use its Hardware to the max except for battery life of course I'm stupid but I'm not that stupid guys look what I found battery life is unlimited when the computer is plugged in in terms of operating systems I'll run Windows 11 with all of its updates and the Nvidia game ready drivers and for Linux I'll run the latest Ubuntu 222.10 with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers on X11 and no other specific customizations to the default and sure some distros might be more optimized than I could use a tailor-made Windows ISO to remove things and make it leaner but that's not what I want to do what I want to do in this video is compare the very vanilla versions of these operating systems without any customizations applied now feel free to tell me in the comments that I'm dumb for not using something else that would work or perform better and I will admit I have some preconceived notions as well like I'm expecting Linux to do worse in battery life and worse in gaming performance but be way like lighter in terms of resource usage but we're gonna have to see so let's begin with the benchmarks so let's start with resource usage this laptop I have been using as a Linux steam console so it does have steam installed and some games on the windows partition and on Linux as well still after install Ubuntu uses up 25 gigabytes of storage I installed it on a 700 gigs partition my home folder uses 394 gigs with steam and Steam games installed and there's 280 gigs of free space plus a 2 gigabyte swap file so we're left with 25 gigs of used space for the system including this steam install and the potential package caches that I didn't empty on Windows the install uses 29 gigs also excluding the users folders and the Steam folder to avoid counting the Steam games that I have installed and that was my first surprise I was not expecting Ubuntu to use that much storage I was expecting it to beat windows by a large of course going longer over time we all know that Windows has some kind of rods that sets in it keeps older folders from older versions of windows so you can go back to them which means that your disk space is going to get very cramped more rapidly than with Linux but out of the box they're pretty much the same as per RAM usage Ubuntu system monitor reported 1.9 gigs of RAM used after a cold boot with no swap space being used on Windows the system reports 3.3 gigabytes of RAM being used after a fresh boot now how well these two numbers can be compared is up to the bait because the system monitors aren't the same application and so they might not measure the exact same thing although they both report the cached RAM amount which means that they probably all report the real actively used RAM amount and the one that is cash for preemptively launching applications so they start faster and on that note Windows reports 4.7 gigabytes of Ram being cached and Ubuntu reported 3.9 so if we add used RAM and cached Ram Ubuntu used about 5.8 gigs where Windows used 8 gigabytes whichever way you want to look at it Ubuntu does use a lot less Ram than Windows whether it's just pure RAM usage or cached RAM usage and now is your chance to tell me how your Windows system or your Linux system uses way less Ram than the numbers that I measured for disk speeds I used K diskmark on Ubuntu which reported read speeds of 3360 megabytes per second and write speeds of 2706 on Windows I used Crystal diskmark which uses the exact same tests as K diskmark and got read speeds of 3500 05 megabytes per second and write speeds of 2782 megabytes per second Windows read speeds on the same Drive felt a little bit higher but not by a noticeable margin so there you have it for resource usage basically apart from just a tiny bit less storage used by Ubuntu and way less Ram being used both systems seem pretty comparable now let's look at internet speeds I ran a speed test both in Wi-Fi and plugged in using ethernet on my fiber connection using Wi-Fi Windows 11 got a download speed of 108 megabits per second and an upload speed of 196 megabits per second on Ubuntu the same speed test over Wi-Fi got 154 megabits per second for download speed and 201 for upload Ubuntu has better download speeds over Wi-Fi than Windows and it's a result I could confirm by just moving the laptop around in my apartment and running the test multiple times it just works better and it's probably due to the specific hardware and to the driver that it uses for it it's an Intel ax200 card and it seems to be working really well using ethernet Windows got 512 megabits per second down and 483 megabits per second up Ubuntu plugged with the same cable got 508 megabits per second down and only 123 megabits per second up and that difference in upload speeds between Ubuntu and Windows is huge and I retried it multiple times I checked what could be running in the background on Ubuntu but there was nothing the performance for upload is just worse and I could also confirm that result by using Fedora plugged in using the same cable and got the same numbers so it feels that there's something on Linux that is maybe throttling the bandwidth for uploads for some reason but yeah the results are here Windows is better for uploads on ethernet for my Hardware but Ubuntu is way better for downloads on Wi-Fi on to the CPU Benchmark namely geekbench 6. on Windows it gave me a score of 2216 in single core and 10805 in multi-core on Ubuntu the same geekbench 6 got scores of 24.94 in single core and 10 138 in multi-core I re-rent the tests multiple times but the difference was always around the same between the two so there is a 3.5 difference in favor of Linux for single core operations but a 6.2 percent Improvement on Windows over Linux for multi-threaded operations now whether it's linked to drivers or just to the operating system and how it handles this I have no idea now let's look at some GPU related benchmarks we're going to run unigene Heaven on both operating systems and that should give us a comparison point for how well they use the GPU I ran unigine at high settings in full screen at the native 2560 by 1440p resolution with tessellation and anti-aliasing disabled on Ubuntu I got 114 FPS average with a score of 28.78 a minimum FPS was around 20 and Max at around 202. on Windows running the exact same Benchmark using opengl as well with the exact same settings I got 105 FPS average with a score of 2665 which is 7.5 percent lower and a minimum FPS of 14 and a Max of 219. so generally worse performance on Windows than on Linux using the GPU but it's running using opengl an API that is not pretty Windows Forte running the same Benchmark using DirectX 11 on Windows resulted in way better performance with an average of 139 FPS and a score of 3513 but minimum FPS dropping even lower at 10 and much higher Max FPS as well at 283 and it's not easy to draw a conclusion here because opengl is more efficient and better on Linux than on Windows but it's also an older API than DirectX 11 which is more complete and allows window those to take more advantage of the hardware to run that Benchmark this Benchmark also gives us a view of thermals with the Benchmark reporting 86 degrees Celsius of system temperature on Ubuntu and around 80 degrees on Windows the fan ramped up a lot more on Windows though being way noisier than on Linux with the fans running at Max Speed the whole time The Benchmark ran making for a pretty unpleasant experience for just marginally better results but still to have a better comparison Point let's talk about games I ran two games specifically on both operating systems the first one is shadow of the Tomb Raider to compare a game that runs natively on both platforms and the second one is Horizon zero Dawn to compare game running with proton to its running natively on Windows for shadow of the Tomb Raider running The in-game Benchmark at high details as the native resolution I got 80 FPS on average on windows with the same settings I got an average of 87 FPS with more stable frame times here it is clear that Windows has the advantage with a 10 improvement over the performance Linux delivers now whether it's from the game being ported badly to Linux or whether it's from directings being better than Vulcan for this specific title we can't really know that but what's for sure is that the fan noise was way more aggressive on Windows than on Linux Horizon doesn't have an in-game Benchmark but playing the same sequence of fighting this thunder jaw with the game running at the native 1440p resolution at high settings with an uncapped frame rate I got a little less than 60 FPS on Ubuntu it mostly stayed at around 55 FPS for the whole fight on Windows using the exact same settings and playing the same fight I got more around 65 to 70 FPS although for some reason the game didn't have any audio not that I would have heard it over the fan noise that went into overdrive on windows again and so for this game as well Windows Takes the Cake but that was expected since Horizon on Linux runs using a translation layer dxvk and wine or proton which means that the CPU has and the GPU have more stuff to do to translate the DirectX calls into Vulcan calls that Linux can understand still the performance difference is pretty high and we could probably test a bunch of other games and see it going back and forth but generally for a proton title you're not going to get better performance than on Windows now for battery life I used Firefox on both operating systems and played YouTube videos in the loop until the battery died over wi-fi at Mid brightness in battery saving mode with nothing else running in the background and both devices running in hybrid graphics mode on Ubuntu the laptop lasted for 6 hours and 52 minutes before it died a little bit lower than what I got when using it with Fedora when I did the review on this device on Windows it only Android short for 5 hours and 36 minutes and I'll admit I was surprised here because I was expecting Linux to fare worse in terms of battery life generally Linux laptops with dedicated gpus have worse battery life on Linux than they might have done on Windows but here the result is clear and I ran it twice which took me a lot of time to do so either Firefox on Windows is super unoptimized compared to its version on Linux all windows just handles battery life worse so where do we stand here well I'm afraid to say it's pretty inconclusive no OS has the edge in all cases now sure Ubuntu uses less RAM and less disk space and he tends to have better download speeds over Wi-Fi on my laptop but Windows seems to use the many cores of the CPU better has marginally better read and write speeds and generally performs better in games with an about 10 performance difference although that performance comes at the cost of your eardrums as the fan blasted to full speed while playing as per battery life Linux is the clear winner on this device and of course it's just a series of benchmarks on one specific device your experience might be the complete opposite on another laptop or another computer depending on how well it's supported and how well the drivers are written for Windows and for Linux and you could always find a use case where one of the operating systems performs vastly better than the other might it be a specific game or application but in day-to-day use they're super close and you can't really point out to any of these specific benchmarks and say this operator system is absolutely terrible for this although that is just for performance for user interface privacy and general naggingness of the operating system Linux is the clear winner there is not even a debate to be had here but for the rest of the general experience of using an operating system they're really very close still this has been educational and apart from the gaming side of things my preconceived notions didn't quite hold up so if you have any comments or any insights on why certain numbers turned out the way they did let me know down there in the comments and if you want to run the exact same benchmarks on your own device and let me know how well it went well you can also tell me in the comments and I can also tell you about today's sponsor if you need a new device and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at Windows computers buy something that supports Linux out of the box from tuxedo they have a big range of computers from laptops desktops nux workstation turns big towers small Ultrabooks gaming laptops everything you might want they're all very customizable with plenty of options to really make it your own you can have your own logo you can have your own custom keyboard layout and all the laptops are also openable repairable you can at least replace the SSD the RAM and the battery and on some you can even replace the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card so if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and buy something from tuxedo it's really really better than buying from a Windows Manufacturer so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and as always if you really enjoy the Channel all the links to support me are in the description below from PayPal super thanks patreon YouTube memberships you decide if there's something you want to contribute to so so thanks everyone and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and whether you're a Linux user or Windows user chances are you've already heard a ton of preconceived notions about these systems like Windows uses more resources Linux is faster or linux's battery life sucks and these claims are all pretty subjective being dependent on your hardware and your use case but still we can probably have a more informed opinion by running actual tests on actual hardware and that's what we're gonna do here so sit back grab a cup of your favorite beverage and we're gonna look at virtually everything battery life disk speeds GPU power CPU power resource consumption thermals everything including this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to try so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster okay let's begin at what Hardware I'll be running all these tests on I'll use my tuxedo Stellaris 15. it's a laptop that came with Linux out of the box but runs Windows just as well what matters is what's inside this thing runs a beefy Intel Core i7 12700h it also has 16 gigabytes of RAM and one terabyte of SSD it also has an RTX 3060 inside which yes it is NVIDIA but that's also a good way to test driver support between operating systems and hybrid graphics as well which will be the default mode it will run on for all tests it has a 1440p screen that can run at 60hz or 240 and I'll be using 60 because 240 just makes no sense for these tests and I will also run everything at the native resolution without any scaling the device will be plugged in and charged for all Tash test so it can use its Hardware to the max except for battery life of course I'm stupid but I'm not that stupid guys look what I found battery life is unlimited when the computer is plugged in in terms of operating systems I'll run Windows 11 with all of its updates and the Nvidia game ready drivers and for Linux I'll run the latest Ubuntu 222.10 with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers on X11 and no other specific customizations to the default and sure some distros might be more optimized than I could use a tailor-made Windows ISO to remove things and make it leaner but that's not what I want to do what I want to do in this video is compare the very vanilla versions of these operating systems without any customizations applied now feel free to tell me in the comments that I'm dumb for not using something else that would work or perform better and I will admit I have some preconceived notions as well like I'm expecting Linux to do worse in battery life and worse in gaming performance but be way like lighter in terms of resource usage but we're gonna have to see so let's begin with the benchmarks so let's start with resource usage this laptop I have been using as a Linux steam console so it does have steam installed and some games on the windows partition and on Linux as well still after install Ubuntu uses up 25 gigabytes of storage I installed it on a 700 gigs partition my home folder uses 394 gigs with steam and Steam games installed and there's 280 gigs of free space plus a 2 gigabyte swap file so we're left with 25 gigs of used space for the system including this steam install and the potential package caches that I didn't empty on Windows the install uses 29 gigs also excluding the users folders and the Steam folder to avoid counting the Steam games that I have installed and that was my first surprise I was not expecting Ubuntu to use that much storage I was expecting it to beat windows by a large of course going longer over time we all know that Windows has some kind of rods that sets in it keeps older folders from older versions of windows so you can go back to them which means that your disk space is going to get very cramped more rapidly than with Linux but out of the box they're pretty much the same as per RAM usage Ubuntu system monitor reported 1.9 gigs of RAM used after a cold boot with no swap space being used on Windows the system reports 3.3 gigabytes of RAM being used after a fresh boot now how well these two numbers can be compared is up to the bait because the system monitors aren't the same application and so they might not measure the exact same thing although they both report the cached RAM amount which means that they probably all report the real actively used RAM amount and the one that is cash for preemptively launching applications so they start faster and on that note Windows reports 4.7 gigabytes of Ram being cached and Ubuntu reported 3.9 so if we add used RAM and cached Ram Ubuntu used about 5.8 gigs where Windows used 8 gigabytes whichever way you want to look at it Ubuntu does use a lot less Ram than Windows whether it's just pure RAM usage or cached RAM usage and now is your chance to tell me how your Windows system or your Linux system uses way less Ram than the numbers that I measured for disk speeds I used K diskmark on Ubuntu which reported read speeds of 3360 megabytes per second and write speeds of 2706 on Windows I used Crystal diskmark which uses the exact same tests as K diskmark and got read speeds of 3500 05 megabytes per second and write speeds of 2782 megabytes per second Windows read speeds on the same Drive felt a little bit higher but not by a noticeable margin so there you have it for resource usage basically apart from just a tiny bit less storage used by Ubuntu and way less Ram being used both systems seem pretty comparable now let's look at internet speeds I ran a speed test both in Wi-Fi and plugged in using ethernet on my fiber connection using Wi-Fi Windows 11 got a download speed of 108 megabits per second and an upload speed of 196 megabits per second on Ubuntu the same speed test over Wi-Fi got 154 megabits per second for download speed and 201 for upload Ubuntu has better download speeds over Wi-Fi than Windows and it's a result I could confirm by just moving the laptop around in my apartment and running the test multiple times it just works better and it's probably due to the specific hardware and to the driver that it uses for it it's an Intel ax200 card and it seems to be working really well using ethernet Windows got 512 megabits per second down and 483 megabits per second up Ubuntu plugged with the same cable got 508 megabits per second down and only 123 megabits per second up and that difference in upload speeds between Ubuntu and Windows is huge and I retried it multiple times I checked what could be running in the background on Ubuntu but there was nothing the performance for upload is just worse and I could also confirm that result by using Fedora plugged in using the same cable and got the same numbers so it feels that there's something on Linux that is maybe throttling the bandwidth for uploads for some reason but yeah the results are here Windows is better for uploads on ethernet for my Hardware but Ubuntu is way better for downloads on Wi-Fi on to the CPU Benchmark namely geekbench 6. on Windows it gave me a score of 2216 in single core and 10805 in multi-core on Ubuntu the same geekbench 6 got scores of 24.94 in single core and 10 138 in multi-core I re-rent the tests multiple times but the difference was always around the same between the two so there is a 3.5 difference in favor of Linux for single core operations but a 6.2 percent Improvement on Windows over Linux for multi-threaded operations now whether it's linked to drivers or just to the operating system and how it handles this I have no idea now let's look at some GPU related benchmarks we're going to run unigene Heaven on both operating systems and that should give us a comparison point for how well they use the GPU I ran unigine at high settings in full screen at the native 2560 by 1440p resolution with tessellation and anti-aliasing disabled on Ubuntu I got 114 FPS average with a score of 28.78 a minimum FPS was around 20 and Max at around 202. on Windows running the exact same Benchmark using opengl as well with the exact same settings I got 105 FPS average with a score of 2665 which is 7.5 percent lower and a minimum FPS of 14 and a Max of 219. so generally worse performance on Windows than on Linux using the GPU but it's running using opengl an API that is not pretty Windows Forte running the same Benchmark using DirectX 11 on Windows resulted in way better performance with an average of 139 FPS and a score of 3513 but minimum FPS dropping even lower at 10 and much higher Max FPS as well at 283 and it's not easy to draw a conclusion here because opengl is more efficient and better on Linux than on Windows but it's also an older API than DirectX 11 which is more complete and allows window those to take more advantage of the hardware to run that Benchmark this Benchmark also gives us a view of thermals with the Benchmark reporting 86 degrees Celsius of system temperature on Ubuntu and around 80 degrees on Windows the fan ramped up a lot more on Windows though being way noisier than on Linux with the fans running at Max Speed the whole time The Benchmark ran making for a pretty unpleasant experience for just marginally better results but still to have a better comparison Point let's talk about games I ran two games specifically on both operating systems the first one is shadow of the Tomb Raider to compare a game that runs natively on both platforms and the second one is Horizon zero Dawn to compare game running with proton to its running natively on Windows for shadow of the Tomb Raider running The in-game Benchmark at high details as the native resolution I got 80 FPS on average on windows with the same settings I got an average of 87 FPS with more stable frame times here it is clear that Windows has the advantage with a 10 improvement over the performance Linux delivers now whether it's from the game being ported badly to Linux or whether it's from directings being better than Vulcan for this specific title we can't really know that but what's for sure is that the fan noise was way more aggressive on Windows than on Linux Horizon doesn't have an in-game Benchmark but playing the same sequence of fighting this thunder jaw with the game running at the native 1440p resolution at high settings with an uncapped frame rate I got a little less than 60 FPS on Ubuntu it mostly stayed at around 55 FPS for the whole fight on Windows using the exact same settings and playing the same fight I got more around 65 to 70 FPS although for some reason the game didn't have any audio not that I would have heard it over the fan noise that went into overdrive on windows again and so for this game as well Windows Takes the Cake but that was expected since Horizon on Linux runs using a translation layer dxvk and wine or proton which means that the CPU has and the GPU have more stuff to do to translate the DirectX calls into Vulcan calls that Linux can understand still the performance difference is pretty high and we could probably test a bunch of other games and see it going back and forth but generally for a proton title you're not going to get better performance than on Windows now for battery life I used Firefox on both operating systems and played YouTube videos in the loop until the battery died over wi-fi at Mid brightness in battery saving mode with nothing else running in the background and both devices running in hybrid graphics mode on Ubuntu the laptop lasted for 6 hours and 52 minutes before it died a little bit lower than what I got when using it with Fedora when I did the review on this device on Windows it only Android short for 5 hours and 36 minutes and I'll admit I was surprised here because I was expecting Linux to fare worse in terms of battery life generally Linux laptops with dedicated gpus have worse battery life on Linux than they might have done on Windows but here the result is clear and I ran it twice which took me a lot of time to do so either Firefox on Windows is super unoptimized compared to its version on Linux all windows just handles battery life worse so where do we stand here well I'm afraid to say it's pretty inconclusive no OS has the edge in all cases now sure Ubuntu uses less RAM and less disk space and he tends to have better download speeds over Wi-Fi on my laptop but Windows seems to use the many cores of the CPU better has marginally better read and write speeds and generally performs better in games with an about 10 performance difference although that performance comes at the cost of your eardrums as the fan blasted to full speed while playing as per battery life Linux is the clear winner on this device and of course it's just a series of benchmarks on one specific device your experience might be the complete opposite on another laptop or another computer depending on how well it's supported and how well the drivers are written for Windows and for Linux and you could always find a use case where one of the operating systems performs vastly better than the other might it be a specific game or application but in day-to-day use they're super close and you can't really point out to any of these specific benchmarks and say this operator system is absolutely terrible for this although that is just for performance for user interface privacy and general naggingness of the operating system Linux is the clear winner there is not even a debate to be had here but for the rest of the general experience of using an operating system they're really very close still this has been educational and apart from the gaming side of things my preconceived notions didn't quite hold up so if you have any comments or any insights on why certain numbers turned out the way they did let me know down there in the comments and if you want to run the exact same benchmarks on your own device and let me know how well it went well you can also tell me in the comments and I can also tell you about today's sponsor if you need a new device and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at Windows computers buy something that supports Linux out of the box from tuxedo they have a big range of computers from laptops desktops nux workstation turns big towers small Ultrabooks gaming laptops everything you might want they're all very customizable with plenty of options to really make it your own you can have your own logo you can have your own custom keyboard layout and all the laptops are also openable repairable you can at least replace the SSD the RAM and the battery and on some you can even replace the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card so if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and buy something from tuxedo it's really really better than buying from a Windows Manufacturer so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and as always if you really enjoy the Channel all the links to support me are in the description below from PayPal super thanks patreon YouTube memberships you decide if there's something you want to contribute to so so thanks everyone and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this is probably the most powerful laptop you can get with Linux pre-installed and one of the most powerful laptops period it's got the specs the build quality the looks a real mechanical keyboard a high refresh rate screen a giant touchpad and of course it runs Linux so let's take a look at this monster right after we take a look at this monster Segway to today's sponsor thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and you probably already have heard about them but if you haven't all you have to know is that if you need a website they're gonna be your all-in-one solution Squarespace lets you build any type of website from a personal portfolio to a blog or a full Digital Store complete with online payment and they have tons of templates that you can even customize fully to represent your brand or identity you can even enrich the website with a bunch of modules like a members only area or video gallery and if you need help booking a domain name to let people access your website or even if you just need a logo Squarespace has tools for that as well so head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description below and you'll get 10 of your first purchase okay so let's begin with the form factor and the build quality there's no two ways about it this is a big device it has a 17 inch screen and it's really 17 inches not the usual 17.3 or 18 inches that you often find in big laptops it's also 16x10 which should please a lot of people and all in all compared to other laptops of the same size it doesn't feel that huge here it is compared to my executive 16 from slim book and while it is wider it's not by much for an additional full inch of display of course it is not an Ultrabook an ultra thin device and it doesn't try to be the goal is to have desktop class performance in a portable form factor so it weighs 2.8 kilos and it's 38 centimeters wide 27 centimeters deep and 2.7 centimeters thick if you have to Lug your laptop around in your backpack all day that's a laptop that your back will definitely feel it is built like a tank as well with the chassis made of aluminum this time and not the usual magnesium alloy which isn't bad but not as rigid this one has literally no flex no band no creaking whatsoever it feels extremely solid and premium it also resists fingerprints really well thanks to a soft touch coating on the inside of the laptop which feels really good almost rubberized in a way but without feeling like plastic and with great thickness comes great power as the saying goes right because this laptop is so thick it can accommodate a really powerful cooling solution with two tall fans and plenty of space for airflow which means that it tends to stay a lot quieter under load than most thin and light laptops and since you have all the tools pre-installed to change the performance settings you can either run it at max power and use all the cooling available or you can run it at something closer to what a thin and light laptop would be like and get a very quiet experience and on top of that tall fans tend to produce a less high-pitched whiny noise than smaller flat fans in ultra thin laptops so even when the fan is running the noise isn't as annoying as it might be in another form factor and of course as with all tuxedo laptops you're free to open it and here you can access and replace the two m.2 SSD slots the ram the wireless card and the battery as well which is screwed in and not glued so yeah it's a very very big laptop very well built but very big but I can't hold that against it because it's basically its purpose okay but with all that torque of power what is actually inside the laptop for starters the CPU is the AMD ryzen 9 6900 HX it's an 8 core 16 threads 4.9 gigahertz processor that's basically the most powerful you can get in a laptop right now from AMD the 7000 series has been announced but it's really not widely available yet all models come with at least 16 gigs of RAM and an RTX 370 TI with 8 gigs of dedicated Ram you also get at least 250 gigs of pcie 3 solid-state storage and a 2560 by 1600 16x10 display that goes up to 240 hertz it also comes with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 but that's not enough to make it the most powerful Linux laptop ever right so yeah you can spec this thing up it can accommodate up to 64 gigs of 4 800 megahertz Ram up to 4 terabytes of pcie4 storage and more importantly either an RTX 3080 or 3080 TI and all cards run at their maximum total Graphics power Allowed by Nvidia which means they are not throttled in any way if you want to let the device run at max power you also get a 99 watt hour battery which is the maximum you'll be able to carry around in the device if you want to take it with you on a plane for example my review unit came with 32 gigs of RAM and the RTX 3080 TI and it comes in any color you want as long as it's black now let's talk about the performance because that's the main draw of this laptop get it draw like power draw first the CPU I ran geekbench 6 and it gave me scores of 2121 in single core and 10 219 in multi-core this is among the highest multi-core score I got on any device that I ever touched Intel still has the edge in single core with the 12th gen i7 reaching 2500 but the raw performance is definitely higher on the AMD side for multi-core so yeah that ryzen 9 6900 HX is a monster it will handle anything you might ever want to do on a laptop as per gaming I ran the usual shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark at high settings add the native resolution of 2560 by 1600 and it got me an average of 101 FPS when cranking all the settings to the Max still at the native resolution it still managed to reach 97 FPS and if you don't mind 1080p for higher frame rates at the higher settings and the game rendered at 1080p the Stellaris 17 got an extremely comfortable 110 FPS this thing will let you gain no doubt about it but I don't think there ever was any doubt about that whether you like AAA titles or Indie titles you'll run everything at Max settings at the native resolution and get 60 FPS no problem I also ran the unigene heaven Benchmark at the native resolution at high settings and got a score of 2715 and an average FPS of 107 with a minimum of 11 and a maximum of 162. it was a bit lower than expected but that Benchmark uses opengl and the CPU and the GPU weren't maxed out at all by The Benchmark so I guess I need to find something that is upper class more powerful than unigin heaven to test these new devices it also gave me an idea about thermals at 75 degrees under heavy load which isn't bad at all and it also gave me a peek at the fan noise which in Max performance mode was really decent and now not too loud it also probably means that some fan curved tweaking might allow the fan to run slower while allowing the laptop to go up to 80 or 85 degrees and this brings us to The Tuxedo Aquarius an external water cooling solution you can add to this laptop it's optional though it's a nicely designed little package you actually plug it in using the laptop's power brick and it then passes that power through to the laptop with a barrel Jack which means you can leave that thing on your desk and you don't have to mess with tons of cables it uses distilled water that you just pour in the small opening on the top and it connects to the laptop using the dedicated 2 ports at the back you then use the tuxedo Control Center app to connect to it through Bluetooth and you get a few settings like you can tweak the fan speed of the Aquarius or the RGB patterns on it I re-ran the shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark at the native resolution and the highest possible settings with the Aquarius attached and I got an average of 101 FPS so a four percent improvement over using the laptop by itself and sure with that accessory the laptop will run cooler for longer play sessions But You're basically trading the fan noise of the device for the fan noise of the Aquarius which is still pretty loud so for that 17-inch model fully specked I don't think it really makes that much of a difference but maybe for the 15 inch which is thinner it might be more useful since the water cooling will be more efficient than the fan inside when you're done using the water cooling system you can just disconnect from the control center and you have a small attachment that lets you drain the water from the laptop before transporting it somewhere else and I will admit seeing water come out of the back of your laptop is not an experience that is very reassuring I mean I know it's designed for it but you still have to be very careful so no water runs inside of one of the ports that is next to it that's not something I'm super comfortable with personally now let's talk about battery life with its 99 watt hour battery running in Nvidia on demand mode with the display at 50 brightness Wi-Fi being used to play YouTube videos in a loop in Firefox the laptop lasted for 8 hours and 12 minutes if you switch to using intel only you'll get about an hour of battery life and of course if you play games or do GPU intensive workflows using the dedicated GPU you can expect more around three to four hours maximum it's not bad and it's definitely more than enough for this use case after all with this device you're not going to be using it as a laptop most of the time it's gonna sit on your desk basically as a desktop replacement but it's nice to know that when you carry it around it is able to last for relatively long time before shutting down now let's talk about the keyboard the Stellaris 17 being the thick boy that it is has ample room to use a nice mechanical keyboard and that's what they're doing here while the Stellaris 15 uses an opto mechanical keyboard which felt nice but didn't have that clicky feel this one uses Cherry MX ultra low profile switches the key travel is really good at 1.8 millimeters and the click happens at 0.8 millimeters which means you don't have to press the key very far to actually actuate the switch it's a full keyboard as well with a nice numpad which I love but I know some people really don't like now what's more interesting is that some of the keys aren't using mechanical switches notably the function keys and the whole numpad they're using membrane switches instead which feels right for these keys and of course the elephant in the room is the noise this keyboard is super loud some of you might love it but if you work near other people you're going to drive them insane with that kind of noise and Tuxedo is aware that it's an acquired taste because the next model of the Stellar 17 will have the option to use membrane switches if you prefer still it is a really good keyboard the keys are a bit small for my taste and the review unit came with a German quartz layout which I just cannot get used to although you can get virtually any layout you want here and the clicky noise is definitely not for me but I can't deny it's a very pleasant typing experience if you wear earplugs now as per the touchpad well you can see it right it's humongous it's also thankfully centered and it's covered in glass so it's really smooth it feels very precise and using it with tap to click feels great now it is a dive board mechanism so obviously you cannot click everywhere on it it has to be in the bottom half of the touchpad and the sound it makes it satisfy buying and doesn't rattle so great inputs if you like clicky keyboards the stroke feels good but the sound is just way too loud and now I realize that this phrase taken out of context might sound pretty weird now what about the display well as I said it's 16 by 10 17 inches and it goes up to 240 hertz refresh rate which for once the innards of the laptop might actually be able to use in certain games the display is g-sync compatible to avoid any screen tearing issues that might happen on Linux with Nvidia and it's decently bright at 380 nits although it is definitely not the brightest panel I've ever seen it also has full ice RGB coverage viewing angles are great but it's hard to find panels that don't have that characteristic nowadays and the resolution is 2560 by 1600 which means that you might even be able to use it without any scaling seeing that it's relatively big in terms of ports you get a decent selection on the left you get the usual Kensington lock a USB a 3.2 gen 2x1 port a Microsoft input and a headphone jack on the right you get an SD card reader and two USB a 3.2 gen 1 Port and on the back you have a port for the Aquarius external water cooling solution a USBC 3.2 gen 2x1 Port an HDMI 2.1 port a gigabit Ethernet port and a barrel Jack now for the downsides there's only one USB C port and that's not super futile proof I would have liked at least a second one there's no Thunderbolts but it's an AMD based laptop and you very rarely get Thunderbolt on AMD laptops and I think that for the size gigabit Ethernet could have been replaced by 2.5 gigs and of course the barrel charger is an annoyance it's really big it's attached to a huge power brick but I guess with that kind of laptop charging through USBC was just not an option let's finish with the mic speakers and webcam the microphone is decent but nothing to write home about you'll want to run it at about 25 five percent volume to avoid picking up on internal sounds and it definitely will pick up the sound of your touchpad and of the keys the speakers get really really loud but they don't distort or sound tinny at all they have a good amount of bass and they will completely fill the room when you're listening to music or watching a show or movie although the sound lags definition a bit [Music] as per the webcam well it's 1080P and it can produce good results with decent lighting but it's still a bit grainy even in natural light it is just a small Notch above the usual potato cam see what I did there Notch webcam okay I'll shut up now and of course we have to talk about the price this laptop in its base configuration goes for 2700 Euros taxes included if you want the same model as my review unit with 32 gigs of RAM and the RTX 3080 TI then you'll have to pay a bit more than 3 500 euros again taxes included and that's not a price everyone can afford I personally can't even with that sweet sweet YouTube money it is a very Niche laptop it's meant for people who rarely carry their devices around but for whom a desktop still wouldn't cut it and for that specific crowd it is probably the best Linux laptop you could get with a fantastic keyboard insane build quality good display good touchpad and an absolute performance monster if you're on a budget though this will stay on aspirational device and if you just need a desktop computer well the same specs will probably cost you a lot less than this still it's really good to see super high-end laptops come with Linux out of the box so if you have the cache and you want the most powerful Linux gaming laptop or workstation you can get well there's a link to the website in the description below and if like me you can only dream of being able to own such a device well you can maybe re-watch the video or just keep drooling over the specs goodbye you giant chungus I'll miss you so thanks everyone for watching the video If you enjoyed it don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications or to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike the video and tell me why down there and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to support what I do well there are plenty of links in the description below for patreon PayPal super thanks YouTube memberships if you want to you decide so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this week again my confidence in free and open source software has been a little bit shaken because not only do we have a concerning blog post from the developer of core JS a very very well used library for web development also used by giant tech companies and that still cannot get enough funding to keep operations going we also have Mycroft shutting down operations and leaving their backers without the devices that they paid for now fortunately we also have some good news with thunderbird's new redesign showing up more of what it's going to bring to the new version and KD plasma 5.27 being the biggest release Getty has ever seen probably in the plasma 5 cycle entirely and if you want some more good news why not listen to this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and if you're looking to start an online business or just create your own personal website it's going to be your One-Stop shop for everything you need not only can you create a website of any kind super quickly by using any of their templates and adjusting the colors or the layout graphically but you can also enrich what you created with tons of modules you can add a video gallery a paid membership space or even an online store complete with online payments even if you know nothing about building a website and Squarespace can also help you with the domain name you'll need for people to access your website or for creating your logo so head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description and you'll get 10 of your first purchase in a pretty pressing blog post the developer of core.js explained how funding in open source is broken core.js is one of the most popular libraries for web development implementing JavaScript support for the latest ecma script standards as well as some ancient features it's what we call a polyfill library that provides modern features to older browsers that don't natively support them it has 9 billion total downloads on npm and around 250 million downloads per month still and is listed as a dependency by 19 million GitHub repositories and it's used by some of the biggest companies out there like PayPal eBay Apple Netflix or LinkedIn and still the developer cannot get enough funding to justify working on that project in the blog post the developer goes over how the development started and the general goal of improving web compatibility for everyone they also go over some personal life events that contributed to making development difficult the core of the issue is that getting funding for open source libraries is extremely complicated asking messages during install asking for user contributions generated hate messages and the introduction of npm fund also disabled messages asking for contributions after install which meant the backer numbers slowly declined at this point the developer earns four or five times less from core JS than they could by taking full-time development contracts for companies making it difficult to sustain developments of the library current monthly Revenue seems to be at around 1700 which is definitely on the low side for a full-time Dev gig depending on where you live and since the developer lives in Russia they've been affected by the recent sanctions that meant a lot of platforms simply could not send him the money he was owed further reducing the revenue the developer ends the post by laying out a few options either they can get appropriate funding and they'll keep working on the library or they'll have to turn the library into a commercial project with all the licensing issues that this could create or they will just stop working on core.js altogether and the core of that story isn't about core.js really it's about fast funding and how our current model for developers to get paid for their work is fundamentally broken because when you have such a successful development library or such a successful product and it's used by giant tech companies but you still cannot make ends meet working on that then something truly doesn't work and it's not just an issue of oh the poor developer cannot make ends meet because that's an issue but that's not the main issue the main issue is such a widely used Library if it's not appropriately funded is also not appropriately maintained which means that the backbone of the web runs on stuff that is basically not secure or not as secure as it could be now some less depressing news as Thunderbirds communication efforts continue and the excellent Json evangelo shared a preview of what you can expect in the mail module of the future version version 115. they are redesigning the folder panel that lists your mail accounts and local folders and I must say it looks pretty damn good there's more space between items so things are more legible but they also kept the current mode with more information density if that's what you prefer it seems to be their main goal here modernizing the user interface for newcomers but letting Thunderbird veterans keep the interface they're already used to they're also working on a new header for that panel with an affectionately named meatball menu as in three dots that gets you various options to display or hide information and a refresh button that just lets you pull in new mail and there's also a big new message button that is way more visible and easier to click Thunderbird will also let users turn local folders off if they don't need that and they can also use tags to sort messages without resorting to folder triage tags will be visible in the folder panel as they relate to organization and they can be used just like you would use traditional folders and I really really like the direction Thunderbird is headed it's colorful it's modern and it retains all the features that people are used to while making newcomers like me basically more familiar with a more simple and accessible interface if the rest of the redesign is along those lines I will definitely use it Getty plasma 5.27 was released this week the last version in the KD 5 series and the team is now working on plasma 6 with all sorts of bigger improvements to the desktop but in the meantime 5.27 is probably the biggest release of KDE in the past years bringing with it a new tiling system that lets you create tiles and seamlessly move your Windows to them and adjust them on the Fly it's a nice addition to the already existing screen Edge tiling features multi-monitor support has been completely revamped and should result in a lot more stable experience where your panels widgets and desktop icons don't jump around all the time when you're disconnecting and reconnecting to external monitors discover was made way more useful with more information and a new homepage to Showcase some applications K Runner got a big logic update that should surface more relevant results first and most if not all widgets have been improved from their tooltips middle click actions presentation or features there's also a new plasma welcome app that presents some of Katie's Advanced features in a nice user-friendly way which should fix one of the main issues I had with Katie for newcomers which was that it doesn't let users know about all the power it has under the hood and of course there's the usual slew of settings changes with some settings being incorporated into existing pages to streamline things new pages added for touchscreens and flat pack permissions or new settings to let you configure how your pen for your drawing tablet works Whalen sessions also now support true fractional scaling and Global shortcuts which means it's basically up to date with what the Weyland protocol currently implements it is a wonderful new version and I have a complete video about it if you haven't already watched it it's linked in the description or in the card up top I briefly reported on Minecraft's demise last week in the audio podcast version of these News videos you can find a link to that in the description and there are some news on that front this week as well unfortunately it looks like the company building the open source and private Voice Assistant will indeed have to stop operations and won't be able to fulfill their orders made on their Kickstarter campaign they gave a little bit more background around why this is is happening and basically it boils down to the fact that they offered the Minecraft Mark II in a crowdfunding campaign which is dedicated pre-built Hardware to run the assistant and since they had to lay off most of the staff they also could not find a Reliable Hardware partner to provide the Mark II at a reasonable price point after the first partner that they had could not manage to make the hardware stable enough they decided to make the devices using off the shelves component then but the increase in prices and supply chain issues that everyone experienced these past years well with all of that the cost Rose from 99 to 300 so they still managed to keep producing these devices to get them certified and to start shipping But ultimately these cost increases and an unnamed patent troll that attacked them and cost them a lot of money in litigation basically put an end to everything now all of these things meant that they also had no money to devote to improving the software and so the mark 2 launched with an underwhelming set of features which in turn meant little in the way of press coverage and good reviews so fewer sales and not enough money to cover the rest of operations so orders made through the website will apparently still be honored those that paid full price but the kickstarter backer rewards won't be sent and operations will unfortunately cease it looks like multiple factors compounded to make Minecraft unable to continue operations but it's always sad to see backers that believed in the project and helped it lift it off the ground not being able to receive their stuff while people who buy it now will I think it's a bit unfair but I can understand why they are doing it now on The Gnome side this week the developers have really showcased a lot of cool things that I hope will make it in time for Gnome 44 next month first there's the ability to generate a QR code straight from the Wi-Fi panel so you can easily connect other devices to the same network without entering a hopefully long and secure password the mouse and touchpad settings panel now has animations to represent certain preferences like the natural scrolling and gnome Shell's Quick Settings should now be much better with the Bluetooth toggle now listing devices you can connect to through a sub menu all toggles getting a main title and a subtitle to give you more information and a new background app section that shows what is running in the background without a window and should maybe be a replacement for tray icons libid Vita also got better avatars when scaling an image down they will be less blurry gnome console got a tab overview screen that you can invoke with shift plus Control Plus oh weather now has a flat header bar and a smoother curve for temperatures contacts now has the ability to share contacts with the QR code and you can now remove birthdays from them if you want and grime web got a new UI to handle permissions like notifications saving logins or accessing the mic and camera it is really cool to see The Gnome team showcasing their work on gnome shell and The Gnome core apps in these weekly blog posts they usually mostly talk about third-party apps so I hope that this trend of showcasing the core work also continues to be more along the lines of what KD does in their weekly blog posts canonical introduced real-time Ubuntu a version of their distribution that uses the real-time Linux kernel a real-time kernel is meant to reduce latency to ensure tasks are performed at predictable timings by guaranteeing that they are performed under a certain number of microseconds the goal here is to have an offering for specific sectors such as industrial work telecommunications Automotive Aerospace and defense real time Ubuntu uses the Linux kernel 5.15 with the preamped RT patch sets that allow this latency reduction for the x86 and arm architectures to access this specific version of Ubuntu you will need an Ubuntu Pro subscription and it is available for most Ubuntu variants although real-time Ubuntu will not be compatible with the live patching system canonical also offers to reduce server downtime by applying patches to the kernel without rebooting it's also not compatible with Nvidia proprietary drivers which might limit its use in scenarios where opencl or Cuda are needed it is meant more for servers of course whether it's the regular Ubuntu Server versions or the Ubuntu core variant designed for smaller Footprints and it's only available for LTS releases now what's really interesting to me here is that canonical seems to be waking up and offering many different commercial Solutions like Ubuntu Pro and now this new real-time Ubuntu for multiple other sectors and I think that's because their IPO might be coming up they already talked about going public about a year ago and it should be about time that they do it so probably they hope that by having a large panel of commercial offerings and services their IPO will go smoother and let's wrap this up with the gaming news first luteris got a new update version 0.5.13 and they now support proton which should make game compatibility rise a bit they also restyled the configuration preferences installer and AD games windows so they should be more legible the grouped configuration options into sections they can now create 32-bit prefixes for games that require it they added a workaround for Humble Bundle authentication but more importantly they added Integrations with each.io and Battlenet it's a pretty big release and with the addition of the game integration for Battle.net I think it means that they basically can show all your libraries from every single third-party Windows Launcher in just one app which is pretty cool the long list of compatibility tools for Linux gaming continues to grow with d8 VK the same thing as the X VK but for DirectX 8 games it's still in development but it's moving forward and it all already supports a bunch of titles like Age of Mythology Arma called War assault Deus Ex Invisible War freelancer GTA 3 and Vice City Max Payne Silent Hill 2 and 3 or Morrowind some of these games were already playable on Linux with our current tools but a dedicated compatibility Library means that the quirks of these older DirectX versions will be handled better and should result in better performance and there's also more work on the Shader cache for steam this thing is meant to let you download pre-built shaders for your games so there's less time wasted in game waiting for the shaders to compile but the issue is a lot of people seem to have to re-download the entire thing every time that they're updated instead of just downloading the parts that changed valve looked into it and found a server-side issue that should reduce the size of these downloads which is always good for metered connection or just for wait times in general from shaders to proton to wine into d8 VK and other compatibility things it kind of looks like Linux is going to be a more comfortable experience than Windows to play games that are either AAA or way older I think that nowadays Linux is kinda more backwards compatible with older Windows games than Windows is itself which is actually kind of insane if you think about it just like you would be insane to not listen to this segue to our sponsor if your current computer is due for a replacement and you want to install Linux on it stop looking at Windows devices and hoping that they might be compatible buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a huge range of devices that should honestly cover every price point and every need and all of their devices are very customizable with tons of options for the CPU the GPU the SS these or Ram you can even have your own keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop or your own logo laser etched on your device or no logo at all and all their laptops are upgradable repairable for the SSD the RAM and the battery and they basically have everything you might want so stop looking at Windows computers look at the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well all these News videos are also in audio podcast form in the link in the description below with more topics and more coverage and if you really enjoy what I do well you know what to do all the links to support the channel are in the description below as well so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this week again my confidence in free and open source software has been a little bit shaken because not only do we have a concerning blog post from the developer of core JS a very very well used library for web development also used by giant tech companies and that still cannot get enough funding to keep operations going we also have Mycroft shutting down operations and leaving their backers without the devices that they paid for now fortunately we also have some good news with thunderbird's new redesign showing up more of what it's going to bring to the new version and KD plasma 5.27 being the biggest release Getty has ever seen probably in the plasma 5 cycle entirely and if you want some more good news why not listen to this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and if you're looking to start an online business or just create your own personal website it's going to be your One-Stop shop for everything you need not only can you create a website of any kind super quickly by using any of their templates and adjusting the colors or the layout graphically but you can also enrich what you created with tons of modules you can add a video gallery a paid membership space or even an online store complete with online payments even if you know nothing about building a website and Squarespace can also help you with the domain name you'll need for people to access your website or for creating your logo so head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description and you'll get 10 of your first purchase in a pretty pressing blog post the developer of core.js explained how funding in open source is broken core.js is one of the most popular libraries for web development implementing JavaScript support for the latest ecma script standards as well as some ancient features it's what we call a polyfill library that provides modern features to older browsers that don't natively support them it has 9 billion total downloads on npm and around 250 million downloads per month still and is listed as a dependency by 19 million GitHub repositories and it's used by some of the biggest companies out there like PayPal eBay Apple Netflix or LinkedIn and still the developer cannot get enough funding to justify working on that project in the blog post the developer goes over how the development started and the general goal of improving web compatibility for everyone they also go over some personal life events that contributed to making development difficult the core of the issue is that getting funding for open source libraries is extremely complicated asking messages during install asking for user contributions generated hate messages and the introduction of npm fund also disabled messages asking for contributions after install which meant the backer numbers slowly declined at this point the developer earns four or five times less from core JS than they could by taking full-time development contracts for companies making it difficult to sustain developments of the library current monthly Revenue seems to be at around 1700 which is definitely on the low side for a full-time Dev gig depending on where you live and since the developer lives in Russia they've been affected by the recent sanctions that meant a lot of platforms simply could not send him the money he was owed further reducing the revenue the developer ends the post by laying out a few options either they can get appropriate funding and they'll keep working on the library or they'll have to turn the library into a commercial project with all the licensing issues that this could create or they will just stop working on core.js altogether and the core of that story isn't about core.js really it's about fast funding and how our current model for developers to get paid for their work is fundamentally broken because when you have such a successful development library or such a successful product and it's used by giant tech companies but you still cannot make ends meet working on that then something truly doesn't work and it's not just an issue of oh the poor developer cannot make ends meet because that's an issue but that's not the main issue the main issue is such a widely used Library if it's not appropriately funded is also not appropriately maintained which means that the backbone of the web runs on stuff that is basically not secure or not as secure as it could be now some less depressing news as Thunderbirds communication efforts continue and the excellent Json evangelo shared a preview of what you can expect in the mail module of the future version version 115. they are redesigning the folder panel that lists your mail accounts and local folders and I must say it looks pretty damn good there's more space between items so things are more legible but they also kept the current mode with more information density if that's what you prefer it seems to be their main goal here modernizing the user interface for newcomers but letting Thunderbird veterans keep the interface they're already used to they're also working on a new header for that panel with an affectionately named meatball menu as in three dots that gets you various options to display or hide information and a refresh button that just lets you pull in new mail and there's also a big new message button that is way more visible and easier to click Thunderbird will also let users turn local folders off if they don't need that and they can also use tags to sort messages without resorting to folder triage tags will be visible in the folder panel as they relate to organization and they can be used just like you would use traditional folders and I really really like the direction Thunderbird is headed it's colorful it's modern and it retains all the features that people are used to while making newcomers like me basically more familiar with a more simple and accessible interface if the rest of the redesign is along those lines I will definitely use it Getty plasma 5.27 was released this week the last version in the KD 5 series and the team is now working on plasma 6 with all sorts of bigger improvements to the desktop but in the meantime 5.27 is probably the biggest release of KDE in the past years bringing with it a new tiling system that lets you create tiles and seamlessly move your Windows to them and adjust them on the Fly it's a nice addition to the already existing screen Edge tiling features multi-monitor support has been completely revamped and should result in a lot more stable experience where your panels widgets and desktop icons don't jump around all the time when you're disconnecting and reconnecting to external monitors discover was made way more useful with more information and a new homepage to Showcase some applications K Runner got a big logic update that should surface more relevant results first and most if not all widgets have been improved from their tooltips middle click actions presentation or features there's also a new plasma welcome app that presents some of Katie's Advanced features in a nice user-friendly way which should fix one of the main issues I had with Katie for newcomers which was that it doesn't let users know about all the power it has under the hood and of course there's the usual slew of settings changes with some settings being incorporated into existing pages to streamline things new pages added for touchscreens and flat pack permissions or new settings to let you configure how your pen for your drawing tablet works Whalen sessions also now support true fractional scaling and Global shortcuts which means it's basically up to date with what the Weyland protocol currently implements it is a wonderful new version and I have a complete video about it if you haven't already watched it it's linked in the description or in the card up top I briefly reported on Minecraft's demise last week in the audio podcast version of these News videos you can find a link to that in the description and there are some news on that front this week as well unfortunately it looks like the company building the open source and private Voice Assistant will indeed have to stop operations and won't be able to fulfill their orders made on their Kickstarter campaign they gave a little bit more background around why this is is happening and basically it boils down to the fact that they offered the Minecraft Mark II in a crowdfunding campaign which is dedicated pre-built Hardware to run the assistant and since they had to lay off most of the staff they also could not find a Reliable Hardware partner to provide the Mark II at a reasonable price point after the first partner that they had could not manage to make the hardware stable enough they decided to make the devices using off the shelves component then but the increase in prices and supply chain issues that everyone experienced these past years well with all of that the cost Rose from 99 to 300 so they still managed to keep producing these devices to get them certified and to start shipping But ultimately these cost increases and an unnamed patent troll that attacked them and cost them a lot of money in litigation basically put an end to everything now all of these things meant that they also had no money to devote to improving the software and so the mark 2 launched with an underwhelming set of features which in turn meant little in the way of press coverage and good reviews so fewer sales and not enough money to cover the rest of operations so orders made through the website will apparently still be honored those that paid full price but the kickstarter backer rewards won't be sent and operations will unfortunately cease it looks like multiple factors compounded to make Minecraft unable to continue operations but it's always sad to see backers that believed in the project and helped it lift it off the ground not being able to receive their stuff while people who buy it now will I think it's a bit unfair but I can understand why they are doing it now on The Gnome side this week the developers have really showcased a lot of cool things that I hope will make it in time for Gnome 44 next month first there's the ability to generate a QR code straight from the Wi-Fi panel so you can easily connect other devices to the same network without entering a hopefully long and secure password the mouse and touchpad settings panel now has animations to represent certain preferences like the natural scrolling and gnome Shell's Quick Settings should now be much better with the Bluetooth toggle now listing devices you can connect to through a sub menu all toggles getting a main title and a subtitle to give you more information and a new background app section that shows what is running in the background without a window and should maybe be a replacement for tray icons libid Vita also got better avatars when scaling an image down they will be less blurry gnome console got a tab overview screen that you can invoke with shift plus Control Plus oh weather now has a flat header bar and a smoother curve for temperatures contacts now has the ability to share contacts with the QR code and you can now remove birthdays from them if you want and grime web got a new UI to handle permissions like notifications saving logins or accessing the mic and camera it is really cool to see The Gnome team showcasing their work on gnome shell and The Gnome core apps in these weekly blog posts they usually mostly talk about third-party apps so I hope that this trend of showcasing the core work also continues to be more along the lines of what KD does in their weekly blog posts canonical introduced real-time Ubuntu a version of their distribution that uses the real-time Linux kernel a real-time kernel is meant to reduce latency to ensure tasks are performed at predictable timings by guaranteeing that they are performed under a certain number of microseconds the goal here is to have an offering for specific sectors such as industrial work telecommunications Automotive Aerospace and defense real time Ubuntu uses the Linux kernel 5.15 with the preamped RT patch sets that allow this latency reduction for the x86 and arm architectures to access this specific version of Ubuntu you will need an Ubuntu Pro subscription and it is available for most Ubuntu variants although real-time Ubuntu will not be compatible with the live patching system canonical also offers to reduce server downtime by applying patches to the kernel without rebooting it's also not compatible with Nvidia proprietary drivers which might limit its use in scenarios where opencl or Cuda are needed it is meant more for servers of course whether it's the regular Ubuntu Server versions or the Ubuntu core variant designed for smaller Footprints and it's only available for LTS releases now what's really interesting to me here is that canonical seems to be waking up and offering many different commercial Solutions like Ubuntu Pro and now this new real-time Ubuntu for multiple other sectors and I think that's because their IPO might be coming up they already talked about going public about a year ago and it should be about time that they do it so probably they hope that by having a large panel of commercial offerings and services their IPO will go smoother and let's wrap this up with the gaming news first luteris got a new update version 0.5.13 and they now support proton which should make game compatibility rise a bit they also restyled the configuration preferences installer and AD games windows so they should be more legible the grouped configuration options into sections they can now create 32-bit prefixes for games that require it they added a workaround for Humble Bundle authentication but more importantly they added Integrations with each.io and Battlenet it's a pretty big release and with the addition of the game integration for Battle.net I think it means that they basically can show all your libraries from every single third-party Windows Launcher in just one app which is pretty cool the long list of compatibility tools for Linux gaming continues to grow with d8 VK the same thing as the X VK but for DirectX 8 games it's still in development but it's moving forward and it all already supports a bunch of titles like Age of Mythology Arma called War assault Deus Ex Invisible War freelancer GTA 3 and Vice City Max Payne Silent Hill 2 and 3 or Morrowind some of these games were already playable on Linux with our current tools but a dedicated compatibility Library means that the quirks of these older DirectX versions will be handled better and should result in better performance and there's also more work on the Shader cache for steam this thing is meant to let you download pre-built shaders for your games so there's less time wasted in game waiting for the shaders to compile but the issue is a lot of people seem to have to re-download the entire thing every time that they're updated instead of just downloading the parts that changed valve looked into it and found a server-side issue that should reduce the size of these downloads which is always good for metered connection or just for wait times in general from shaders to proton to wine into d8 VK and other compatibility things it kind of looks like Linux is going to be a more comfortable experience than Windows to play games that are either AAA or way older I think that nowadays Linux is kinda more backwards compatible with older Windows games than Windows is itself which is actually kind of insane if you think about it just like you would be insane to not listen to this segue to our sponsor if your current computer is due for a replacement and you want to install Linux on it stop looking at Windows devices and hoping that they might be compatible buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a huge range of devices that should honestly cover every price point and every need and all of their devices are very customizable with tons of options for the CPU the GPU the SS these or Ram you can even have your own keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop or your own logo laser etched on your device or no logo at all and all their laptops are upgradable repairable for the SSD the RAM and the battery and they basically have everything you might want so stop looking at Windows computers look at the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well all these News videos are also in audio podcast form in the link in the description below with more topics and more coverage and if you really enjoy what I do well you know what to do all the links to support the channel are in the description below as well so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you thought that next Cloud was only for file storage then stick around because here are 16 applications that I use for next Cloud every day to run my channel the podcast the website and everything else next cloud is now basically my replacement to Google Docs or Office 365 but less privacy invasive you can install all these applications in one click straight from next Cloud's IP library and of course if you use something that is not mentioned in this video on your own next Cloud Server well don't hesitate to let me know down there in the comments and I won't hesitate to let you know about today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and you probably already heard about Alma Linux the Enterprise grade replacement for Centos it's free it's one-to-one binary compatible with red hat Enterprise it's managed by the community and it's backed financially by tax care well they're now introducing their commercial support for Alma Linux called Alma my care it gives you 16 years of support life patching fips compliance and a lot more so you can run Alma Linux in any Mission critical environment and if you want to learn more about that they're running a webinar on March 1st to explain all the features and how it works so if you already run Alma Linux or if you're just interested in it then click the link in the description and book your slots to attend the webinar OK let's begin with one that is absolutely crucial to everything that I do and that is next cloud news news is an RSS feed reader and I know RSS is old and maybe you never even used it before but it's still the single best way of gathering the news that you care about without any algorithm deciding what you will actually see an RSS reader is simply a place where you gather feeds that list new articles from websites that you decided to include and that reader lets you browse these articles read them in the reader itself or access the original website if you prefer next cloud news lets you import an already existing list of feeds or you can create one by adding the websites you like one by one it supports folders so you can sort your feeds by categories and if your website doesn't actually have an RSS feed button you can still just copy paste its URL and news can Auto discover the feed for you and add the website anyway serves them right for ignoring old but very useful Tech you don't have a feed yes you do oh and by the way you can also add any YouTube channel URL and nextcloud news will Auto detect all new videos so you can watch them straight from your reader without having to contend with the YouTube algorithm on top of that news lets you export your feed list it lets you navigate using the J and K keys of your keyboard to scroll through articles and if you don't like the web interface you can even use another app that plugs into next cloud like news flash on ground for example it is an absolutely integral part of the way I work and the way I gather all the news that I talk about in the Linux News videos or in the podcast next app is notes and I know it's is a basic one but it's also a super important part of my workflow all my scripts and articles are written in next Cloud notes before they make it onto my website or as a video notes is very simple you just get basic markdown support for titles you get bold and italic and section headers and that's about it it has an edit mode and a View mode for when you want that markdown syntax to fade away and it lets you place your notes into categories for a bit more organization next Cloud also supports versioning for these nodes so you will always be able to go back to an earlier draft if you want and the cool thing is that all these notes are individual markdown files which means that if you sync them to your desktop using the next Cloud desktop client you can open them with any text editor and they're also portable if you ever decide to leave next Cloud I personally use iotas as my note-taking app it's a very simple gnome application that uses your next Cloud online account if it's been added to your gnome settings and that auto syncs with next Cloud regularly on mobile there are plenty of options on iOS I use cloud nodes and on Android I use the aptly name next Cloud nodes app it is a very useful little app it might be two bare bones for you if what you need is more than just simple basic plain text but for my needs it's perfect it's fast it sinks everywhere and I can take my notes on any devices if your notes needs are more along the lines of a Wiki or a knowledge base than next Cloud collectives is also interesting I started using it a few months ago to outline what I wanted out of my new website that I'm working on and it's basically a leaner faster version of something like Confluence it lets you create collectives lets others collaborate and edit them and they support more advanced syntax than the basic Notes app with images or emojis you can create templates Pages sub Pages you can view page outlines or add links from one page to the other it is pretty powerful unfortunately there are no mobile apps to access your content from outside of the web interface but still if that's not an issue for you collectives is an absolutely perfect choice for task management I use next Cloud tasks and next Cloud deck these two are how I organize my work week and the whole publication calendar for the month tasks let you create multiple lists and multiple tasks per list with support for tags start dates due date priorities and even completion percentage or current status each task can have notes added to it and you can turn a task into a subtask by simple drag and drop you can also store your tasks to make them easier to find now to access them on my computer I just use Endeavor the application not the distribution Endeavor Auto syncs with my gnome online accounts and automatically grabs all my tasks and lists and lets me interact with it without using a web interface it doesn't support all the features of next Cloud tasks just yet but it's still super handy the only thing that's missing from next Cloud tasks in my opinion is recurring tasks as in you create a task and when you take it off it automatically creates another one for the next day the next week the next month this support is not in yet and it kinda sucks to access my tasks on mobile on iOS I just use the Apple reminders app which integrates with any caldaf task list which next Cloud tasks is on Android you have open tasks for example that does the same thing as per next Cloud deck it piggybacks off of tasks but it places them in boards that you can customize with all the columns you want and it supports the same tags and the same properties for each task as next Cloud tasks so you can have a more graphical view of what you have to do this one I use for planning my month and my publication schedule as it gives me a bird's eye view of of what I need to do and what I need to prepare in advance deck has IOS and Android mobile apps and you can also just access it from the web browser which is what I generally do although I would be perfectly okay with a desktop client for Gnome if one existed next one is next Cloud passwords it's a password manager with the benefit of being self-hosted on your next Cloud Server so it's less likely to be affected by your wide data breach like the one that happened to LastPass recently it will be as safe as your next Cloud Server is basically it has a web interface to browse your passwords but you will really just want to use the browser extensions for Firefox or any Chrome based browser it will auto detect passwords when you enter them so you can save them you can edit the credentials or add a new password manually it can generate a password for you and that's about all you needed to do I couldn't make the extension become the autofill provider inside of Firefox which is kind of annoying but on mobile the next Cloud passwords app can be set as your autofill provider on iOS or on Android so you're all set and now that everyone knows that I store my passwords in my next Cloud Server I guess I have to delete them all and use something else just to be safe another small app I use every day is external sites it's super simple it just lets you add shortcuts to other websites inside your next Cloud menu and it will open these websites in an iframe directly from your next Cloud interface I personally added my podcast website so I can check statistics and manage the episodes from next Cloud instead of having to open yet another browser tab it should work with most websites unless the website you want to access has decided it does not allow it to be accessed from another website which is the case for my accounting software and that sucks oh well I guess I just won't be doing any accounting then kind of useless isn't it on to my office suite which is only office next cloud has a connector to let you plug an office suite directly to your next Cloud Server I went for only office and it lets me create new documents straight from the next cloud files app and edit existing ones from the web interface on any computer I want you do need to have an only Office document server running somewhere which is what I do I have a dedicated lenode instance for that and then you just configure the URL for this document server in your next Cloud settings and you're good to go as long as the document server is secured with an https certificate on the office is pretty cool and has all the features I need but you could also go for a collabora if you prefer they generally have the same feature set more or less it is basically my replacement for Google Docs or office 365. it gives me the exact same feature set the exact same convenience plus I have desktop apps that can plug into my next Cloud instance and no weird company is trying to push me to upgrade to anything or is selling my data now a smaller app but a nice one nonetheless is custom menu It's one I use to make my long list of next Cloud apps more manageable on the web interface what it does is basically give you complete control over how your menu works you get a second list of applications that you can interact with with a new menu button in the top left corner and you get to pick which apps go in that sidebar menu and which go in your header so it's easier to have access to the apps you use the most in the top bar and still retain access to everything else in the sidebar you can also pick which apps will open in a new browser tab if you prefer that behavior instead of replacing the current APP you have open inside of the web interface and you can change the Sorting order of applications as well simple but very useful if you use a lot of next Cloud features it just helps keep things legible another small app I use is Mastodon integration it lets me add my Mastodon feed or mentions onto my next Cloud dashboard so I can see if I have any important messages waiting for me right when I open next Cloud it can also be said to have a link to your Mastodon instance straight from your next Cloud menu although since it opens in a new tab I guess it would be better to just add your Mastodon instance as an external website like I showed earlier and if you prefer that there is also the same kind of integration but for Twitter but with the nice bonus of having the fragrance of a dumpster fire added onto it for more realism now pretty run of the mail but the next ones are contacts and Canon under all my contacts are hosted on next cloud and so are my calendars they plug in nicely on the desktop with gnome's online accounts so I can access them without having to open a web browser and on mobile well it's just caldav and cards DAV so any good mobile operating system will have access to that and will let you auto sync both contacts and calendars from your phone to your next Cloud Server and vice versa again simple replacement for Google Calendar or outlook.com I have everything in one place it's self-hosted and it's more private okay now this one I don't really use every day but I still use it relatively often it's next Cloud forms it's basically like Google forms in that it lets you create surveys easily with multiple question types single or multiple answers long form text fields and more and it lets you publish a public link to that survey so people can answer it after that you get to see all the results in a single page or you can view each form individually it's very handy to collect some feedback as I've done in the past for my patreon perks and as I plan to do soon for collecting your votes on a distro Awards video that I will be working on simple easy to use free of charge and non-privacy invasive unless you decide to ask people that answer your form to give you private information in which case you're doing the Privacy Invasion that's neat I also use next Cloud photos every day it's progressed a ton in the last version of nexcloud and now supports albums editing your photos sharing them with other people and it can even Auto recognize faces in your various pictures so you can tag them and find them more easily I auto upload all my pictures from my phone to my next Cloud Server with a general nexcloud app for IOS and Android and I can just sync these photos back to my computer thanks to the desktop client for nextcloud albums you create in the web interface base of next Cloud photos don't sync back to your mobile phone or to your desktop unfortunately it's not creating folders where your photos will automatically be moved which is kind of bad but I just don't use that kind of feature because I'm terrible at organizing photos anyways and of course I can't end the video without talking about the files app the core feature of next Cloud that I use basically every day to save what I work on to edit what I already created and more it's very robust with the ability to move copy paste favorite your files and folders you can share them inside or outside of next Cloud you can edit them with your office suite if you have one linked into next cloud and of course it auto syncs with the next Cloud desktop client and you can access everything from the next Cloud mobile app for IOS and Android it also supports versioning so you can go back if anything goes wrong generally my use case is just creating the file on the computer I'm working on and it will just auto sync with nexcloud and be downloaded onto all my other devices but I also use the sharing feature to share my weekly patreoncast with YouTube members for example or to send sponsored mentions to the various sponsors so they can check everything is okay before I add these mentions to a video and this should about cover it these are the applications that help me run and manage my YouTube channel my podcast my website and basically every stupid administrative task that I have to do to run this very company of course if you use anything else don't hesitate to let me know down in the comments always happy to learn about new stuff and I'm always happy to tell you about our sponsor if it's time for you to buy a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at Windows devices and researching online whether they're compatible or not just by something that actually supports Linux from today's sponsor tuxedo they have a huge range of devices that should cover every need and every price point every device has tons of choice for the CPU the G GPU the ram the SSD and you can even customize them further with your own keyboard layout engraved on the keys of your laptop or your own logo engraved on the lid of your laptop they're really solid some models come in multiple colors depending on your preferences and you can even open them repair them and upgrade them so if you need a new computer stop buying Windows computers buy a Linux one from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications or to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well the dislike button still sort of works and if you really enjoy what I do and you want to support the channel there are plenty of links down there for patreon for YouTube memberships both of them get access to special weekly perks and you can also just donate on PayPal or click the super thanks button you decide all my socials are also down there including the new podcast for the Linux news so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you thought that next Cloud was only for file storage then stick around because here are 16 applications that I use for next Cloud every day to run my channel the podcast the website and everything else next cloud is now basically my replacement to Google Docs or Office 365 but less privacy invasive you can install all these applications in one click straight from next Cloud's IP library and of course if you use something that is not mentioned in this video on your own next Cloud Server well don't hesitate to let me know down there in the comments and I won't hesitate to let you know about today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and you probably already heard about Alma Linux the Enterprise grade replacement for Centos it's free it's one-to-one binary compatible with red hat Enterprise it's managed by the community and it's backed financially by tax care well they're now introducing their commercial support for Alma Linux called Alma my care it gives you 16 years of support life patching fips compliance and a lot more so you can run Alma Linux in any Mission critical environment and if you want to learn more about that they're running a webinar on March 1st to explain all the features and how it works so if you already run Alma Linux or if you're just interested in it then click the link in the description and book your slots to attend the webinar OK let's begin with one that is absolutely crucial to everything that I do and that is next cloud news news is an RSS feed reader and I know RSS is old and maybe you never even used it before but it's still the single best way of gathering the news that you care about without any algorithm deciding what you will actually see an RSS reader is simply a place where you gather feeds that list new articles from websites that you decided to include and that reader lets you browse these articles read them in the reader itself or access the original website if you prefer next cloud news lets you import an already existing list of feeds or you can create one by adding the websites you like one by one it supports folders so you can sort your feeds by categories and if your website doesn't actually have an RSS feed button you can still just copy paste its URL and news can Auto discover the feed for you and add the website anyway serves them right for ignoring old but very useful Tech you don't have a feed yes you do oh and by the way you can also add any YouTube channel URL and nextcloud news will Auto detect all new videos so you can watch them straight from your reader without having to contend with the YouTube algorithm on top of that news lets you export your feed list it lets you navigate using the J and K keys of your keyboard to scroll through articles and if you don't like the web interface you can even use another app that plugs into next cloud like news flash on ground for example it is an absolutely integral part of the way I work and the way I gather all the news that I talk about in the Linux News videos or in the podcast next app is notes and I know it's is a basic one but it's also a super important part of my workflow all my scripts and articles are written in next Cloud notes before they make it onto my website or as a video notes is very simple you just get basic markdown support for titles you get bold and italic and section headers and that's about it it has an edit mode and a View mode for when you want that markdown syntax to fade away and it lets you place your notes into categories for a bit more organization next Cloud also supports versioning for these nodes so you will always be able to go back to an earlier draft if you want and the cool thing is that all these notes are individual markdown files which means that if you sync them to your desktop using the next Cloud desktop client you can open them with any text editor and they're also portable if you ever decide to leave next Cloud I personally use iotas as my note-taking app it's a very simple gnome application that uses your next Cloud online account if it's been added to your gnome settings and that auto syncs with next Cloud regularly on mobile there are plenty of options on iOS I use cloud nodes and on Android I use the aptly name next Cloud nodes app it is a very useful little app it might be two bare bones for you if what you need is more than just simple basic plain text but for my needs it's perfect it's fast it sinks everywhere and I can take my notes on any devices if your notes needs are more along the lines of a Wiki or a knowledge base than next Cloud collectives is also interesting I started using it a few months ago to outline what I wanted out of my new website that I'm working on and it's basically a leaner faster version of something like Confluence it lets you create collectives lets others collaborate and edit them and they support more advanced syntax than the basic Notes app with images or emojis you can create templates Pages sub Pages you can view page outlines or add links from one page to the other it is pretty powerful unfortunately there are no mobile apps to access your content from outside of the web interface but still if that's not an issue for you collectives is an absolutely perfect choice for task management I use next Cloud tasks and next Cloud deck these two are how I organize my work week and the whole publication calendar for the month tasks let you create multiple lists and multiple tasks per list with support for tags start dates due date priorities and even completion percentage or current status each task can have notes added to it and you can turn a task into a subtask by simple drag and drop you can also store your tasks to make them easier to find now to access them on my computer I just use Endeavor the application not the distribution Endeavor Auto syncs with my gnome online accounts and automatically grabs all my tasks and lists and lets me interact with it without using a web interface it doesn't support all the features of next Cloud tasks just yet but it's still super handy the only thing that's missing from next Cloud tasks in my opinion is recurring tasks as in you create a task and when you take it off it automatically creates another one for the next day the next week the next month this support is not in yet and it kinda sucks to access my tasks on mobile on iOS I just use the Apple reminders app which integrates with any caldaf task list which next Cloud tasks is on Android you have open tasks for example that does the same thing as per next Cloud deck it piggybacks off of tasks but it places them in boards that you can customize with all the columns you want and it supports the same tags and the same properties for each task as next Cloud tasks so you can have a more graphical view of what you have to do this one I use for planning my month and my publication schedule as it gives me a bird's eye view of of what I need to do and what I need to prepare in advance deck has IOS and Android mobile apps and you can also just access it from the web browser which is what I generally do although I would be perfectly okay with a desktop client for Gnome if one existed next one is next Cloud passwords it's a password manager with the benefit of being self-hosted on your next Cloud Server so it's less likely to be affected by your wide data breach like the one that happened to LastPass recently it will be as safe as your next Cloud Server is basically it has a web interface to browse your passwords but you will really just want to use the browser extensions for Firefox or any Chrome based browser it will auto detect passwords when you enter them so you can save them you can edit the credentials or add a new password manually it can generate a password for you and that's about all you needed to do I couldn't make the extension become the autofill provider inside of Firefox which is kind of annoying but on mobile the next Cloud passwords app can be set as your autofill provider on iOS or on Android so you're all set and now that everyone knows that I store my passwords in my next Cloud Server I guess I have to delete them all and use something else just to be safe another small app I use every day is external sites it's super simple it just lets you add shortcuts to other websites inside your next Cloud menu and it will open these websites in an iframe directly from your next Cloud interface I personally added my podcast website so I can check statistics and manage the episodes from next Cloud instead of having to open yet another browser tab it should work with most websites unless the website you want to access has decided it does not allow it to be accessed from another website which is the case for my accounting software and that sucks oh well I guess I just won't be doing any accounting then kind of useless isn't it on to my office suite which is only office next cloud has a connector to let you plug an office suite directly to your next Cloud Server I went for only office and it lets me create new documents straight from the next cloud files app and edit existing ones from the web interface on any computer I want you do need to have an only Office document server running somewhere which is what I do I have a dedicated lenode instance for that and then you just configure the URL for this document server in your next Cloud settings and you're good to go as long as the document server is secured with an https certificate on the office is pretty cool and has all the features I need but you could also go for a collabora if you prefer they generally have the same feature set more or less it is basically my replacement for Google Docs or office 365. it gives me the exact same feature set the exact same convenience plus I have desktop apps that can plug into my next Cloud instance and no weird company is trying to push me to upgrade to anything or is selling my data now a smaller app but a nice one nonetheless is custom menu It's one I use to make my long list of next Cloud apps more manageable on the web interface what it does is basically give you complete control over how your menu works you get a second list of applications that you can interact with with a new menu button in the top left corner and you get to pick which apps go in that sidebar menu and which go in your header so it's easier to have access to the apps you use the most in the top bar and still retain access to everything else in the sidebar you can also pick which apps will open in a new browser tab if you prefer that behavior instead of replacing the current APP you have open inside of the web interface and you can change the Sorting order of applications as well simple but very useful if you use a lot of next Cloud features it just helps keep things legible another small app I use is Mastodon integration it lets me add my Mastodon feed or mentions onto my next Cloud dashboard so I can see if I have any important messages waiting for me right when I open next Cloud it can also be said to have a link to your Mastodon instance straight from your next Cloud menu although since it opens in a new tab I guess it would be better to just add your Mastodon instance as an external website like I showed earlier and if you prefer that there is also the same kind of integration but for Twitter but with the nice bonus of having the fragrance of a dumpster fire added onto it for more realism now pretty run of the mail but the next ones are contacts and Canon under all my contacts are hosted on next cloud and so are my calendars they plug in nicely on the desktop with gnome's online accounts so I can access them without having to open a web browser and on mobile well it's just caldav and cards DAV so any good mobile operating system will have access to that and will let you auto sync both contacts and calendars from your phone to your next Cloud Server and vice versa again simple replacement for Google Calendar or outlook.com I have everything in one place it's self-hosted and it's more private okay now this one I don't really use every day but I still use it relatively often it's next Cloud forms it's basically like Google forms in that it lets you create surveys easily with multiple question types single or multiple answers long form text fields and more and it lets you publish a public link to that survey so people can answer it after that you get to see all the results in a single page or you can view each form individually it's very handy to collect some feedback as I've done in the past for my patreon perks and as I plan to do soon for collecting your votes on a distro Awards video that I will be working on simple easy to use free of charge and non-privacy invasive unless you decide to ask people that answer your form to give you private information in which case you're doing the Privacy Invasion that's neat I also use next Cloud photos every day it's progressed a ton in the last version of nexcloud and now supports albums editing your photos sharing them with other people and it can even Auto recognize faces in your various pictures so you can tag them and find them more easily I auto upload all my pictures from my phone to my next Cloud Server with a general nexcloud app for IOS and Android and I can just sync these photos back to my computer thanks to the desktop client for nextcloud albums you create in the web interface base of next Cloud photos don't sync back to your mobile phone or to your desktop unfortunately it's not creating folders where your photos will automatically be moved which is kind of bad but I just don't use that kind of feature because I'm terrible at organizing photos anyways and of course I can't end the video without talking about the files app the core feature of next Cloud that I use basically every day to save what I work on to edit what I already created and more it's very robust with the ability to move copy paste favorite your files and folders you can share them inside or outside of next Cloud you can edit them with your office suite if you have one linked into next cloud and of course it auto syncs with the next Cloud desktop client and you can access everything from the next Cloud mobile app for IOS and Android it also supports versioning so you can go back if anything goes wrong generally my use case is just creating the file on the computer I'm working on and it will just auto sync with nexcloud and be downloaded onto all my other devices but I also use the sharing feature to share my weekly patreoncast with YouTube members for example or to send sponsored mentions to the various sponsors so they can check everything is okay before I add these mentions to a video and this should about cover it these are the applications that help me run and manage my YouTube channel my podcast my website and basically every stupid administrative task that I have to do to run this very company of course if you use anything else don't hesitate to let me know down in the comments always happy to learn about new stuff and I'm always happy to tell you about our sponsor if it's time for you to buy a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at Windows devices and researching online whether they're compatible or not just by something that actually supports Linux from today's sponsor tuxedo they have a huge range of devices that should cover every need and every price point every device has tons of choice for the CPU the G GPU the ram the SSD and you can even customize them further with your own keyboard layout engraved on the keys of your laptop or your own logo engraved on the lid of your laptop they're really solid some models come in multiple colors depending on your preferences and you can even open them repair them and upgrade them so if you need a new computer stop buying Windows computers buy a Linux one from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications or to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well the dislike button still sort of works and if you really enjoy what I do and you want to support the channel there are plenty of links down there for patreon for YouTube memberships both of them get access to special weekly perks and you can also just donate on PayPal or click the super thanks button you decide all my socials are also down there including the new podcast for the Linux news so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and oh boy it's been a mixed bag of good and bad news this week because on the one hand we have research proving that Windows 11 sends data to third parties without user consent right after the install and we have an AI tool that uses GPL licensed code without redistributing anything or respecting attribution but on the other hand we have Fedora actually moving to full-on Flat Hub and we have performance improvements coming to the Dome software soon and we have some more details about Thunderbirds development roadmap so should I be happy or worried and should you be happy to see this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenote lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so if there was still any doubt it's now confirmed that Windows 11 is basically spyware a recent video from the PC security Channel on YouTube shows that the latest versions of Windows 11 reach out to third-party servers right after the first boot without asking for any user permission using Wireshark to analyze the DNS traffic they found out that Windows 11 connects to MSN Bing and Windows update immediately after boot but it also reaches out to third parties like steam McAfee or comscore market research even on a fresh install all these requests provide Telemetry data to various advertising companies Market researchers and even geolocation domains without any permission or even without opening a web browser the same channel tried Windows XP as a comparison point and found that it only calls to Windows update and nothing else now granted that OS was introduced in 2000 and one and at the time user data wasn't remotely as valuable as today but it still shows a worrying Trend when the biggest operating system on Earth is as careless of user preferences or consent and decides to supply third parties with data without the user's knowledge you know something is truly rotten compounded with the various ads that Microsoft adds in its default experience from the start menu to the news widget overlay the lock screen the Search tool or even the file explorer it's clear that the focus of windows isn't to provide the user with a tool to actually use their computer but to extract as much data and money out of them as possible and if you're watching this chances are you're actually using Linux which means that you're not affected by this and it's nice to have that reassurance that our choice was the right one but also if you were not already using Linux well that's another argument for you to make the switch finally Fedora is embracing flat pack and flat Hub fully while the distro was always at the Forefront of flat pack usage pushing it early on they had decided to stick to their own remote by default that only offered a subset of the apps available on flat Hub well these days will end with Fedora 38 which will offer full flat Hub as a third-party remote that users can enable just as easily as they enabled fedora's remote The Proposal was actually made earlier for Fedora 37 but had been rejected at the time by the Fedora steering committee this means that Fedora users as long as they enable third-party remotes in the first run setup of gnome or ingridome software after install will get access to the full breadth of flat hop without having to add it manually themselves it wasn't a difficult step by any means as you could just download any app from Flat hub's website and double click it to install it and the remote would be added automatically but it was still a potential confusion source for users who aren't familiar with flat pack so it's great to see it resolved flat Hub currently has about 2 000 applications available including the most popular ones like Library office Firefox and more and now if all distros could follow suits then we could have a truly great and easy app installed experience for everyone and maybe the last kings in flat pack software could be handled faster and yes I'm looking at you element story OS no your little description text on the onboarding app and the app center isn't enough you need a toggle for people to actually enable flat Hub in one click a developer found that an AI tool called voice.ai used open source libraries without respecting their licenses namely the GPL version 3 and the lgpl version 2.1 it looks like the tool uses code from Pratt an open source speech analysis software to build their real-time voice synthesizer they also use libg Crypt but in both instances they don't release the source code of the modifications they built on top of it or of any part of their software and they don't follow attribution in any file or dialog in the application they even actively prevent transferring the code or the product to anyone in their licensing terms the developer who found out about this has a blog post in which they explain how they uncovered this violation using reverse engineering tools and looking for references to specific strings used in the open source libraries they used the developer then reached out to the tools Discord for an explanation and where banned from it shortly after without warning for talking about reverse engineering the company since answered and put out a pretty self-contradictory statement saying that they do not violate open source licenses but at the same time that yes they do use these open source libraries which clearly means that they do violate the licenses since they didn't follow them at all after including the software in their code they said they will make the relevant source code available in their GitHub repo and that they have since removed old GPL V3 code from their software but that still doesn't fix the issue according to the licenses they have to release the source code for their tool up to the version before they removed GPL V3 code something I am pretty certain they won't do judging from their reaction and sure the fact that it's an AI tool isn't really relevant it's just another startup that decided to use open source code without respecting the licenses but it still shows a general pattern of AI related tools that they generally don't really have any regard for the license of the content they use either to train their model or to build their own tools now if you use gnome you might have noticed that the gnome software app can sometimes be pretty slow to display stuff especially when listing apps in a category well there's good news as the prolific George stavrakas has spent some time profiling the app to see what was taking so long to load using sysprov a nice graphical profiling tool they discovered that an operation took more than 4 seconds to execute and this operation is the one used to list the applications in a specific category in genome software looking into it they found out that loading app icons was the culprit here because some apps declare remote icons that then have to be downloaded from Flat hub for example but some apps have invalid URLs for these icons which means that gnome software might wait for a while before displaying anything so the developers quickly found the fix by using your cache for app icons and by displaying things even without having everything ready and queuing up the downloads in the back background George published a quick video showing the difference before and after the fix and it's night and day with the new version taking less than half the time of the old one to display the same elements so let's hope that this profiling work will make it to other gnome applications so we can have the zippiest experience possible if like me you haven't been able to use Thunderbird because of its dated interface and convoluted user experience then here's an interesting read in a blog post their product design manager explained the history of the project and their plans for the future to rebuild Thunderbird from the ground up bit by bit their goal is to get rid of Technical and UI debt that they accumulated over the past 10 years Alex goes over the history of Thunderbird explaining how it was created by reusing the code of Firefox then how it was moved to a Community Driven model as the Mozilla Foundation stopped working on it while this generated a lot of user funding that allowed Thunderbird to keep going as well as a lot of contributions to the project it also made this project complex to manage and coordinate as it moved from one development model to another this resulted in an inconsistent user interface and difficulties to build and release Thunderbird as coordination with the Firefox development efforts was lost nowadays Thunderbird has more paid employees working on the project being owned by a subsidiary of Mozilla and this meant that while Thunderbird is still open source with an open development model code and changes are now approved by core developers and designers which means that some contributions might be rejected if they are not up to Snuff now with Thunderbird being sustainable they are focusing on removing technical debt and rebuilding each module in turn to have a better experience all around the first visible results will be in version 115 in July that will bring a Simple and Clean user interface with customization options so long time Thunderbird users can keep their workflows and they will keep at it for the next two years focusing on usability and accessibility and it's wonderful to see because Thunderbird is basically one of the most powerful contact calendar RSS the personal information management Suite that we all want on Linux but its current interface doesn't let it reach its true potential so if they can manage to have something simpler for people who want a simpler experience while keeping all the power under there I think they'll have a winner now let's take a quick look at what's been brewing in The Gnome world first gnome Builder the IDE to build gnome apps uses more up-to-date gdk4 widgets which enables them to also have drag and drop in the project 3. Global search was also improved to support filtering and previewing of search results Loop the new image viewer has now been accepted in The Gnome incubator program which is basically the process that lets apps become gnome core application that might be shipped by default with every version of gnome this new viewer also got swipe gestures to navigate between images a revamped image browsing code to fix some bugs and support for moving images to the trash warp the computer to computer file transfer app got a new release with QR code support to let you transfer files easily and they also have an experimental Windows version so it supports more devices there's also a new iplan application in the works which is basically a to-do list app with support for projects boards and more it's too early to say how well it works but since I'm a sucker for new productivity tools I will give it a shot as soon as it has a stable release out there's also design a new 2D CAD application that was released it supports the dxf format uses common workflows that other CAD apps traditionally use it lets you use the command line or a Toolbar to draw and manipulate your drawing it has layer management and it has support for entities that you can look at and modify I think it's interesting to see a cad tool coming to gnome because gran home has traditionally been home to more simple applications with one very small simple purpose and this kind of app is kind of more complex so I think maybe with libid Vita and a more unified development environment developers are now tackling bigger and more complex projects and as for KDE the team has added the ability to Define your default apps for a lot more file types straight from the settings the accent color UI has been condensed so it uses less screen space which should let developers add day or night color scheme switching in plasma 6. the on-screen display that shows the current audio device being used also shows the battery level now visual glitches have been fixed in the corners of various frames across multiple applications and they fixed 108 bugs across the whole project now all these changes will make it to plasma 6. as we are way too close to plasma 5.27's release date in just three days and of course stay tuned And subscribe to the channel if you want to see my review of that new release which should be a big one seeing as it's going to be the last KDE plasma release for version 5. and let's finish this with the gaming news it looks like Ray tracing on Linux is going to improve in the future as the Vulcan beta drivers for NVIDIA gpus are now adding support for a new Vulcan extension affectionately named vkxed pipeline Library group handles which basically improves compatibility with certain DirectX Ray tracing calls proton still needs to make use of that new extension and for now only the Nvidia beta drivers have it where Mesa used for AMD and Intel doesn't but it's still good news for people who want to halve their performance for some pretty sunlights and if you bought the lower storage capacity steam deck and you feel that the performance penalty using an SD card is still too big you might be happy to learn that you will now be able to easily buy replacement ssds up to two terabytes for your steam deck from framework that company makes the very well reviewed framework laptop but it looks like they want to expand their General Vision to other consumer products which is great especially since finding compatible ssds for the deck can be tricky as it uses a small uncommon SSD format imagine how cool it would be to have framework become the PowerHouse company that provides replacement parts and upgrades for a variety of consumer devices that would be pretty awesome awesome like today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it maybe it's time to stop buying Windows devices crossing your fingers and praying that everything runs smoothly maybe it's time to buy a computer that's actually been designed to run Linux from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a big range of devices that honestly should suit every price point and every need they have laptops and desktops they have affordable ones and pricier ones they have super simple ones and very powerful ones for gaming for work for workstations you decide and they are all super customizable with various options they are all repairable and upgradable and you can have your own logo engraved on the lid of your laptop or no logo at all if you don't like branding and you can also have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys so if you need a new device you want to support linux's development and you want to run Linux on that device well click the link in the description below and check out tuxedo's products they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment and if you didn't like it there's also the dislike button you can see how many people clicked on it unless you have an extension but it still works and if you really enjoy what I do and you want to support the channel well there are plenty of links down there in the description from Super thanks on YouTube to PayPal to patreon subscribers or you YouTube members and the audio version of that podcast which you can also support on patreon so if you want to know more about what I do my website anything else check those links out in the meantime thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and the last release of KD plasma is now out at least for the KD 5 series the next one will be plasma 6 and the KDE team definitely wants plasma 5 to end with a bank they fixed multi-monitor support added tiling improved virtually all plasma widgets polished everything completed Weyland support with fractional scaling and Global shortcuts and they still found the time to make discover actually useful so I poured over the change logs under weekly blog posts and I gathered here all the major and minor features that you can expect and there is a lot to cover including this segue to today's sponsor thanks to linode for sponsoring this video linode is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own nexcloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games like pie hole pihole is a DNS sinkhole that filters out requests to add serving domains basically it lets you block ads and improve Network performance it lets you actively monitor every DNS request made on your network and block requests as they come in and you can deploy it in one click only nodes so you can ensure I stay poor and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below and let's begin with plasma welcome their whole new first run experience to let new users get to grips with plasma this new little app will open after a fresh caddy install at least if your distro decides to use it by default it's 9 pages but you can skip it all together it explains the very Basics like how to connect to the internet or how to change settings but it also presents a bunch of great features plasma has and never really talked about before these include volts the encrypted folders activities KD connect K Runner the system overview and the ability to get new themes wallpapers widgets and more and it is excellent it's a very nice introduction to let people know about features that were never that well explained and it really showcases the power of KD it's a great step to fix the discoverability issue that KDE has and which I made a video about with a very click baity thumbnail Katie has tons of power but it might as well not exist it's completely wasted if users don't know about it now you also get the mandatory app store Page listing various applications you can get and you get a Telemetry data page that lets you enable data collection if you want which also means that this data collection slider has been removed from the settings home homepage since users have already been exposed to that choice finally you get the online accounts page and how to get involved or how to support KDE financially distributions will apparently be able to customize these Pages at startups so it might be interesting to see what this rules decide to push what but it's also sure to annoy KDE veterans because now it adds one more click at every install oh no kitty is bloated now okay but you're here for the mainline feature right the tiling capabilities of KDE so let's talk about that while kwin won't replace a full tiling Window Manager it now has the ability to create tiling layouts and then to place windows in the various tiles you created to set up a tiling layout you press super plus T and you'll get that overview with a default layout in three columns you have the ability to load another layout from a pre-made selection and you can also adjust the padding between zones which will be reflected when tiling Windows each Zone can be split into others either horizontally or vertically or removed entirely and then once your layout suits you all you have to do is drag a window while holding shift and your window will automatically occupy the tiling Zone it's sitting above tiling zones are either static or floating meaning you can keep a portion of your screen with floating windows if you want Windows when tiled can be resized and the tiling layout will also reflect these changes it's a very cool new addition but since I'm a nitpicky bastard I have some complaints first it's impossible to discover by yourself the shortcut is never explained unless you go look for it in the desktop Effect called tiling editor and nowhere does it tell you that you need to press shift to place windows in this mode either so discoverability is basically non-existent second you cannot save your own layouts if you craft one you like but decide to quickly move to another one for a specific temporary setup there's no way to go back to the previous one it's just lost and you'll have to create it again third there are no keyboard shortcuts to place windows in the tiling zones you have to do it with the mouse and the shift key which is sure to annoy people who are used to a regular tiling manager and want to use a mouse as little as possible although maybe there are shortcuts and I just could not find them but I looked everywhere I swear anyway the implementation of o2 tiling in pop OS should probably have been the example to follow here it's fluid it's easy to understand and it can be toggled on or off easily and graphically still it's a cool addition and I'm sure a lot of people will find it useful I just hope that they refine it in plasma 6. okay but the meat of the changes are in the plasma desktop the widgets and tools have received so many improvements that even in this lengthy section I cannot list them all first K Runner got a nice update to surface more relevant search results it can now search in any part of a file's name and will offer a web search when no results are available it also displays time zones in a much more legible Manner and you can search for specific time zones like for example time CET and it will show you how far ahead or behind they are compared to your current time zone settings pages are also now placed higher in the results when you search for their exact name and so are files if you type their exact name they'll appear first unless they are really old and there's something else that shares the exact same name and that feels more relevant and if you search for a dictionary definition pressing enter will copy to the clipboard with a notification to let you know it happened k-runner is wonderful and it's great to see them still working on its logic but I don't know if that search Logic is also applied to the kickoff menu or not then as a general change when hovering over widgets they will tell you what you can expect if you middle click them for example turning airplane mode when middle clicking the network applet the tooltips have also been greatly improved with the one for Bluetooth showing battery life AI for connected devices the one for DND no not Dungeons and Dragons do not disturb so the one for do not disturb is now showing you when the mode ends and basically all tooltips have more information the calendar widgets now also supports more calendars including the Hebrew calendar the battery monitor now shows the charging status of connected devices the media applet now has two layouts one for horizontal panels with the album art and the song title and one for vertical panels with the album art only the Color Picker can now show up to 9 colors instead of just one and clicking a color will automatically copy it to the clipboard with a notification the weather widget can Now display the temperature in the taskbar and has an easier to use location picker for the view now lets you show hidden folders if you want pop-up nodes will make links clickable by default when you paste them into a note and kickoff now supports separators in the menu if you added them in the menu editor without both working your keyboard navigation as they are not selected when using the keyboard oh but that's not all yeah they really went into overdrive for this release in no particular order the wallpaper list should be much faster since it now uses multiple CPU cores to render them changing wallpapers now uses a transition animation just like changing themes we'll do now floating panels will automatically be defloated when a window touches them and they will use less padding and less space in that defloated mode the breeze theme now has an outline around windows in dark mode which makes them more easy to parse at a glance trying to use a VPN will prompt you to install the relevant plugin that supports it the screenshot tool now remembers the last used rectangular selection until you close the app and it now lets you change the screenshot type straight from the sidebar and then there's the Weyland support plasma now supports high resolution scrolling under Weyland for smoother Mouse operations and they now support content types which lets the compositor adjust the display's refresh rate depending on what you're doing watching a movie playing a game or web browsing of course you will need to have a display that supports variable refresh rates fractional scaling is also Now natively supported under Weyland you could do it before but it was a hack it rendered at the closest integer scale so 1X or 2X and then scaled down from this to reach your desired scaling Factor now it renders directly at the factor you want for example 1.25 and this results in less battery consumption more performance and less blurriness when sharing your screen on Wayland the window picker will now have thumbnails to let you decide what you want to share and there's also a new setting to let X Weyland applications access the key presses of the whole system so they get Global shortcuts back and using the open file with app action from the context menu will now open the relevant portal so everything looks nicer and is more secure oh and here comes another major change the multi-monitor refactoring plasma was Infamous for the various issues it created with multi-monitor setups especially if you frequently unplugged external monitors and re-plug them while this should be over now plasma revamped their whole way of handling this so all panels Windows wallpapers and widgets are saved per Monitor and restored when a monitor is plugged back in these monitor sets are kept between X11 and Weyland and the UI was revamped when using three monitors or more letting you attribute monitor numbers to every one of them and place them better the display applet will also Auto Hide now in the icon tray when you only have one monitor or when you're using a desktop setup with multiple displays but on the laptop with an external monitor or more it will stay with visible at all times then you can click it to surface some options easily I'm not saying that all bugs related to multi-monitors have been fixed but you should definitely have a much more pleasant experience now and also where would get EB without more settings so yeah let's look at that first are flat pack permissions they have their own new settings page that lets you review what applications have access to and give them more permissions or remove some it's not quite as complete as what flat seal offers but it's pretty damn close you also get some general changes like the Highlight change settings button that move to the hamburger menu and that now will show you the keyboard shortcuts you changed some settings Pages like the desktop session settings now use a more legible look with bold headers that lets you parse the page more easily it should make its way to other pages in the future on top of that the icon size preferences in the appearance settings have been redesigned the launch feedback settings don't have their own page anymore they've been moved to the cursors page which makes much more sense the info center will now show you open CL related informations the keyboard shortcuts page now has a new custom commands UI which should be way easier to use than the previous one and it lets you pick a script file with a graphical file picker there's also a new touchscreen page and the drawing tablet page now lets you map your pen buttons to specific commands but since I don't own any of these devices I can't really show you how that looks and there's also some progress on Discover it will now show more flat back permissions on applications Pages including Bluetooth access for example and it won't show the category of an app in its card in the results since it's just not that useful of an information the home page has received a new look with editor's Choice popular applications and categories so it's easier to navigate the all applications button is also now back in the sidebar because navigating without it was kind of a pain and when you're searching for something inside of a category if nothing is available you'll get a nice message and a button to search the whole store and not just that specific category on top of that offline updates will now give you more informations on the packages you're updating and there's a message when you're in offline mode instead of a never-ending progress bar so yeah basically now discover lives up to its name it actually lets you discover applications nice and I'm still missing all the bug fixes and some other minor changes to applets widgets and whatever else on the desktop the next version will be plasma 6 and we might have to wait more than four months to get it so in the meantime every caddy user will be stuck on 5.27 so it's really good that it's so good it's insanely polished compared to a few releases ago it's faster it's while on support is basically complete with fractional scaling Global shortcuts and portals and multi-monitor support is now finally excellent and should result in way less issues especially on laptops It's a Wonderful version and you should absolutely install it if your distro offers it it's a very solid foundation for us to wait on while the team works on plasma 6 heavily recommended like today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at Windows devices and crossing your fingers and praying that everything will run smoothly on Linux buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they are based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every price point and every need whether it's an affordable Ultrabook or a super high-end workstation Tower or gaming laptop they have it they're all very customizable with plenty of options to tailor your device to what you want to do with it and they're all repairable upgradable you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop your own custom logo laser edged on the lid of your laptop or no logo at all if you don't like branding so if you need a new computer and you want to run Linux on it and you want to help support linux's development buy a new computer from tuxedo using the link in the description below they are really cool so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's always that dislike button and the comment section to let me know what I messed up and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to support what I do there are plenty of links down there in the description for PayPal super thanks YouTube memberships patreon memberships those last two give you access to specific benefits check them out if you're interested in the meantime thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and we might be the last generation to be able to enjoy a nice open Unified worldwide internet because with the centralization that big tech companies operate on their various services and the lockdown they impose on their users plus the various measures that countries take to determine what their citizens can or can't access online it's undeniable that the open interoperable web is dying so let's see why let's see a few signs that the internet is actually kinda healing in certain ways and also let's see this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and once again they're giving you some pretty cool information for free using the link in the description you can download their latest white paper which is going to help you decide whether the Kata approach to security can work for you Kata stands for continuous adaptive risk and Trust assessment and it's a model built by Gartner based on monitoring automation using Technologies for multiple vendors and that lets you respond quickly to various security vulnerabilities and threats with the free report you'll know how to use this model to secure your operations you'll know the various challenges that you'll face and how you can integrate live patching in support of this model so head over to the link in the description learn more about Carta and start securing your operations now so the first big thing that is killing the open web is the centralization of all services all user data and the lockdown that big tech companies impose on their users big tech companies like apple Google or Microsoft are making all efforts possible to ensure that their users stick to their online services and products and this ends up dictating what parts of the internet they end up accessing or not using a specific web browser means you're using a specific web browser engine which dates what you can or cannot do online Safari on iOS doesn't support all modern features of web apps Google Chrome and their blink engine limits what ad blocking or tracker blocking capabilities you can have they are restricting your open internet experience but it's not just browsers it's also the phones or the phone OS that they make which have their own limited app stores that dictate what you can or can't install or do on your own device but hey it's not like your smartphone is going to become your main way of accessing the internet right that that mobile internet fan it's never gonna catch on now it's also the search engines from these companies that will dictate which website surface and which don't whether you're using Google or Bing or Yandex or Baidu every single one of these engines will prioritize certain websites and content over others often making their own Services first and foremost now the the algorithms from the platform you use like YouTube for video Facebook or Twitter will Define what content you see and what content you don't and thus limit your internet experience as well it is really easy to fall into a comfortable bubble of services offered by one single company for example if you only use Google services you basically only view Google's vision of the internet and that vision is not the full open web What it lets you see first or what it lets you see at all is dictated by their advertisers not by what you should see or what you actually want to see now even worse some people basically only access the internet through one application Facebook Twitter or a chat app like WeChat it's their entire portal to do anything that they will read play write or do this everything app vision is insanely scary and stupid it and it's something I will discuss in another video and then you have the lack of interoperability like being unable to talk to people on Twitter if you only have a Facebook account or iMessage not working with regular normal SMS or RCS limiting the features and the way you can talk to people or just the data being unusable in another service even if you export it from your current service and some of you might think well of course Twitter isn't interoperable by Facebook they are not made by the same company but that's not how the internet used to work or how the internet was built chat apps for example used to almost all rely on a single protocol and they could all talk to each other whatever the client you were using so suffices to say that the bigger a company gets the more it's going to restrict what it's gonna show you of the internet it won't prevent you from accessing everything but you still won't do it because it's going to be way easier to just click and access what the company wants you to see but this stuff you can still bypass yourself it's not that hard to replace most Google services with something else I did it the only thing I use nowadays is YouTube and I didn't have to rip off my own arms to do it more concerning is what countries do to limit what you can and cannot access since people use the internet to exchange data between each other or with other countries they also use the internet to bypass certain limitations that countries try to impose on information and so these countries Implement various filters that are basically censorship some of it is totally acceptable like blocking access to Illegal material like child pornography or terrorist content and some of it is more questionable like blocking websites that reference various copyrighted materials like torrent sites the torrent file itself sure might be illegal but but the site that lets you access the torrent hasn't done anything wrong it would be like blocking Wikipedia because they have the chemical formula of an explosive sure you could use it to do something illegal but the website didn't sell you any TNT so countries order various companies to remove content or to block their user access to stuff like India ordering the removal of a lot of Chinese apps from various app stores or asking isps to block various IP addresses including the website for VLC because they could not understand the difference between VLC the official application and people Distributing infected copies of VLC illegally sure let's block the only safe way to download VLC without malware you also have Russia ordering companies like Google or Microsoft to remove certain links and websites from their search results so no one in Russia can access them anymore this is limiting access to the free and open web it's killing the open internet you don't get the full connected web you get a subset of it companies who refuse can be banned in these countries so they generally comply if they want to stay in business there but that is not enough Banning Google entirely from your country because they would have refused to censor some stuff is not super easy if you're not as big as China or Russia for example and think of what you're depriving your citizens of like where are your children is going to get all that spyware but it's not just authoritarian governments that do it in the EU for example France has blocked various media websites and TV channels linked to Russia after the war in Ukraine France also at some point had a law that would ban a user from even having an internet connection if if there were caught downloading pirated content three times in a row fortunately they never really applied that rule but it still let them Implement a mass surveillance Network cool now as I said these techniques are also used to block child pornography or terrorist related content and other generally unacceptable media but it's not just that that gets censored and once the capability is built it's easy to abuse it to remove stuff that the government might not like and all these filters are basically killing the open interconnected internet because your government decides to restrict what you can or cannot access online it's not what the internet has been designed to be now when filters Aren't Enough countries now Implement full internet blackouts generally to deal with protests against the government's actions in 2020 268 million people had their internet access shut down that's 49 more than in 2019. India for example did it in Kashmir for almost a full year and as we all know people never rebelled before the internet was invented like there were no Revolutions in any country whatsoever before sir Tim berners-lee implemented the internet and its Marxist idea of exchanging information while these blackouts are selective and can still let governments access the internet themselves while the general public can't they are devastating for a country's economy and business and they cannot be maintained for very long periods of time so they are generally only used by totalitarian regimes that want to either shut down any contestation or to hide their crimes now these blackouts are obviously against the open internet and open communication and they're kind of killing the web very literally in the countries where they're implemented but the ultimate candidate against the open web is what China has built themselves they might be linked to the general internet everybody else enjoys but it's a one-way Street people can access their websites but the Chinese people can't access a lot of the rest of the internet being limited to what the Chinese government allows China has built their own entire alternative internet with their own services and their own websites and it's not for nothing that people are talking about the great firewall of China because when you're in there you cannot access anything that the government has deemed not okay it's basically The Logical continuation of the filter system that we talked about already not only do you filter stuff but the stuff that you filtered and that people might want to use you replace with something that one of your companies that you control has developed internally and with China's internet being so successful at curtailing protests and undesirable information it's no wonder other countries would be willing willing to follow suit except that fortunately for the open internet they would have to build massive companies in their own countries that would be able to compete and replace all Google services all Apple Services Microsoft services and others that's the idea of digital sovereignty that for example the French government has been touting a lot and if a country relatively rich like France can't Implement that in a reasonable time frame I don't think a lot of other countries have a shot at it if they don't have the same population and economic power as China or India for example and of course it's not all doom and gloom the internet is showing signs of healing at least on certain fronts the main way is decentralized Services these are emerging again and they're slowly offering alternatives to the big closed down networks Mastodon for example is a success story of a Federated decentralized Network offering a viable alternative to Twitter and that can talk to a variety of other services like pixel fed WordPress spiritube Caster pod and the like and even if you combine all of these Services they're still extremely small compared to just Twitter but Mastodon is still succeeding financially and is generally a very very good experience at least in the case of Mastodon if you manage to choose a server to create your account on so you mean to tell me that on top of choosing my internet access provider my email provider my phone manufacturer my OS of choice for my desktop I now have to choose a server for my social network [ __ ] this I'm out jokes aside on top of this various laws are also being passed forcing big tech companies to relinquish a bit of control over their platforms or their app stores for example with apple being forced in the EU to have iMessage be interoperable and allowing third-party app stores on iOS so yes the open internet is slowly dying by a death of a Thousand Cuts more and more we're seeing a lack of openness on the internet and a lack of control over what we can see and what is actually shown to us fortunately the power of big tech companies is starting to be curtailed at least in some parts of the world and we're seeing some decentralized alternatives to the major social networks that might be able to finally break that filter bubble that companies want to impose on people but we still should be very very concerned over the various countries that try to restrict to close down their versions of the internet so that they don't really show their citizens everything that they might want to see and as a first move to get away from Big tech companies why not buy a computer that runs Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they ship worldwide a big range of computers that run Linux out of the box which is undeniably better if you actually want to run Linux than buying a Windows computer and trying to install Linux on it praying that it's going to be supported they have a nice big range of devices that should have options for every price point and every need whether you want a small laptop or a giant workstation or a gaming device in between they have everything most of their devices are openable repairable and they're all very customizable including your own custom keyboard layout on the keyboard of your laptop or your own logo on the lid of your device or even no logo at all if you don't like branding so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development check check out the link in the description and buy yourself a device from tuxedo they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well the dislike button still works and leave me a comment down below as well so I know why this video sucked and if you really enjoy what I'm doing on this channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to an exclusive weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topic that I'll cover so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and we might be the last generation to be able to enjoy a nice open Unified worldwide internet because with the centralization that big tech companies operate on their various services and the lockdown they impose on their users plus the various measures that countries take to determine what their citizens can or can't access online it's undeniable that the open interoperable web is dying so let's see why let's see a few signs that the internet is actually kinda healing in certain ways and also let's see this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and once again they're giving you some pretty cool information for free using the link in the description you can download their latest white paper which is going to help you decide whether the Kata approach to security can work for you Kata stands for continuous adaptive risk and Trust assessment and it's a model built by Gartner based on monitoring automation using Technologies for multiple vendors and that lets you respond quickly to various security vulnerabilities and threats with the free report you'll know how to use this model to secure your operations you'll know the various challenges that you'll face and how you can integrate live patching in support of this model so head over to the link in the description learn more about Carta and start securing your operations now so the first big thing that is killing the open web is the centralization of all services all user data and the lockdown that big tech companies impose on their users big tech companies like apple Google or Microsoft are making all efforts possible to ensure that their users stick to their online services and products and this ends up dictating what parts of the internet they end up accessing or not using a specific web browser means you're using a specific web browser engine which dates what you can or cannot do online Safari on iOS doesn't support all modern features of web apps Google Chrome and their blink engine limits what ad blocking or tracker blocking capabilities you can have they are restricting your open internet experience but it's not just browsers it's also the phones or the phone OS that they make which have their own limited app stores that dictate what you can or can't install or do on your own device but hey it's not like your smartphone is going to become your main way of accessing the internet right that that mobile internet fan it's never gonna catch on now it's also the search engines from these companies that will dictate which website surface and which don't whether you're using Google or Bing or Yandex or Baidu every single one of these engines will prioritize certain websites and content over others often making their own Services first and foremost now the the algorithms from the platform you use like YouTube for video Facebook or Twitter will Define what content you see and what content you don't and thus limit your internet experience as well it is really easy to fall into a comfortable bubble of services offered by one single company for example if you only use Google services you basically only view Google's vision of the internet and that vision is not the full open web What it lets you see first or what it lets you see at all is dictated by their advertisers not by what you should see or what you actually want to see now even worse some people basically only access the internet through one application Facebook Twitter or a chat app like WeChat it's their entire portal to do anything that they will read play write or do this everything app vision is insanely scary and stupid it and it's something I will discuss in another video and then you have the lack of interoperability like being unable to talk to people on Twitter if you only have a Facebook account or iMessage not working with regular normal SMS or RCS limiting the features and the way you can talk to people or just the data being unusable in another service even if you export it from your current service and some of you might think well of course Twitter isn't interoperable by Facebook they are not made by the same company but that's not how the internet used to work or how the internet was built chat apps for example used to almost all rely on a single protocol and they could all talk to each other whatever the client you were using so suffices to say that the bigger a company gets the more it's going to restrict what it's gonna show you of the internet it won't prevent you from accessing everything but you still won't do it because it's going to be way easier to just click and access what the company wants you to see but this stuff you can still bypass yourself it's not that hard to replace most Google services with something else I did it the only thing I use nowadays is YouTube and I didn't have to rip off my own arms to do it more concerning is what countries do to limit what you can and cannot access since people use the internet to exchange data between each other or with other countries they also use the internet to bypass certain limitations that countries try to impose on information and so these countries Implement various filters that are basically censorship some of it is totally acceptable like blocking access to Illegal material like child pornography or terrorist content and some of it is more questionable like blocking websites that reference various copyrighted materials like torrent sites the torrent file itself sure might be illegal but but the site that lets you access the torrent hasn't done anything wrong it would be like blocking Wikipedia because they have the chemical formula of an explosive sure you could use it to do something illegal but the website didn't sell you any TNT so countries order various companies to remove content or to block their user access to stuff like India ordering the removal of a lot of Chinese apps from various app stores or asking isps to block various IP addresses including the website for VLC because they could not understand the difference between VLC the official application and people Distributing infected copies of VLC illegally sure let's block the only safe way to download VLC without malware you also have Russia ordering companies like Google or Microsoft to remove certain links and websites from their search results so no one in Russia can access them anymore this is limiting access to the free and open web it's killing the open internet you don't get the full connected web you get a subset of it companies who refuse can be banned in these countries so they generally comply if they want to stay in business there but that is not enough Banning Google entirely from your country because they would have refused to censor some stuff is not super easy if you're not as big as China or Russia for example and think of what you're depriving your citizens of like where are your children is going to get all that spyware but it's not just authoritarian governments that do it in the EU for example France has blocked various media websites and TV channels linked to Russia after the war in Ukraine France also at some point had a law that would ban a user from even having an internet connection if if there were caught downloading pirated content three times in a row fortunately they never really applied that rule but it still let them Implement a mass surveillance Network cool now as I said these techniques are also used to block child pornography or terrorist related content and other generally unacceptable media but it's not just that that gets censored and once the capability is built it's easy to abuse it to remove stuff that the government might not like and all these filters are basically killing the open interconnected internet because your government decides to restrict what you can or cannot access online it's not what the internet has been designed to be now when filters Aren't Enough countries now Implement full internet blackouts generally to deal with protests against the government's actions in 2020 268 million people had their internet access shut down that's 49 more than in 2019. India for example did it in Kashmir for almost a full year and as we all know people never rebelled before the internet was invented like there were no Revolutions in any country whatsoever before sir Tim berners-lee implemented the internet and its Marxist idea of exchanging information while these blackouts are selective and can still let governments access the internet themselves while the general public can't they are devastating for a country's economy and business and they cannot be maintained for very long periods of time so they are generally only used by totalitarian regimes that want to either shut down any contestation or to hide their crimes now these blackouts are obviously against the open internet and open communication and they're kind of killing the web very literally in the countries where they're implemented but the ultimate candidate against the open web is what China has built themselves they might be linked to the general internet everybody else enjoys but it's a one-way Street people can access their websites but the Chinese people can't access a lot of the rest of the internet being limited to what the Chinese government allows China has built their own entire alternative internet with their own services and their own websites and it's not for nothing that people are talking about the great firewall of China because when you're in there you cannot access anything that the government has deemed not okay it's basically The Logical continuation of the filter system that we talked about already not only do you filter stuff but the stuff that you filtered and that people might want to use you replace with something that one of your companies that you control has developed internally and with China's internet being so successful at curtailing protests and undesirable information it's no wonder other countries would be willing willing to follow suit except that fortunately for the open internet they would have to build massive companies in their own countries that would be able to compete and replace all Google services all Apple Services Microsoft services and others that's the idea of digital sovereignty that for example the French government has been touting a lot and if a country relatively rich like France can't Implement that in a reasonable time frame I don't think a lot of other countries have a shot at it if they don't have the same population and economic power as China or India for example and of course it's not all doom and gloom the internet is showing signs of healing at least on certain fronts the main way is decentralized Services these are emerging again and they're slowly offering alternatives to the big closed down networks Mastodon for example is a success story of a Federated decentralized Network offering a viable alternative to Twitter and that can talk to a variety of other services like pixel fed WordPress spiritube Caster pod and the like and even if you combine all of these Services they're still extremely small compared to just Twitter but Mastodon is still succeeding financially and is generally a very very good experience at least in the case of Mastodon if you manage to choose a server to create your account on so you mean to tell me that on top of choosing my internet access provider my email provider my phone manufacturer my OS of choice for my desktop I now have to choose a server for my social network [ __ ] this I'm out jokes aside on top of this various laws are also being passed forcing big tech companies to relinquish a bit of control over their platforms or their app stores for example with apple being forced in the EU to have iMessage be interoperable and allowing third-party app stores on iOS so yes the open internet is slowly dying by a death of a Thousand Cuts more and more we're seeing a lack of openness on the internet and a lack of control over what we can see and what is actually shown to us fortunately the power of big tech companies is starting to be curtailed at least in some parts of the world and we're seeing some decentralized alternatives to the major social networks that might be able to finally break that filter bubble that companies want to impose on people but we still should be very very concerned over the various countries that try to restrict to close down their versions of the internet so that they don't really show their citizens everything that they might want to see and as a first move to get away from Big tech companies why not buy a computer that runs Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they ship worldwide a big range of computers that run Linux out of the box which is undeniably better if you actually want to run Linux than buying a Windows computer and trying to install Linux on it praying that it's going to be supported they have a nice big range of devices that should have options for every price point and every need whether you want a small laptop or a giant workstation or a gaming device in between they have everything most of their devices are openable repairable and they're all very customizable including your own custom keyboard layout on the keyboard of your laptop or your own logo on the lid of your device or even no logo at all if you don't like branding so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development check check out the link in the description and buy yourself a device from tuxedo they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well the dislike button still works and leave me a comment down below as well so I know why this video sucked and if you really enjoy what I'm doing on this channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to an exclusive weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topic that I'll cover so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and oh boy it's been a mixed bag of good and bad news this week because on the one hand we have research proving that Windows 11 sends data to third parties without user consent right after the install and we have an AI tool that uses GPL licensed code without redistributing anything or respecting attribution but on the other hand we have Fedora actually moving to full-on Flat Hub and we have performance improvements coming to the Dome software soon and we have some more details about Thunderbirds development roadmap so should I be happy or worried and should you be happy to see this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenote lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so if there was still any doubt it's now confirmed that Windows 11 is basically spyware a recent video from the PC security Channel on YouTube shows that the latest versions of Windows 11 reach out to third-party servers right after the first boot without asking for any user permission using Wireshark to analyze the DNS traffic they found out that Windows 11 connects to MSN Bing and Windows update immediately after boot but it also reaches out to third parties like steam McAfee or comscore market research even on a fresh install all these requests provide Telemetry data to various advertising companies Market researchers and even geolocation domains without any permission or even without opening a web browser the same channel tried Windows XP as a comparison point and found that it only calls to Windows update and nothing else now granted that OS was introduced in 2000 and one and at the time user data wasn't remotely as valuable as today but it still shows a worrying Trend when the biggest operating system on Earth is as careless of user preferences or consent and decides to supply third parties with data without the user's knowledge you know something is truly rotten compounded with the various ads that Microsoft adds in its default experience from the start menu to the news widget overlay the lock screen the Search tool or even the file explorer it's clear that the focus of windows isn't to provide the user with a tool to actually use their computer but to extract as much data and money out of them as possible and if you're watching this chances are you're actually using Linux which means that you're not affected by this and it's nice to have that reassurance that our choice was the right one but also if you were not already using Linux well that's another argument for you to make the switch finally Fedora is embracing flat pack and flat Hub fully while the distro was always at the Forefront of flat pack usage pushing it early on they had decided to stick to their own remote by default that only offered a subset of the apps available on flat Hub well these days will end with Fedora 38 which will offer full flat Hub as a third-party remote that users can enable just as easily as they enabled fedora's remote The Proposal was actually made earlier for Fedora 37 but had been rejected at the time by the Fedora steering committee this means that Fedora users as long as they enable third-party remotes in the first run setup of gnome or ingridome software after install will get access to the full breadth of flat hop without having to add it manually themselves it wasn't a difficult step by any means as you could just download any app from Flat hub's website and double click it to install it and the remote would be added automatically but it was still a potential confusion source for users who aren't familiar with flat pack so it's great to see it resolved flat Hub currently has about 2 000 applications available including the most popular ones like Library office Firefox and more and now if all distros could follow suits then we could have a truly great and easy app installed experience for everyone and maybe the last kings in flat pack software could be handled faster and yes I'm looking at you element story OS no your little description text on the onboarding app and the app center isn't enough you need a toggle for people to actually enable flat Hub in one click a developer found that an AI tool called voice.ai used open source libraries without respecting their licenses namely the GPL version 3 and the lgpl version 2.1 it looks like the tool uses code from Pratt an open source speech analysis software to build their real-time voice synthesizer they also use libg Crypt but in both instances they don't release the source code of the modifications they built on top of it or of any part of their software and they don't follow attribution in any file or dialog in the application they even actively prevent transferring the code or the product to anyone in their licensing terms the developer who found out about this has a blog post in which they explain how they uncovered this violation using reverse engineering tools and looking for references to specific strings used in the open source libraries they used the developer then reached out to the tools Discord for an explanation and where banned from it shortly after without warning for talking about reverse engineering the company since answered and put out a pretty self-contradictory statement saying that they do not violate open source licenses but at the same time that yes they do use these open source libraries which clearly means that they do violate the licenses since they didn't follow them at all after including the software in their code they said they will make the relevant source code available in their GitHub repo and that they have since removed old GPL V3 code from their software but that still doesn't fix the issue according to the licenses they have to release the source code for their tool up to the version before they removed GPL V3 code something I am pretty certain they won't do judging from their reaction and sure the fact that it's an AI tool isn't really relevant it's just another startup that decided to use open source code without respecting the licenses but it still shows a general pattern of AI related tools that they generally don't really have any regard for the license of the content they use either to train their model or to build their own tools now if you use gnome you might have noticed that the gnome software app can sometimes be pretty slow to display stuff especially when listing apps in a category well there's good news as the prolific George stavrakas has spent some time profiling the app to see what was taking so long to load using sysprov a nice graphical profiling tool they discovered that an operation took more than 4 seconds to execute and this operation is the one used to list the applications in a specific category in genome software looking into it they found out that loading app icons was the culprit here because some apps declare remote icons that then have to be downloaded from Flat hub for example but some apps have invalid URLs for these icons which means that gnome software might wait for a while before displaying anything so the developers quickly found the fix by using your cache for app icons and by displaying things even without having everything ready and queuing up the downloads in the back background George published a quick video showing the difference before and after the fix and it's night and day with the new version taking less than half the time of the old one to display the same elements so let's hope that this profiling work will make it to other gnome applications so we can have the zippiest experience possible if like me you haven't been able to use Thunderbird because of its dated interface and convoluted user experience then here's an interesting read in a blog post their product design manager explained the history of the project and their plans for the future to rebuild Thunderbird from the ground up bit by bit their goal is to get rid of Technical and UI debt that they accumulated over the past 10 years Alex goes over the history of Thunderbird explaining how it was created by reusing the code of Firefox then how it was moved to a Community Driven model as the Mozilla Foundation stopped working on it while this generated a lot of user funding that allowed Thunderbird to keep going as well as a lot of contributions to the project it also made this project complex to manage and coordinate as it moved from one development model to another this resulted in an inconsistent user interface and difficulties to build and release Thunderbird as coordination with the Firefox development efforts was lost nowadays Thunderbird has more paid employees working on the project being owned by a subsidiary of Mozilla and this meant that while Thunderbird is still open source with an open development model code and changes are now approved by core developers and designers which means that some contributions might be rejected if they are not up to Snuff now with Thunderbird being sustainable they are focusing on removing technical debt and rebuilding each module in turn to have a better experience all around the first visible results will be in version 115 in July that will bring a Simple and Clean user interface with customization options so long time Thunderbird users can keep their workflows and they will keep at it for the next two years focusing on usability and accessibility and it's wonderful to see because Thunderbird is basically one of the most powerful contact calendar RSS the personal information management Suite that we all want on Linux but its current interface doesn't let it reach its true potential so if they can manage to have something simpler for people who want a simpler experience while keeping all the power under there I think they'll have a winner now let's take a quick look at what's been brewing in The Gnome world first gnome Builder the IDE to build gnome apps uses more up-to-date gdk4 widgets which enables them to also have drag and drop in the project 3. Global search was also improved to support filtering and previewing of search results Loop the new image viewer has now been accepted in The Gnome incubator program which is basically the process that lets apps become gnome core application that might be shipped by default with every version of gnome this new viewer also got swipe gestures to navigate between images a revamped image browsing code to fix some bugs and support for moving images to the trash warp the computer to computer file transfer app got a new release with QR code support to let you transfer files easily and they also have an experimental Windows version so it supports more devices there's also a new iplan application in the works which is basically a to-do list app with support for projects boards and more it's too early to say how well it works but since I'm a sucker for new productivity tools I will give it a shot as soon as it has a stable release out there's also design a new 2D CAD application that was released it supports the dxf format uses common workflows that other CAD apps traditionally use it lets you use the command line or a Toolbar to draw and manipulate your drawing it has layer management and it has support for entities that you can look at and modify I think it's interesting to see a cad tool coming to gnome because gran home has traditionally been home to more simple applications with one very small simple purpose and this kind of app is kind of more complex so I think maybe with libid Vita and a more unified development environment developers are now tackling bigger and more complex projects and as for KDE the team has added the ability to Define your default apps for a lot more file types straight from the settings the accent color UI has been condensed so it uses less screen space which should let developers add day or night color scheme switching in plasma 6. the on-screen display that shows the current audio device being used also shows the battery level now visual glitches have been fixed in the corners of various frames across multiple applications and they fixed 108 bugs across the whole project now all these changes will make it to plasma 6. as we are way too close to plasma 5.27's release date in just three days and of course stay tuned And subscribe to the channel if you want to see my review of that new release which should be a big one seeing as it's going to be the last KDE plasma release for version 5. and let's finish this with the gaming news it looks like Ray tracing on Linux is going to improve in the future as the Vulcan beta drivers for NVIDIA gpus are now adding support for a new Vulcan extension affectionately named vkxed pipeline Library group handles which basically improves compatibility with certain DirectX Ray tracing calls proton still needs to make use of that new extension and for now only the Nvidia beta drivers have it where Mesa used for AMD and Intel doesn't but it's still good news for people who want to halve their performance for some pretty sunlights and if you bought the lower storage capacity steam deck and you feel that the performance penalty using an SD card is still too big you might be happy to learn that you will now be able to easily buy replacement ssds up to two terabytes for your steam deck from framework that company makes the very well reviewed framework laptop but it looks like they want to expand their General Vision to other consumer products which is great especially since finding compatible ssds for the deck can be tricky as it uses a small uncommon SSD format imagine how cool it would be to have framework become the PowerHouse company that provides replacement parts and upgrades for a variety of consumer devices that would be pretty awesome awesome like today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it maybe it's time to stop buying Windows devices crossing your fingers and praying that everything runs smoothly maybe it's time to buy a computer that's actually been designed to run Linux from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a big range of devices that honestly should suit every price point and every need they have laptops and desktops they have affordable ones and pricier ones they have super simple ones and very powerful ones for gaming for work for workstations you decide and they are all super customizable with various options they are all repairable and upgradable and you can have your own logo engraved on the lid of your laptop or no logo at all if you don't like branding and you can also have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys so if you need a new device you want to support linux's development and you want to run Linux on that device well click the link in the description below and check out tuxedo's products they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment and if you didn't like it there's also the dislike button you can see how many people clicked on it unless you have an extension but it still works and if you really enjoy what I do and you want to support the channel well there are plenty of links down there in the description from Super thanks on YouTube to PayPal to patreon subscribers or you YouTube members and the audio version of that podcast which you can also support on patreon so if you want to know more about what I do my website anything else check those links out in the meantime thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and the last release of KD plasma is now out at least for the KD 5 series the next one will be plasma 6 and the KDE team definitely wants plasma 5 to end with a bank they fixed multi-monitor support added tiling improved virtually all plasma widgets polished everything completed Weyland support with fractional scaling and Global shortcuts and they still found the time to make discover actually useful so I poured over the change logs under weekly blog posts and I gathered here all the major and minor features that you can expect and there is a lot to cover including this segue to today's sponsor thanks to linode for sponsoring this video linode is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own nexcloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games like pie hole pihole is a DNS sinkhole that filters out requests to add serving domains basically it lets you block ads and improve Network performance it lets you actively monitor every DNS request made on your network and block requests as they come in and you can deploy it in one click only nodes so you can ensure I stay poor and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below and let's begin with plasma welcome their whole new first run experience to let new users get to grips with plasma this new little app will open after a fresh caddy install at least if your distro decides to use it by default it's 9 pages but you can skip it all together it explains the very Basics like how to connect to the internet or how to change settings but it also presents a bunch of great features plasma has and never really talked about before these include volts the encrypted folders activities KD connect K Runner the system overview and the ability to get new themes wallpapers widgets and more and it is excellent it's a very nice introduction to let people know about features that were never that well explained and it really showcases the power of KD it's a great step to fix the discoverability issue that KDE has and which I made a video about with a very click baity thumbnail Katie has tons of power but it might as well not exist it's completely wasted if users don't know about it now you also get the mandatory app store Page listing various applications you can get and you get a Telemetry data page that lets you enable data collection if you want which also means that this data collection slider has been removed from the settings home homepage since users have already been exposed to that choice finally you get the online accounts page and how to get involved or how to support KDE financially distributions will apparently be able to customize these Pages at startups so it might be interesting to see what this rules decide to push what but it's also sure to annoy KDE veterans because now it adds one more click at every install oh no kitty is bloated now okay but you're here for the mainline feature right the tiling capabilities of KDE so let's talk about that while kwin won't replace a full tiling Window Manager it now has the ability to create tiling layouts and then to place windows in the various tiles you created to set up a tiling layout you press super plus T and you'll get that overview with a default layout in three columns you have the ability to load another layout from a pre-made selection and you can also adjust the padding between zones which will be reflected when tiling Windows each Zone can be split into others either horizontally or vertically or removed entirely and then once your layout suits you all you have to do is drag a window while holding shift and your window will automatically occupy the tiling Zone it's sitting above tiling zones are either static or floating meaning you can keep a portion of your screen with floating windows if you want Windows when tiled can be resized and the tiling layout will also reflect these changes it's a very cool new addition but since I'm a nitpicky bastard I have some complaints first it's impossible to discover by yourself the shortcut is never explained unless you go look for it in the desktop Effect called tiling editor and nowhere does it tell you that you need to press shift to place windows in this mode either so discoverability is basically non-existent second you cannot save your own layouts if you craft one you like but decide to quickly move to another one for a specific temporary setup there's no way to go back to the previous one it's just lost and you'll have to create it again third there are no keyboard shortcuts to place windows in the tiling zones you have to do it with the mouse and the shift key which is sure to annoy people who are used to a regular tiling manager and want to use a mouse as little as possible although maybe there are shortcuts and I just could not find them but I looked everywhere I swear anyway the implementation of o2 tiling in pop OS should probably have been the example to follow here it's fluid it's easy to understand and it can be toggled on or off easily and graphically still it's a cool addition and I'm sure a lot of people will find it useful I just hope that they refine it in plasma 6. okay but the meat of the changes are in the plasma desktop the widgets and tools have received so many improvements that even in this lengthy section I cannot list them all first K Runner got a nice update to surface more relevant search results it can now search in any part of a file's name and will offer a web search when no results are available it also displays time zones in a much more legible Manner and you can search for specific time zones like for example time CET and it will show you how far ahead or behind they are compared to your current time zone settings pages are also now placed higher in the results when you search for their exact name and so are files if you type their exact name they'll appear first unless they are really old and there's something else that shares the exact same name and that feels more relevant and if you search for a dictionary definition pressing enter will copy to the clipboard with a notification to let you know it happened k-runner is wonderful and it's great to see them still working on its logic but I don't know if that search Logic is also applied to the kickoff menu or not then as a general change when hovering over widgets they will tell you what you can expect if you middle click them for example turning airplane mode when middle clicking the network applet the tooltips have also been greatly improved with the one for Bluetooth showing battery life AI for connected devices the one for DND no not Dungeons and Dragons do not disturb so the one for do not disturb is now showing you when the mode ends and basically all tooltips have more information the calendar widgets now also supports more calendars including the Hebrew calendar the battery monitor now shows the charging status of connected devices the media applet now has two layouts one for horizontal panels with the album art and the song title and one for vertical panels with the album art only the Color Picker can now show up to 9 colors instead of just one and clicking a color will automatically copy it to the clipboard with a notification the weather widget can Now display the temperature in the taskbar and has an easier to use location picker for the view now lets you show hidden folders if you want pop-up nodes will make links clickable by default when you paste them into a note and kickoff now supports separators in the menu if you added them in the menu editor without both working your keyboard navigation as they are not selected when using the keyboard oh but that's not all yeah they really went into overdrive for this release in no particular order the wallpaper list should be much faster since it now uses multiple CPU cores to render them changing wallpapers now uses a transition animation just like changing themes we'll do now floating panels will automatically be defloated when a window touches them and they will use less padding and less space in that defloated mode the breeze theme now has an outline around windows in dark mode which makes them more easy to parse at a glance trying to use a VPN will prompt you to install the relevant plugin that supports it the screenshot tool now remembers the last used rectangular selection until you close the app and it now lets you change the screenshot type straight from the sidebar and then there's the Weyland support plasma now supports high resolution scrolling under Weyland for smoother Mouse operations and they now support content types which lets the compositor adjust the display's refresh rate depending on what you're doing watching a movie playing a game or web browsing of course you will need to have a display that supports variable refresh rates fractional scaling is also Now natively supported under Weyland you could do it before but it was a hack it rendered at the closest integer scale so 1X or 2X and then scaled down from this to reach your desired scaling Factor now it renders directly at the factor you want for example 1.25 and this results in less battery consumption more performance and less blurriness when sharing your screen on Wayland the window picker will now have thumbnails to let you decide what you want to share and there's also a new setting to let X Weyland applications access the key presses of the whole system so they get Global shortcuts back and using the open file with app action from the context menu will now open the relevant portal so everything looks nicer and is more secure oh and here comes another major change the multi-monitor refactoring plasma was Infamous for the various issues it created with multi-monitor setups especially if you frequently unplugged external monitors and re-plug them while this should be over now plasma revamped their whole way of handling this so all panels Windows wallpapers and widgets are saved per Monitor and restored when a monitor is plugged back in these monitor sets are kept between X11 and Weyland and the UI was revamped when using three monitors or more letting you attribute monitor numbers to every one of them and place them better the display applet will also Auto Hide now in the icon tray when you only have one monitor or when you're using a desktop setup with multiple displays but on the laptop with an external monitor or more it will stay with visible at all times then you can click it to surface some options easily I'm not saying that all bugs related to multi-monitors have been fixed but you should definitely have a much more pleasant experience now and also where would get EB without more settings so yeah let's look at that first are flat pack permissions they have their own new settings page that lets you review what applications have access to and give them more permissions or remove some it's not quite as complete as what flat seal offers but it's pretty damn close you also get some general changes like the Highlight change settings button that move to the hamburger menu and that now will show you the keyboard shortcuts you changed some settings Pages like the desktop session settings now use a more legible look with bold headers that lets you parse the page more easily it should make its way to other pages in the future on top of that the icon size preferences in the appearance settings have been redesigned the launch feedback settings don't have their own page anymore they've been moved to the cursors page which makes much more sense the info center will now show you open CL related informations the keyboard shortcuts page now has a new custom commands UI which should be way easier to use than the previous one and it lets you pick a script file with a graphical file picker there's also a new touchscreen page and the drawing tablet page now lets you map your pen buttons to specific commands but since I don't own any of these devices I can't really show you how that looks and there's also some progress on Discover it will now show more flat back permissions on applications Pages including Bluetooth access for example and it won't show the category of an app in its card in the results since it's just not that useful of an information the home page has received a new look with editor's Choice popular applications and categories so it's easier to navigate the all applications button is also now back in the sidebar because navigating without it was kind of a pain and when you're searching for something inside of a category if nothing is available you'll get a nice message and a button to search the whole store and not just that specific category on top of that offline updates will now give you more informations on the packages you're updating and there's a message when you're in offline mode instead of a never-ending progress bar so yeah basically now discover lives up to its name it actually lets you discover applications nice and I'm still missing all the bug fixes and some other minor changes to applets widgets and whatever else on the desktop the next version will be plasma 6 and we might have to wait more than four months to get it so in the meantime every caddy user will be stuck on 5.27 so it's really good that it's so good it's insanely polished compared to a few releases ago it's faster it's while on support is basically complete with fractional scaling Global shortcuts and portals and multi-monitor support is now finally excellent and should result in way less issues especially on laptops It's a Wonderful version and you should absolutely install it if your distro offers it it's a very solid foundation for us to wait on while the team works on plasma 6 heavily recommended like today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop looking at Windows devices and crossing your fingers and praying that everything will run smoothly on Linux buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they are based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every price point and every need whether it's an affordable Ultrabook or a super high-end workstation Tower or gaming laptop they have it they're all very customizable with plenty of options to tailor your device to what you want to do with it and they're all repairable upgradable you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop your own custom logo laser edged on the lid of your laptop or no logo at all if you don't like branding so if you need a new computer and you want to run Linux on it and you want to help support linux's development buy a new computer from tuxedo using the link in the description below they are really cool so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's always that dislike button and the comment section to let me know what I messed up and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want to support what I do there are plenty of links down there in the description for PayPal super thanks YouTube memberships patreon memberships those last two give you access to specific benefits check them out if you're interested in the meantime thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and not everyone can afford a monthly payment for a cloud storage solution or not everyone is willing to have their precious data hosted on the server that they don't control the obvious solution is to have your own home server but again not everyone has the time needed to maintain that and set that up or the technical know-how to configure everything themselves and if that's your case then what you need is a nask the small home servers are insanely easy to set up and configure even with very minimal technical knowledge and they can do everything a Home Server can do from file storage backup photo storage productivity hosting websites and more so let's take a look at why you need a Nas at home okay but what exactly is a Nas apart from a rapper Nas stands for network attached storage but basically what it is is a computer in a small enclosure whose space is taken mainly by plenty of hard drives so you have all the storage space that you want they run specific operating systems designed to make them as easy to use as possible with package libraries to add features and easy to understand graphical user interfaces to let you configure things even if you don't know anything about servers think of it as a regular Home Server but without all the hassle of configuring it yourself installing all the utilities that you need opening the boards it all takes care of that for you so in this video I'll use a Synology Nas because they were kind enough to provide me with their ds-1522 plus and a bunch of drives to slot in in order to make this video Synology is one of the biggest Nas manufacturers and they run their own Nas operating system called disk station manager it uses Linux but the OS that runs on top of it isn't open source it has plenty of one-click installable packages to extend the functionality Beyond just file storage and some of these packages are open source of course if what you want is more of a do-it-yourself approach you could grab any old computer attach drives to it and install another Nas operating system like trunass or freenas but you'll need to ensure Hardware compatibility their interfaces are arguably not as simple to use as synologies and the package Library might not be as complete still of course everything that I show here will be doable on another Nas than synologies using a different package name or different package manager and a different interface the goal here is to show you what you can do with a Nas and why you should probably have one so let's see how you actually set up one of these things first you need to slot your drives in so here are a bunch of four terabyte drives that I will insert one by one into the nas pretty easy you just remove the drive bay you slot the drive in there and you screw it in so it doesn't move and you just pop that back in once that's done you plug your Nas and then you connect it to your router or internet provider box and you boot it up to access the interface here Synology just has a simple URL but other Nas will also be accessible in the same fashion through a web browser you go through a first run setup to install the OS on the device and let it reboot and then you'll need to create a storage pool that actually makes use of these drives that's where the nas OS will really make a difference compared to running your own server you'll be able to create a red array graphically for example so the data is replicated onto multiple drives and OneDrive failing won't take down all your files this is something that requires a bit more technical knowledge to set up on a regular Linux server for example and basically once that's done if all you need is file storage then you got it here on my Fedora laptop I can just open the file manager and I'll automatically see my Nas available clicking on it asks me to enter the password I set up during the first run install of the OS and then I'm good to go I can create a shared folder and I can transfer files to it manually copy paste anything it's just there as additional storage that I can use whenever I want I also have access to the OS interface which basically is a grid of icons straight from my web browser on my local network here it includes a nice set of utilities for managing resource usage file storage search log settings but also the package Center which will let me install whatever other application I need to extend the feature set of my Nas because of course file storage might not be the only thing that you actually want to do on that small Home Server for example what if I want to share that file storage with others or access it from outside of my home from a regular internet connection and not the local network well I can quickly enable my Nas to be accessible from outside my local network here in the OS I'll just go to external access and create a domain name in a few clicks using Synology as the provider but I could have picked from a selection of others I can also get a certificate so the connection uses https and is more secure it's not absolutely foolproof and you might need to find a tutorial online to guide you if you don't know anything about servers but it's still way easier than trying to figure out how to use the command line on a regular Linux server and once that's done I can just type that domain name into my web browser from anywhere in the world and get access to my Nas pretty cool and then that's where the package manager becomes useful here for example I will just install the webdav server package which will let me access the storage on my NAS from anywhere on any network in one click it's added to my list of applications I can just open it enable https access and that's it and now in my file manager my webdav storage appears automatically or I can just type DAV colon slash then the domain name I just set up and boom I log in with my Nas user and my storage is mounted in my file manager so I can access it from anywhere and if I want to auto sync files I can use Synology Drive which is basically exactly like Google drive but stored privately at home and they have clients for every operating system including Linux and smartphones next is backups yeah backups are cool you need them a good backup strategy is to have a local copy of your files on your computer then a backup of that at home and another backup of that outside of your home backup Solutions are a dime a dozen and you can just automate that with Synology drive or any other backup app for any other Nas now here for example I could backup the content of cloud storage accounts like Google workspace or Microsoft 365 although since a Nas can replace all of these cloud storage solutions that's not something I consider super useful for me personally but you also have stuff like active backup for business which lets you well back up another Nas multiple PCS servers and even virtual machines to your nest other Nas operating systems will also have packages to backup anything you want now there's something that everyone uses cloud storage for but a Nas does more privately and more securely and that's photo storage here again let let's take a look at the package Center where there's a neat little app called Synology photos I can install it in one click again and then access it from the operating system directly and there we go I have an online photo library where I can add photos manually and even have face recognition if I want that's running locally on my Nas so everything is private but if you have to manually upload your photos every time there's a new one then the experience kinda sucks right unfortunately you can sync photos from your smartphone directly to your Nas I can install the Synology photos app on my phone and auto upload anything from there photos and videos and also view all of them with the albums I configured the face recognition if I have that enabled and more so basically it's Google or iCloud photos but stored at home privately and securely and you can still access it from anywhere and we're just getting started because a Nas can also be used as your own home media server where you can store every single DVD or Blu-ray that you absolutely legally own and absolutely legally ripped and you can then stream all of this to your TV or any other computer here for example I can install Plex in one click from the package Center I could also install jellyfin using the docker app and its Docker image once it's installed I can just configure it like any other Plex server by logging into my account or creating one then creating a media library using folders I created in the files app of my Nas to keep things orderly and that's it now I can run the blacks app from my smart TV or computer connect to the server and access all that media easily and stream it like it was a streaming service that I own Plex can also handle music if you have a local music collection but if you're more of an iTunes person there's an iTunes server app you can install on synology's NAS to be accessible by a large variety of music players including on Linux so yeah your Nas can also be your full-on media server for music for videos for TV shows and it's stored at home securely and privately but it can also do a lot more things like productivity and office work with contacts calendars notes and even office suites here for example I can install node station for notes or Synology contacts and calendars to have my own online fine solution to store all of that and they have Synology office which is an office suite integrated with your file storage that lets you create and edit text files spreadsheets or presentations straight from your Nas it supports collaborative editing and it's compatible with Microsoft Office formats and it looks just like Google Docs so it should be familiar on other Nas operating systems you could also install stuff like Cola Bora or only office if you prefer basically your Nas can become a full replacement for Google workspace or Microsoft 365 with all the same features and all the same applications but running at home securely and you control everything that's going on or if you prefer a fully open source solution you could also use your Nas to install nextcloud through a Docker image for example and you'll get your own next Cloud Server fully ready with tons of storage accessible from anywhere and that only covers the basics your Nas can also be used to host your own website or even multiple websites on the same Nas it can run an anti-virus for you if you plan to let Windows users access your file storage or if you plan to send them files from it that you might have gotten of the internet you can even set up your own DNS server if you want you can run a chat server a VPN basically anything a regular server can do you'll find a one-click installable package for it on your Nas operating system that's the real draw of a Nas it's basically exactly like a home server but way easier to use and configure it's not completely foolproof and for some applications you will need a tutorial online but it's still way easier than using the command line on for example Ubuntu Server of course we have to talk about the price because you're buying a computer and some drives so obviously you will pay more in one go than with just a monthly cloud storage payment but if you start adding things up then it really really makes sense you can get a basic Nas for around 150 dollars and a two terabyte drive for around another 50 bucks which means that you get for 200 two terabytes of storage and that's less than two years of Google Cloud Storage for the same amount of data two terabytes which means that if you plan to store your stuff for two years or more then a Nas makes more financial sense than using cloud storage and if you ever need more storage you can just slot in another Drive no monthly payment required and that's not counting the Privacy advantages whether you use a Synology Nas or any other system you're storing stuff at home without any data being sent to anyone and you have full control over the hardware so if you don't want to use the cloud and setting up your own Home Server from scratch is something that you're not interested in then what you need is a nest it's more private it's stored at home and it is more money up front but in the long run it's actually going to save you money compared to cloud storage so yeah I'd say it's absolutely worth it worth it like today's sponsor if you need a new device to run Linux on stop looking at Windows computers and praying and crossing your fingers for everything to run just buy something from tuxedo today's sponsor they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point and every single one of them is configurable to your liking with CPU options GPU options RAM storage and you can even have your own custom keyboard layout engraved on the keys of your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop all their laptops are upgradable repairable you can change the battery the ram the SSD they're just a very very good choice so if you need a new device stop buying Windows computers click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching I hope you enjoyed the video if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe type to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel and you want me to make more of these videos there are plenty of links in the description below for super thanks PayPal patreon or YouTube memberships both of these get you access to really nice benefits every week so yeah check them out if you're interested in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye thank you foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and not everyone can afford a monthly payment for a cloud storage solution or not everyone is willing to have their precious data hosted on the server that they don't control the obvious solution is to have your own home server but again not everyone has the time needed to maintain that and set that up or the technical know-how to configure everything themselves and if that's your case then what you need is a nask the small home servers are insanely easy to set up and configure even with very minimal technical knowledge and they can do everything a Home Server can do from file storage backup photo storage productivity hosting websites and more so let's take a look at why you need a Nas at home okay but what exactly is a Nas apart from a rapper Nas stands for network attached storage but basically what it is is a computer in a small enclosure whose space is taken mainly by plenty of hard drives so you have all the storage space that you want they run specific operating systems designed to make them as easy to use as possible with package libraries to add features and easy to understand graphical user interfaces to let you configure things even if you don't know anything about servers think of it as a regular Home Server but without all the hassle of configuring it yourself installing all the utilities that you need opening the boards it all takes care of that for you so in this video I'll use a Synology Nas because they were kind enough to provide me with their ds-1522 plus and a bunch of drives to slot in in order to make this video Synology is one of the biggest Nas manufacturers and they run their own Nas operating system called disk station manager it uses Linux but the OS that runs on top of it isn't open source it has plenty of one-click installable packages to extend the functionality Beyond just file storage and some of these packages are open source of course if what you want is more of a do-it-yourself approach you could grab any old computer attach drives to it and install another Nas operating system like trunass or freenas but you'll need to ensure Hardware compatibility their interfaces are arguably not as simple to use as synologies and the package Library might not be as complete still of course everything that I show here will be doable on another Nas than synologies using a different package name or different package manager and a different interface the goal here is to show you what you can do with a Nas and why you should probably have one so let's see how you actually set up one of these things first you need to slot your drives in so here are a bunch of four terabyte drives that I will insert one by one into the nas pretty easy you just remove the drive bay you slot the drive in there and you screw it in so it doesn't move and you just pop that back in once that's done you plug your Nas and then you connect it to your router or internet provider box and you boot it up to access the interface here Synology just has a simple URL but other Nas will also be accessible in the same fashion through a web browser you go through a first run setup to install the OS on the device and let it reboot and then you'll need to create a storage pool that actually makes use of these drives that's where the nas OS will really make a difference compared to running your own server you'll be able to create a red array graphically for example so the data is replicated onto multiple drives and OneDrive failing won't take down all your files this is something that requires a bit more technical knowledge to set up on a regular Linux server for example and basically once that's done if all you need is file storage then you got it here on my Fedora laptop I can just open the file manager and I'll automatically see my Nas available clicking on it asks me to enter the password I set up during the first run install of the OS and then I'm good to go I can create a shared folder and I can transfer files to it manually copy paste anything it's just there as additional storage that I can use whenever I want I also have access to the OS interface which basically is a grid of icons straight from my web browser on my local network here it includes a nice set of utilities for managing resource usage file storage search log settings but also the package Center which will let me install whatever other application I need to extend the feature set of my Nas because of course file storage might not be the only thing that you actually want to do on that small Home Server for example what if I want to share that file storage with others or access it from outside of my home from a regular internet connection and not the local network well I can quickly enable my Nas to be accessible from outside my local network here in the OS I'll just go to external access and create a domain name in a few clicks using Synology as the provider but I could have picked from a selection of others I can also get a certificate so the connection uses https and is more secure it's not absolutely foolproof and you might need to find a tutorial online to guide you if you don't know anything about servers but it's still way easier than trying to figure out how to use the command line on a regular Linux server and once that's done I can just type that domain name into my web browser from anywhere in the world and get access to my Nas pretty cool and then that's where the package manager becomes useful here for example I will just install the webdav server package which will let me access the storage on my NAS from anywhere on any network in one click it's added to my list of applications I can just open it enable https access and that's it and now in my file manager my webdav storage appears automatically or I can just type DAV colon slash then the domain name I just set up and boom I log in with my Nas user and my storage is mounted in my file manager so I can access it from anywhere and if I want to auto sync files I can use Synology Drive which is basically exactly like Google drive but stored privately at home and they have clients for every operating system including Linux and smartphones next is backups yeah backups are cool you need them a good backup strategy is to have a local copy of your files on your computer then a backup of that at home and another backup of that outside of your home backup Solutions are a dime a dozen and you can just automate that with Synology drive or any other backup app for any other Nas now here for example I could backup the content of cloud storage accounts like Google workspace or Microsoft 365 although since a Nas can replace all of these cloud storage solutions that's not something I consider super useful for me personally but you also have stuff like active backup for business which lets you well back up another Nas multiple PCS servers and even virtual machines to your nest other Nas operating systems will also have packages to backup anything you want now there's something that everyone uses cloud storage for but a Nas does more privately and more securely and that's photo storage here again let let's take a look at the package Center where there's a neat little app called Synology photos I can install it in one click again and then access it from the operating system directly and there we go I have an online photo library where I can add photos manually and even have face recognition if I want that's running locally on my Nas so everything is private but if you have to manually upload your photos every time there's a new one then the experience kinda sucks right unfortunately you can sync photos from your smartphone directly to your Nas I can install the Synology photos app on my phone and auto upload anything from there photos and videos and also view all of them with the albums I configured the face recognition if I have that enabled and more so basically it's Google or iCloud photos but stored at home privately and securely and you can still access it from anywhere and we're just getting started because a Nas can also be used as your own home media server where you can store every single DVD or Blu-ray that you absolutely legally own and absolutely legally ripped and you can then stream all of this to your TV or any other computer here for example I can install Plex in one click from the package Center I could also install jellyfin using the docker app and its Docker image once it's installed I can just configure it like any other Plex server by logging into my account or creating one then creating a media library using folders I created in the files app of my Nas to keep things orderly and that's it now I can run the blacks app from my smart TV or computer connect to the server and access all that media easily and stream it like it was a streaming service that I own Plex can also handle music if you have a local music collection but if you're more of an iTunes person there's an iTunes server app you can install on synology's NAS to be accessible by a large variety of music players including on Linux so yeah your Nas can also be your full-on media server for music for videos for TV shows and it's stored at home securely and privately but it can also do a lot more things like productivity and office work with contacts calendars notes and even office suites here for example I can install node station for notes or Synology contacts and calendars to have my own online fine solution to store all of that and they have Synology office which is an office suite integrated with your file storage that lets you create and edit text files spreadsheets or presentations straight from your Nas it supports collaborative editing and it's compatible with Microsoft Office formats and it looks just like Google Docs so it should be familiar on other Nas operating systems you could also install stuff like Cola Bora or only office if you prefer basically your Nas can become a full replacement for Google workspace or Microsoft 365 with all the same features and all the same applications but running at home securely and you control everything that's going on or if you prefer a fully open source solution you could also use your Nas to install nextcloud through a Docker image for example and you'll get your own next Cloud Server fully ready with tons of storage accessible from anywhere and that only covers the basics your Nas can also be used to host your own website or even multiple websites on the same Nas it can run an anti-virus for you if you plan to let Windows users access your file storage or if you plan to send them files from it that you might have gotten of the internet you can even set up your own DNS server if you want you can run a chat server a VPN basically anything a regular server can do you'll find a one-click installable package for it on your Nas operating system that's the real draw of a Nas it's basically exactly like a home server but way easier to use and configure it's not completely foolproof and for some applications you will need a tutorial online but it's still way easier than using the command line on for example Ubuntu Server of course we have to talk about the price because you're buying a computer and some drives so obviously you will pay more in one go than with just a monthly cloud storage payment but if you start adding things up then it really really makes sense you can get a basic Nas for around 150 dollars and a two terabyte drive for around another 50 bucks which means that you get for 200 two terabytes of storage and that's less than two years of Google Cloud Storage for the same amount of data two terabytes which means that if you plan to store your stuff for two years or more then a Nas makes more financial sense than using cloud storage and if you ever need more storage you can just slot in another Drive no monthly payment required and that's not counting the Privacy advantages whether you use a Synology Nas or any other system you're storing stuff at home without any data being sent to anyone and you have full control over the hardware so if you don't want to use the cloud and setting up your own Home Server from scratch is something that you're not interested in then what you need is a nest it's more private it's stored at home and it is more money up front but in the long run it's actually going to save you money compared to cloud storage so yeah I'd say it's absolutely worth it worth it like today's sponsor if you need a new device to run Linux on stop looking at Windows computers and praying and crossing your fingers for everything to run just buy something from tuxedo today's sponsor they have a nice big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point and every single one of them is configurable to your liking with CPU options GPU options RAM storage and you can even have your own custom keyboard layout engraved on the keys of your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop all their laptops are upgradable repairable you can change the battery the ram the SSD they're just a very very good choice so if you need a new device stop buying Windows computers click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching I hope you enjoyed the video if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe type to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel and you want me to make more of these videos there are plenty of links in the description below for super thanks PayPal patreon or YouTube memberships both of these get you access to really nice benefits every week so yeah check them out if you're interested in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye thank you foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this is Linux desktop week as virtually every desktop environment has decided to release something new or to announce something that's coming in the future not that I'm complaining of course so this time we have system 76 unveiling a bunch of new designs for Cosmic and an interesting Peak at how these design decisions were made we have meant teasing Weyland supports and a bunch of other features for their next release and we have Elementor EOS now being available for everyone to download and also we have budgie releasing some new and interesting updates we have xfc also working on Wayland support and we even have some updates to plasma mobile so let's get started with this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by linode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft Arc CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started system 76 shared more information in a blog post about their progress on their Cosmic desktop environment that will replace their custom gnome on pop OS they've added support for tabs and segmented buttons in their UI library to get more control types to create their settings and they have an interesting approach to search for these settings they will show all the relevant categories and options in the continuous scrolling page so you don't have to click on multiple items in a sidebar to change what you're seeing all the search results will be following one another in a single list they also did some user testing on what they already had developed and they adjusted their designs accordingly and they also provided links to each settings page on GitHub where they explain why they chose to make these settings work like they did which is very nice and transparent on them the power settings for example will show device cards for each currently plugged device or stuff that's connected wirelessly so you have a One-Stop shop for all your bad battery statuses the display panel will let users choose the graphics mode like using the integrated GPU or the dedicated one the language settings will let users pick the formatting of various units like the calendar the date format the temperature or the measurement system and the sound panel will let users adjust the volume of alerts and individual applications other things they are working on is dynamic rendering by which they mean the desktop will pick the best rendering option depending on your Hardware so software rendering when you don't have a GPU or no good drivers or opengl and Vulcan if you have a GPU depending on what your driver supports Cosmic will use Wayland And implements X Weyland with support being added to their compositor and they created a library for adding animations inside of applications so everything can look nice modern and responsive of course it's still in early development and we don't really know yet if they plan to replace genome applications or if it's just going to be your shell plus some settings but their design decisions are already very interesting and I'm excited to see if Linux developers managed to use their libraries to build applications or if it just stays as an individual shell with other apps slotted on top of it the Linux Mint team gave some more details about their future release and there are some interesting improvements mint 21.2 codenamed Victoria could be the starting point of Waylon's support as they announced that their login manager will get support for Weyland sessions of course it could just mean that they will let people install Wayland and access Weyland sessions from the greeter but it's also possible that it's done in preparation for implementing whale and support in cinnamon itself and seeing as xfc 4.20 will bring Weyland support as well and xfc is one of the additions of mint it could also be related to that Victoria is planned for June 2023 and the first feature is their teasing which aren't the total sum of what is planned of course include a choice of keyboard layouts in the login manager as well as tap to click support on touchpads the on-screen keyboard layout will be configurable and keyboard navigation will also receive some love so you can use the arrow keys to edit the password you're typing the image viewer picks will be rebased on the latest G thump which means it will get a header bar at odds with the rest of mint apps but it will also bring better performance support for more file formats improved Zoom controls support for color profiles a Color Picker customizable keyboard shortcuts and more and the document viewer will also get support for Adobe Illustrator documents and don't let the small version number fool you because mint updates as demonstrated by the previous ones are generally pretty big and honestly if they can add Wireless support and gestures on laptops I don't think I will have any gripe left with mint at all elementary EOS 7 Horus was released this week and it's an evolutionary new version it's based on Ubuntu 222.04 now with the latest Hardware support from Ubuntu and while it doesn't change the formula it shows the usual level of Polish and attention to detail the installer has been improved to be less intrusive in how it informs you of the battery status of your laptop although you will still have to fully reinstall the OS there is no upgrade path the onboarding app now lets you pick an auto light and dark mode based on the time of day and it lets you enable auto updates and the app center was the main focus for this release as well it brings better app pages with bigger screenshots and captions it's now adaptive to better work on small screens and window sizes it has a dedicated updates button and it shows more clearly if an application is maintained or not as well as being less intrusive when adding apps from Flat Hub letting you know they are not curated by the Elementary OS team with a small badge instead of a full dialogue the apps have received a few new features as well with the file manager now working either in single click or double click to open mode because bumped to its latest version Now using gdk4 the music player has been completely Rewritten to be just a music player with a Q instead of a library or organizer the terminal now supports color profiles the code editor got better search tools and the mail client got a UI update and a lot of stability fixes so it shouldn't crash nearly as often as the previous iteration it is a solid foundation upon which they can now build their semi-rolling release or strolling release but it's not that much different from Elementary OS 6.1 I have a full video on the channel if you want to see all the changes graphically check it out in the link in the description budgie The Gnome based desktop environment got a new update version 10.7 with this new release users get a new application indexer that basically Aggregates data from the dot desktop files that serve as application launchers in various menus and this new indexer replaces The Gnome one and unifies the indexation between the budgie menu and the Run dialog so you will get the same list of apps in both depending on what you're looking for this dialog also shows give more consistent search results and is now displayed at the correct width and will adapt to the resolution of your monitor the app description is also now listed under the app name for improved legibility but G also gets a new screenshot tool that replaces The Gnome screenshot tool but it looks absolutely identical to the previous one so users won't be phased by the change the budgie menu now checks for the availability of dedicated gpus so you can start apps using that instead of the integrated GPU and you'll also be able to open various folders straight from the menu like the downloads documents desktop pictures music or videos folders and there are easy buttons to open the desktop settings the control center and the power dialog that lets you lock log out suspend reboot or shut down your computer notifications now have a fade effect when opening and being dismissed and more importantly these notifications won't take your input Focus anymore other improvements include the Raven panel adding an API to let third-party developers build widgets to go inside that panel and you can position the widgets as you want in the menu or remove those you don't need and on top of that there's a new usage monitor widget it looks like a very solid update and it makes what I said in my Linux desktop tier list video incorrect budgie is not staying still while they're waiting to revamp their desktop with the efl libraries they're actually releasing some stuff it was just that I wasn't paying enough attention looks like plasma mobile is progressing nicely especially in the apps Department developers redesigned audio tube the YouTube client to let you have videos playing while you're navigating to other pages in the application alligator the RSS feed reader now works better on widescreen configurations because yes most of these plasma mobile apps also work on desktops being fully adaptive spacebar the SMS MMS app has received a lot of updates like a button to auto scroll to the bottom of the list of your messages with a message number counter it now displays how many members there are in a group conversation and the app is way faster to open scrolling has also been improved and should be smoother the chat lists aren't reloaded all the time and the backend also received some love to fix a bunch of issues some developers including the excellent nikolo venerandi also started work on an e-book reader called Ariana which supports ePub and has basic Library management and search capabilities a bunch of other apps also received updates like calc the calculator Coco the image viewer neochat The Matrix client or kweather and casts the podcast app got redesigned header bar controls and the sidebar on desktop got reworked as well to be more similar to the one used on mobile they rewrote the audio back-end from scratch now being able to use lib VLC G streamer or cute multimedia and chapter images are Now supported in your podcasts and timestamps in an episode's description are now clickable and casts might be a great application to subscribe to my Linux News podcast because yes these videos have an audio podcast version with more details on the topics and more topics the link is in the description below check it out and let's finish this with the gaming news and with a nice example of how Linux gaming is in full swing Deadspace the Remake was released last week with very poor performance especially on the steam deck and Linux stutters crashes raindrops it basically was unplayable for a lot of people and just a few days after that valve managed to make the game Run well even when the developers themselves did it with the new release of proton they put in place a Shader cache that will reduce stutters and they fixed a game crash that happened when opening the in-game map and they also added some performance fixes so now the game is fully playable without the developer having to lift a finger pretty great if you ask me and it also looks like the work on eliminating stutters in games running with proton is still moving forward with big developments being done on the AMD GPU driver developers have focused on certain Vulcan extensions which should bring up to 50 000 improvements in fast linking pipelines which is basically how the GPU compiles shaders while NVIDIA drivers already do that pretty well the AMD drivers were lagging a bit behind and it looks like with Mesa 23.1 we can expect some huge performance gains when loading shaders in games on the deck or any system using an AMD GPU the heroic games launcher that lets you run epic games and Gog on Linux got updated to version 2.6 with a bunch of improvements there's a new default theme looking pretty good the game settings will now open in a dialogue instead of a new page heroic will now suggest a new version of wine to install when the selected one isn't available anymore and there's a setting to auto update games or to completely skip updates for certain titles and for people using steam or Steam OS there's a big update that fixes audio crackling on on Linux when using remote play but it also made the new Big Picture Mode the one used in Steam OS as the default for everyone the old one is still available for compatibility purposes steam input received a lot of love as well so controller support should be much improved you probably already have gotten the updates although if you do use an Nvidia GPU I would recommend you stick to the older Big Picture Mode because the new one still has horrendous performance issues probably because they never enabled the hardware accelerated web rendering for NVIDIA drivers because that new Big Picture Mode is basically a webview and this is basically a segue to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer to run Linux on stop looking at Windows laptops or desktops and praying that they're gonna support Linux well buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they have a nice big range of devices from affordable laptops to nux to high-end workstations or gaming laptops they're all customizable with plenty of options to make it your own and choose your performance point and your price point and they're also all upgradable repairable and you can even customize them a lot with your own keyboard layout laser etched on the keys or your own logo laser engraved on the lid of your laptop so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and buy something from tuxedo it's just better than buying a Windows device so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did honestly to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment to check out the audio podcast in the description and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel there are plenty of options below super thanks PayPal link patreon YouTube memberships which both give you some nice advantages you decide if you want if you can support the channel I won't bother you with that anymore so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this is Linux desktop week as virtually every desktop environment has decided to release something new or to announce something that's coming in the future not that I'm complaining of course so this time we have system 76 unveiling a bunch of new designs for Cosmic and an interesting Peak at how these design decisions were made we have meant teasing Weyland supports and a bunch of other features for their next release and we have Elementor EOS now being available for everyone to download and also we have budgie releasing some new and interesting updates we have xfc also working on Wayland support and we even have some updates to plasma mobile so let's get started with this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by linode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft Arc CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started system 76 shared more information in a blog post about their progress on their Cosmic desktop environment that will replace their custom gnome on pop OS they've added support for tabs and segmented buttons in their UI library to get more control types to create their settings and they have an interesting approach to search for these settings they will show all the relevant categories and options in the continuous scrolling page so you don't have to click on multiple items in a sidebar to change what you're seeing all the search results will be following one another in a single list they also did some user testing on what they already had developed and they adjusted their designs accordingly and they also provided links to each settings page on GitHub where they explain why they chose to make these settings work like they did which is very nice and transparent on them the power settings for example will show device cards for each currently plugged device or stuff that's connected wirelessly so you have a One-Stop shop for all your bad battery statuses the display panel will let users choose the graphics mode like using the integrated GPU or the dedicated one the language settings will let users pick the formatting of various units like the calendar the date format the temperature or the measurement system and the sound panel will let users adjust the volume of alerts and individual applications other things they are working on is dynamic rendering by which they mean the desktop will pick the best rendering option depending on your Hardware so software rendering when you don't have a GPU or no good drivers or opengl and Vulcan if you have a GPU depending on what your driver supports Cosmic will use Wayland And implements X Weyland with support being added to their compositor and they created a library for adding animations inside of applications so everything can look nice modern and responsive of course it's still in early development and we don't really know yet if they plan to replace genome applications or if it's just going to be your shell plus some settings but their design decisions are already very interesting and I'm excited to see if Linux developers managed to use their libraries to build applications or if it just stays as an individual shell with other apps slotted on top of it the Linux Mint team gave some more details about their future release and there are some interesting improvements mint 21.2 codenamed Victoria could be the starting point of Waylon's support as they announced that their login manager will get support for Weyland sessions of course it could just mean that they will let people install Wayland and access Weyland sessions from the greeter but it's also possible that it's done in preparation for implementing whale and support in cinnamon itself and seeing as xfc 4.20 will bring Weyland support as well and xfc is one of the additions of mint it could also be related to that Victoria is planned for June 2023 and the first feature is their teasing which aren't the total sum of what is planned of course include a choice of keyboard layouts in the login manager as well as tap to click support on touchpads the on-screen keyboard layout will be configurable and keyboard navigation will also receive some love so you can use the arrow keys to edit the password you're typing the image viewer picks will be rebased on the latest G thump which means it will get a header bar at odds with the rest of mint apps but it will also bring better performance support for more file formats improved Zoom controls support for color profiles a Color Picker customizable keyboard shortcuts and more and the document viewer will also get support for Adobe Illustrator documents and don't let the small version number fool you because mint updates as demonstrated by the previous ones are generally pretty big and honestly if they can add Wireless support and gestures on laptops I don't think I will have any gripe left with mint at all elementary EOS 7 Horus was released this week and it's an evolutionary new version it's based on Ubuntu 222.04 now with the latest Hardware support from Ubuntu and while it doesn't change the formula it shows the usual level of Polish and attention to detail the installer has been improved to be less intrusive in how it informs you of the battery status of your laptop although you will still have to fully reinstall the OS there is no upgrade path the onboarding app now lets you pick an auto light and dark mode based on the time of day and it lets you enable auto updates and the app center was the main focus for this release as well it brings better app pages with bigger screenshots and captions it's now adaptive to better work on small screens and window sizes it has a dedicated updates button and it shows more clearly if an application is maintained or not as well as being less intrusive when adding apps from Flat Hub letting you know they are not curated by the Elementary OS team with a small badge instead of a full dialogue the apps have received a few new features as well with the file manager now working either in single click or double click to open mode because bumped to its latest version Now using gdk4 the music player has been completely Rewritten to be just a music player with a Q instead of a library or organizer the terminal now supports color profiles the code editor got better search tools and the mail client got a UI update and a lot of stability fixes so it shouldn't crash nearly as often as the previous iteration it is a solid foundation upon which they can now build their semi-rolling release or strolling release but it's not that much different from Elementary OS 6.1 I have a full video on the channel if you want to see all the changes graphically check it out in the link in the description budgie The Gnome based desktop environment got a new update version 10.7 with this new release users get a new application indexer that basically Aggregates data from the dot desktop files that serve as application launchers in various menus and this new indexer replaces The Gnome one and unifies the indexation between the budgie menu and the Run dialog so you will get the same list of apps in both depending on what you're looking for this dialog also shows give more consistent search results and is now displayed at the correct width and will adapt to the resolution of your monitor the app description is also now listed under the app name for improved legibility but G also gets a new screenshot tool that replaces The Gnome screenshot tool but it looks absolutely identical to the previous one so users won't be phased by the change the budgie menu now checks for the availability of dedicated gpus so you can start apps using that instead of the integrated GPU and you'll also be able to open various folders straight from the menu like the downloads documents desktop pictures music or videos folders and there are easy buttons to open the desktop settings the control center and the power dialog that lets you lock log out suspend reboot or shut down your computer notifications now have a fade effect when opening and being dismissed and more importantly these notifications won't take your input Focus anymore other improvements include the Raven panel adding an API to let third-party developers build widgets to go inside that panel and you can position the widgets as you want in the menu or remove those you don't need and on top of that there's a new usage monitor widget it looks like a very solid update and it makes what I said in my Linux desktop tier list video incorrect budgie is not staying still while they're waiting to revamp their desktop with the efl libraries they're actually releasing some stuff it was just that I wasn't paying enough attention looks like plasma mobile is progressing nicely especially in the apps Department developers redesigned audio tube the YouTube client to let you have videos playing while you're navigating to other pages in the application alligator the RSS feed reader now works better on widescreen configurations because yes most of these plasma mobile apps also work on desktops being fully adaptive spacebar the SMS MMS app has received a lot of updates like a button to auto scroll to the bottom of the list of your messages with a message number counter it now displays how many members there are in a group conversation and the app is way faster to open scrolling has also been improved and should be smoother the chat lists aren't reloaded all the time and the backend also received some love to fix a bunch of issues some developers including the excellent nikolo venerandi also started work on an e-book reader called Ariana which supports ePub and has basic Library management and search capabilities a bunch of other apps also received updates like calc the calculator Coco the image viewer neochat The Matrix client or kweather and casts the podcast app got redesigned header bar controls and the sidebar on desktop got reworked as well to be more similar to the one used on mobile they rewrote the audio back-end from scratch now being able to use lib VLC G streamer or cute multimedia and chapter images are Now supported in your podcasts and timestamps in an episode's description are now clickable and casts might be a great application to subscribe to my Linux News podcast because yes these videos have an audio podcast version with more details on the topics and more topics the link is in the description below check it out and let's finish this with the gaming news and with a nice example of how Linux gaming is in full swing Deadspace the Remake was released last week with very poor performance especially on the steam deck and Linux stutters crashes raindrops it basically was unplayable for a lot of people and just a few days after that valve managed to make the game Run well even when the developers themselves did it with the new release of proton they put in place a Shader cache that will reduce stutters and they fixed a game crash that happened when opening the in-game map and they also added some performance fixes so now the game is fully playable without the developer having to lift a finger pretty great if you ask me and it also looks like the work on eliminating stutters in games running with proton is still moving forward with big developments being done on the AMD GPU driver developers have focused on certain Vulcan extensions which should bring up to 50 000 improvements in fast linking pipelines which is basically how the GPU compiles shaders while NVIDIA drivers already do that pretty well the AMD drivers were lagging a bit behind and it looks like with Mesa 23.1 we can expect some huge performance gains when loading shaders in games on the deck or any system using an AMD GPU the heroic games launcher that lets you run epic games and Gog on Linux got updated to version 2.6 with a bunch of improvements there's a new default theme looking pretty good the game settings will now open in a dialogue instead of a new page heroic will now suggest a new version of wine to install when the selected one isn't available anymore and there's a setting to auto update games or to completely skip updates for certain titles and for people using steam or Steam OS there's a big update that fixes audio crackling on on Linux when using remote play but it also made the new Big Picture Mode the one used in Steam OS as the default for everyone the old one is still available for compatibility purposes steam input received a lot of love as well so controller support should be much improved you probably already have gotten the updates although if you do use an Nvidia GPU I would recommend you stick to the older Big Picture Mode because the new one still has horrendous performance issues probably because they never enabled the hardware accelerated web rendering for NVIDIA drivers because that new Big Picture Mode is basically a webview and this is basically a segue to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer to run Linux on stop looking at Windows laptops or desktops and praying that they're gonna support Linux well buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they have a nice big range of devices from affordable laptops to nux to high-end workstations or gaming laptops they're all customizable with plenty of options to make it your own and choose your performance point and your price point and they're also all upgradable repairable and you can even customize them a lot with your own keyboard layout laser etched on the keys or your own logo laser engraved on the lid of your laptop so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and buy something from tuxedo it's just better than buying a Windows device so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did honestly to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment to check out the audio podcast in the description and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel there are plenty of options below super thanks PayPal link patreon YouTube memberships which both give you some nice advantages you decide if you want if you can support the channel I won't bother you with that anymore so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick an Elementary OS 7 is finally here it took a year and a half between OS 6 and Os 7 and a lot has changed in the Linux desktop space since then so is OS 7 enough of a leap forward to make me abandon groom and KDE and go back to my first Linux distro love well we're gonna take a look at what's new and you'll have to wait until the end of the video to know whether I'm switching back or not but you won't have to wait for this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider or of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to track so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster OK let's start with a few basic details about elementary EOS 7. it's based on Ubuntu 22.04.1 which is about a year old at that point it's an LTS release so don't expect the very latest packages in the repos or the latest kernel and drivers Elementary iOS 7 will get the hardware enablement stack as Ubuntu release is it so it will get more Hardware Support over time and newer kernels but a bleeding edge distro this is not it still uses its own desktop environment called Pantheon and its own applications developed for Elementary OS and it is still available for free or you can pay what you want to get it the code name this time around is Horus and you know me I'm a 40K Fanboy so I have to call it heresy detected okay nerdy jokes aside let's look at what's new installing OS 7 isn't different from installing OS 6 the installer looks the same and feels the same you still get a few changes here and there like less invasive messages to tell you to plug in your device for example you will get a recap page before installing that will let you know what to expect and also warn you about installing in a VM because obviously it's not the same experience as a real install which is why every time I review a distro or a desktop environment I I always install it on a real laptop because a distro first look or test run on a VM is completely meaningless but also highlight sometimes I do record stuff from a VM but I have tested it before on the real device the installer will also Auto detect if you try and click using the right Mouse button and allow you to change to a left-handed configuration there's a new page letting you connect to the internet if you're not already connected and that's about it still no partitioning you can do it using G parted but the installer doesn't have these capabilities the onboarding process added a few things as well like the ability to select the auto dark and light theme depending on the time of day or to configure automatic updates but that's about it nothing really changed here but also nothing needed to change it was one of the most user-friendly and easy to understand install and onboarding process and it's still the case today now in terms of look and feel they are there's no two ways about it it looks identical to Elementary OS 6.1 you still have the top panel and the dock the theme is the same you have the same accent colors and the same dark mode no noticeable changes here the only thing are the icons which might look identical to the previous release but they've actually been tweaked or redone so they all follow a more coherent size and shape so you shouldn't have tall icons sitting next to your squat Square icons in your dock small changes have been done here and there on the toolbar icons as well but generally the art style is identical it's colorful it's a little bit 3D and a little bit skeuomorphic and I kind of like it I think it past the point where it looked old all the way to Circle back to now that it feels fresh compared to all the flat and pretty bland design languages that we've had on mobile phones and desktop for the past 10 years the general theme is also identical even though some applications were moved to gtk4 like the calculator the side load app the music player the shortcuts list or the onboarding app the porting efforts are still underway and the bigger apps like the file manager for example are still gtk3 and they will be ported over to gtk4 over the life cycle of os7 which hopefully should also bring these apps more features because yes Elementor iOS sort of follows the same model as KD neon you have a stable base that doesn't really evolve over the life cycle of the distro but the desktop and the applications themselves get updates consistently so not exactly a rolling release maybe a dragging release because it it sort of doesn't roll but it still moves I don't know we need a name for that so now let's talk app center that thing was Miles Ahead of the competition when OS 6 released it looked better it was faster it had more information about apps it lets you pay what you want for applications or get them for free it was just great when a company like system 76 decides to take the absent instead of gnome software for their distro that they actually ship on devices they sell to customers you know App Center was doing something right well if you don't count the fact that App Center did not come with flat Hub or with access to the various apps in the Ubuntu repost that was not really great since then though gnome software and discover have caught up and so OS 7 implements a few changes of its own first the store is now responsive and works better on small screen sizes it's good for tiling it on one side of the screen but it also means it sort of looks weird like with the search bar that feels way too big at regular window sizes the header bar was redone with a permanent updates button instead of using the installed apps Tab and the settings icon to enable auto updates in application Pages you now get bigger screenshots something that's still an issue in Gnome software where they're way too small and they're surrounded by bright accent colors and and even captions to describe what the app can do it looks good and it's a joy to use on a laptop with super precise touchpad gestures that follow your fingers as they move on the touchpad os7 also adds a few mentions on app pages like an outdated tag if an app hasn't been updated for OS 7 you'll still be able to run it because it uses flat pack so apps from OS 6 will run on OS 7 and vice versa but it's an indication that the developer hasn't yet followed through with the release and you will also get more update notes with up to 5 versions so you know if the app is actively maintained or not and now for the not so good stuff on the App Center first still no flat pack by default you have to add it manually you still get that small text when your search returns nothing with a link to Flat Hub and the sideload app will let you add flat Hub graphically but it still sucks that there's no simple one checkbox option to edit at install and also no graphical way to access Ubuntu apps or Ubuntu libraries from the Ubuntu repos which is still super dumb you will need to use the command line to install anything from these repos but also I guess that means that you don't get snaps on the desktop which is good third the app pagers are now way less detailed than the ones you will get in Gnome software or discover no list of permissions for flat pack apps no age ratings no safety indication no details about the license and the app update info generally seems less complete than on Chrome software so yeah App Center used to have the edge over gnome software and discover hands down it was a better experience and nowadays the app's UI is better but the information it displays and the quantity of apps it lets users install out of the box is just not good it's not a bad experience because you can fix those issues but it's just not the best test and other app stores have just caught up and surpassed it now speaking of applications that brings us to side loading which basically means getting an app from Flat Harbor and installing it manually you can still do that just by downloading an app from the flat Hub website for example you'll get a graphical window and this will add flat Hype to your sources and then you will have access to all flat Hub apps in the app center afterwards now once you added flat Hub you won't get a dialog for each app you install from it telling you that it's not curated you just get a small tag in the apps page so there's less friction apps installed from Flat Hub will not reflect the elementary us Theme by default so they will look out of place and they will not follow your accent color because there is no standard there yet either and they might not follow your dark mode preference either depending on the app for example LibreOffice doesn't and sure adding flat Hub graphically is very easy but you just can't force users to use a very small app ecosystem like the one Elementor us has which has no access to apps users actually you want to use like an office suite or Firefox well okay maybe not Firefox because it seems that not many people use that anymore apart from me but you get my point basically users need to have the apps that they will always want to install available Elementary iOS by default has no other web browsers available and no office suites it's done now let's look at the updates to the applications first you get gnome web ported to gdk4 with a much faster webkit engine it supports creating web apps that will show up in your Elementary OS menu and for me it's night and day with the previous version because I can finally play YouTube videos on it which never worked before on Epiphany or gnome web for me on any device it is still extremely smooth with touchpad gestures to go back and forward and it's now a pretty good browser I must say apart from extension support which is being worked on but isn't really there yet the mail client also received a lot of love now you still need to use the online accounts feature to add your email account and on a side note these online accounts on Elementary OS are super bear boats you don't get the option to add a Google account on Microsoft account a next Cloud account or basically it's just IMAP or caldav and you have to enter all the details manually gnome and Katie he have them beat by a large large margin now once you added your account you're treated with a refresh UI that should make its way to other Elementary apps in the future the icons of the toolbar are now part of the content and not split in a separate header bar which makes the app look a bit cleaner and less heavy now Office 365 accounts will now also appear in the Unified Inbox and the app is a lot more stable on OS 6 it crashed and froze and failed to display email all the time but it's much much better in OS 7. still it lacks a few key features like the ability to create labels or folders or to handle signatures or out of office messages at least it's now usable because it's stable and it doesn't crash all the time but it still will be unsuitable for anyone who needs an office mail client and not just a personal one the tasks app was pretty Bare Bones in OS 6. it was also a bit buggy but now it's much improved you can create new task lists offline and they will sync to your caldev account when you get back online if you have such an account configured and tasks that reach their due date will now send notifications if you want the file manager now lets you select folders by clicking on them when before a single click would open them you can turn on that option in the context menu and that's about all the changes in the file manager it's still super simple and a lot of people will probably find it too basic for their needs the music app is the one that changed the most it's been Rewritten and it's no longer a music collection manager it is just a player with a cube you just add songs and they play and that's it no management of albums artists genres or stuff like that it looks beautiful and it's fast and it's fluid and it does what it's supposed to do play music files but if you wanted a collection organizer that can rip CDs and just organize everything with editing tags then that's not it and you will have to find another alternative personally I don't have a local music collection anymore and I haven't had for ages I'm ashamed to say I moved on to music streaming a long while ago but for people who do have a need for this app yeah it's a downgrade compared to this collection manager that was previously available code the text edit editor slash small IDE also got a few updates with a full height project bar moving the icons that were on that panel to the right of the window it also now supports your system-wide dock preference instead of only having manual options for light and dark theme they added the find tools to the applications menu and they now support regular expressions and selecting some text in a file will pre-fill the find tool with that text hiding and showing panels is also now done from the apps menu and hidden folders will appear in your project 3 automatically the terminal also now can follow your system-wide dark or light mode but it lost its transparency by default which I'm sad about but it gained the ability to create custom color profiles which is pretty great and finally archive manager and document viewer both apps pulled from gnome received updates to their version 43 With Better Dark mode support and flat pack portals evolutionary changes all around nothing here will blow your mind or revolutionize how you used your system compared to Elementary OS or even compared to no now let's finish this with the settings first you now get power profiles with a performance mode power save mode and balanced mode performance mode generally only appears on devices with a dedicated GPU and on my laptop it's not there and you also cannot switch profiles from the power indicator which sucks you'll have to go into the settings themselves but it's still good to have these available hot Corners are also more configurable in the multitasking preferences you can now execute a custom command when activating one of these the keyboard shortcuts panel also is much better letting you reset something to the default easily and the shortcuts app can now be launched like any other application more importantly though you can now easily set the super key to open the multitasking view instead of either the shortcuts or the application menu and I still wish that either the application menu or the multitasking view had a system-wide search feature to look for files folders applications web pages akin to what you can find in gnomes activity view or in KD's overview not having that feature on Elementor OS is insane you also get cleaner printer settings with the ability to clear the print Cube or printer and it shows ink levels much more legibly you also get a new option in the security panel to prevent new USB devices from being mounted when the computer is locked okay so OS 7 is it enough for me to switch back well let me be brutally honest os7 feels amazing the touchpad gestures are really great for navigating between apps but also inside of apps with the ability to go back from settings panels or from the App Center or in the web browser it's all super smooth and responsive and it's on X11 not on Wayland OS 7 is as polished as ever every detail is nicely crafted and it looks great and the attention to design wording and placement is palpable but what Elementary OS offers is now compared against much more matured versions of gnome and KDE which have both surpassed it in almost every single aspect these desktops have a better app ecosystem now they both support Wayland the default apps have more features they are both more configurable even gnome with its extensions and they move faster on updates as well and they're still the bone-headed decisions no easy way to add flat Hub in one click no graphical access to Ubuntu repos by default no way to add tray icons simply no full system-wide search for files apps folders or web pages what were minor annoyances in Elementary OS 6 because other desktops just didn't really do things better are now roadblocks for me and sure OS 7 will absolutely be a wonderful upgrade for Elementary OS users it will be amazing but it's not enough to make me switch back from gnome and KDE to Elementary OS sure I'll miss the Polish and I'll miss the advanced touchpad gestures that they have inside of applications that gnome and Kelly do not have but still it's not enough to tempt me back but I can appreciate all the effort and all the time that went into crafting such a polished experience that honestly no other distro still can match so I'll be keeping my eye on OS 7 I'll look at the updates that they add I'll see if the contention points that are there for me are fixed in the future and maybe I'll reconsider but for now I'll stick to gnome and 2kde and I'll stick to this segue to today's sponsor if you need a new laptop or desktop to run Linux on stop buying Windows devices and trying to slap Linux on it buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they are based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a huge range of devices that should fit every price point and every need whether you're looking for a small affordable nug or laptop or a very high-end workstation they have options for everything they have multiple configuration options you can open them repair them and upgrade them you can install any distro you like on them and you can basically customize them all you want with a custom keyboard layout on the keys of your laptop a custom logo or no logo at all if you don't like branding so if you need a new device you want to support linux's development and you want to make sure that Linux runs great on it click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo device so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and if you didn't you can also well dislike it and tell me why in the comments and if you want to support what I do and the channel you'll find plenty of links below to my social networks PayPal super Banks YouTube memberships patreon memberships just click on whatever you like or just buy some merch there's some merch now as well you decide in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick an Elementary OS 7 is finally here it took a year and a half between OS 6 and Os 7 and a lot has changed in the Linux desktop space since then so is OS 7 enough of a leap forward to make me abandon groom and KDE and go back to my first Linux distro love well we're gonna take a look at what's new and you'll have to wait until the end of the video to know whether I'm switching back or not but you won't have to wait for this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider or of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to track so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster OK let's start with a few basic details about elementary EOS 7. it's based on Ubuntu 22.04.1 which is about a year old at that point it's an LTS release so don't expect the very latest packages in the repos or the latest kernel and drivers Elementary iOS 7 will get the hardware enablement stack as Ubuntu release is it so it will get more Hardware Support over time and newer kernels but a bleeding edge distro this is not it still uses its own desktop environment called Pantheon and its own applications developed for Elementary OS and it is still available for free or you can pay what you want to get it the code name this time around is Horus and you know me I'm a 40K Fanboy so I have to call it heresy detected okay nerdy jokes aside let's look at what's new installing OS 7 isn't different from installing OS 6 the installer looks the same and feels the same you still get a few changes here and there like less invasive messages to tell you to plug in your device for example you will get a recap page before installing that will let you know what to expect and also warn you about installing in a VM because obviously it's not the same experience as a real install which is why every time I review a distro or a desktop environment I I always install it on a real laptop because a distro first look or test run on a VM is completely meaningless but also highlight sometimes I do record stuff from a VM but I have tested it before on the real device the installer will also Auto detect if you try and click using the right Mouse button and allow you to change to a left-handed configuration there's a new page letting you connect to the internet if you're not already connected and that's about it still no partitioning you can do it using G parted but the installer doesn't have these capabilities the onboarding process added a few things as well like the ability to select the auto dark and light theme depending on the time of day or to configure automatic updates but that's about it nothing really changed here but also nothing needed to change it was one of the most user-friendly and easy to understand install and onboarding process and it's still the case today now in terms of look and feel they are there's no two ways about it it looks identical to Elementary OS 6.1 you still have the top panel and the dock the theme is the same you have the same accent colors and the same dark mode no noticeable changes here the only thing are the icons which might look identical to the previous release but they've actually been tweaked or redone so they all follow a more coherent size and shape so you shouldn't have tall icons sitting next to your squat Square icons in your dock small changes have been done here and there on the toolbar icons as well but generally the art style is identical it's colorful it's a little bit 3D and a little bit skeuomorphic and I kind of like it I think it past the point where it looked old all the way to Circle back to now that it feels fresh compared to all the flat and pretty bland design languages that we've had on mobile phones and desktop for the past 10 years the general theme is also identical even though some applications were moved to gtk4 like the calculator the side load app the music player the shortcuts list or the onboarding app the porting efforts are still underway and the bigger apps like the file manager for example are still gtk3 and they will be ported over to gtk4 over the life cycle of os7 which hopefully should also bring these apps more features because yes Elementor iOS sort of follows the same model as KD neon you have a stable base that doesn't really evolve over the life cycle of the distro but the desktop and the applications themselves get updates consistently so not exactly a rolling release maybe a dragging release because it it sort of doesn't roll but it still moves I don't know we need a name for that so now let's talk app center that thing was Miles Ahead of the competition when OS 6 released it looked better it was faster it had more information about apps it lets you pay what you want for applications or get them for free it was just great when a company like system 76 decides to take the absent instead of gnome software for their distro that they actually ship on devices they sell to customers you know App Center was doing something right well if you don't count the fact that App Center did not come with flat Hub or with access to the various apps in the Ubuntu repost that was not really great since then though gnome software and discover have caught up and so OS 7 implements a few changes of its own first the store is now responsive and works better on small screen sizes it's good for tiling it on one side of the screen but it also means it sort of looks weird like with the search bar that feels way too big at regular window sizes the header bar was redone with a permanent updates button instead of using the installed apps Tab and the settings icon to enable auto updates in application Pages you now get bigger screenshots something that's still an issue in Gnome software where they're way too small and they're surrounded by bright accent colors and and even captions to describe what the app can do it looks good and it's a joy to use on a laptop with super precise touchpad gestures that follow your fingers as they move on the touchpad os7 also adds a few mentions on app pages like an outdated tag if an app hasn't been updated for OS 7 you'll still be able to run it because it uses flat pack so apps from OS 6 will run on OS 7 and vice versa but it's an indication that the developer hasn't yet followed through with the release and you will also get more update notes with up to 5 versions so you know if the app is actively maintained or not and now for the not so good stuff on the App Center first still no flat pack by default you have to add it manually you still get that small text when your search returns nothing with a link to Flat Hub and the sideload app will let you add flat Hub graphically but it still sucks that there's no simple one checkbox option to edit at install and also no graphical way to access Ubuntu apps or Ubuntu libraries from the Ubuntu repos which is still super dumb you will need to use the command line to install anything from these repos but also I guess that means that you don't get snaps on the desktop which is good third the app pagers are now way less detailed than the ones you will get in Gnome software or discover no list of permissions for flat pack apps no age ratings no safety indication no details about the license and the app update info generally seems less complete than on Chrome software so yeah App Center used to have the edge over gnome software and discover hands down it was a better experience and nowadays the app's UI is better but the information it displays and the quantity of apps it lets users install out of the box is just not good it's not a bad experience because you can fix those issues but it's just not the best test and other app stores have just caught up and surpassed it now speaking of applications that brings us to side loading which basically means getting an app from Flat Harbor and installing it manually you can still do that just by downloading an app from the flat Hub website for example you'll get a graphical window and this will add flat Hype to your sources and then you will have access to all flat Hub apps in the app center afterwards now once you added flat Hub you won't get a dialog for each app you install from it telling you that it's not curated you just get a small tag in the apps page so there's less friction apps installed from Flat Hub will not reflect the elementary us Theme by default so they will look out of place and they will not follow your accent color because there is no standard there yet either and they might not follow your dark mode preference either depending on the app for example LibreOffice doesn't and sure adding flat Hub graphically is very easy but you just can't force users to use a very small app ecosystem like the one Elementor us has which has no access to apps users actually you want to use like an office suite or Firefox well okay maybe not Firefox because it seems that not many people use that anymore apart from me but you get my point basically users need to have the apps that they will always want to install available Elementary iOS by default has no other web browsers available and no office suites it's done now let's look at the updates to the applications first you get gnome web ported to gdk4 with a much faster webkit engine it supports creating web apps that will show up in your Elementary OS menu and for me it's night and day with the previous version because I can finally play YouTube videos on it which never worked before on Epiphany or gnome web for me on any device it is still extremely smooth with touchpad gestures to go back and forward and it's now a pretty good browser I must say apart from extension support which is being worked on but isn't really there yet the mail client also received a lot of love now you still need to use the online accounts feature to add your email account and on a side note these online accounts on Elementary OS are super bear boats you don't get the option to add a Google account on Microsoft account a next Cloud account or basically it's just IMAP or caldav and you have to enter all the details manually gnome and Katie he have them beat by a large large margin now once you added your account you're treated with a refresh UI that should make its way to other Elementary apps in the future the icons of the toolbar are now part of the content and not split in a separate header bar which makes the app look a bit cleaner and less heavy now Office 365 accounts will now also appear in the Unified Inbox and the app is a lot more stable on OS 6 it crashed and froze and failed to display email all the time but it's much much better in OS 7. still it lacks a few key features like the ability to create labels or folders or to handle signatures or out of office messages at least it's now usable because it's stable and it doesn't crash all the time but it still will be unsuitable for anyone who needs an office mail client and not just a personal one the tasks app was pretty Bare Bones in OS 6. it was also a bit buggy but now it's much improved you can create new task lists offline and they will sync to your caldev account when you get back online if you have such an account configured and tasks that reach their due date will now send notifications if you want the file manager now lets you select folders by clicking on them when before a single click would open them you can turn on that option in the context menu and that's about all the changes in the file manager it's still super simple and a lot of people will probably find it too basic for their needs the music app is the one that changed the most it's been Rewritten and it's no longer a music collection manager it is just a player with a cube you just add songs and they play and that's it no management of albums artists genres or stuff like that it looks beautiful and it's fast and it's fluid and it does what it's supposed to do play music files but if you wanted a collection organizer that can rip CDs and just organize everything with editing tags then that's not it and you will have to find another alternative personally I don't have a local music collection anymore and I haven't had for ages I'm ashamed to say I moved on to music streaming a long while ago but for people who do have a need for this app yeah it's a downgrade compared to this collection manager that was previously available code the text edit editor slash small IDE also got a few updates with a full height project bar moving the icons that were on that panel to the right of the window it also now supports your system-wide dock preference instead of only having manual options for light and dark theme they added the find tools to the applications menu and they now support regular expressions and selecting some text in a file will pre-fill the find tool with that text hiding and showing panels is also now done from the apps menu and hidden folders will appear in your project 3 automatically the terminal also now can follow your system-wide dark or light mode but it lost its transparency by default which I'm sad about but it gained the ability to create custom color profiles which is pretty great and finally archive manager and document viewer both apps pulled from gnome received updates to their version 43 With Better Dark mode support and flat pack portals evolutionary changes all around nothing here will blow your mind or revolutionize how you used your system compared to Elementary OS or even compared to no now let's finish this with the settings first you now get power profiles with a performance mode power save mode and balanced mode performance mode generally only appears on devices with a dedicated GPU and on my laptop it's not there and you also cannot switch profiles from the power indicator which sucks you'll have to go into the settings themselves but it's still good to have these available hot Corners are also more configurable in the multitasking preferences you can now execute a custom command when activating one of these the keyboard shortcuts panel also is much better letting you reset something to the default easily and the shortcuts app can now be launched like any other application more importantly though you can now easily set the super key to open the multitasking view instead of either the shortcuts or the application menu and I still wish that either the application menu or the multitasking view had a system-wide search feature to look for files folders applications web pages akin to what you can find in gnomes activity view or in KD's overview not having that feature on Elementor OS is insane you also get cleaner printer settings with the ability to clear the print Cube or printer and it shows ink levels much more legibly you also get a new option in the security panel to prevent new USB devices from being mounted when the computer is locked okay so OS 7 is it enough for me to switch back well let me be brutally honest os7 feels amazing the touchpad gestures are really great for navigating between apps but also inside of apps with the ability to go back from settings panels or from the App Center or in the web browser it's all super smooth and responsive and it's on X11 not on Wayland OS 7 is as polished as ever every detail is nicely crafted and it looks great and the attention to design wording and placement is palpable but what Elementary OS offers is now compared against much more matured versions of gnome and KDE which have both surpassed it in almost every single aspect these desktops have a better app ecosystem now they both support Wayland the default apps have more features they are both more configurable even gnome with its extensions and they move faster on updates as well and they're still the bone-headed decisions no easy way to add flat Hub in one click no graphical access to Ubuntu repos by default no way to add tray icons simply no full system-wide search for files apps folders or web pages what were minor annoyances in Elementary OS 6 because other desktops just didn't really do things better are now roadblocks for me and sure OS 7 will absolutely be a wonderful upgrade for Elementary OS users it will be amazing but it's not enough to make me switch back from gnome and KDE to Elementary OS sure I'll miss the Polish and I'll miss the advanced touchpad gestures that they have inside of applications that gnome and Kelly do not have but still it's not enough to tempt me back but I can appreciate all the effort and all the time that went into crafting such a polished experience that honestly no other distro still can match so I'll be keeping my eye on OS 7 I'll look at the updates that they add I'll see if the contention points that are there for me are fixed in the future and maybe I'll reconsider but for now I'll stick to gnome and 2kde and I'll stick to this segue to today's sponsor if you need a new laptop or desktop to run Linux on stop buying Windows devices and trying to slap Linux on it buy something that supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they are based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a huge range of devices that should fit every price point and every need whether you're looking for a small affordable nug or laptop or a very high-end workstation they have options for everything they have multiple configuration options you can open them repair them and upgrade them you can install any distro you like on them and you can basically customize them all you want with a custom keyboard layout on the keys of your laptop a custom logo or no logo at all if you don't like branding so if you need a new device you want to support linux's development and you want to make sure that Linux runs great on it click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo device so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and if you didn't you can also well dislike it and tell me why in the comments and if you want to support what I do and the channel you'll find plenty of links below to my social networks PayPal super Banks YouTube memberships patreon memberships just click on whatever you like or just buy some merch there's some merch now as well you decide in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and cloud storage is pretty much unavoidable these days and one of the biggest providers is of course Google a company that is not known for its focus on privacy fortunately Google drive or any other big Tech cloud storage option is the easiest to replace out of the whole ecosystem so we're gonna look at a bunch of Alternatives so you can finally get your files out of big Tech's computer I tried to pick options that are open source or not affordable or not self-hostable or not but of course I can't cover everything so if you have a preference for cloud storage that you use and that I didn't cover in this video let everyone know Down Below in the comments and let everyone know about this segue to today's sponsor thanks to linode for sponsoring this video Lenard is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own next Cloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games for example focal board if you don't know about it it's an open source alternative to tools like Trello Azana or notion it lets you create Milestones keep track of your notes have a bird's eye view of your project and it basically helps you get stuff done and you can deploy your focal board server in one click from your Linux dashboard something I should probably do to ensure that I keep delivering my videos on time and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below it's Cloud yeah again next Cloud isn't just cloud storage but it's a very easy way to have complete control over your files and who can access them next Cloud can be self-hosted on a Home Server or Raspberry Pi connected to as much storage as you want or you can rent a server from any provider like lenode how convenient no but also seriously that's what I do like I use next Cloud to store everything in the cloud and I use lenode to host it in any case next Cloud file storage is pretty powerful it handles folders you can favorite files and folders to get back to them easily you can tag anything you like you can share anything either with selected people or with a public link you can even add comments to any file and it supports versioning as well to restore older versions if you want which thank goodness for that because as I was writing this very video I accidentally selected everything and deleted it so were it not for next Cloud versioning I would have had to rewrite basically the whole script on top of that you can also Mount that storage as web dev in any good file manager on Linux with gnome and KDE this happens automatically when you configure a next cloud account in the online account settings and of course you have a desktop client that lets you sync files either from an xcloud folder or even from outside that folder to make sure that your files are actually where you want them and there's a mobile app as well that will let you auto upload all your pictures to the cloud manage your files and generally Marvel at how amazing it is to host your own server nextcloud is open source it's updated very often and it can do plenty more than just file storage including having your own online office suite like only office or collabora for free that's perfectly integrated with the storage and supports collaborative editing of documents if you want to self-host or at least control where your files are going I don't think you can do better than next Cloud now sync thing isn't exactly cloud storage it doesn't store files on a Cloud Server it just syncs them from one computer to the other in real time as long as both your devices are turned on so you set up sync thing on your laptop and your desktop and it will send files back and forth as they are modified between both devices without any intermediary in between now of course it has a few drawbacks like not having a copy accessible online from a web browser no file sharing with others and it won't download anything to one of your devices if all other devices are turned off but it also means you don't have to pay anything no Cloud subscription the app is free of charge and open source you get all the storage you want because that's your local storage on your computers and it works over a local network or just over the internet if your devices aren't on the same network it has clients for every OS including an official client for Android and an unofficial client for iOS and even for every single BSD might think of free net open dragonfly even Mac OS well can we really count Mac OS as BSD if what you need isn't necessarily storage that can be shared with others but you just want a way to have all your files on all your devices same thing is a great option if you're already a protonmail customer you might want to take a look at Proton Drive it's an end-to-end encrypted solution hosted in Switzerland with relatively strong privacy laws that don't really matter since everything is encrypted anyways it's not like someone could look at what you stored since files are encrypted on your device before being sent to the cloud it's also open source and it obviously integrates well with the other proton tools like mail or calendar even though it's encrypted you can still share files with others without file size limits as well as password protect files Define expiration dates for links and more now of course you will have to pay because you only get one gigabyte of free storage but 200 gigs are 3 Euros 99 per month and 500 gigs or 9.99 it's more expensive than Google Drive for sure but it's only one Euro more per month for 200 gigabytes which should be enough for most people and if not seriously what do you store in your cloud storage my whole lifetime of photos videos and documents only occupies about 60 gigs now the price gap widens for the 500 gigs tier because for the same price you get 2 terabytes from Google but also Google storage isn't encrypted Proton Drive will probably be a no-brainer for people already using protonmail and for people who want to replace multiple Google tools at the same time mail calendar and drive another open source alternative is cozy Cloud it's French so you gotta love it well at least I do because us French hate everything except French things actually that's not true we also hate French things cozy cloud is a suite of tools but the main one is cozy Drive which is you guessed it cloud storage with some sharing options it's available for Android iOS Linux Mac OS and windows and it gives you 5 gigabytes for free with additional tiers at 50 gigs for 2 Euros 99 per month and one terabyte for 9 Euros 98 still more expensive than Google but also more private it also has Auto Import features from your phone camera roll to your drive and can also automatically import certain documents for more than 100 providers like your Bales your health refunds your bank statements and more if you want them that's optional in terms of privacy they are very clear about what they collect only your traffic data from the website all the files are completely private they also have other apps that collect some amount of data like cozy banks that will automatically pull your bank statements in one single place to manage your budget or cozy notes for well note-taking and cozy pass for storing passwords but these are completely optional and just because they're French doesn't mean you can't use them if you don't live there although if you want to call them cozy Cloud it has to come from the Cozy region of France pcloud is an option I used extensively in the past for all my cloud storage it's not open source but it has optional encryption features if you want to make sure that you're the only one that can look at your stuff they are on the affordable side with 500 gigs costing you 50 euros per year or about 4 Euros per month and 2 terabytes for 100 euros a year or a bit more than 8 Euros per month they also have lifetime plans that will cost you more once but without any further payments but lifetime plans are something I tend to not really trust because the company could just decide to not honor it or to find a loophole ask filmora users how well their lifetime plans panned out they didn't and now they have to repay pcloud has clients for Linux Windows Mac OS iOS Android and even a command line version if you prefer it will let you backup your PC to the Cloud sync files and folders between computers from anywhere on your disk you're not limited to a single folder and you can share files and folders with anyone and they also have a password manager now if you're looking for something like that of course they are not open source so whether you trust them with your data or not is up to you but I personally use them for two years and I've had no issue to report if what you need is massive storage space and you don't want to self-host then I think Mega is your only option their base plans are more expensive than others at 5 Euros per month for 400 gigs but they can go up to 16 terabytes for 30 Euros per month which is a lot of storage for not that much money considering the two terabyte plan is on par with other options at 10 euros per month if you can look past the kim.com origins of this service which are unsavory at best you'll be happy to know that this company is now very much transparent they publish reports about the takedown request they receive and stuff like that Mega isn't open source either they publish some source code for their clients but it's under a proprietary Source license that only lets People review and comment but not contribute or modify or redistribute still it lets people check for vulnerabilities or back doors in the clients but the server part is fully opaque they have apps for all platforms including Linux and smartphones and you can share files with anyone sync from your computer or phone automatically and everything is end-to-end encrypted they also have a chat app also end-to-end encrypted and a backup solution whether you trust Mega or not is your choice but it Bears its name pretty well if what you're looking for is millions of Megas then Mega is for you if you don't really care all that much about privacy or open source but you still want to teach big Tech then Zoho is probably your best bet they have replacements for everything Google does and a lot more on top of that and prices are relatively inexpensive now of course it's more meant for teams because their plans start with three users minimum but even with that their prices aren't ridiculous for one terabyte you'll pay 750 per month and for three terabytes you'll pay 13.50 so it's not completely unreasonable and also when I say you get everything you do get everything file storage sharing collaboration a full office suite that's absolutely a Google Docs competitor mobile apps desktop syncing with apps for every OS that exists well maybe not Temple OS plus file versioning encryption and you can even get a free 5 gigabyte storage plan if you want to try it out and that's just file storage and the office suite you can also get an email address with a very powerful Webmail you can get a CRM analytics a ridge node text editor an equivalent to Google forms and more and if you trust the company they also say they comply with gdpr and their privacy policy says they don't share any information with anyone except with employees that have a real need to access it like customer support honestly if I didn't have my next Cloud all set up I would probably use Zoho because it's just one workspace for everything and of course these are but a selection there are tons more that are open source or proprietary some you probably know about like Dropbox some you might not like C file but the selection I picked should cover basically every use case for Google Drive and every price point people would be willing to pay with Solutions you can self-host and solutions without a Cloud Server because as they say the cloud is just someone else's computer unless it's actually your computer it's also the cloud if you self-host my preference currently goes to nextcloud because it's really easy to either run a server from a VPS provider like lenode or to self-host it at home with as much storage as you want but you get to pick what you prefer so there is virtually no reason left to keep storing your files on Google's computers or microsofts or apples just pick anything and you'll get a more private and more secure solution and you'll get more Segways to today's spawn answer if you're in the market for a new computer laptop or desktop and you plan to run Linux on it stop buying Windows devices and crossing your fingers and hoping that Linux will run on them just buy something that supports Linux out of the box from tuxedo for example they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and their range of devices should cover basically every price point and every need they have small affordable laptops up to big giant workstations or gaming laptops you decide they're all customizable with your own logo engraved on the lid of your laptop or your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of the laptop and you can open them repair them upgrade the SSD the ram you get plenty of customization options for the specs they basically have something for everyone so if you're looking for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment down below and if you didn't like the video well you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support what I do there are plenty of links in the description below for Merch for patreon for YouTube memberships for PayPal super things whatever you can donate anything you want if you're able to and if you're willing to I won't annoy you many more with that so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and cloud storage is pretty much unavoidable these days and one of the biggest providers is of course Google a company that is not known for its focus on privacy fortunately Google drive or any other big Tech cloud storage option is the easiest to replace out of the whole ecosystem so we're gonna look at a bunch of Alternatives so you can finally get your files out of big Tech's computer I tried to pick options that are open source or not affordable or not self-hostable or not but of course I can't cover everything so if you have a preference for cloud storage that you use and that I didn't cover in this video let everyone know Down Below in the comments and let everyone know about this segue to today's sponsor thanks to linode for sponsoring this video Lenard is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own next Cloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games for example focal board if you don't know about it it's an open source alternative to tools like Trello Azana or notion it lets you create Milestones keep track of your notes have a bird's eye view of your project and it basically helps you get stuff done and you can deploy your focal board server in one click from your Linux dashboard something I should probably do to ensure that I keep delivering my videos on time and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below it's Cloud yeah again next Cloud isn't just cloud storage but it's a very easy way to have complete control over your files and who can access them next Cloud can be self-hosted on a Home Server or Raspberry Pi connected to as much storage as you want or you can rent a server from any provider like lenode how convenient no but also seriously that's what I do like I use next Cloud to store everything in the cloud and I use lenode to host it in any case next Cloud file storage is pretty powerful it handles folders you can favorite files and folders to get back to them easily you can tag anything you like you can share anything either with selected people or with a public link you can even add comments to any file and it supports versioning as well to restore older versions if you want which thank goodness for that because as I was writing this very video I accidentally selected everything and deleted it so were it not for next Cloud versioning I would have had to rewrite basically the whole script on top of that you can also Mount that storage as web dev in any good file manager on Linux with gnome and KDE this happens automatically when you configure a next cloud account in the online account settings and of course you have a desktop client that lets you sync files either from an xcloud folder or even from outside that folder to make sure that your files are actually where you want them and there's a mobile app as well that will let you auto upload all your pictures to the cloud manage your files and generally Marvel at how amazing it is to host your own server nextcloud is open source it's updated very often and it can do plenty more than just file storage including having your own online office suite like only office or collabora for free that's perfectly integrated with the storage and supports collaborative editing of documents if you want to self-host or at least control where your files are going I don't think you can do better than next Cloud now sync thing isn't exactly cloud storage it doesn't store files on a Cloud Server it just syncs them from one computer to the other in real time as long as both your devices are turned on so you set up sync thing on your laptop and your desktop and it will send files back and forth as they are modified between both devices without any intermediary in between now of course it has a few drawbacks like not having a copy accessible online from a web browser no file sharing with others and it won't download anything to one of your devices if all other devices are turned off but it also means you don't have to pay anything no Cloud subscription the app is free of charge and open source you get all the storage you want because that's your local storage on your computers and it works over a local network or just over the internet if your devices aren't on the same network it has clients for every OS including an official client for Android and an unofficial client for iOS and even for every single BSD might think of free net open dragonfly even Mac OS well can we really count Mac OS as BSD if what you need isn't necessarily storage that can be shared with others but you just want a way to have all your files on all your devices same thing is a great option if you're already a protonmail customer you might want to take a look at Proton Drive it's an end-to-end encrypted solution hosted in Switzerland with relatively strong privacy laws that don't really matter since everything is encrypted anyways it's not like someone could look at what you stored since files are encrypted on your device before being sent to the cloud it's also open source and it obviously integrates well with the other proton tools like mail or calendar even though it's encrypted you can still share files with others without file size limits as well as password protect files Define expiration dates for links and more now of course you will have to pay because you only get one gigabyte of free storage but 200 gigs are 3 Euros 99 per month and 500 gigs or 9.99 it's more expensive than Google Drive for sure but it's only one Euro more per month for 200 gigabytes which should be enough for most people and if not seriously what do you store in your cloud storage my whole lifetime of photos videos and documents only occupies about 60 gigs now the price gap widens for the 500 gigs tier because for the same price you get 2 terabytes from Google but also Google storage isn't encrypted Proton Drive will probably be a no-brainer for people already using protonmail and for people who want to replace multiple Google tools at the same time mail calendar and drive another open source alternative is cozy Cloud it's French so you gotta love it well at least I do because us French hate everything except French things actually that's not true we also hate French things cozy cloud is a suite of tools but the main one is cozy Drive which is you guessed it cloud storage with some sharing options it's available for Android iOS Linux Mac OS and windows and it gives you 5 gigabytes for free with additional tiers at 50 gigs for 2 Euros 99 per month and one terabyte for 9 Euros 98 still more expensive than Google but also more private it also has Auto Import features from your phone camera roll to your drive and can also automatically import certain documents for more than 100 providers like your Bales your health refunds your bank statements and more if you want them that's optional in terms of privacy they are very clear about what they collect only your traffic data from the website all the files are completely private they also have other apps that collect some amount of data like cozy banks that will automatically pull your bank statements in one single place to manage your budget or cozy notes for well note-taking and cozy pass for storing passwords but these are completely optional and just because they're French doesn't mean you can't use them if you don't live there although if you want to call them cozy Cloud it has to come from the Cozy region of France pcloud is an option I used extensively in the past for all my cloud storage it's not open source but it has optional encryption features if you want to make sure that you're the only one that can look at your stuff they are on the affordable side with 500 gigs costing you 50 euros per year or about 4 Euros per month and 2 terabytes for 100 euros a year or a bit more than 8 Euros per month they also have lifetime plans that will cost you more once but without any further payments but lifetime plans are something I tend to not really trust because the company could just decide to not honor it or to find a loophole ask filmora users how well their lifetime plans panned out they didn't and now they have to repay pcloud has clients for Linux Windows Mac OS iOS Android and even a command line version if you prefer it will let you backup your PC to the Cloud sync files and folders between computers from anywhere on your disk you're not limited to a single folder and you can share files and folders with anyone and they also have a password manager now if you're looking for something like that of course they are not open source so whether you trust them with your data or not is up to you but I personally use them for two years and I've had no issue to report if what you need is massive storage space and you don't want to self-host then I think Mega is your only option their base plans are more expensive than others at 5 Euros per month for 400 gigs but they can go up to 16 terabytes for 30 Euros per month which is a lot of storage for not that much money considering the two terabyte plan is on par with other options at 10 euros per month if you can look past the kim.com origins of this service which are unsavory at best you'll be happy to know that this company is now very much transparent they publish reports about the takedown request they receive and stuff like that Mega isn't open source either they publish some source code for their clients but it's under a proprietary Source license that only lets People review and comment but not contribute or modify or redistribute still it lets people check for vulnerabilities or back doors in the clients but the server part is fully opaque they have apps for all platforms including Linux and smartphones and you can share files with anyone sync from your computer or phone automatically and everything is end-to-end encrypted they also have a chat app also end-to-end encrypted and a backup solution whether you trust Mega or not is your choice but it Bears its name pretty well if what you're looking for is millions of Megas then Mega is for you if you don't really care all that much about privacy or open source but you still want to teach big Tech then Zoho is probably your best bet they have replacements for everything Google does and a lot more on top of that and prices are relatively inexpensive now of course it's more meant for teams because their plans start with three users minimum but even with that their prices aren't ridiculous for one terabyte you'll pay 750 per month and for three terabytes you'll pay 13.50 so it's not completely unreasonable and also when I say you get everything you do get everything file storage sharing collaboration a full office suite that's absolutely a Google Docs competitor mobile apps desktop syncing with apps for every OS that exists well maybe not Temple OS plus file versioning encryption and you can even get a free 5 gigabyte storage plan if you want to try it out and that's just file storage and the office suite you can also get an email address with a very powerful Webmail you can get a CRM analytics a ridge node text editor an equivalent to Google forms and more and if you trust the company they also say they comply with gdpr and their privacy policy says they don't share any information with anyone except with employees that have a real need to access it like customer support honestly if I didn't have my next Cloud all set up I would probably use Zoho because it's just one workspace for everything and of course these are but a selection there are tons more that are open source or proprietary some you probably know about like Dropbox some you might not like C file but the selection I picked should cover basically every use case for Google Drive and every price point people would be willing to pay with Solutions you can self-host and solutions without a Cloud Server because as they say the cloud is just someone else's computer unless it's actually your computer it's also the cloud if you self-host my preference currently goes to nextcloud because it's really easy to either run a server from a VPS provider like lenode or to self-host it at home with as much storage as you want but you get to pick what you prefer so there is virtually no reason left to keep storing your files on Google's computers or microsofts or apples just pick anything and you'll get a more private and more secure solution and you'll get more Segways to today's spawn answer if you're in the market for a new computer laptop or desktop and you plan to run Linux on it stop buying Windows devices and crossing your fingers and hoping that Linux will run on them just buy something that supports Linux out of the box from tuxedo for example they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and their range of devices should cover basically every price point and every need they have small affordable laptops up to big giant workstations or gaming laptops you decide they're all customizable with your own logo engraved on the lid of your laptop or your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of the laptop and you can open them repair them upgrade the SSD the ram you get plenty of customization options for the specs they basically have something for everyone so if you're looking for a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like like to subscribe to turn on notifications and to write a comment down below and if you didn't like the video well you can also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support what I do there are plenty of links in the description below for Merch for patreon for YouTube memberships for PayPal super things whatever you can donate anything you want if you're able to and if you're willing to I won't annoy you many more with that so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this has been a pretty bad week for open source software because this week There's a new proposed European Union law that would basically make open source developers liable for any security issues that there is in the software that they developed when their current licenses clearly state that the software is provided as is without any warranty and we also have Google firing a ton of people including their brightest and most talented open source Engineers which is obviously not great oh and we also have the gnome 44 Alpha being made available for everyone to test so let's unpack this segue to today's sponsor yes it came packaged in a box thanks to linode for sponsoring this video linode is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own next Cloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games like pie hole pie hole is a DNS sinkhole that filters out requests to add serving domains basically it lets you block ads and improve Network performance it lets you actively monitor every DNS request made on your network and block requests as they come in and you can deploy it in one click only nodes so you can ensure I stay poor and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below I regularly praise the EU for curbing the Privacy abuses of various companies but this time what they have in mind might be a big mistake the proposed cyber resiliency act or CRA is a new legal framework that aims to improve software and Hardware security and it would basically let the EU stamp a CE sign on software products with the simple goals of having a common metric to judge a project security and better information to Consumers on the security status of various pieces of software probably through some kind of seal of approval delivered by the EU I would say something akin to nutrition labels but for secure software so far so good but the main issue is that this legal framework might very well mean open source software is out of bounds and would never be able to get that certification open source software is by nature provided as is without warranty or liability for its authors and these new proposed laws would basically mean that open source developers would in fact be liable for their product security when the goal is to provide accessible software that companies can then modify and secure themselves or contract companies that sell maintenance services around that open source software another issue is that this new Cyber resiliency act would restrict the use of Unfinished software for testing purposes only an unfinished software is a very vague definition and it would mean no betas allowed at all of course the open source initiative has submitted feedback to try and make the European commission reconsider their loss for open source software giving it an exception so it can keep functioning as an open development community so let's hope it's just going to be a matter of wording to exclude open source software from the scope of this new regulation I am not saying that open source software should not be secure or isn't secure but by its very nature it's going to be very hard for it to conform to such a high security standard or to comply with the security certification and if no exclusion is put in place since virtually all companies make use of some kind of Open Source software or another on their website web app or just pure software product it's going to kill development innovation in the EU if open source cannot be used reliably by companies that want to propose something that conforms to this security standard you might have seen that Google laid off 12 000 employees recently which is bad enough especially when you consider that some of their investors would like them to slash 20 of their Workforce and reduce compensation but what is worse is that these layoffs seem to affect particularly their open source and Linux teams prominent developers that were let go include the founder of Google's open source programs office basically their whole open source division as well as the co-creator of Samba and the person recently hired to spearhead Google's open source security initiatives layoffs also include 16 of the 400 employees working on fuchsia their new kernel plus OS that was once touted as the replacement for Android and that already ships on some Nest devices the only open source division that seems relatively unaffected was the one working on AI related projects of course this happens in a context where alphabet Google's parent company reported revenue for the third quarter of 2022 that was up six percent compared to last year but profits were down by 16 and since everyone else in the tax sector is firing people they had to follow suit to police investors CCI fund management one of Google's investors even reported that the most talented and brightest computer scientist at Google were but a fraction of the company's total Manpower but the issue here is that it's not administrative Personnel being let go which would still suck it's actual Engineers working on the backbone of the internet which as we all know runs on open source seeing Google laying out people working on these crucial projects is definitely not a good sign for the direction the company is headed in so if there still was any doubt the Google don't be evil era is gone and done and has been for a long while now they will only cater to investors and the only thing they care about is AI it's not a good sign the genome 44 Alpha is now out for testing and it brings a bunch of changes first The Gnome web browser is now ported to gtk4 although it is not used all that much by many people so maybe that doesn't matter the gtk file picker finally supports a grid view with thumbnails something that will finally put an end to that old meme that's been around for a decade at least Nautilus now handles 64 pixels icon sizes in the grid view the Quick Settings menu now has a Bluetooth Sub menu to pair with devices you've already connected to something that required an extension previously you can also disable settings search results in the activity View and the accessibility settings have been redesigned entirely on top of that sharing Wi-Fi passwords using your QR code is now easier the date and time panel now works better on mobile devices and the about panel in the settings will show firmware versions as well you will also be able to set a default calls and SMS app for mobile phones the display panel will better handle night light errors and the Thunderbolt panel will only appear if your device actually supports it which makes sense a bunch of other settings panels have been touched up and also the gnome software store now better supports RPM os3 so updates on distributions like silver blue will be way more legible with progress and Gators you will also be able to hide non-open Source applications from the store and to automatically remove unused flat back runtimes so you can save some space and of course the various gnome apps received a bunch of updates like Maps being able to pull Wikipedia thumbnails and article extracts for locations there's a new service to detect sandboxed apps that are running in the background the shortcuts portal is implemented so apps can use keyboard shortcuts even when they're not in Focus under Wayland And Nautilus search should now be faster on paper it doesn't really look like a big update to gnome but the developers still have until the end of March to finalize all of this and maybe add some new features as well like the proposed removal of the application name menu that's in the top bar and that currently is kind of useless Ubuntu made their Ubuntu Pro subscription generally available to everyone after introducing it as a beta in October it's also not just available commercially for companies but it's free for individuals on up to five computers Ubuntu Pro basically gives your Ubuntu release 10 years of support life patching for the kernel so you can apply updates without any downtime plus extended security maintenance so you can get patches for critical high and some medium security issues with the critical patches being delivered under 24 hours they will also provide support for 2300 open source Debian packages in the Ubuntu main repo for 10 years and they will support 23 000 packages from the universe repo for 10 years as well it is definitely more geared towards servers than desktops but companies that run Ubuntu desktops for their employees might also want this to ensure their Fleet is always secure and if you as an individual running Ubuntu on your laptop or desktop also want these benefits because you like sticking to LTS releases and you don't want to upgrade all the time well all you need is a free Ubuntu One account and you can register up to five machines to get these advantages linking your computer to that subscription requires a few command lines but nothing tricky I think it's a really good move from canonical to offer this kind of service it's very valuable for anyone who has a fleet of servers or desktops but it can also be very useful for enthusiasts that just don't feel like upgrading to every new release that's not an LTS I will probably use that on my next Cloud Server which runs Ubuntu the next distros are a dime a dozen but sometimes you get something more than just an Ubuntu derivative with a theme amount of few apps this time it's blend OS a distribution that aims to be the last distro you will ever use if you're a distro hopper and you can't decide between Arch Ubuntu or Fedora blend OS is basically arch with gnome on Wayland but it offers the ability to install Ubuntu dab packages and Fedora RPM packages both in distro box and podman containers so they don't mess with the rest of your arch system you will have to install apt and dnf yourself to make use of this and you can also install blend os's own package manager called blend when you install a package using apt or dnf the distro will create a container automatically and you can then use the command lines you're used to without any weird stuff to do and packages will install where they're supposed to without breaking your system by mixing dependencies the blend package manager will then be able to update all packages from all package managers in a single command so you don't have to maintain too many things yourself of course it has access to the Aur as well and to Flat pack with a flat Hub Store app installed which is basically just a web view of the flat Hub website it also supports immutable file systems if you want to use that and it lets you install any other desktop environment if you prefer or even a window manager like I3 or sway it's a very interesting concept for people who absolutely want the bleeding age capabilities of arch with the latest desktop environments the latest applications and basically the latest everything but also to have access to a simple stable development environment using Fedora or Ubuntu now we also have a few application updates in Gnome land this week just like every other week Tom Graham the web browser that lets you keep a bunch of web apps pinned in a single simple window has been ported to gdk4 and libid Vita and it now has a responsive UI plus better web performance probably thanks to an updated webkit engine and also support for the system dark or light theme Denaro the personal finance manager formerly called money has a new release out with a bunch of new features like attaching an image of a receipt for transactions letting you repeat those transactions exporting an account as a PDF sorting transactions by ID or date and some performance improvements as well bottles got a new update as well and they greatly optimized the first startup of the app by downloading necessary components way faster they also added gamescope improvements for running it on the steam deck and the API should work properly now for NVIDIA users and there are tons of bug fixes and vkd3d is enabled by default for gaming bottles and we also got a nice look at gnomon mobile phones and it already looks quite functional being all based on nice easy gestures that should be familiar to everyone using Android or iOS it was demoed on a OnePlus 6t with post-market OS and it all feels very fast and fluid now there are still some things that need tweaking of course like the double pull down gesture to show The Gnome quick settings or the keyboard not always showing up in text Fields but it's already in pretty good shape honestly all it seems to be missing for me at least is a simple easy implementation of way Droid and maybe micro G so I can install the few Android apps I need if I could find a good phone good enough that runs it I would probably switch and let's finish this with the gaming news first since EA had replaced their origin launcher by the EA app a lot of their games stopped working correctly on Linux and on the steam deck fortunately it seems like it's being fixed as valve went and re-reviewed a bunch of titles to mark them as playable after they delivered a fix in proton newly replayable titles now include Battlefield 1 4 and 5 Jedi Fallen order the Sims 4 Titanfall 2 a way out it takes two the Mass Effect legendary edition Mass Effect Andromeda and a lot more now a new year a new version of wine at this time version 8.0 this one finally completes the transition of libraries to the PE executable format which means the road is open for supporting copy protection 32-bit on 64-bit systems and more importantly x86 apps on arm a new theme is enabled by default as well so Windows apps won't look so Windows 95 anymore and the various Graphics drivers for Vulcan and DirectX have been improved a lot with major performance improvements mpeg-1 audio decoders are now also implemented and the media Foundation libraries that lets video and audio be played have been improved finally controller hot plug support has received improvements as well on top of adding support for driving Wheels joysticks Rumble dual shock and dual sense controllers from the PlayStation and more all included apps with wine now also support theming and high DPI and there are a lot of improvements to various libraries and services and of course wine 8.0 will probably serve as the base for proton 8 which means that all these improvements should trickle their way down to us poor Linux Gamers that use Steam and finally we have a new version of dxvk the DirectX translation layer used to run games on Linux this new release adds basic HDR support but for game scope only for now so on the steam deck or Holo ISO Shader compilation has also been improved for everyone so there should be less stutters when loading shaders in a game and as always this new version should land in Proton really really soon so we can all make use of these performance improvements it is really really a great time to be a Linux gamer and it is a great time for this Segway to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer to run Linux on stop looking at Windows devices buy something that actually supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a huge range of devices that ship with Linux out of the box when you buy from them you know that you can just install your Linux distro and it will run perfectly with perfect support they have devices for every need and every price point from the most affordable laptops to the higher end workstations gaming laptops or towers and you can customize them quite heavily you can basically spec it out but you can also replace the keyboard layout with your own custom keyboard layout you can have your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop and all the laptops that I've tested can be opened up and upgraded with the RAM and the SSD being replaceable so if you need a new device and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support Linux development get yourself a tuxedo device by clicking on the link in the description below so thanks everyone for watching I hope you enjoyed the video if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well there's that dislike button as always and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath the video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast on Monday and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel oh and also there's a audio podcast version of these Linux news where I cover more topics and I go more in depth so check them out in the link in the description as well thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this has been a pretty bad week for open source software because this week There's a new proposed European Union law that would basically make open source developers liable for any security issues that there is in the software that they developed when their current licenses clearly state that the software is provided as is without any warranty and we also have Google firing a ton of people including their brightest and most talented open source Engineers which is obviously not great oh and we also have the gnome 44 Alpha being made available for everyone to test so let's unpack this segue to today's sponsor yes it came packaged in a box thanks to linode for sponsoring this video linode is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own next Cloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games like pie hole pie hole is a DNS sinkhole that filters out requests to add serving domains basically it lets you block ads and improve Network performance it lets you actively monitor every DNS request made on your network and block requests as they come in and you can deploy it in one click only nodes so you can ensure I stay poor and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below I regularly praise the EU for curbing the Privacy abuses of various companies but this time what they have in mind might be a big mistake the proposed cyber resiliency act or CRA is a new legal framework that aims to improve software and Hardware security and it would basically let the EU stamp a CE sign on software products with the simple goals of having a common metric to judge a project security and better information to Consumers on the security status of various pieces of software probably through some kind of seal of approval delivered by the EU I would say something akin to nutrition labels but for secure software so far so good but the main issue is that this legal framework might very well mean open source software is out of bounds and would never be able to get that certification open source software is by nature provided as is without warranty or liability for its authors and these new proposed laws would basically mean that open source developers would in fact be liable for their product security when the goal is to provide accessible software that companies can then modify and secure themselves or contract companies that sell maintenance services around that open source software another issue is that this new Cyber resiliency act would restrict the use of Unfinished software for testing purposes only an unfinished software is a very vague definition and it would mean no betas allowed at all of course the open source initiative has submitted feedback to try and make the European commission reconsider their loss for open source software giving it an exception so it can keep functioning as an open development community so let's hope it's just going to be a matter of wording to exclude open source software from the scope of this new regulation I am not saying that open source software should not be secure or isn't secure but by its very nature it's going to be very hard for it to conform to such a high security standard or to comply with the security certification and if no exclusion is put in place since virtually all companies make use of some kind of Open Source software or another on their website web app or just pure software product it's going to kill development innovation in the EU if open source cannot be used reliably by companies that want to propose something that conforms to this security standard you might have seen that Google laid off 12 000 employees recently which is bad enough especially when you consider that some of their investors would like them to slash 20 of their Workforce and reduce compensation but what is worse is that these layoffs seem to affect particularly their open source and Linux teams prominent developers that were let go include the founder of Google's open source programs office basically their whole open source division as well as the co-creator of Samba and the person recently hired to spearhead Google's open source security initiatives layoffs also include 16 of the 400 employees working on fuchsia their new kernel plus OS that was once touted as the replacement for Android and that already ships on some Nest devices the only open source division that seems relatively unaffected was the one working on AI related projects of course this happens in a context where alphabet Google's parent company reported revenue for the third quarter of 2022 that was up six percent compared to last year but profits were down by 16 and since everyone else in the tax sector is firing people they had to follow suit to police investors CCI fund management one of Google's investors even reported that the most talented and brightest computer scientist at Google were but a fraction of the company's total Manpower but the issue here is that it's not administrative Personnel being let go which would still suck it's actual Engineers working on the backbone of the internet which as we all know runs on open source seeing Google laying out people working on these crucial projects is definitely not a good sign for the direction the company is headed in so if there still was any doubt the Google don't be evil era is gone and done and has been for a long while now they will only cater to investors and the only thing they care about is AI it's not a good sign the genome 44 Alpha is now out for testing and it brings a bunch of changes first The Gnome web browser is now ported to gtk4 although it is not used all that much by many people so maybe that doesn't matter the gtk file picker finally supports a grid view with thumbnails something that will finally put an end to that old meme that's been around for a decade at least Nautilus now handles 64 pixels icon sizes in the grid view the Quick Settings menu now has a Bluetooth Sub menu to pair with devices you've already connected to something that required an extension previously you can also disable settings search results in the activity View and the accessibility settings have been redesigned entirely on top of that sharing Wi-Fi passwords using your QR code is now easier the date and time panel now works better on mobile devices and the about panel in the settings will show firmware versions as well you will also be able to set a default calls and SMS app for mobile phones the display panel will better handle night light errors and the Thunderbolt panel will only appear if your device actually supports it which makes sense a bunch of other settings panels have been touched up and also the gnome software store now better supports RPM os3 so updates on distributions like silver blue will be way more legible with progress and Gators you will also be able to hide non-open Source applications from the store and to automatically remove unused flat back runtimes so you can save some space and of course the various gnome apps received a bunch of updates like Maps being able to pull Wikipedia thumbnails and article extracts for locations there's a new service to detect sandboxed apps that are running in the background the shortcuts portal is implemented so apps can use keyboard shortcuts even when they're not in Focus under Wayland And Nautilus search should now be faster on paper it doesn't really look like a big update to gnome but the developers still have until the end of March to finalize all of this and maybe add some new features as well like the proposed removal of the application name menu that's in the top bar and that currently is kind of useless Ubuntu made their Ubuntu Pro subscription generally available to everyone after introducing it as a beta in October it's also not just available commercially for companies but it's free for individuals on up to five computers Ubuntu Pro basically gives your Ubuntu release 10 years of support life patching for the kernel so you can apply updates without any downtime plus extended security maintenance so you can get patches for critical high and some medium security issues with the critical patches being delivered under 24 hours they will also provide support for 2300 open source Debian packages in the Ubuntu main repo for 10 years and they will support 23 000 packages from the universe repo for 10 years as well it is definitely more geared towards servers than desktops but companies that run Ubuntu desktops for their employees might also want this to ensure their Fleet is always secure and if you as an individual running Ubuntu on your laptop or desktop also want these benefits because you like sticking to LTS releases and you don't want to upgrade all the time well all you need is a free Ubuntu One account and you can register up to five machines to get these advantages linking your computer to that subscription requires a few command lines but nothing tricky I think it's a really good move from canonical to offer this kind of service it's very valuable for anyone who has a fleet of servers or desktops but it can also be very useful for enthusiasts that just don't feel like upgrading to every new release that's not an LTS I will probably use that on my next Cloud Server which runs Ubuntu the next distros are a dime a dozen but sometimes you get something more than just an Ubuntu derivative with a theme amount of few apps this time it's blend OS a distribution that aims to be the last distro you will ever use if you're a distro hopper and you can't decide between Arch Ubuntu or Fedora blend OS is basically arch with gnome on Wayland but it offers the ability to install Ubuntu dab packages and Fedora RPM packages both in distro box and podman containers so they don't mess with the rest of your arch system you will have to install apt and dnf yourself to make use of this and you can also install blend os's own package manager called blend when you install a package using apt or dnf the distro will create a container automatically and you can then use the command lines you're used to without any weird stuff to do and packages will install where they're supposed to without breaking your system by mixing dependencies the blend package manager will then be able to update all packages from all package managers in a single command so you don't have to maintain too many things yourself of course it has access to the Aur as well and to Flat pack with a flat Hub Store app installed which is basically just a web view of the flat Hub website it also supports immutable file systems if you want to use that and it lets you install any other desktop environment if you prefer or even a window manager like I3 or sway it's a very interesting concept for people who absolutely want the bleeding age capabilities of arch with the latest desktop environments the latest applications and basically the latest everything but also to have access to a simple stable development environment using Fedora or Ubuntu now we also have a few application updates in Gnome land this week just like every other week Tom Graham the web browser that lets you keep a bunch of web apps pinned in a single simple window has been ported to gdk4 and libid Vita and it now has a responsive UI plus better web performance probably thanks to an updated webkit engine and also support for the system dark or light theme Denaro the personal finance manager formerly called money has a new release out with a bunch of new features like attaching an image of a receipt for transactions letting you repeat those transactions exporting an account as a PDF sorting transactions by ID or date and some performance improvements as well bottles got a new update as well and they greatly optimized the first startup of the app by downloading necessary components way faster they also added gamescope improvements for running it on the steam deck and the API should work properly now for NVIDIA users and there are tons of bug fixes and vkd3d is enabled by default for gaming bottles and we also got a nice look at gnomon mobile phones and it already looks quite functional being all based on nice easy gestures that should be familiar to everyone using Android or iOS it was demoed on a OnePlus 6t with post-market OS and it all feels very fast and fluid now there are still some things that need tweaking of course like the double pull down gesture to show The Gnome quick settings or the keyboard not always showing up in text Fields but it's already in pretty good shape honestly all it seems to be missing for me at least is a simple easy implementation of way Droid and maybe micro G so I can install the few Android apps I need if I could find a good phone good enough that runs it I would probably switch and let's finish this with the gaming news first since EA had replaced their origin launcher by the EA app a lot of their games stopped working correctly on Linux and on the steam deck fortunately it seems like it's being fixed as valve went and re-reviewed a bunch of titles to mark them as playable after they delivered a fix in proton newly replayable titles now include Battlefield 1 4 and 5 Jedi Fallen order the Sims 4 Titanfall 2 a way out it takes two the Mass Effect legendary edition Mass Effect Andromeda and a lot more now a new year a new version of wine at this time version 8.0 this one finally completes the transition of libraries to the PE executable format which means the road is open for supporting copy protection 32-bit on 64-bit systems and more importantly x86 apps on arm a new theme is enabled by default as well so Windows apps won't look so Windows 95 anymore and the various Graphics drivers for Vulcan and DirectX have been improved a lot with major performance improvements mpeg-1 audio decoders are now also implemented and the media Foundation libraries that lets video and audio be played have been improved finally controller hot plug support has received improvements as well on top of adding support for driving Wheels joysticks Rumble dual shock and dual sense controllers from the PlayStation and more all included apps with wine now also support theming and high DPI and there are a lot of improvements to various libraries and services and of course wine 8.0 will probably serve as the base for proton 8 which means that all these improvements should trickle their way down to us poor Linux Gamers that use Steam and finally we have a new version of dxvk the DirectX translation layer used to run games on Linux this new release adds basic HDR support but for game scope only for now so on the steam deck or Holo ISO Shader compilation has also been improved for everyone so there should be less stutters when loading shaders in a game and as always this new version should land in Proton really really soon so we can all make use of these performance improvements it is really really a great time to be a Linux gamer and it is a great time for this Segway to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer to run Linux on stop looking at Windows devices buy something that actually supports Linux out of the box from today's sponsor tuxedo they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a huge range of devices that ship with Linux out of the box when you buy from them you know that you can just install your Linux distro and it will run perfectly with perfect support they have devices for every need and every price point from the most affordable laptops to the higher end workstations gaming laptops or towers and you can customize them quite heavily you can basically spec it out but you can also replace the keyboard layout with your own custom keyboard layout you can have your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop and all the laptops that I've tested can be opened up and upgraded with the RAM and the SSD being replaceable so if you need a new device and you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support Linux development get yourself a tuxedo device by clicking on the link in the description below so thanks everyone for watching I hope you enjoyed the video if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well there's that dislike button as always and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath the video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast on Monday and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel oh and also there's a audio podcast version of these Linux news where I cover more topics and I go more in depth so check them out in the link in the description as well thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and you might have heard of a little complicated social network called Mastodon hey just because you understand it perfectly doesn't mean everyone does because Mastodon can be confusing and while it offers the same basic Service as Twitter it's a very different platform so here's a comprehensive guide on how to join how to find people to follow how to use Mastodon and the general etiquette to follow and also how to follow up with this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenote lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nextcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so let's start with what Mastodon is because it's absolutely insane the number of websites and articles and videos that just completely fail to explain that let's hope I can manage it better so Mastodon is a social network it lets you write short messages that other people can read and answer to and it lets you read an answer to what other people have posted it basically has the very same function as Twitter but instead of tweets the short messages are called posts or toots which is a very dumb name that I will never use but also tweets was a super dumb name as well to describe a short message especially when the French tried to use their own word for it and gazuyi where Mastodon differs from Twitter is that it's not just controlled and hosted by a single company with only one login page to create an account and access the service it's made of plenty of individual servers also called instances and you create an account and log in onto the server that you have picked and all of these servers can talk to each other so you can follow people from any server and people from any other server can follow you as well and each server can have different rules for moderation or character limit and a lot more things so basically Mastodon is a platform that serves the same purpose as Twitter but it's open source it's not owned by a single company and it's made up of multiple different servers that all talk to each other to form one single social network so how do you join well the first step is to pick a server since Mastodon is made of multiple independent servers you have to pick one to join and that server is where you will create the account and log in think of it as creating your email account you have to pick an email provider you have to create an account and when you need to log in you log in onto that specific email provider but you can still exchange email with everybody else you're not limited to the people who are on the same provider as you thankfully no Mom I did not receive your PowerPoint you need to use Gmail I don't have a Yahoo mail account to pick a server you have a handy short list on join mastodon.com servers not all of them are here but there's a handy selection from different regions and with different interests certain servers aim to create communities centered around a shared interest or identity like Tech food and wine or veganism and some are just generalist servers choosing a server based on a specific interest or Community will not prevent you from talking to everyone else on every other server unless you absolutely want to stay in your safe and comfortable bubble in which case you absolutely can and you can never follow anyone from any other server like a social media hermit some servers will let you join immediately just like any traditional social media app and some will ask you to apply for an account because they vet who can join to ensure that the conversation stays civil and polite or to avoid trolling and harassment you can just choose any server that talks about the stuff you find interesting or a journalist server and you can create or apply for an account by clicking on the button on the website and you will have a nice list of the moderation guidelines that you will have to follow on that specific server if you don't agree with them you're free to pick another server of course and if no server has moderation rules that agree with you then you're probably a horrible human being but that's very unlikely I hope you wouldn't be watching this video but still in that case you can create your own Mastodon server and plug into the wider network of Mastodon servers but that's not the point of this video and if you're wondering your handle is in two parts with two ad symbols the first one is your actual handle and the second is the server on which your account has been created mine for example is at the Linux exp at mastodon.social so once you have your account it's time to actually use Mastodon so let's look at the clients the first obvious one is the web interface just use the server's URL in your web browser for example for me it's mastodon.social it works on desktop and on mobile and by default you will get your user on the left column with a text field to start posting you'll get the contents of your timeline in the middle and the navigation items on the right on the mobile website your user is in the top right next to the publish button that lets you write something and the navigation items are on the right as well we'll explore all of that in a minute don't worry it's actually super simple if you prefer using mobile apps on your phone there are plenty of choices the official applications are good enough for Android and iOS but third-party clients are also allowed and a lot of them are listed on joinmasterdawn.com apps one that has been heavily recommended is Megalodon for Android which adds a few features that the official app doesn't have personally I found the official ones more than enough for my needs and I would recommend that you start with them and move on to something else if you want once you're more familiar with Mastodon experimented Mastodon users will probably also recommend plenty of great clients down there in the comments but if you want to jump the shark then you can always start with Megalodon so let's look at the interface I will take the mobile app as a reference but all of its features are also on the web version for desktop and mobile the first thing is your profile to edit and complete it just tap your user photo and click the edit button you should probably write a short bio with a few hashtags to let people find you if you want you can also add links to your various other socials and you'll notice that's where you can be verified this implies having your own website it's an external verification you copy a link to your Mastodon profile into the code of your website and it will show up in green like this with a check mark it's not perfect because you need a website people who follow you also need to know that this is the website you should be associated with and I also have to open your profiles about tab to actually see if you're verified but all in only it's still better than Twitter blue in terms of interface the app is simple by default your timeline in the Home tab of the mobile app up will show posts from everyone you follow they are in chronological order no algorithmic Shenanigans here at all the search tab lets you look for people to follow you have a search field and tabs the first tab will by default show you a list of suggested posts that are generally just popular ones on any Mastodon server the hashtag tab shows the latest trending hashtags the news tab shows various news articles that have generated a lot of posts recently the community tab contains what we call the local timeline which is a feed that shows all the posts from everyone in your server whether you follow them or not and the For You tab is a suggestion of people to follow based on the people you already follow basically that search tab will be a fantastic tool to let you find people you actually want to follow and then you have your post button which is the button at the bottom in the middle we'll talk about that in a minute and finally you get your notifications tab inside there the everything tab shows you every interaction and dimensions tab only shows written replies to your posts there's one feature that the default official apps don't have but that you will have on certain third-party clients and on the web and it's the Federated timeline it's a list of every single post from every single Mastodon user on every single server that the one you're on has agreed to talk to the servers that your instance has blocked obviously will not appear in there so on Mastodon you basically have three timelines you have your Home tab which is the default and the same behavior as on Twitter it's all the people you follow whatever server they're on then you have the local timeline which contains all the posts from all the people on your server whether you follow them or not and then you have the Federated timeline which is just a giant dump of every post from everyone on every server your own instance can talk to I absolutely never use the Federated timeline but you might find a use for it okay now let's see how you can interact with other people when looking at what someone has posted you have a few options you can reply which is basically just writing a response you can boost which is exactly like a retweet on Twitter you're posting to your followers the message you're boosting as is without any commentary there are no quotes for now on Mastodon you can't post something from someone else with added commentary and that's voluntary because this feature is generally just used to harass people on Twitter then you can favorite a post which is that little star button it doesn't do anything specific apart from letting the author of the post know that you like what they posted you can share a post of course and you also have a three dot menu it lets you mute a user so you won't see anything from them block a user so they can't even interact with you or see what you posted or you can report a user if you feel that they really cross the line and finally you can bookmark their post to find it later these are basically the exact same interactions as what you can do on Twitter except that you cannot quote a post from someone for better or forwards but don't worry you can still be snarky and subtweet people now if you want to write a post then you just hit the post button on the mobile app or you'll start writing on the left column on the desktop posts have a character limit that your server sets by default it's 500 but it can be more or less if your server allows for more characters don't worry other people that have a smaller limit will still see your entire message you can add hashtags like on Twitter by just typing the hashtag symbol and you can mention people by typing the add symbol the app will suggest accounts and hashtags as you type of course you can embed images you can also add polls with up to four options and you can add content warnings these are basically a filter that will hide the content of your post behind blur and some text people will only see the text you wrote in the content warning and if they want to see the actual post they will have to click on it very very useful when discussing topics that a lot of people might not want to be exposed to like movie spoilers not say forward content politics or the fact that you use Arch Linux finally you can also pick who will see your post either only the people you mention which is the only way to write a direct message on Mastodon all your followers or everyone oh and also you can edit your posts whenever you want for free but not on the official mobile apps just yet you can do it on third-party clients and on the web versions now Mastodon might behave more or less like Twitter but it doesn't mean the conventions are the exact same there are a few behaviors that are kind of expected on Mastodon or just helpful and there's also a few tips that are useful to know first when writing posts if you add an image use the description and fill it in a lot of people on Master don't do it takes seconds to describe the image and it will help everyone who is visually impaired it's just nicer Second Use content warnings liberally some servers have moderation rules that say what has to be behind the content warning but if you're in doubt if what you're talking about will be weird offensive or just not great to see when scrolling a timeline hide it behind the content warning it takes seconds and it's way better for everyone and you can also use it to make your post more fun like I could clickbait people into seeing a post about a video by writing a very catchy title in a Content warning or you could write the start of a joke in a Content warning and the end of the joke in the post itself it can be playful and it's also very useful for other people so use it third use the sensitive content filter for images very liberally as well you can find it on some third-party clients and on the web versions the official mobile apps don't have it yet why would you want to do that why well because not everyone wants to see screenshots of gory games or pictures of spiders for example hiding these makes sure that people have a nice time when they scroll think of that filter as an additional content warning but just for the image itself okay but all of this is completely useless if your timeline is empty so how do you actually find people you can follow well the first thing is do you already have a Twitter account with people you follow if you do there are some tools you can use to automatically find the Mastodon profiles of people you followed on Twitter the more useful one I found is called move to Don you log in with your Twitter account then your Mastodon account and it will look at your Twitter follows find the ones that are on Mastodon and offer you to follow them individually or follow them all in one click it's a very easy First Step but if you're not a Twitter user then you'll have to find people manually the first place to check is on your local timeline using the local tab on the web or in the search that and Community tab on the mobile app this is where people who share your hobbies or interests will be talking and where you can find interesting people to follow next is using hashtags you can actually follow hashtags on Mastodon doing so means that all posts using that hashtag from all the servers your own instance talks to will appear in your timeline this lets you follow a topic instead of following people and in turn it will make people that talk about that topic appear in your home timeline but you can decide to follow them individually to follow a hashtag just click on it and click the follow button and then on Plenty of websites people will share their own Mastodon profile click on it to view it and follow it and that's it now you know everything you need to to understand how it works how to use Mastodon and how to behave on it of course Mastodon is part of what we call the fediverse which is a giant social network regrouping many different services like Mastodon or pixel fed which is an Instagram alternative or peer tube a YouTube alternative and all of these Services can talk to each other so you could for example follow a peer tube channel using Mastodon so you will have a new post every time that channel posts a new video but you'll get that post on Mastodon directly if you want to know more about the fediverse I have a quick start guide Linked In the description of the video and I also have this segue to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer to run Linux on stop buying Windows computers and try going to slap your favorite distro on it buy something from tuxedo because the computers that they develop and ship are made to run Linux out of the box they pick the hardware specifically for Linux to run on it and they have a big range that should fit every price point and every need from the smallest affordable laptop to the biggest Ultrabook or workstation Tower they are all customizable configurable you can open them repair them exchange the SSD and the ram you have plenty of CPU GPU Ram options and you can even customize your own keyboard layout on your laptop or your own logo on the lid of the laptop so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to make sure that the manufacturer you buy from supports Linux and linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well you can all also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoyed the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday where I talk about Linux Tech open source the channel everything personal everything generally for about half an hour every Monday and you also get to vote on the next topic that I'll cover on the channel so if you're interested both links are down there and in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and you might have heard of a little complicated social network called Mastodon hey just because you understand it perfectly doesn't mean everyone does because Mastodon can be confusing and while it offers the same basic Service as Twitter it's a very different platform so here's a comprehensive guide on how to join how to find people to follow how to use Mastodon and the general etiquette to follow and also how to follow up with this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenote lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nextcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so let's start with what Mastodon is because it's absolutely insane the number of websites and articles and videos that just completely fail to explain that let's hope I can manage it better so Mastodon is a social network it lets you write short messages that other people can read and answer to and it lets you read an answer to what other people have posted it basically has the very same function as Twitter but instead of tweets the short messages are called posts or toots which is a very dumb name that I will never use but also tweets was a super dumb name as well to describe a short message especially when the French tried to use their own word for it and gazuyi where Mastodon differs from Twitter is that it's not just controlled and hosted by a single company with only one login page to create an account and access the service it's made of plenty of individual servers also called instances and you create an account and log in onto the server that you have picked and all of these servers can talk to each other so you can follow people from any server and people from any other server can follow you as well and each server can have different rules for moderation or character limit and a lot more things so basically Mastodon is a platform that serves the same purpose as Twitter but it's open source it's not owned by a single company and it's made up of multiple different servers that all talk to each other to form one single social network so how do you join well the first step is to pick a server since Mastodon is made of multiple independent servers you have to pick one to join and that server is where you will create the account and log in think of it as creating your email account you have to pick an email provider you have to create an account and when you need to log in you log in onto that specific email provider but you can still exchange email with everybody else you're not limited to the people who are on the same provider as you thankfully no Mom I did not receive your PowerPoint you need to use Gmail I don't have a Yahoo mail account to pick a server you have a handy short list on join mastodon.com servers not all of them are here but there's a handy selection from different regions and with different interests certain servers aim to create communities centered around a shared interest or identity like Tech food and wine or veganism and some are just generalist servers choosing a server based on a specific interest or Community will not prevent you from talking to everyone else on every other server unless you absolutely want to stay in your safe and comfortable bubble in which case you absolutely can and you can never follow anyone from any other server like a social media hermit some servers will let you join immediately just like any traditional social media app and some will ask you to apply for an account because they vet who can join to ensure that the conversation stays civil and polite or to avoid trolling and harassment you can just choose any server that talks about the stuff you find interesting or a journalist server and you can create or apply for an account by clicking on the button on the website and you will have a nice list of the moderation guidelines that you will have to follow on that specific server if you don't agree with them you're free to pick another server of course and if no server has moderation rules that agree with you then you're probably a horrible human being but that's very unlikely I hope you wouldn't be watching this video but still in that case you can create your own Mastodon server and plug into the wider network of Mastodon servers but that's not the point of this video and if you're wondering your handle is in two parts with two ad symbols the first one is your actual handle and the second is the server on which your account has been created mine for example is at the Linux exp at mastodon.social so once you have your account it's time to actually use Mastodon so let's look at the clients the first obvious one is the web interface just use the server's URL in your web browser for example for me it's mastodon.social it works on desktop and on mobile and by default you will get your user on the left column with a text field to start posting you'll get the contents of your timeline in the middle and the navigation items on the right on the mobile website your user is in the top right next to the publish button that lets you write something and the navigation items are on the right as well we'll explore all of that in a minute don't worry it's actually super simple if you prefer using mobile apps on your phone there are plenty of choices the official applications are good enough for Android and iOS but third-party clients are also allowed and a lot of them are listed on joinmasterdawn.com apps one that has been heavily recommended is Megalodon for Android which adds a few features that the official app doesn't have personally I found the official ones more than enough for my needs and I would recommend that you start with them and move on to something else if you want once you're more familiar with Mastodon experimented Mastodon users will probably also recommend plenty of great clients down there in the comments but if you want to jump the shark then you can always start with Megalodon so let's look at the interface I will take the mobile app as a reference but all of its features are also on the web version for desktop and mobile the first thing is your profile to edit and complete it just tap your user photo and click the edit button you should probably write a short bio with a few hashtags to let people find you if you want you can also add links to your various other socials and you'll notice that's where you can be verified this implies having your own website it's an external verification you copy a link to your Mastodon profile into the code of your website and it will show up in green like this with a check mark it's not perfect because you need a website people who follow you also need to know that this is the website you should be associated with and I also have to open your profiles about tab to actually see if you're verified but all in only it's still better than Twitter blue in terms of interface the app is simple by default your timeline in the Home tab of the mobile app up will show posts from everyone you follow they are in chronological order no algorithmic Shenanigans here at all the search tab lets you look for people to follow you have a search field and tabs the first tab will by default show you a list of suggested posts that are generally just popular ones on any Mastodon server the hashtag tab shows the latest trending hashtags the news tab shows various news articles that have generated a lot of posts recently the community tab contains what we call the local timeline which is a feed that shows all the posts from everyone in your server whether you follow them or not and the For You tab is a suggestion of people to follow based on the people you already follow basically that search tab will be a fantastic tool to let you find people you actually want to follow and then you have your post button which is the button at the bottom in the middle we'll talk about that in a minute and finally you get your notifications tab inside there the everything tab shows you every interaction and dimensions tab only shows written replies to your posts there's one feature that the default official apps don't have but that you will have on certain third-party clients and on the web and it's the Federated timeline it's a list of every single post from every single Mastodon user on every single server that the one you're on has agreed to talk to the servers that your instance has blocked obviously will not appear in there so on Mastodon you basically have three timelines you have your Home tab which is the default and the same behavior as on Twitter it's all the people you follow whatever server they're on then you have the local timeline which contains all the posts from all the people on your server whether you follow them or not and then you have the Federated timeline which is just a giant dump of every post from everyone on every server your own instance can talk to I absolutely never use the Federated timeline but you might find a use for it okay now let's see how you can interact with other people when looking at what someone has posted you have a few options you can reply which is basically just writing a response you can boost which is exactly like a retweet on Twitter you're posting to your followers the message you're boosting as is without any commentary there are no quotes for now on Mastodon you can't post something from someone else with added commentary and that's voluntary because this feature is generally just used to harass people on Twitter then you can favorite a post which is that little star button it doesn't do anything specific apart from letting the author of the post know that you like what they posted you can share a post of course and you also have a three dot menu it lets you mute a user so you won't see anything from them block a user so they can't even interact with you or see what you posted or you can report a user if you feel that they really cross the line and finally you can bookmark their post to find it later these are basically the exact same interactions as what you can do on Twitter except that you cannot quote a post from someone for better or forwards but don't worry you can still be snarky and subtweet people now if you want to write a post then you just hit the post button on the mobile app or you'll start writing on the left column on the desktop posts have a character limit that your server sets by default it's 500 but it can be more or less if your server allows for more characters don't worry other people that have a smaller limit will still see your entire message you can add hashtags like on Twitter by just typing the hashtag symbol and you can mention people by typing the add symbol the app will suggest accounts and hashtags as you type of course you can embed images you can also add polls with up to four options and you can add content warnings these are basically a filter that will hide the content of your post behind blur and some text people will only see the text you wrote in the content warning and if they want to see the actual post they will have to click on it very very useful when discussing topics that a lot of people might not want to be exposed to like movie spoilers not say forward content politics or the fact that you use Arch Linux finally you can also pick who will see your post either only the people you mention which is the only way to write a direct message on Mastodon all your followers or everyone oh and also you can edit your posts whenever you want for free but not on the official mobile apps just yet you can do it on third-party clients and on the web versions now Mastodon might behave more or less like Twitter but it doesn't mean the conventions are the exact same there are a few behaviors that are kind of expected on Mastodon or just helpful and there's also a few tips that are useful to know first when writing posts if you add an image use the description and fill it in a lot of people on Master don't do it takes seconds to describe the image and it will help everyone who is visually impaired it's just nicer Second Use content warnings liberally some servers have moderation rules that say what has to be behind the content warning but if you're in doubt if what you're talking about will be weird offensive or just not great to see when scrolling a timeline hide it behind the content warning it takes seconds and it's way better for everyone and you can also use it to make your post more fun like I could clickbait people into seeing a post about a video by writing a very catchy title in a Content warning or you could write the start of a joke in a Content warning and the end of the joke in the post itself it can be playful and it's also very useful for other people so use it third use the sensitive content filter for images very liberally as well you can find it on some third-party clients and on the web versions the official mobile apps don't have it yet why would you want to do that why well because not everyone wants to see screenshots of gory games or pictures of spiders for example hiding these makes sure that people have a nice time when they scroll think of that filter as an additional content warning but just for the image itself okay but all of this is completely useless if your timeline is empty so how do you actually find people you can follow well the first thing is do you already have a Twitter account with people you follow if you do there are some tools you can use to automatically find the Mastodon profiles of people you followed on Twitter the more useful one I found is called move to Don you log in with your Twitter account then your Mastodon account and it will look at your Twitter follows find the ones that are on Mastodon and offer you to follow them individually or follow them all in one click it's a very easy First Step but if you're not a Twitter user then you'll have to find people manually the first place to check is on your local timeline using the local tab on the web or in the search that and Community tab on the mobile app this is where people who share your hobbies or interests will be talking and where you can find interesting people to follow next is using hashtags you can actually follow hashtags on Mastodon doing so means that all posts using that hashtag from all the servers your own instance talks to will appear in your timeline this lets you follow a topic instead of following people and in turn it will make people that talk about that topic appear in your home timeline but you can decide to follow them individually to follow a hashtag just click on it and click the follow button and then on Plenty of websites people will share their own Mastodon profile click on it to view it and follow it and that's it now you know everything you need to to understand how it works how to use Mastodon and how to behave on it of course Mastodon is part of what we call the fediverse which is a giant social network regrouping many different services like Mastodon or pixel fed which is an Instagram alternative or peer tube a YouTube alternative and all of these Services can talk to each other so you could for example follow a peer tube channel using Mastodon so you will have a new post every time that channel posts a new video but you'll get that post on Mastodon directly if you want to know more about the fediverse I have a quick start guide Linked In the description of the video and I also have this segue to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer to run Linux on stop buying Windows computers and try going to slap your favorite distro on it buy something from tuxedo because the computers that they develop and ship are made to run Linux out of the box they pick the hardware specifically for Linux to run on it and they have a big range that should fit every price point and every need from the smallest affordable laptop to the biggest Ultrabook or workstation Tower they are all customizable configurable you can open them repair them exchange the SSD and the ram you have plenty of CPU GPU Ram options and you can even customize your own keyboard layout on your laptop or your own logo on the lid of the laptop so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to make sure that the manufacturer you buy from supports Linux and linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well you can all also dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoyed the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday where I talk about Linux Tech open source the channel everything personal everything generally for about half an hour every Monday and you also get to vote on the next topic that I'll cover on the channel so if you're interested both links are down there and in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and all my videos this month have been written by AI hey what do you mean that's why the quality dropped so much I was joking I write my own crap thank you very much anyway this week we have the Linux Foundation setting up the basis to build an open source metaverse alternative to zuck's Vision we have Getty Images suing the makers of stable diffusion in the hopes of setting a precedent on how AI is regulated and we have the first beta of KD 5.27 which will also be the last version of KDE 5. fortunately though this won't be the last segue to today's sponsor thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and if by any chance by now you haven't heard about Squarespace yet just know that there you're all in one solution to handle your online presence now while they let you create a simple website very easily and graphically by just choosing a template among a lot of professional looking ones they also have a ton of features around this website the ones that really spoke to me personally as someone who wants to upgrade their little blog into a full-on website is the members area which I could use to give my patrons and YouTube members access to all the exclusive content I make for them and there's also the shop the online shop in just a few clicks you can set up your own merch shop you still have to create and ship the merch yourself but the front end is extremely easy to make and on top of that they can help you design your logo they can help you book your own domain name and a lot more they're basically your One-Stop shop to do everything related to your own website and you don't need any technical knowledge at all so if you need a new website head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description and you'll get 10 of your first purchase for a website or domain name if you thought the metaverse was stupid well it looks like the Linux Foundation disagrees because they are launching the open metaverse foundation a new initiative to try and get various actors working on open source standards and open source software for a vendor neutral metaverse they already have a few members none of which I have ever heard of but I'm not an expert on that domain they organized the foundation into interest groups for users transactions digital assets artificial intelligence security and privacy and more and each of these groups has the task of discussing the topics onboarding contributors and generally just Advance on the matter at hand since it's very very early days and they don't have any code yet to show for it they also have a dedicated website up and running with a few articles including one that says that they intend to use the open 3D engine which is another project hosted by a foundation created by the Linux Foundation the open 3D engine would be used as the base for that inter operable metaverse all contributions are licensed under the Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses apparently which would let anyone use modify extend and distribute the source code without any commercial obligations apart from attribution these are very permissive licenses and they mean that commercial entities might be interested in the project because they won't have to contribute every single change they make under an open license personally I am not interested in the metaverse at all because it looks like a solution in search of a problem it's basically doing the same things that we can already do pretty well but worse and less comfortable but if we're gonna have to have a metaverse I would rather it be open source and Linux driven than something that Zuckerberg dreamed of although if the Linux Foundation could wait until meta kills itself trying to develop second life with legless avatars that would also be pretty cool Getty Images is now suing stability AI the makers of stable diffusion for scraping its content to train its AI Getty Images shared a press statement stating that they believe stable diffusion unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright obviously to train its machine learning algorithm the company has started legal proceedings in England by sending stability AI a letter before action which is basically just a letter of intent to tell someone that you're suing them basically what they say is that stable diffusion has used their property without asking without consent to build a commercial product for their own personal benefit and they don't think this use is covered by fair use in the US or by its UK equivalent called Fair dealing they say stability AI never reached out to them to see if they could use any images and they also say that the current landscape regarding AI is like what existed at the beginning of digital music where services like Napster offered music to people without any regard for the rights to distribute these files and Getty Images think that we need a clear Euro framework for intellectual property rights around AI they're apparently not even seeking Financial damages or looking to stop the development of AI tools they just want to set a legal precedent so that AI tools have to license content they use to train their models and I can't really argue with that myself I don't think that the legal framework that exists today around copyright around attribution and the various fair use cases applies to what AI does and I think we at least need some rulings to know if yes the current copyright framework works and everything goes or if it doesn't work for AI and then we need to have the rules set in place so that content cannot be used against anyone's will KDE plasma 5.27 beta is now available for people who want to give it some test time you can already install it using the unstable version of caddy neon or with Docker images or with packages from your distro if they package betas or you can just compile the code yourself if you feel like it or if you like Gentoo the major improvements that need to be tested are the new plasma welcome app which is basically just a first Run Tour explaining what plasma is letting you connect online accounts or telling you how to get help of course it can be skipped if you don't need it flat pack support has been improved finally complete with permissions letting you grant or revoke access to any flatback app to your file system your home folder sound printers Bluetooth everything multi-monitor support has also been completely refactored and should be way less buggy although they said that they didn't fix every single multi-monitor related bug and you will also get more fine-grained control on how to handle setups with three or more monitors and finally there's also the new kwin tiling system that will give tiling Window Manager features to plasma out of the box by creating layouts and placing windows in the spaces you defined for them using the mouse or the keyboard all in all this is shaping up to be an excellent release that I will definitely make a video about in February when it's stated to launch I think it's on the 14th and it's also going to be the last release of the KDE plasma 5 series because they already branched that series into KDE plasma 6. so the next release is will be kde6 but it's probably not coming out in four months it's going to be longer than that there are some concerning developments in India as the government proposed that social media firms rely on fact-checking solutions that are done by government agencies they propose that the Press Bureau of India and its related agencies become the reference for what is misinformation or disinformation online so that social networks can have a common reference on what is true or not this proposal is just a draft for now and it's part of an amendment to India's I.T rules and it accompanies laws that would put social media firms and gaming companies in charge of ensuring that any content they display Isn't patently false or untrue or misleading in nature whether the company created that content or their users did except that what is true and what isn't would be determined by a government agency and not an independent source and that agency the Press Bureau of India has already been found to have misleading fact checks in the past anything that wouldn't be deemed true could be taken down it's not just a matter of labeling content with a small Banner now various foundations and Industry groups including ones that represent the big tech companies we're all used to are opposed to that proposal labeling it as absolutist and regressive and look whether you're a proponent of absolute Free Speech where even misinformation goes and users have to decide by themselves all your for a little bit more moderation to curtail what is patently false I think we can all agree that no government should have the power to decide what is true and what isn't because even the most benevolent government that would exist today could someday turn into something else and with that kind of framework it's very good grounds for Pure censorship remember the opt-in Telemetry gnome developers offered to users well there are some answers now with more than 2500 people uploading their data to the genome servers of course since all of it was opt in and recruitment happened on gnome's media channels they have a subset of gnome users that are confident in installing a command line tool and that already like gnome probably so it's not fully representative of gnome users it's seen in the OS usage with Fedora representing 54 of responses the good old ThinkPad seems to still be the device of choice for people running Linux with 23 percent of respondents using a device from Lenovo as per workspaces most people use the default with workspaces being only displayed on the primary display for 82 percent of respondents and 89 of them using Dynamic workspaces instead of a fixed number which again is the default setting a small majority of people did make use of the online accounts with Google being the biggest nexcloud second and Microsoft third over 90 percent of systems had flat back installed with 84 percent of all systems using flat Hub the default browser was mostly Firefox at 73 and chrome second at 11 percent shell extensions were used by 84 of users most of them having from one to five manually installed extensions no surprise Here app indicator support is the biggest one with JS connect user themes and dash to dock or Dash to panel extensions being the most popular so with this kind of data if the gnome developers don't seriously reconsider adding notification tray icons to the default gnome version then yes you'll be able to say that they do not listen to their users because if the most gnome diehards that are willing to install a Telemetry tool and send their data that are using Fedora on ThinkPad if they all install the app indicator extension then it should probably be part of the default setup speaking of gnome developers this week have been working on redesigning the sound panel with sounds levels per app getting their own dedicated window and also using bigger icons and a new volume level indicator so you can see which app is making noise various apps also received updates like gaff4 the uml modeling tool getting git merge conflict support CSS autocomplete for style sheets and various cross-platform fixes for Windows and Mac OS Black Box a new terminal app got customizable keyboard shortcuts background transparency and fixed scrolling on touchpads and touchscreens our note the hand-drawn notes taking tool now supports tabs thanks to libid Vita and it also gained a Color Picker and floating toolbars money the personal finance manager has been renamed dinaro which means the same thing but in Italian and got a new account setting dialogue with support for custom currencies and Export to PDF feature and documentation available through the help tool of gnome on top of that login manage your settings the tool that does what its name says got a bug fix update and flare the signal GDK client got background notifications definitely useful for a messaging client you kind of want them to be able to tell you when you received something even if the app isn't open and in terms of gaming news we have Aya Neo the company making handheld PCS for gaming announcing that their own Linux based operating system inventively called Aya Neo OS will be released this year they announced it on Twitter with a few screenshots but it's hard to judge from them how this thing will work the company has recently been relatively successful launching the ironyo 2 with a bit more than 3 million dollars collected to fund that campaign and the reasoning for developing their own OS is basically that windows on handhelds and small screens suck and you can't argue with that Windows has its use case but it's definitely not for a small appliance dedicated to one task only the interface isn't designed for a gaming Hub the performance and the background resource usage is designed for an all-purpose OS whether as with Linux you can completely tailor it to do exactly what you want and nothing else which is great and also I think Aya Neo OS might in the end be more interesting to build your own console than steamos because Steam OS is designed to just play Steam games you can add with workarounds games from other stores but they'll never add an epic games login or Gog login ayani OS might do it so you will have a way better more integrated experience although whether they will share the sources and let people install that OS on their own devices we don't know yet and finally there it is stadia is now officially dead it shuttered on Wednesday about three years after it started and it was a clean down with Google refunding every customer for their purchases and making sure the controller can work with regular computers and not just with stadia so it's not just a paperweight it looks like stadia was a pretty promising technological achievement people who were using it really liked it but the problem was more on the business side with Google wanting people to pay full price for the games on top of an optional subscription instead of offering a monthly fee to access a catalog like what competitors are doing including Game Pass Google never stood a chance in that Arena basically buying one game full price on stadia would have bought you 5 months of Xbox game pass on xcloud with way more games to choose from and comparable quality and performance stadia might have looked a little bit better might have been just a tiny bit more responsive but for most people the value proposition just wasn't there quantity beat quality this time it seems unlike this segue to today's sponsor which marries quantity and quality tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box and they ship it worldwide and the reason why you would want that instead of buying any old Windows computer and slapping Linux on it is that basically with tuxedo you know that it's compatible with Linux because the hardware has been picked to run Linux and they have a big range of devices that should cover every price point and every need from affordable laptops to high-end gaming devices whether they're Towers or Ultrabooks or just monster gaming PCs you can get it all workstations if you like doing work instead of gaming they also have that and all devices are customizable you can mostly open them all up and change the ram the SSD you have multiple configurations available multiple price points for each devices you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys your own custom logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop it's very very powerful so if you need a new new Linux device check out the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well there's always that dislike button and you can also tell me why in the comments below also don't forget these News videos are now also in podcast form you can find the link in the description below I tackle more topics and also I go more in depth on each topic it's about an hour long it's free of ads free of sponsors you can just support it if you want by using the links in the description below patreon YouTube memberships you get exclusive benefits you know the drill so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and all my videos this month have been written by AI hey what do you mean that's why the quality dropped so much I was joking I write my own crap thank you very much anyway this week we have the Linux Foundation setting up the basis to build an open source metaverse alternative to zuck's Vision we have Getty Images suing the makers of stable diffusion in the hopes of setting a precedent on how AI is regulated and we have the first beta of KD 5.27 which will also be the last version of KDE 5. fortunately though this won't be the last segue to today's sponsor thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and if by any chance by now you haven't heard about Squarespace yet just know that there you're all in one solution to handle your online presence now while they let you create a simple website very easily and graphically by just choosing a template among a lot of professional looking ones they also have a ton of features around this website the ones that really spoke to me personally as someone who wants to upgrade their little blog into a full-on website is the members area which I could use to give my patrons and YouTube members access to all the exclusive content I make for them and there's also the shop the online shop in just a few clicks you can set up your own merch shop you still have to create and ship the merch yourself but the front end is extremely easy to make and on top of that they can help you design your logo they can help you book your own domain name and a lot more they're basically your One-Stop shop to do everything related to your own website and you don't need any technical knowledge at all so if you need a new website head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment or just click the link in the description and you'll get 10 of your first purchase for a website or domain name if you thought the metaverse was stupid well it looks like the Linux Foundation disagrees because they are launching the open metaverse foundation a new initiative to try and get various actors working on open source standards and open source software for a vendor neutral metaverse they already have a few members none of which I have ever heard of but I'm not an expert on that domain they organized the foundation into interest groups for users transactions digital assets artificial intelligence security and privacy and more and each of these groups has the task of discussing the topics onboarding contributors and generally just Advance on the matter at hand since it's very very early days and they don't have any code yet to show for it they also have a dedicated website up and running with a few articles including one that says that they intend to use the open 3D engine which is another project hosted by a foundation created by the Linux Foundation the open 3D engine would be used as the base for that inter operable metaverse all contributions are licensed under the Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses apparently which would let anyone use modify extend and distribute the source code without any commercial obligations apart from attribution these are very permissive licenses and they mean that commercial entities might be interested in the project because they won't have to contribute every single change they make under an open license personally I am not interested in the metaverse at all because it looks like a solution in search of a problem it's basically doing the same things that we can already do pretty well but worse and less comfortable but if we're gonna have to have a metaverse I would rather it be open source and Linux driven than something that Zuckerberg dreamed of although if the Linux Foundation could wait until meta kills itself trying to develop second life with legless avatars that would also be pretty cool Getty Images is now suing stability AI the makers of stable diffusion for scraping its content to train its AI Getty Images shared a press statement stating that they believe stable diffusion unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright obviously to train its machine learning algorithm the company has started legal proceedings in England by sending stability AI a letter before action which is basically just a letter of intent to tell someone that you're suing them basically what they say is that stable diffusion has used their property without asking without consent to build a commercial product for their own personal benefit and they don't think this use is covered by fair use in the US or by its UK equivalent called Fair dealing they say stability AI never reached out to them to see if they could use any images and they also say that the current landscape regarding AI is like what existed at the beginning of digital music where services like Napster offered music to people without any regard for the rights to distribute these files and Getty Images think that we need a clear Euro framework for intellectual property rights around AI they're apparently not even seeking Financial damages or looking to stop the development of AI tools they just want to set a legal precedent so that AI tools have to license content they use to train their models and I can't really argue with that myself I don't think that the legal framework that exists today around copyright around attribution and the various fair use cases applies to what AI does and I think we at least need some rulings to know if yes the current copyright framework works and everything goes or if it doesn't work for AI and then we need to have the rules set in place so that content cannot be used against anyone's will KDE plasma 5.27 beta is now available for people who want to give it some test time you can already install it using the unstable version of caddy neon or with Docker images or with packages from your distro if they package betas or you can just compile the code yourself if you feel like it or if you like Gentoo the major improvements that need to be tested are the new plasma welcome app which is basically just a first Run Tour explaining what plasma is letting you connect online accounts or telling you how to get help of course it can be skipped if you don't need it flat pack support has been improved finally complete with permissions letting you grant or revoke access to any flatback app to your file system your home folder sound printers Bluetooth everything multi-monitor support has also been completely refactored and should be way less buggy although they said that they didn't fix every single multi-monitor related bug and you will also get more fine-grained control on how to handle setups with three or more monitors and finally there's also the new kwin tiling system that will give tiling Window Manager features to plasma out of the box by creating layouts and placing windows in the spaces you defined for them using the mouse or the keyboard all in all this is shaping up to be an excellent release that I will definitely make a video about in February when it's stated to launch I think it's on the 14th and it's also going to be the last release of the KDE plasma 5 series because they already branched that series into KDE plasma 6. so the next release is will be kde6 but it's probably not coming out in four months it's going to be longer than that there are some concerning developments in India as the government proposed that social media firms rely on fact-checking solutions that are done by government agencies they propose that the Press Bureau of India and its related agencies become the reference for what is misinformation or disinformation online so that social networks can have a common reference on what is true or not this proposal is just a draft for now and it's part of an amendment to India's I.T rules and it accompanies laws that would put social media firms and gaming companies in charge of ensuring that any content they display Isn't patently false or untrue or misleading in nature whether the company created that content or their users did except that what is true and what isn't would be determined by a government agency and not an independent source and that agency the Press Bureau of India has already been found to have misleading fact checks in the past anything that wouldn't be deemed true could be taken down it's not just a matter of labeling content with a small Banner now various foundations and Industry groups including ones that represent the big tech companies we're all used to are opposed to that proposal labeling it as absolutist and regressive and look whether you're a proponent of absolute Free Speech where even misinformation goes and users have to decide by themselves all your for a little bit more moderation to curtail what is patently false I think we can all agree that no government should have the power to decide what is true and what isn't because even the most benevolent government that would exist today could someday turn into something else and with that kind of framework it's very good grounds for Pure censorship remember the opt-in Telemetry gnome developers offered to users well there are some answers now with more than 2500 people uploading their data to the genome servers of course since all of it was opt in and recruitment happened on gnome's media channels they have a subset of gnome users that are confident in installing a command line tool and that already like gnome probably so it's not fully representative of gnome users it's seen in the OS usage with Fedora representing 54 of responses the good old ThinkPad seems to still be the device of choice for people running Linux with 23 percent of respondents using a device from Lenovo as per workspaces most people use the default with workspaces being only displayed on the primary display for 82 percent of respondents and 89 of them using Dynamic workspaces instead of a fixed number which again is the default setting a small majority of people did make use of the online accounts with Google being the biggest nexcloud second and Microsoft third over 90 percent of systems had flat back installed with 84 percent of all systems using flat Hub the default browser was mostly Firefox at 73 and chrome second at 11 percent shell extensions were used by 84 of users most of them having from one to five manually installed extensions no surprise Here app indicator support is the biggest one with JS connect user themes and dash to dock or Dash to panel extensions being the most popular so with this kind of data if the gnome developers don't seriously reconsider adding notification tray icons to the default gnome version then yes you'll be able to say that they do not listen to their users because if the most gnome diehards that are willing to install a Telemetry tool and send their data that are using Fedora on ThinkPad if they all install the app indicator extension then it should probably be part of the default setup speaking of gnome developers this week have been working on redesigning the sound panel with sounds levels per app getting their own dedicated window and also using bigger icons and a new volume level indicator so you can see which app is making noise various apps also received updates like gaff4 the uml modeling tool getting git merge conflict support CSS autocomplete for style sheets and various cross-platform fixes for Windows and Mac OS Black Box a new terminal app got customizable keyboard shortcuts background transparency and fixed scrolling on touchpads and touchscreens our note the hand-drawn notes taking tool now supports tabs thanks to libid Vita and it also gained a Color Picker and floating toolbars money the personal finance manager has been renamed dinaro which means the same thing but in Italian and got a new account setting dialogue with support for custom currencies and Export to PDF feature and documentation available through the help tool of gnome on top of that login manage your settings the tool that does what its name says got a bug fix update and flare the signal GDK client got background notifications definitely useful for a messaging client you kind of want them to be able to tell you when you received something even if the app isn't open and in terms of gaming news we have Aya Neo the company making handheld PCS for gaming announcing that their own Linux based operating system inventively called Aya Neo OS will be released this year they announced it on Twitter with a few screenshots but it's hard to judge from them how this thing will work the company has recently been relatively successful launching the ironyo 2 with a bit more than 3 million dollars collected to fund that campaign and the reasoning for developing their own OS is basically that windows on handhelds and small screens suck and you can't argue with that Windows has its use case but it's definitely not for a small appliance dedicated to one task only the interface isn't designed for a gaming Hub the performance and the background resource usage is designed for an all-purpose OS whether as with Linux you can completely tailor it to do exactly what you want and nothing else which is great and also I think Aya Neo OS might in the end be more interesting to build your own console than steamos because Steam OS is designed to just play Steam games you can add with workarounds games from other stores but they'll never add an epic games login or Gog login ayani OS might do it so you will have a way better more integrated experience although whether they will share the sources and let people install that OS on their own devices we don't know yet and finally there it is stadia is now officially dead it shuttered on Wednesday about three years after it started and it was a clean down with Google refunding every customer for their purchases and making sure the controller can work with regular computers and not just with stadia so it's not just a paperweight it looks like stadia was a pretty promising technological achievement people who were using it really liked it but the problem was more on the business side with Google wanting people to pay full price for the games on top of an optional subscription instead of offering a monthly fee to access a catalog like what competitors are doing including Game Pass Google never stood a chance in that Arena basically buying one game full price on stadia would have bought you 5 months of Xbox game pass on xcloud with way more games to choose from and comparable quality and performance stadia might have looked a little bit better might have been just a tiny bit more responsive but for most people the value proposition just wasn't there quantity beat quality this time it seems unlike this segue to today's sponsor which marries quantity and quality tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box and they ship it worldwide and the reason why you would want that instead of buying any old Windows computer and slapping Linux on it is that basically with tuxedo you know that it's compatible with Linux because the hardware has been picked to run Linux and they have a big range of devices that should cover every price point and every need from affordable laptops to high-end gaming devices whether they're Towers or Ultrabooks or just monster gaming PCs you can get it all workstations if you like doing work instead of gaming they also have that and all devices are customizable you can mostly open them all up and change the ram the SSD you have multiple configurations available multiple price points for each devices you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys your own custom logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop it's very very powerful so if you need a new new Linux device check out the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well there's always that dislike button and you can also tell me why in the comments below also don't forget these News videos are now also in podcast form you can find the link in the description below I tackle more topics and also I go more in depth on each topic it's about an hour long it's free of ads free of sponsors you can just support it if you want by using the links in the description below patreon YouTube memberships you get exclusive benefits you know the drill so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and today we're gonna talk about next Cloud again because okay it always was a fantastic alternative to proprietary ecosystems like apples or Googles but it still lacked a few interesting things that other proprietary platforms did and fortunately next Cloud Hub 3 the latest version fixes most if not all of these issues and now nextcloud is a perfect replacement to Apple's ecosystem or to most of Google services so let's take a look at what is new at what you should ditch your privacy invasive current ecosystem and also at this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and if you run Centos machines you might be starting to panic about the fast approaching end of life of Centos 7. well you don't have to worry anymore because thanks to Duck scare you can still get four years of free software updates and security patches for Centos when you purchase a kernel Care Enterprise subscription so not only do you get live patching for these servers to stay secure and up to date without any downtime or reboots or maintenance Windows to plan around but you can also keep your current operating system so you have more time to plan your upgrade path check out kernel Care Enterprise and get your free extended support for Centos 7 by clicking the link in the description below okay really quickly under one minute let's take a look at what next cloud is for people who don't know about it nexcloud is an open source Cloud solution you can either host it yourself on the virtual private server or at home on any small nerc or Raspberry Pi or you can find a provider online that will give you an account it's a replacement for the cloud services Apple can give you or for most of Google services and it's obviously private secure and you can extend it with a lot of apps that let you manage your tasks calendars contacts emails chat you can use it for your photo albums to get a kanban board and integrated office 3 taking notes manage your ass's feed track your phone's position listen to podcast basically anything you want it's also fantastic for managing a team with strong collaboration features for instant messaging audio and video calls and more and all that data can also be accessed through mobile apps for IOS and Android sync through card DAV and Carl DAV and there's a desktop app to auto sync files as well almost and that's a lot of stuff and most of these features I actually use every day to handle my YouTube channel and with the latest updates next Cloud Hub 3 everything got way better so first next Cloud always looked a bit Spartan and not in the muscle bearded cool guy kind of way more in the super boring and uninspired design kind of way now with the latest updates you now get a lot more personalization options the whole interface for next cloud and and its apps has received a Fresh coat of paint you can choose a wallpaper that will permeate behind the interface and you can color it with some transparency and blur Corners are rounded and have a nicer and friendlier feel you can also decide to go dark mode and light mode with an automatic switch depending on your system something you could not do before it was either or light or all dark and you had to switch manually auto dock mode is a must-have feature for any website or web app or so I'm told by dark mode fans I'm more of a light theme kind of guy but don't tell anyone this revamp isn't critical to how you use next Cloud but it's still welcome as most proprietary Alternatives have quite comfy and well-designed user experiences apple is even revamping its iCloud online services in beta to improve them now since the web interface can be your main way to access your next Cloud applications it's good to see that they are focusing on making it look as good as the competition of course looks can only take you so far and I know that because I peaked in my mid-20s and it's only been going downhill since then now the second main issue with nexcloud was performance it wasn't super slow but it wasn't Lightning Fast either especially in the unified search now this feature on paper is awesome it lets you search for anything in any next Cloud app you have but the more apps and data you had the slower it got taking multiple seconds or more to return a single result with next Cloud Hub 3 everything is way faster from switching to another app to search the load for some operations has been reduced by up to 90 percent search is at least 20 faster and application loading times have been reduced by 30 percent the difference is night and day on my server since I got the update those are really incredible changes that make using the web interface actually usable now and it also means that your next Cloud Server doesn't need to be powerful to work well which is nice something most people do on their cloud storage is photo storage like if you're using an iPhone or an Android phone chances are your dick your deer picks are on someone else's computer and next Cloud was always super lackluster in the picture organization Department it had basically nothing and that's all fixed in what must be the biggest change to next cloud ever photos now have a whole new tile view that not only looks better but is way faster as well and it lets you scroll through your photos quickly and smoothly you also get the ability to create photo albums finally and a photo can be in multiple albums and you can share these with others through a public link so anyone can look at them or download them without needing a next cloud account on your server you also get a brand new photo editor with filters cropping drawing brightness contrast blur image warmth control resizing and more but what is more useful is AI powered features for your photo library and done right as in everything runs locally on your server no data goes to anyone else contrary to what Google or Apple does and it's optional as well you will need to install the recognize app from the next Cloud app store to make it work now this app will automatically tag your photos recognize faces objects landmarks pets and even audio genres for your music and you can find all the people it identified in a dedicated tab to add their names it has its own settings to let you turn specific tagging on and off and there are easy one-click buttons to reset all tagging the photo experience is now absolutely fantastic and it basically has everything that anyone might want out of a cloud photo storage service and of course to get all your pictures onto your next Cloud Server you just have to use the next Cloud mobile application which will auto upload them if you so choose now in terms of Webmail and calendar the Webmail isn't a mail service on next Cloud you still need to add your email address to it so you need an external email service to add but the experience has been improved a lot there are now quick actions which are must faster to access from a message you can preview mail content in the sidebar there's a new account setup wizard that will Auto detect your email settings when possible and you can now reply to calendar invitations from the Webmail itself you can also view attachments without leaving the email app and without saving the file you can set your out of office message and you can now use Rich Text signatures with images as per the calendar it now lets you duplicate events and has a way better appointment page to let you see who is available or not if you have multiple people on your next Cloud Server this mail app was so far behind anything else that it was basically unusable but fortunately that's no longer the case I still prefer using a desktop client for email but at least now you have an option to use something in your web browser now if you plan to use nextcloud for your family or for a small company there are also some cool improvements here next Cloud talk the chat interface has been revamped entirely and it looks much much better links now transform into cards with a rich view of what you shared you can decide to select who will receive notifications for a video or audio call or a message to not disturb everyone in a group conversation you can configure your work hours enable a do not disturb option and they also added message expiration uploading documents straight from the chat bar or the ability to create a poll in a conversation next Cloud talk isn't just for business you could absolutely use it for a close-knit group of frames a community you run or even your family and of course next Cloud still has all the apps it previously had you have tasks to handle your to-do lists you have deck to have a kanban board you have notes for note taking in markdown with categories and favorites you have news to read RSS feeds forms to create complete surveys like what Google forms can do you have collectives for documentation and knowledge bases you have multiple office suites like only office or collabora that let you edit documents online straight from nexcloud and collaborate online on the same dock you can personalize the colors and theme and Logo reorganize the menus and sync everything to various mobile and desktop applications it is just super versatile and really really easy to use and to extend installing applications takes just a few clicks from the web interface all the settings are in the same place and it syncs really well with iPhones or with Android devices with DAV X5 which is a small and free app to get your calendars contacts and tasks over to your phone you can even create automations with flow to automatically convert files into other formats when they land in a specific folder or getting notifications based on certain file tags and if you use Linux as your desktop you have a bunch of applications that can link to your next Cloud Server Like iotas for note-taking or Endeavor for tasks if you want to move to next cloud and start ditching Google or Apple Services It's relatively easy first you can find an online provider that offers next Cloud accounts as a service including some with free plans I left a link in the description if you want to check some of these out of course your free storage will be limited here because no one can provide tens of gigs for free unless they're at the scale of Microsoft Google or Apple and you're trusting another company with your data again which I mean if you want to leave Apple or Google you might as well not put your data in the hands up yet another company right so if that's not your jam self-hosting is quite simple if you have a small PC or Raspberry Pi there are plenty of tutorials online and on YouTube and if you don't want to bother with running a server at home any decent VPS provider will let you install next cloud in a few clicks I would recommend using the snap package as it's a one command line install and it auto updates perfectly it's super stable and it just work I hate to admit it but my own next Cloud Server which is hosted on lenode runs with the snap version of nexclown they only update it when they're certain there are no issues whatsoever ever that could impact current users and it's just been extremely stable since I installed it I've been using it for years now and it just runs smoothly it auto updates I just never have to do any maintenance at all and once you have your server running there's a desktop client for Linux Windows and Mac OS to let you sync files automatically and auto upload them you can set up your next Cloud account on Linux with gnome or KD's online accounts to get your calendars contacts and storage immediately synced and configured and of course you can download the mobile apps to auto upload your pictures access your notes your files and whatever else so if you're uncomfortable with living all your files your photos your tasks and your data in the hands of giant tech companies but if next Cloud always felt like it was lacking a few features I think it's time you gave it another shot next Cloud Hub 3 is really where it's at and I think it can replace everything nowadays just like today's sponsor can replace your current computer that's is a company based in Germany and they ship laptops and desktops worldwide with Linux pre-installed on them and the simple reason why you would want that instead of buying any old Windows device and trying to slap Linux on it is because tuxedo chooses the hardware to be compatible with Linux which means that you can just install your distro and it runs plus they have a big range of devices that should cover every price point and every need from super small affordable laptops to Giant desktop Tower workstations or gaming laptops or gaming desktops or Ultrabooks you name it you can open the vast majority of their devices and upgrade them or repair them and you can customize them with a bunch of options including your own custom keyboard layout on your laptop your own Super Key to have for example a tux logo or just the word super or you can have your own logo on the lid of your laptop if you prefer or no logo at all if you don't want a branded machine so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development on Hardware check out the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo device they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it the dislike button still works I guess and there's a comment section below to tell me why the video sucked and if you really enjoy what I'm doing here well there's a super thanks button underneath the video there's the PayPal Link in the description and you can also join my patreon subscribers and YouTube members both get access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I've been an Android User for most of my life I've started with the Galaxy Nexus and I've been using Android up until last year with very few brief iPhone related stints in between but Android just doesn't work for me anymore on many different levels the alternatives they are not great so let's unpack this and let's unpack this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and chances are you already know what Squarespace is but just in case you're new to the internet Squarespace is a fantastic tool that lets you build your own website and I'm not talking about a Blog because while you can do that with Squarespace it also really goes way beyond that since I'm currently looking at remaking my website I can also say that the option to have a members area for my patreon supporters and YouTube members picked my curiosity as did the fact that you can set up an online store in minutes complete with online payment for a lot of different services like PayPal or stripe maybe it's time to finally set up my tlestore.com and get on that merch bandwagon like so many other prominent YouTubers I've done and if I didn't already have a logo or a domain name well Squarespace could handle that as well it's an all-in-one solution for your online presence and it can and scale all the way up or all the way down depending on your needs so if you need a new website head over to Squarespace slash the Linux experiment and get yourself a 10 discount on your first purchase of a website or domain name as always the link is in the description below now let's begin with the first reason why Android is just not working for me anymore and that reason is the hardware and I know that's weird I mean Android has so many Hardware choices right it's one of the strength of its ecosystem you get so many options to pick from except well if you have preferences that go against the current trends you do not have much choice at all my preferences list is relatively small I want a small phone around 6 inches or a little bit more than that I want a high refresh rate display 90 Hertz or more and I want a good camera rate that can do video portrait mode because I use that all the time for Hardware reviews oh and also I don't want my phone to be made by your Chinese company I don't need a flagship in terms of specs and power I don't game on my phone I don't do anything super intensive but the fact is after using a high refresh rate display there is no way I'm going back to 60 hertz my laptop is 90 Hertz my desktop is plugged into 100hz Monitor and at that point only my TV is 60 hertz and I'm starting to notice thankfully my steam deck rarely hits over 40 frames per second so yeah that choppiness can be attributed to the deck and not to my TV now for the size current phones are just way too big okay sure the iPhone 5 style is just too small nowadays but with kinda over compensated in the other direction don't you think seriously 6.86.97 inches for a phone that's ridiculous that's way too big for a phone as for the provenance of the phone Chinese manufacturers are a red flag for me pun intended obviously yes now it's not paranoia but every Chinese company is legally required to hand over all information about their users to the Chinese government which means that if you use their phones with their default Android ROM their apps or services or even just their firmware chances are they are collecting data about you and that data ends up in the hands of the Chinese government and if you think that makes me weird just look at this Dell is apparently planning to remove every single component or chip made from China from their devices that's not paranoia that's being afraid of back doors that the Chinese government would force onto these cheap designing companies now still this excludes phones from xiaomi Oppo OnePlus Huawei and even Motorola which belongs to Lenovo which is a Chinese company and so this basically just leaves us with Samsung and Google and both are equally unsuitable I used Samsung phones for a long while I started on the Galaxy S8 then I had an S9 plus then an s10e then an S21 in between some of these phones I owned an iPhone 11 but I kept it for less than a year the form factor was just bad I ran the default Samsung ROM on most of these and slash e on others I'll talk about software a little bit later and I find Samsung phones great I even missed the curved edges screen I don't understand why people are piling on it curves are always better and not just for phones now more seriously if you ever used a curved Edge phone I don't understand how you can prefer flat glass for a gesture-based navigation system like what Android has curved edges May make that easy now my problem with Samsung is more in terms of reliability all phones I owned from them had the exact same issue after about a year they stopped recognizing my SIM card at some point they'll start saying no SIM card inserted and whatever I do I can only fix it by rebooting the phone two or three times in a row or removing and reinserting the SIM card again and again until it manages to detect it and it's completely random which means I can never predict when it's going to happen sometimes I'll leave the house with my phone in my pocket not touching it and at some point during the day I realized that it just lost every kind of signal it doesn't know my SIM card is there and so if anyone has tried to call me text me or notify me of anything I've been in the dark for hours at that point this is definitely not what you want at least it's not what I want I'm tired of it so Samsung they're gone which basically only leaves Google and the pixels are highly rated by some people who use them but first and it's very subjective I find them horrible to look at that camera bar is ugly yes sin the colors are super Bland the bezels around the screen still aren't all the same width which triggers me to no end maybe I'm difficult but this thing that does not look good this is ugly as hell and on top of that the pixel reliability track record is really bad first gen had severe performance degradation over time the second gen had a bad OLED screen that burned in way too quickly and a super easy to break USBC connector the third pixels were plagued by software issues the fourth had a bad screen again and an insecure Face Unlock mechanism the fifth had huge manufacturing issues with the screen separating from the main body which means it barely stayed on sale for any length of time and the 6 pixel had issues with the fingerprint sensor not working well the assistant could ghost dial random contacts there was a screenflicker issue basically zero quality control on these phones and as per the pixel 7 it now looks like the camera glass is spontaneously cracking not a great track record not confidence inspiring at all and yes I know it's a collection of issues that not everyone has experienced but still manufacturers that sell 10 times 100 times the quantity that pixels sold never had that many issues leveled against any of their product generation so no no pixels for me but that's that's just the hardware and I'm sure I could look hard and long enough and find something that I would enjoy actually I'm pretty sure someone will recommend something in the comments that would fit my needs perfectly wanna bet someone recommends me a pixel 7 Pro the exact opposite of all I want but even if I could find a device that fits all my needs there's the software problem Android is just messy there's no two ways about it depending on which manufacturer you go with you won't get the same experience at all not the same default apps not the same app store not the same settings not the same look and feel or even not the same features Samsung's brand of Android called one UI was pretty good in my opinion with a great design flare easy to use with one hand with major controls at the bottom of the screen where they belong good gesture navigation and looks wise it was pretty good but it's riddled with ads that you cannot remove especially in their News application and also it's a mess of duplicate applications that do the same thing Samsung basically throws three ecosystems at you at the same time their own which is shrinking by the day Microsoft which is slowly replacing Samsung services like their photo storage or Cloud Drive and Googles because you have to ship Google apps to get access to the Play Store which means that out of the box you get two or three different apps that do the exact same thing for multiple apps and you can't really remove them only disable them but they are still on your phone this people is what bloatware looks like bloatware isn't a distro shipping LibreOffice by default even if you don't need it bloatware is a phone manufacturer shipping duplicate or triplicate apps that you cannot delete and if you go with vanilla Android from Google then you get something that is way more trimmed down with only Google Apps and services but first the design is but ugly again in my opinion with horrid pastel colors huge buttons with so much padding and generally the feeling of using a kid's toy I really really hate material you as a design system it's bad with its color choices it's bad with contrast it's got bad ux it's a terrible interface in my opinion and also it's sold Google services that's going to be an issue with all Android phones i d Googled my life almost entirely the only thing I use from them is YouTube because I run this Channel and if anything else I plucked year after year replacing with next cloud or other online providers that are more private going with the Google pixel or vanilla Android would be a step back in that direction because even if you don't use all Google services the OS itself still collects and sends tons of data all the time about you it would be a huge step back which leads us to alternate ROMs yes there's a whole world out there and a pixel with graphene OS would give me a super secure and private experience but it only works on pixels and as I explained no way I'm buying one of those not with that track record then there's lineage or even slash e my favorite ROM which goes even further than lineage in terms of removing Google crap and has a very nice simple aesthetic that I find super pleasing I mean it's quite easy to see what they took inspiration from yeah it's it's iOS basically and I'm fine with that I used slash e for about a year on a Galaxy S9 plus and I liked it but at the time it wasn't quite ready too many apps didn't work because the phone didn't pass the safety net check and the App Store just lacked a lot of applications nowadays slash e is more than ready it does pass safety net check at least it did on the fairphone 4 I tried it on which means my banking app worked out of the box with the security features two-factor authentication and the like and it has a better App Store with access to every single Google Play Store app and purchases and in-app purchases although for all paid stuff you do have to use a Google account which kinda defeats the whole purpose of a d Googled ROM but I guess you could create an empty new Google account to handle that slash e is what I would use if I could find a phone I like to use it on my Galaxy S21 is in a drawer and I would love to use that with Slash e SIM card problems notwithstanding but I can't because they don't support it most modern flagships aren't supported until a few years after they're out and sometimes they're never supported which means I'm out of luck I have very few Hardware requirements I only want a phone that's not sold by a Chinese company that has a high refresh rate display and is in the under 6.3 inches range and I cannot find anything that fits and that would also be able to run a d Googled private ROM so there's currently a mismatch between what Android offers and my needs and wants and that's why I'm ditching Android which back to the question what to use now and I went for an iPhone but not because I find it better it's actually worse in a lot of ways it's supposedly private but it collects just as much data as what Google does on Android only sends it to Apple for use with their ad Network on the App Store the hardware is phenomenal though I went for the 13 Pro and it puts every other phone I ever used to shame stainless steel is just a better material than aluminum it's Hefty but it's small it doesn't have rough edges it's just wonderfully made sometimes there's a piece of Hardware that just feels right in your hands I have four of those the Xbox Elite controller the steam pack my iPhone 13 Pro and I will not say what the fourth is but the software iOS it's so limited I don't need a thousand apps but I still like to change a few things and that grid-based home screen sucks without any free icon placement there is no icon packs no themes no colors you can change and notifications on iOS are just worse than on Android no debating they are terrible you either get way too many or you pack them in a summary that's really bad to interact act with and also there's no always on display if you don't have the latest iPhone model which is stupid and how about Linux phones well there's no Hardware that fits my needs and also the OS is just not ready I do need a few apps that I cannot replace with a website my banking app my workout app the YouTube studio app and a few other things and as long as Linux phones don't have a perfect way of running Android apps to supplement the gaps there's no way I can switch to any of that and of course this is not a Critic of Android it's my own experience I realize that my specific wants and needs are what are causing the problem here but still it means I have to use an OS I don't specially like and that isn't as private as I'd like and it sucks for the time being Android just isn't working out and Linux phones are not ready so I have to use apple Hardware yay I'm thrilled what I'm really thrilled about though is today's sponsor if you need a new device to run Linux on stop buying Windows computers and trying to slap Linux on it buy from tuxedo they make Hardware that has been picked and designed specifically to run Linux and on top of that they have a big range that will fit every budget and every need from laptops to desktops gaming focused workstations or gaming focused laptops or just small cheaper Ultrabooks they have everything that you might want and they're all customizable repairable upgradable you can open them up and not lose your warranty you can slap any distro you want on them that just really really good so if you need a new device and you want to support Linux development and you want to run Linux on that device don't buy a Windows computer click the link in the description below and buy Linux Hardware so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well there's that dislike button and also tell me why in the comments it's more polite and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships by signing up for any of these you get access to a weekly podcast exclusive to members and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and today we're gonna talk about next Cloud again because okay it always was a fantastic alternative to proprietary ecosystems like apples or Googles but it still lacked a few interesting things that other proprietary platforms did and fortunately next Cloud Hub 3 the latest version fixes most if not all of these issues and now nextcloud is a perfect replacement to Apple's ecosystem or to most of Google services so let's take a look at what is new at what you should ditch your privacy invasive current ecosystem and also at this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and if you run Centos machines you might be starting to panic about the fast approaching end of life of Centos 7. well you don't have to worry anymore because thanks to Duck scare you can still get four years of free software updates and security patches for Centos when you purchase a kernel Care Enterprise subscription so not only do you get live patching for these servers to stay secure and up to date without any downtime or reboots or maintenance Windows to plan around but you can also keep your current operating system so you have more time to plan your upgrade path check out kernel Care Enterprise and get your free extended support for Centos 7 by clicking the link in the description below okay really quickly under one minute let's take a look at what next cloud is for people who don't know about it nexcloud is an open source Cloud solution you can either host it yourself on the virtual private server or at home on any small nerc or Raspberry Pi or you can find a provider online that will give you an account it's a replacement for the cloud services Apple can give you or for most of Google services and it's obviously private secure and you can extend it with a lot of apps that let you manage your tasks calendars contacts emails chat you can use it for your photo albums to get a kanban board and integrated office 3 taking notes manage your ass's feed track your phone's position listen to podcast basically anything you want it's also fantastic for managing a team with strong collaboration features for instant messaging audio and video calls and more and all that data can also be accessed through mobile apps for IOS and Android sync through card DAV and Carl DAV and there's a desktop app to auto sync files as well almost and that's a lot of stuff and most of these features I actually use every day to handle my YouTube channel and with the latest updates next Cloud Hub 3 everything got way better so first next Cloud always looked a bit Spartan and not in the muscle bearded cool guy kind of way more in the super boring and uninspired design kind of way now with the latest updates you now get a lot more personalization options the whole interface for next cloud and and its apps has received a Fresh coat of paint you can choose a wallpaper that will permeate behind the interface and you can color it with some transparency and blur Corners are rounded and have a nicer and friendlier feel you can also decide to go dark mode and light mode with an automatic switch depending on your system something you could not do before it was either or light or all dark and you had to switch manually auto dock mode is a must-have feature for any website or web app or so I'm told by dark mode fans I'm more of a light theme kind of guy but don't tell anyone this revamp isn't critical to how you use next Cloud but it's still welcome as most proprietary Alternatives have quite comfy and well-designed user experiences apple is even revamping its iCloud online services in beta to improve them now since the web interface can be your main way to access your next Cloud applications it's good to see that they are focusing on making it look as good as the competition of course looks can only take you so far and I know that because I peaked in my mid-20s and it's only been going downhill since then now the second main issue with nexcloud was performance it wasn't super slow but it wasn't Lightning Fast either especially in the unified search now this feature on paper is awesome it lets you search for anything in any next Cloud app you have but the more apps and data you had the slower it got taking multiple seconds or more to return a single result with next Cloud Hub 3 everything is way faster from switching to another app to search the load for some operations has been reduced by up to 90 percent search is at least 20 faster and application loading times have been reduced by 30 percent the difference is night and day on my server since I got the update those are really incredible changes that make using the web interface actually usable now and it also means that your next Cloud Server doesn't need to be powerful to work well which is nice something most people do on their cloud storage is photo storage like if you're using an iPhone or an Android phone chances are your dick your deer picks are on someone else's computer and next Cloud was always super lackluster in the picture organization Department it had basically nothing and that's all fixed in what must be the biggest change to next cloud ever photos now have a whole new tile view that not only looks better but is way faster as well and it lets you scroll through your photos quickly and smoothly you also get the ability to create photo albums finally and a photo can be in multiple albums and you can share these with others through a public link so anyone can look at them or download them without needing a next cloud account on your server you also get a brand new photo editor with filters cropping drawing brightness contrast blur image warmth control resizing and more but what is more useful is AI powered features for your photo library and done right as in everything runs locally on your server no data goes to anyone else contrary to what Google or Apple does and it's optional as well you will need to install the recognize app from the next Cloud app store to make it work now this app will automatically tag your photos recognize faces objects landmarks pets and even audio genres for your music and you can find all the people it identified in a dedicated tab to add their names it has its own settings to let you turn specific tagging on and off and there are easy one-click buttons to reset all tagging the photo experience is now absolutely fantastic and it basically has everything that anyone might want out of a cloud photo storage service and of course to get all your pictures onto your next Cloud Server you just have to use the next Cloud mobile application which will auto upload them if you so choose now in terms of Webmail and calendar the Webmail isn't a mail service on next Cloud you still need to add your email address to it so you need an external email service to add but the experience has been improved a lot there are now quick actions which are must faster to access from a message you can preview mail content in the sidebar there's a new account setup wizard that will Auto detect your email settings when possible and you can now reply to calendar invitations from the Webmail itself you can also view attachments without leaving the email app and without saving the file you can set your out of office message and you can now use Rich Text signatures with images as per the calendar it now lets you duplicate events and has a way better appointment page to let you see who is available or not if you have multiple people on your next Cloud Server this mail app was so far behind anything else that it was basically unusable but fortunately that's no longer the case I still prefer using a desktop client for email but at least now you have an option to use something in your web browser now if you plan to use nextcloud for your family or for a small company there are also some cool improvements here next Cloud talk the chat interface has been revamped entirely and it looks much much better links now transform into cards with a rich view of what you shared you can decide to select who will receive notifications for a video or audio call or a message to not disturb everyone in a group conversation you can configure your work hours enable a do not disturb option and they also added message expiration uploading documents straight from the chat bar or the ability to create a poll in a conversation next Cloud talk isn't just for business you could absolutely use it for a close-knit group of frames a community you run or even your family and of course next Cloud still has all the apps it previously had you have tasks to handle your to-do lists you have deck to have a kanban board you have notes for note taking in markdown with categories and favorites you have news to read RSS feeds forms to create complete surveys like what Google forms can do you have collectives for documentation and knowledge bases you have multiple office suites like only office or collabora that let you edit documents online straight from nexcloud and collaborate online on the same dock you can personalize the colors and theme and Logo reorganize the menus and sync everything to various mobile and desktop applications it is just super versatile and really really easy to use and to extend installing applications takes just a few clicks from the web interface all the settings are in the same place and it syncs really well with iPhones or with Android devices with DAV X5 which is a small and free app to get your calendars contacts and tasks over to your phone you can even create automations with flow to automatically convert files into other formats when they land in a specific folder or getting notifications based on certain file tags and if you use Linux as your desktop you have a bunch of applications that can link to your next Cloud Server Like iotas for note-taking or Endeavor for tasks if you want to move to next cloud and start ditching Google or Apple Services It's relatively easy first you can find an online provider that offers next Cloud accounts as a service including some with free plans I left a link in the description if you want to check some of these out of course your free storage will be limited here because no one can provide tens of gigs for free unless they're at the scale of Microsoft Google or Apple and you're trusting another company with your data again which I mean if you want to leave Apple or Google you might as well not put your data in the hands up yet another company right so if that's not your jam self-hosting is quite simple if you have a small PC or Raspberry Pi there are plenty of tutorials online and on YouTube and if you don't want to bother with running a server at home any decent VPS provider will let you install next cloud in a few clicks I would recommend using the snap package as it's a one command line install and it auto updates perfectly it's super stable and it just work I hate to admit it but my own next Cloud Server which is hosted on lenode runs with the snap version of nexclown they only update it when they're certain there are no issues whatsoever ever that could impact current users and it's just been extremely stable since I installed it I've been using it for years now and it just runs smoothly it auto updates I just never have to do any maintenance at all and once you have your server running there's a desktop client for Linux Windows and Mac OS to let you sync files automatically and auto upload them you can set up your next Cloud account on Linux with gnome or KD's online accounts to get your calendars contacts and storage immediately synced and configured and of course you can download the mobile apps to auto upload your pictures access your notes your files and whatever else so if you're uncomfortable with living all your files your photos your tasks and your data in the hands of giant tech companies but if next Cloud always felt like it was lacking a few features I think it's time you gave it another shot next Cloud Hub 3 is really where it's at and I think it can replace everything nowadays just like today's sponsor can replace your current computer that's is a company based in Germany and they ship laptops and desktops worldwide with Linux pre-installed on them and the simple reason why you would want that instead of buying any old Windows device and trying to slap Linux on it is because tuxedo chooses the hardware to be compatible with Linux which means that you can just install your distro and it runs plus they have a big range of devices that should cover every price point and every need from super small affordable laptops to Giant desktop Tower workstations or gaming laptops or gaming desktops or Ultrabooks you name it you can open the vast majority of their devices and upgrade them or repair them and you can customize them with a bunch of options including your own custom keyboard layout on your laptop your own Super Key to have for example a tux logo or just the word super or you can have your own logo on the lid of your laptop if you prefer or no logo at all if you don't want a branded machine so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development on Hardware check out the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo device they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it the dislike button still works I guess and there's a comment section below to tell me why the video sucked and if you really enjoy what I'm doing here well there's a super thanks button underneath the video there's the PayPal Link in the description and you can also join my patreon subscribers and YouTube members both get access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and welcome to this Linux and open source news video and you're gonna want to stick to at least the middle of the video because I have an announcement to make but I'm not gonna make it right now let's just say it's about getting all the news but without seeing my ugly face so this week our main items are Apple being fined for privacy violations in France we have new Mastodon users that arrived after the Twitter acquisition not necessarily sticking around and we have Mozilla joining the fattyverse with their own Mastodon instance and we also have this Segway to today's sponsor thanks to linode for sponsoring this video Leonard is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own next Cloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games like pie hole pie hole is a DNS sinkhole that filters out requests to add serving domains basically it lets you block ads and improve Network performance it lets you actively monitor every DNS request made on your network and block requests as they come in and you can deploy it in one click only nodes so you can ensure I stay poor and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below Apple's marketing campaign might be hitting the Privacy beats pretty hard but it doesn't mean you should trust them on that front as this new find indicates the French kneel for commission National de la formatic or national commission for computer science and freedoms just find Apple for a measly 8 million Euros which isn't much but is still a condemnation of the company's bad privacy practices app Apple was found to be illegally harvesting user data to Target them with ads without proper consent Apple apparently failed to obtain the consent of French iPhone users before depositing or writing identifiers used for advertising purposes on their phones in the App Store Apple had already been fined in France last month for another million euros for imposing abusive commercial Clauses on French app Developers for accessing the App Store now of course Apple will appeal this privacy decision as they say they prioritize user privacy and that they do more than anyone else to provide users with a clear choice for personalized ads of course that choice is only applied to third-party applications and not to Apple's own apps as was evidenced in November last year turning iPhone analytics off won't stop Apple apps from collecting data and tracking you them saying they do more for privacy than anyone else is like saying I do more push-ups than my cat it might technically be true but if the Baseline is zero does it really matter better still pretty bad time to be an iPhone user Elon Musk might be driving many new users to Mastodon with the way he's handling Twitter these days and while that's great for the small fediverse platform it doesn't mean that everyone that starts using Mastodon sticks around since its peak back when musk bought Twitter the number of active Mastodon users declined by 30 with about 1.8 million of them in early January compared to 2.5 million in early December although this decrease might also be due to the holiday season when people are with their families and not on their phones all that much still it's normal to expect to decrease of users on a new platform especially considering it grew from 500 000 users to 2 million by mid-november after the mask acquisition people were bound to return to Twitter or to stop using Mastodon altogether and since mastodon's growth can be directly linked to every decision musk made with a very clear impact with each new blunder it's also normal that people would drop out because they didn't join four Mastodon they joined for alternative to Twitter which Mastodon isn't completely a lot of users are still sticking around and Mastodon is actually doing extremely well in terms of user funding they even refuse a ton of potential investment from Silicon Valley venture capital I'll have a dedicated video about Mastodon to help people move to it and understand how it works later next week or the week after that still on the fediverse topics this is something I missed at the end of 2022 but it looks like Mozilla is entering the fetty verse too they'll be testing a publicly accessible instance called mozilla.social in early 2023 which is going to be focused on Mastodon first the move is part of their pledge for a healthy internet which basically boils down to we would like people to not be bastards own Zone to promote an Internet that makes that possible Mozilla joins others like Vivaldi in offering Mastodon instances still seems like the only service most people are interested in on the fedivers which is a shame because stuff like pixel fed castopod worm or peer tube are also in excellent shape but I guess if the Mastodon experiment goes well for Mozilla they might end up hosting a few instances through other services as well I am all for more companies and non-profits joining the fedivers Mastodon and any other service if you don't like these companies and non-profits you don't use their instance and you can avoid interacting with their users and if you do like them they have kind of a seal of approval a guarantee that gives you an instance that you can trust it's way easier for someone to sign up for a service that's on mozilla.social then something that's hosted by someone you don't know at the other end of the world that you don't really trust okay you've been patient here is the announcement well these Linux and open source News videos are now also available in audio podcast form in these podcasts I cover the same topics but more in depth and with more personal opinions and I also cover more topics that just don't fit in the length of a regular Linux and open source news video it is hosted on castopod which means it's part of the fediverse you can follow it using Mastodon for example but there's also an RSS feed to add it to any podcast client you might add and it's also on iTunes and Spotify the link to access the website is in the description below using the website is also pretty cool because there's a comment section where you can let me know your feedback about the podcast and we can discuss the various topics that I mentioned which is also pretty nice okay now back to the topics at hand last week I talked about a full AMD desktop from slim book well this week we have a full AMD laptop from system 76. they announced their new Pangolin laptop which now uses AMD CPUs and gpus the new laptop doesn't have a release date just yet but it will be a 15 inch device it will have at least a full HD 144hz display with a ryzen 7 6800u coupled with a Radeon 680 M GPU it has a 70 watt hour battery and weighs 1.8 kilograms so it's not like it's an Ultrabook or anything and of course you get the usual slots for m.2 ssds up to 16 terabytes you have ddr5 Ram you have a nice sport selection and the usual potato 720p webcam unfortunately the chassis seems to have been changed compared to the previous model and battery life should be a lot better up to 10 hours compared to 6 hours for the previous gen generation the graphics chip shouldn't be anything incredible with performance about in line with the GTX 1050 TI but at least it's an AMD dedicated GPU and this means better Linux compatibility still with some performance available for video editing workflows 3D modeling or other compute intensive tasks they didn't announce all the configurations or all the options you could have but it looks like an interesting laptop and for once I might be able to review it because I've been talking more with system 76 lately since I reviewed their keyboards on the channel and so they're probably going to send me a review unit for this one which is pretty cool now yet another privacy breach and this time from Google allegedly accompanied by a small measly settlement of 23 million dollars Google agreed to pay that amount to settle a decade-long lawsuit that was opened in California in 2010. this suit still needs Court approval and concerns the fact that Google allegedly shared Search terms that consumers had typed in the search engine with advertisers and third-party vendors without permission that happened on the web and on Android and when the user clicked on any link their personal information was also apparently disclosed to set third parties and the lawsuit also alleges that these third parties paid Google to have more information about which search related factors led the user to click on a specific link or not so this would mean that Google sold private personal data but also sold all the previous history and the decisions the user made that made them click on a specific link and so this means that Google would have violated the stored Communications act which is a U.S federal law Google had already tried to settle the case for 8.5 million dollars in 2013 but that settlement fell through because of decisions in another case which basically means that they were convicted of something similarly Shady which convinced the opposing lawyers that they had a shot at a bigger amount and look Google settling this case isn't an admission of guilt but it kinda is because even with such a measly amount they dragged this lawsuit for more than 10 years why would they settle now it's basically admitting that yes okay you know what we're gonna pay you so you stop bothering us without privacy violations which reminds us that whether you're an Apple user or an Android User you're not private and it all sucks now if you thought gnome developers never listened to users or did whatever they wanted well this new initiative might be interesting to you they're introducing a new extension called Focus indicator which is meant for users to be able to preview a potential change in Gnome 44 which is the removal of the application name menu in the top panel and its replacement by a new animation when changing which window is focused this application name menu initially contained basically everything the hamburger menu now contains on gnome apps and it also served for the user to know which app was focused at the moment but since since all the contents of this menu are now basically useless only letting you quit the app or show its details in Gnome software this menu doesn't really serve that much of a purpose and The Gnome design team also says it's not clear what it does is it a task switcher a shortcut to an application or something else they say it's basically not comprehensible and so they're testing its replacement with an animation instead when focusing a new window it will have a small zoom in and out effect to indicate to the user that it is indeed in Focus it's pretty cool that they're letting users test this out and give feedback and I guess it's a good use of the extensions mechanism and it also lets you tweak the animation parameters if you want now in its current state I have zero problems with that menu being removed it serves no purpose I literally never clicked on it once to do anything with the currently focused application I would prefer if they made that menu more useful like with the contents of the hamburger menu like each used to have or even with the full menu bar on applications that still have one but if they're not going to improve it they might as well get rid of it it serves no purpose there are some good news on the unity desktop environment front they are now working on the ability to run it underway land this new variant is called Unity X and it has all the same features as Unity 7 but with the ability to run it with any Window Manager you want replacing or removing the panel and more Unity X is basically exactly like the current Unity but with the ability to mix and match components something you can't do in the current Unity version it is already available on gitlab but it will have convenient packages in the next Ubuntu unity and Manjaro Unity releases now the dash works and looks as you would expect but you can adjust the opacity of it the HUD that lets you search through menu bar entries is now independent from the dash and it supports more applications than the regular Unity had and it can also be opened in multiple apps at the same time the control center is the same but has options to change more settings than in the default unity and there's a new yaml file that you can edit to replace the window manager the panel the settings Daemon and more now seeing that Unity X has all the same features but more and better compared to the regular Unity version I don't really know why they keep working on the regular Unity instead of just working on Unity X but I guess there's something I might be missing still it's good to have this because more modularity means more distributions might be able to ship an implementation of unity instead of having to stick to the current very rigid desktop that it offers and on to the gaming news with the release of proton next 7.0-6 letting you test the newest advancements and making a bunch of games playable like the Uncharted Legacy of Thieves collection Gotham Knights or Heroes of the dark proton experimental the even more Alpha quality testing release also fixes a bunch of stuff like alt tabbing being broken on ground 43 various performance tweaks and improvements and letting Halo Infinite Run even though there are still plenty of graphical issues with Nvidia Hardware if you like emulation dolphin the Wii and Gamecube Emulator is going to get a nice big performance boost using Vulcan they will be using the Vulcan memory allocator to better handle graphical RAM and this should result in performance being massively better especially for Super Mario Galaxy which should be able to reach 140 FPS on the steam deck instead of around 80. most games should see better performance but not necessarily of that magnitude and a while back someone decided to start working on a new open source Nvidia driver for Vulcan based on what Nvidia opened up earlier in 2022 this driver called nvk was to be a replacement for Nuvo starting fresh without needing reverse engineering but it couldn't really run anything at the time well now it can run video games the developer posted a screenshot of the Talos principle running although a pretty abysmal frame rate namely 5 FPS but it can still render the game which is nice the developer already knows how to fix that performance issue and is working on it I am so glad to see a modern open source driver for NVIDIA making strides it probably will not be completely fully production usable before the end of the year I would not expect it to be but still it's insane that in just a few months they managed to get a game completely rendered using Vulcan with a brand new driver started from scratch it's cool and it's also cool that it only took me minutes to create this segue to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer to run Linux on stop buying Windows devices and installing Linux on top of it and praying that it works just buy a computer that was designed to run Linux from tuxedo for example which is today's sponsor they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have products for basically every price point and every need whether you're looking for a laptop or a desktop for a small affordable Ultrabook or for a super Decked Out workstation that's never going to leave your desk they have it they're customizable they're repairable they're upgradable and you can have your own Super key on the keyboard of your laptop your own custom keyboard layout as well or your own logo on the lid of your laptop or engraved on your desktop as well they have tons of options so if you need a new computer you want to run Linux on check out the link in the description below and buy one from tuxedo they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it there's the dislike button and the comment section below as well and if you want to support the channel there's a PayPal Link in the description there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video and there are links to my patreon page and my YouTube memberships page both get access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topic that I thought so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I've been an Android User for most of my life I've started with the Galaxy Nexus and I've been using Android up until last year with very few brief iPhone related stints in between but Android just doesn't work for me anymore on many different levels the alternatives they are not great so let's unpack this and let's unpack this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and chances are you already know what Squarespace is but just in case you're new to the internet Squarespace is a fantastic tool that lets you build your own website and I'm not talking about a Blog because while you can do that with Squarespace it also really goes way beyond that since I'm currently looking at remaking my website I can also say that the option to have a members area for my patreon supporters and YouTube members picked my curiosity as did the fact that you can set up an online store in minutes complete with online payment for a lot of different services like PayPal or stripe maybe it's time to finally set up my tlestore.com and get on that merch bandwagon like so many other prominent YouTubers I've done and if I didn't already have a logo or a domain name well Squarespace could handle that as well it's an all-in-one solution for your online presence and it can and scale all the way up or all the way down depending on your needs so if you need a new website head over to Squarespace slash the Linux experiment and get yourself a 10 discount on your first purchase of a website or domain name as always the link is in the description below now let's begin with the first reason why Android is just not working for me anymore and that reason is the hardware and I know that's weird I mean Android has so many Hardware choices right it's one of the strength of its ecosystem you get so many options to pick from except well if you have preferences that go against the current trends you do not have much choice at all my preferences list is relatively small I want a small phone around 6 inches or a little bit more than that I want a high refresh rate display 90 Hertz or more and I want a good camera rate that can do video portrait mode because I use that all the time for Hardware reviews oh and also I don't want my phone to be made by your Chinese company I don't need a flagship in terms of specs and power I don't game on my phone I don't do anything super intensive but the fact is after using a high refresh rate display there is no way I'm going back to 60 hertz my laptop is 90 Hertz my desktop is plugged into 100hz Monitor and at that point only my TV is 60 hertz and I'm starting to notice thankfully my steam deck rarely hits over 40 frames per second so yeah that choppiness can be attributed to the deck and not to my TV now for the size current phones are just way too big okay sure the iPhone 5 style is just too small nowadays but with kinda over compensated in the other direction don't you think seriously 6.86.97 inches for a phone that's ridiculous that's way too big for a phone as for the provenance of the phone Chinese manufacturers are a red flag for me pun intended obviously yes now it's not paranoia but every Chinese company is legally required to hand over all information about their users to the Chinese government which means that if you use their phones with their default Android ROM their apps or services or even just their firmware chances are they are collecting data about you and that data ends up in the hands of the Chinese government and if you think that makes me weird just look at this Dell is apparently planning to remove every single component or chip made from China from their devices that's not paranoia that's being afraid of back doors that the Chinese government would force onto these cheap designing companies now still this excludes phones from xiaomi Oppo OnePlus Huawei and even Motorola which belongs to Lenovo which is a Chinese company and so this basically just leaves us with Samsung and Google and both are equally unsuitable I used Samsung phones for a long while I started on the Galaxy S8 then I had an S9 plus then an s10e then an S21 in between some of these phones I owned an iPhone 11 but I kept it for less than a year the form factor was just bad I ran the default Samsung ROM on most of these and slash e on others I'll talk about software a little bit later and I find Samsung phones great I even missed the curved edges screen I don't understand why people are piling on it curves are always better and not just for phones now more seriously if you ever used a curved Edge phone I don't understand how you can prefer flat glass for a gesture-based navigation system like what Android has curved edges May make that easy now my problem with Samsung is more in terms of reliability all phones I owned from them had the exact same issue after about a year they stopped recognizing my SIM card at some point they'll start saying no SIM card inserted and whatever I do I can only fix it by rebooting the phone two or three times in a row or removing and reinserting the SIM card again and again until it manages to detect it and it's completely random which means I can never predict when it's going to happen sometimes I'll leave the house with my phone in my pocket not touching it and at some point during the day I realized that it just lost every kind of signal it doesn't know my SIM card is there and so if anyone has tried to call me text me or notify me of anything I've been in the dark for hours at that point this is definitely not what you want at least it's not what I want I'm tired of it so Samsung they're gone which basically only leaves Google and the pixels are highly rated by some people who use them but first and it's very subjective I find them horrible to look at that camera bar is ugly yes sin the colors are super Bland the bezels around the screen still aren't all the same width which triggers me to no end maybe I'm difficult but this thing that does not look good this is ugly as hell and on top of that the pixel reliability track record is really bad first gen had severe performance degradation over time the second gen had a bad OLED screen that burned in way too quickly and a super easy to break USBC connector the third pixels were plagued by software issues the fourth had a bad screen again and an insecure Face Unlock mechanism the fifth had huge manufacturing issues with the screen separating from the main body which means it barely stayed on sale for any length of time and the 6 pixel had issues with the fingerprint sensor not working well the assistant could ghost dial random contacts there was a screenflicker issue basically zero quality control on these phones and as per the pixel 7 it now looks like the camera glass is spontaneously cracking not a great track record not confidence inspiring at all and yes I know it's a collection of issues that not everyone has experienced but still manufacturers that sell 10 times 100 times the quantity that pixels sold never had that many issues leveled against any of their product generation so no no pixels for me but that's that's just the hardware and I'm sure I could look hard and long enough and find something that I would enjoy actually I'm pretty sure someone will recommend something in the comments that would fit my needs perfectly wanna bet someone recommends me a pixel 7 Pro the exact opposite of all I want but even if I could find a device that fits all my needs there's the software problem Android is just messy there's no two ways about it depending on which manufacturer you go with you won't get the same experience at all not the same default apps not the same app store not the same settings not the same look and feel or even not the same features Samsung's brand of Android called one UI was pretty good in my opinion with a great design flare easy to use with one hand with major controls at the bottom of the screen where they belong good gesture navigation and looks wise it was pretty good but it's riddled with ads that you cannot remove especially in their News application and also it's a mess of duplicate applications that do the same thing Samsung basically throws three ecosystems at you at the same time their own which is shrinking by the day Microsoft which is slowly replacing Samsung services like their photo storage or Cloud Drive and Googles because you have to ship Google apps to get access to the Play Store which means that out of the box you get two or three different apps that do the exact same thing for multiple apps and you can't really remove them only disable them but they are still on your phone this people is what bloatware looks like bloatware isn't a distro shipping LibreOffice by default even if you don't need it bloatware is a phone manufacturer shipping duplicate or triplicate apps that you cannot delete and if you go with vanilla Android from Google then you get something that is way more trimmed down with only Google Apps and services but first the design is but ugly again in my opinion with horrid pastel colors huge buttons with so much padding and generally the feeling of using a kid's toy I really really hate material you as a design system it's bad with its color choices it's bad with contrast it's got bad ux it's a terrible interface in my opinion and also it's sold Google services that's going to be an issue with all Android phones i d Googled my life almost entirely the only thing I use from them is YouTube because I run this Channel and if anything else I plucked year after year replacing with next cloud or other online providers that are more private going with the Google pixel or vanilla Android would be a step back in that direction because even if you don't use all Google services the OS itself still collects and sends tons of data all the time about you it would be a huge step back which leads us to alternate ROMs yes there's a whole world out there and a pixel with graphene OS would give me a super secure and private experience but it only works on pixels and as I explained no way I'm buying one of those not with that track record then there's lineage or even slash e my favorite ROM which goes even further than lineage in terms of removing Google crap and has a very nice simple aesthetic that I find super pleasing I mean it's quite easy to see what they took inspiration from yeah it's it's iOS basically and I'm fine with that I used slash e for about a year on a Galaxy S9 plus and I liked it but at the time it wasn't quite ready too many apps didn't work because the phone didn't pass the safety net check and the App Store just lacked a lot of applications nowadays slash e is more than ready it does pass safety net check at least it did on the fairphone 4 I tried it on which means my banking app worked out of the box with the security features two-factor authentication and the like and it has a better App Store with access to every single Google Play Store app and purchases and in-app purchases although for all paid stuff you do have to use a Google account which kinda defeats the whole purpose of a d Googled ROM but I guess you could create an empty new Google account to handle that slash e is what I would use if I could find a phone I like to use it on my Galaxy S21 is in a drawer and I would love to use that with Slash e SIM card problems notwithstanding but I can't because they don't support it most modern flagships aren't supported until a few years after they're out and sometimes they're never supported which means I'm out of luck I have very few Hardware requirements I only want a phone that's not sold by a Chinese company that has a high refresh rate display and is in the under 6.3 inches range and I cannot find anything that fits and that would also be able to run a d Googled private ROM so there's currently a mismatch between what Android offers and my needs and wants and that's why I'm ditching Android which back to the question what to use now and I went for an iPhone but not because I find it better it's actually worse in a lot of ways it's supposedly private but it collects just as much data as what Google does on Android only sends it to Apple for use with their ad Network on the App Store the hardware is phenomenal though I went for the 13 Pro and it puts every other phone I ever used to shame stainless steel is just a better material than aluminum it's Hefty but it's small it doesn't have rough edges it's just wonderfully made sometimes there's a piece of Hardware that just feels right in your hands I have four of those the Xbox Elite controller the steam pack my iPhone 13 Pro and I will not say what the fourth is but the software iOS it's so limited I don't need a thousand apps but I still like to change a few things and that grid-based home screen sucks without any free icon placement there is no icon packs no themes no colors you can change and notifications on iOS are just worse than on Android no debating they are terrible you either get way too many or you pack them in a summary that's really bad to interact act with and also there's no always on display if you don't have the latest iPhone model which is stupid and how about Linux phones well there's no Hardware that fits my needs and also the OS is just not ready I do need a few apps that I cannot replace with a website my banking app my workout app the YouTube studio app and a few other things and as long as Linux phones don't have a perfect way of running Android apps to supplement the gaps there's no way I can switch to any of that and of course this is not a Critic of Android it's my own experience I realize that my specific wants and needs are what are causing the problem here but still it means I have to use an OS I don't specially like and that isn't as private as I'd like and it sucks for the time being Android just isn't working out and Linux phones are not ready so I have to use apple Hardware yay I'm thrilled what I'm really thrilled about though is today's sponsor if you need a new device to run Linux on stop buying Windows computers and trying to slap Linux on it buy from tuxedo they make Hardware that has been picked and designed specifically to run Linux and on top of that they have a big range that will fit every budget and every need from laptops to desktops gaming focused workstations or gaming focused laptops or just small cheaper Ultrabooks they have everything that you might want and they're all customizable repairable upgradable you can open them up and not lose your warranty you can slap any distro you want on them that just really really good so if you need a new device and you want to support Linux development and you want to run Linux on that device don't buy a Windows computer click the link in the description below and buy Linux Hardware so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well there's that dislike button and also tell me why in the comments it's more polite and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships by signing up for any of these you get access to a weekly podcast exclusive to members and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I am decidedly unqualified to talk about Smart Homes why because I live in a decidedly dumb apartment where nothing is connected to anything no controllable LEDs in the sunroom hand cranked window blinds dumb basic thermostat cool intercom from the 70s no voice assistant or smart speaker to be seen but as a matter of fact this is by choice because the smart home is a security and privacy nightmare so let's look at why your smart home might actually be a dumb idea and like this clever segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to try so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster now on the surface I absolutely understand why you would want to live in a smart home like preheating your house 15 minutes before you come home from work or opening your door while you're in the garden for a friend or just automatically raising your window blinds when you wake up and I can even understand really dumb stuff like not getting off the couch to turn lights on or off or your fridge telling you to buy milk or you vacuum robot alerting you it needs a fill to change or a connected video doorbell to know who's at the door even though you're not home I get why people would want to include all of that in their lives just like with any other technology it saves time it's convenient it removes a few actions or decisions to make every day and it lets you focus on what you really want to do like snooze all this Automation and get back to sleep but the smart home doesn't only have advantages with every device you connect to the internet comes a risk for your security and also a risk for your privacy now we all know that smartphones are also a privacy nightmare in a lot of cases they can send tens of megabytes of data on us every day to Google or Apple our location our habits but that's something that mainly stays in your pocket or on your desk your smart home appliances they're in your home all the time they have cameras and microphones and motion detectors and they can map your house and know who is in which room who goes where who was naughty and who was nice and wait no that's Santa but still there are a lot of problems with having a smart home the more obvious threats is to your home security and to who inhabits that home all that data these appliances collect is generally passed on to the manufacturer of the appliance most of them use a cloud service to store data to automate actions to interact with the device through a smartphone the very rarely will these devices only run through your local network they mostly all use a Cloud Server that you don't own and don't have access to but while you can't hackers definitely do have access to your data if they want to look at yuffie the Smart camera system that proclaimed everything was local and not in the cloud turns out they lied and they used the cloud and their server had basically zero security so everyone could see the feed from any camera if they brute forced it until they landed on the right ID in March 2021 hackers breached the server for security cameras gaining access to live feeds for hospitals women's health clinics prisons police departments and even schools Tesla was also affected and it revealed the bad working conditions in one of their factories and that's security cameras something you might expect to be harder to access than individual s Alexa speakers were also hacked with malicious actors getting access to banking details voice search history and even access to the various skills and commands you could ask Alexa or still from Amazon their ring range of devices was also easily hacked showing fake videos to connect to doorbell owners to let strangers in when they thought it was their friends stealing their Wi-Fi passwords or even communicating through the smart cameras in a specific case a hacker actually talked to an eight-year-old kid through the security camera after spying on the kid now if that doesn't creep you out you're probably one of these people I'm just a regular person bro I get nothing to hide bro and if the bra didn't give it away this stance is really dumb first hackers wouldn't just access your smart home appliances they would access all the appliances from the same manufacturer who are using the same Cloud Server they just hacked second this data is a treasure Trove for anyone who might want to know when you're not home and Rob you or use that data to impersonate you or mimic your voice get your banking information anything really they could even have a full map of your house thanks to your robot vacuum which diligently created that map for them Amazon bought iRobot for that exact purpose they don't care about your clean floors they care about the map to your house to know what changes if you're redoing your kitchens or turning your office into a nursery so they can sell you more stuff preemptively and then there's the privacy but this time the people who benefit from it are the companies that sold you the appliances most companies that make smart home appliances don't care about the smart home they care about the data these appliances can give them and how they can sell access to that data to advertisers Google didn't buy nest because they love keeping your home at the right temperature they want that data to be added to their already huge user profiles Comcast and atnt are also getting into the smart home business do you trust these companies with your data I wouldn't basically if you buy your smart home appliance that connects to the cloud chances are the manufacturer is more interested in the data they can gather and resell than the Smart Home Appliance at all they will make more money from that data than from the cheap smart home camera or doorbell that they could sell you and again why would that matter we are already giving away most of our data to Google Apple meta Microsoft and a lot of others what does it matter if it also goes to some smart home appliance company and at first glance it doesn't it's just a little bit more data about you floating around that is going to be used to sell you targeted ads but it's not just data about you is it it's data about your home and everyone who lives in it your significant other your kids your visiting friends cousins family as long as they stay in your house that data is also going to the company who made your appliances so you're basically subjecting anyone who visits you to data collection they are not aware of while they feel safe in the privacy of your home but the main reason you probably should care is because that data isn't going your way and it is available to any government that has laws that gives it access to in the US the government very frequently requests data about users and has done so for years now your smart home data is going to be included in that in China all this data can be used towards your social credit score that can literally get you fired have your citizen rights revoked or prevent you from renting or buying a house you told a joke comparing the prime minister to Whitney neither Pooh welcome to prison and in any other country a very quick law change could give access to law enforcement agencies to all of your live feeds of your cameras in your house if they decided they needed it for any inquiry and if you're thinking that you have nothing to hide you do or you will I explained why in this video up here or in the description down there now of course you can set up a smart home without using cloud-based products there's a very cool thing called home assistant it's open source it can run on something as small as a Raspberry Pi you can self-host it and all the data stays on your local network where it's not 100 safe but it's still way safer than being on the open internet home assistant integrates with tons and tons of services like homekit Alexa Google Assistant zigbee Philips U Samsung SmartThings Google Cast Z-Wave and more and they will probably also support the matter standard when that thing is available which will probably unify all these things but home assistant isn't perfect first out of the box it's local only so no controlling your stuff when you're not on your own Wi-Fi network you can solve that using home assistant cloud and this serves as a messenger between your home and the various cloud services you might use and this Cloud doesn't store anything so at least it isn't super susceptible to attack although someone could hack the server and listen to everything that is being passed on in there but guess what if you use that you're still using other cloud services like a voice assistant for example to communicate with home assistant and that means your data still goes to a third party for example Amazon if you use Alexa to talk to your home assistant all the devices you're using also will still phone home to their respective companies only your home assistant Hub will be fully private which means you have to pick smart home appliance that don't use the cloud and that are compatible with home assistant and this is probably why home assistant will never catch on for the general public why would you want to go through all that trouble to make that stuff work and host it yourself when your Samsung TV is already a smart home hub or your Apple TV but the trade-off is that you're putting all your data on servers you don't control at all and it's not just browsing data here it's direct live feeds of your home people who ring your doorbell or just walk in front of your door a map of your house recordings of your kids that data is then used to sell you products but can also be hacked by malicious actors it can be leaked or accessed by employees or given to governments to use against you depending on who controls your government at any given point your political beliefs your religious beliefs your sexual orientation your gender this is a massive issue and this is why my house is a dumb house and not a smart house until I'm confident that everything I want to do in my house will be home assistant compatible and will not talk to any cloud service then my window blinds will stay hand cranked my doorbell will say stupid and my thermostat will only work when I actually touch it so basically it's the same as everything else if you want to stay private you have to work extra hard except in this case it's not just a few browsing data on the websites you visit it's your own personal life in your own personal house with your family and your friends being affected as well it is way worse so yeah yes it is more work but it's probably also really worth it to spend that extra time to stay private for your smart home oh you know you could just get off your ass and actually trigger the light switch to turn on your lights it also works exactly like today's sponsor if you need a new device to run Linux on start buying Windows devices and replacing windows with Linux buy a device that's been made to run Linux from tuxedo today's sponsor they have a big range from small Ultrabooks to nux to gaming workstations to laptop to gaming laptops everything you might want and you can open them repair them upgrade them you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop or you can have no logo at all if you prefer you can have a Super Key after choosing with a tax logo or Linux logo they are very customizable and they're all available through the link in the description below so if you need a new device to run Linux on check them out they are really good so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoy it and if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it the dislike button still works and you can tell me in the comments as well why you think this video sucked and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both of these members get access to a weekly podcast on Mondays and also the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so check those links out if you're interested and in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and I am decidedly unqualified to talk about Smart Homes why because I live in a decidedly dumb apartment where nothing is connected to anything no controllable LEDs in the sunroom hand cranked window blinds dumb basic thermostat cool intercom from the 70s no voice assistant or smart speaker to be seen but as a matter of fact this is by choice because the smart home is a security and privacy nightmare so let's look at why your smart home might actually be a dumb idea and like this clever segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to try so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster now on the surface I absolutely understand why you would want to live in a smart home like preheating your house 15 minutes before you come home from work or opening your door while you're in the garden for a friend or just automatically raising your window blinds when you wake up and I can even understand really dumb stuff like not getting off the couch to turn lights on or off or your fridge telling you to buy milk or you vacuum robot alerting you it needs a fill to change or a connected video doorbell to know who's at the door even though you're not home I get why people would want to include all of that in their lives just like with any other technology it saves time it's convenient it removes a few actions or decisions to make every day and it lets you focus on what you really want to do like snooze all this Automation and get back to sleep but the smart home doesn't only have advantages with every device you connect to the internet comes a risk for your security and also a risk for your privacy now we all know that smartphones are also a privacy nightmare in a lot of cases they can send tens of megabytes of data on us every day to Google or Apple our location our habits but that's something that mainly stays in your pocket or on your desk your smart home appliances they're in your home all the time they have cameras and microphones and motion detectors and they can map your house and know who is in which room who goes where who was naughty and who was nice and wait no that's Santa but still there are a lot of problems with having a smart home the more obvious threats is to your home security and to who inhabits that home all that data these appliances collect is generally passed on to the manufacturer of the appliance most of them use a cloud service to store data to automate actions to interact with the device through a smartphone the very rarely will these devices only run through your local network they mostly all use a Cloud Server that you don't own and don't have access to but while you can't hackers definitely do have access to your data if they want to look at yuffie the Smart camera system that proclaimed everything was local and not in the cloud turns out they lied and they used the cloud and their server had basically zero security so everyone could see the feed from any camera if they brute forced it until they landed on the right ID in March 2021 hackers breached the server for security cameras gaining access to live feeds for hospitals women's health clinics prisons police departments and even schools Tesla was also affected and it revealed the bad working conditions in one of their factories and that's security cameras something you might expect to be harder to access than individual s Alexa speakers were also hacked with malicious actors getting access to banking details voice search history and even access to the various skills and commands you could ask Alexa or still from Amazon their ring range of devices was also easily hacked showing fake videos to connect to doorbell owners to let strangers in when they thought it was their friends stealing their Wi-Fi passwords or even communicating through the smart cameras in a specific case a hacker actually talked to an eight-year-old kid through the security camera after spying on the kid now if that doesn't creep you out you're probably one of these people I'm just a regular person bro I get nothing to hide bro and if the bra didn't give it away this stance is really dumb first hackers wouldn't just access your smart home appliances they would access all the appliances from the same manufacturer who are using the same Cloud Server they just hacked second this data is a treasure Trove for anyone who might want to know when you're not home and Rob you or use that data to impersonate you or mimic your voice get your banking information anything really they could even have a full map of your house thanks to your robot vacuum which diligently created that map for them Amazon bought iRobot for that exact purpose they don't care about your clean floors they care about the map to your house to know what changes if you're redoing your kitchens or turning your office into a nursery so they can sell you more stuff preemptively and then there's the privacy but this time the people who benefit from it are the companies that sold you the appliances most companies that make smart home appliances don't care about the smart home they care about the data these appliances can give them and how they can sell access to that data to advertisers Google didn't buy nest because they love keeping your home at the right temperature they want that data to be added to their already huge user profiles Comcast and atnt are also getting into the smart home business do you trust these companies with your data I wouldn't basically if you buy your smart home appliance that connects to the cloud chances are the manufacturer is more interested in the data they can gather and resell than the Smart Home Appliance at all they will make more money from that data than from the cheap smart home camera or doorbell that they could sell you and again why would that matter we are already giving away most of our data to Google Apple meta Microsoft and a lot of others what does it matter if it also goes to some smart home appliance company and at first glance it doesn't it's just a little bit more data about you floating around that is going to be used to sell you targeted ads but it's not just data about you is it it's data about your home and everyone who lives in it your significant other your kids your visiting friends cousins family as long as they stay in your house that data is also going to the company who made your appliances so you're basically subjecting anyone who visits you to data collection they are not aware of while they feel safe in the privacy of your home but the main reason you probably should care is because that data isn't going your way and it is available to any government that has laws that gives it access to in the US the government very frequently requests data about users and has done so for years now your smart home data is going to be included in that in China all this data can be used towards your social credit score that can literally get you fired have your citizen rights revoked or prevent you from renting or buying a house you told a joke comparing the prime minister to Whitney neither Pooh welcome to prison and in any other country a very quick law change could give access to law enforcement agencies to all of your live feeds of your cameras in your house if they decided they needed it for any inquiry and if you're thinking that you have nothing to hide you do or you will I explained why in this video up here or in the description down there now of course you can set up a smart home without using cloud-based products there's a very cool thing called home assistant it's open source it can run on something as small as a Raspberry Pi you can self-host it and all the data stays on your local network where it's not 100 safe but it's still way safer than being on the open internet home assistant integrates with tons and tons of services like homekit Alexa Google Assistant zigbee Philips U Samsung SmartThings Google Cast Z-Wave and more and they will probably also support the matter standard when that thing is available which will probably unify all these things but home assistant isn't perfect first out of the box it's local only so no controlling your stuff when you're not on your own Wi-Fi network you can solve that using home assistant cloud and this serves as a messenger between your home and the various cloud services you might use and this Cloud doesn't store anything so at least it isn't super susceptible to attack although someone could hack the server and listen to everything that is being passed on in there but guess what if you use that you're still using other cloud services like a voice assistant for example to communicate with home assistant and that means your data still goes to a third party for example Amazon if you use Alexa to talk to your home assistant all the devices you're using also will still phone home to their respective companies only your home assistant Hub will be fully private which means you have to pick smart home appliance that don't use the cloud and that are compatible with home assistant and this is probably why home assistant will never catch on for the general public why would you want to go through all that trouble to make that stuff work and host it yourself when your Samsung TV is already a smart home hub or your Apple TV but the trade-off is that you're putting all your data on servers you don't control at all and it's not just browsing data here it's direct live feeds of your home people who ring your doorbell or just walk in front of your door a map of your house recordings of your kids that data is then used to sell you products but can also be hacked by malicious actors it can be leaked or accessed by employees or given to governments to use against you depending on who controls your government at any given point your political beliefs your religious beliefs your sexual orientation your gender this is a massive issue and this is why my house is a dumb house and not a smart house until I'm confident that everything I want to do in my house will be home assistant compatible and will not talk to any cloud service then my window blinds will stay hand cranked my doorbell will say stupid and my thermostat will only work when I actually touch it so basically it's the same as everything else if you want to stay private you have to work extra hard except in this case it's not just a few browsing data on the websites you visit it's your own personal life in your own personal house with your family and your friends being affected as well it is way worse so yeah yes it is more work but it's probably also really worth it to spend that extra time to stay private for your smart home oh you know you could just get off your ass and actually trigger the light switch to turn on your lights it also works exactly like today's sponsor if you need a new device to run Linux on start buying Windows devices and replacing windows with Linux buy a device that's been made to run Linux from tuxedo today's sponsor they have a big range from small Ultrabooks to nux to gaming workstations to laptop to gaming laptops everything you might want and you can open them repair them upgrade them you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop or you can have no logo at all if you prefer you can have a Super Key after choosing with a tax logo or Linux logo they are very customizable and they're all available through the link in the description below so if you need a new device to run Linux on check them out they are really good so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoy it and if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it the dislike button still works and you can tell me in the comments as well why you think this video sucked and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both of these members get access to a weekly podcast on Mondays and also the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so check those links out if you're interested and in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and welcome to this Linux and open source news video and you're gonna want to stick to at least the middle of the video because I have an announcement to make but I'm not gonna make it right now let's just say it's about getting all the news but without seeing my ugly face so this week our main items are Apple being fined for privacy violations in France we have new Mastodon users that arrived after the Twitter acquisition not necessarily sticking around and we have Mozilla joining the fattyverse with their own Mastodon instance and we also have this Segway to today's sponsor thanks to linode for sponsoring this video Leonard is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own next Cloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games like pie hole pie hole is a DNS sinkhole that filters out requests to add serving domains basically it lets you block ads and improve Network performance it lets you actively monitor every DNS request made on your network and block requests as they come in and you can deploy it in one click only nodes so you can ensure I stay poor and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below Apple's marketing campaign might be hitting the Privacy beats pretty hard but it doesn't mean you should trust them on that front as this new find indicates the French kneel for commission National de la formatic or national commission for computer science and freedoms just find Apple for a measly 8 million Euros which isn't much but is still a condemnation of the company's bad privacy practices app Apple was found to be illegally harvesting user data to Target them with ads without proper consent Apple apparently failed to obtain the consent of French iPhone users before depositing or writing identifiers used for advertising purposes on their phones in the App Store Apple had already been fined in France last month for another million euros for imposing abusive commercial Clauses on French app Developers for accessing the App Store now of course Apple will appeal this privacy decision as they say they prioritize user privacy and that they do more than anyone else to provide users with a clear choice for personalized ads of course that choice is only applied to third-party applications and not to Apple's own apps as was evidenced in November last year turning iPhone analytics off won't stop Apple apps from collecting data and tracking you them saying they do more for privacy than anyone else is like saying I do more push-ups than my cat it might technically be true but if the Baseline is zero does it really matter better still pretty bad time to be an iPhone user Elon Musk might be driving many new users to Mastodon with the way he's handling Twitter these days and while that's great for the small fediverse platform it doesn't mean that everyone that starts using Mastodon sticks around since its peak back when musk bought Twitter the number of active Mastodon users declined by 30 with about 1.8 million of them in early January compared to 2.5 million in early December although this decrease might also be due to the holiday season when people are with their families and not on their phones all that much still it's normal to expect to decrease of users on a new platform especially considering it grew from 500 000 users to 2 million by mid-november after the mask acquisition people were bound to return to Twitter or to stop using Mastodon altogether and since mastodon's growth can be directly linked to every decision musk made with a very clear impact with each new blunder it's also normal that people would drop out because they didn't join four Mastodon they joined for alternative to Twitter which Mastodon isn't completely a lot of users are still sticking around and Mastodon is actually doing extremely well in terms of user funding they even refuse a ton of potential investment from Silicon Valley venture capital I'll have a dedicated video about Mastodon to help people move to it and understand how it works later next week or the week after that still on the fediverse topics this is something I missed at the end of 2022 but it looks like Mozilla is entering the fetty verse too they'll be testing a publicly accessible instance called mozilla.social in early 2023 which is going to be focused on Mastodon first the move is part of their pledge for a healthy internet which basically boils down to we would like people to not be bastards own Zone to promote an Internet that makes that possible Mozilla joins others like Vivaldi in offering Mastodon instances still seems like the only service most people are interested in on the fedivers which is a shame because stuff like pixel fed castopod worm or peer tube are also in excellent shape but I guess if the Mastodon experiment goes well for Mozilla they might end up hosting a few instances through other services as well I am all for more companies and non-profits joining the fedivers Mastodon and any other service if you don't like these companies and non-profits you don't use their instance and you can avoid interacting with their users and if you do like them they have kind of a seal of approval a guarantee that gives you an instance that you can trust it's way easier for someone to sign up for a service that's on mozilla.social then something that's hosted by someone you don't know at the other end of the world that you don't really trust okay you've been patient here is the announcement well these Linux and open source News videos are now also available in audio podcast form in these podcasts I cover the same topics but more in depth and with more personal opinions and I also cover more topics that just don't fit in the length of a regular Linux and open source news video it is hosted on castopod which means it's part of the fediverse you can follow it using Mastodon for example but there's also an RSS feed to add it to any podcast client you might add and it's also on iTunes and Spotify the link to access the website is in the description below using the website is also pretty cool because there's a comment section where you can let me know your feedback about the podcast and we can discuss the various topics that I mentioned which is also pretty nice okay now back to the topics at hand last week I talked about a full AMD desktop from slim book well this week we have a full AMD laptop from system 76. they announced their new Pangolin laptop which now uses AMD CPUs and gpus the new laptop doesn't have a release date just yet but it will be a 15 inch device it will have at least a full HD 144hz display with a ryzen 7 6800u coupled with a Radeon 680 M GPU it has a 70 watt hour battery and weighs 1.8 kilograms so it's not like it's an Ultrabook or anything and of course you get the usual slots for m.2 ssds up to 16 terabytes you have ddr5 Ram you have a nice sport selection and the usual potato 720p webcam unfortunately the chassis seems to have been changed compared to the previous model and battery life should be a lot better up to 10 hours compared to 6 hours for the previous gen generation the graphics chip shouldn't be anything incredible with performance about in line with the GTX 1050 TI but at least it's an AMD dedicated GPU and this means better Linux compatibility still with some performance available for video editing workflows 3D modeling or other compute intensive tasks they didn't announce all the configurations or all the options you could have but it looks like an interesting laptop and for once I might be able to review it because I've been talking more with system 76 lately since I reviewed their keyboards on the channel and so they're probably going to send me a review unit for this one which is pretty cool now yet another privacy breach and this time from Google allegedly accompanied by a small measly settlement of 23 million dollars Google agreed to pay that amount to settle a decade-long lawsuit that was opened in California in 2010. this suit still needs Court approval and concerns the fact that Google allegedly shared Search terms that consumers had typed in the search engine with advertisers and third-party vendors without permission that happened on the web and on Android and when the user clicked on any link their personal information was also apparently disclosed to set third parties and the lawsuit also alleges that these third parties paid Google to have more information about which search related factors led the user to click on a specific link or not so this would mean that Google sold private personal data but also sold all the previous history and the decisions the user made that made them click on a specific link and so this means that Google would have violated the stored Communications act which is a U.S federal law Google had already tried to settle the case for 8.5 million dollars in 2013 but that settlement fell through because of decisions in another case which basically means that they were convicted of something similarly Shady which convinced the opposing lawyers that they had a shot at a bigger amount and look Google settling this case isn't an admission of guilt but it kinda is because even with such a measly amount they dragged this lawsuit for more than 10 years why would they settle now it's basically admitting that yes okay you know what we're gonna pay you so you stop bothering us without privacy violations which reminds us that whether you're an Apple user or an Android User you're not private and it all sucks now if you thought gnome developers never listened to users or did whatever they wanted well this new initiative might be interesting to you they're introducing a new extension called Focus indicator which is meant for users to be able to preview a potential change in Gnome 44 which is the removal of the application name menu in the top panel and its replacement by a new animation when changing which window is focused this application name menu initially contained basically everything the hamburger menu now contains on gnome apps and it also served for the user to know which app was focused at the moment but since since all the contents of this menu are now basically useless only letting you quit the app or show its details in Gnome software this menu doesn't really serve that much of a purpose and The Gnome design team also says it's not clear what it does is it a task switcher a shortcut to an application or something else they say it's basically not comprehensible and so they're testing its replacement with an animation instead when focusing a new window it will have a small zoom in and out effect to indicate to the user that it is indeed in Focus it's pretty cool that they're letting users test this out and give feedback and I guess it's a good use of the extensions mechanism and it also lets you tweak the animation parameters if you want now in its current state I have zero problems with that menu being removed it serves no purpose I literally never clicked on it once to do anything with the currently focused application I would prefer if they made that menu more useful like with the contents of the hamburger menu like each used to have or even with the full menu bar on applications that still have one but if they're not going to improve it they might as well get rid of it it serves no purpose there are some good news on the unity desktop environment front they are now working on the ability to run it underway land this new variant is called Unity X and it has all the same features as Unity 7 but with the ability to run it with any Window Manager you want replacing or removing the panel and more Unity X is basically exactly like the current Unity but with the ability to mix and match components something you can't do in the current Unity version it is already available on gitlab but it will have convenient packages in the next Ubuntu unity and Manjaro Unity releases now the dash works and looks as you would expect but you can adjust the opacity of it the HUD that lets you search through menu bar entries is now independent from the dash and it supports more applications than the regular Unity had and it can also be opened in multiple apps at the same time the control center is the same but has options to change more settings than in the default unity and there's a new yaml file that you can edit to replace the window manager the panel the settings Daemon and more now seeing that Unity X has all the same features but more and better compared to the regular Unity version I don't really know why they keep working on the regular Unity instead of just working on Unity X but I guess there's something I might be missing still it's good to have this because more modularity means more distributions might be able to ship an implementation of unity instead of having to stick to the current very rigid desktop that it offers and on to the gaming news with the release of proton next 7.0-6 letting you test the newest advancements and making a bunch of games playable like the Uncharted Legacy of Thieves collection Gotham Knights or Heroes of the dark proton experimental the even more Alpha quality testing release also fixes a bunch of stuff like alt tabbing being broken on ground 43 various performance tweaks and improvements and letting Halo Infinite Run even though there are still plenty of graphical issues with Nvidia Hardware if you like emulation dolphin the Wii and Gamecube Emulator is going to get a nice big performance boost using Vulcan they will be using the Vulcan memory allocator to better handle graphical RAM and this should result in performance being massively better especially for Super Mario Galaxy which should be able to reach 140 FPS on the steam deck instead of around 80. most games should see better performance but not necessarily of that magnitude and a while back someone decided to start working on a new open source Nvidia driver for Vulcan based on what Nvidia opened up earlier in 2022 this driver called nvk was to be a replacement for Nuvo starting fresh without needing reverse engineering but it couldn't really run anything at the time well now it can run video games the developer posted a screenshot of the Talos principle running although a pretty abysmal frame rate namely 5 FPS but it can still render the game which is nice the developer already knows how to fix that performance issue and is working on it I am so glad to see a modern open source driver for NVIDIA making strides it probably will not be completely fully production usable before the end of the year I would not expect it to be but still it's insane that in just a few months they managed to get a game completely rendered using Vulcan with a brand new driver started from scratch it's cool and it's also cool that it only took me minutes to create this segue to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer to run Linux on stop buying Windows devices and installing Linux on top of it and praying that it works just buy a computer that was designed to run Linux from tuxedo for example which is today's sponsor they're based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have products for basically every price point and every need whether you're looking for a laptop or a desktop for a small affordable Ultrabook or for a super Decked Out workstation that's never going to leave your desk they have it they're customizable they're repairable they're upgradable and you can have your own Super key on the keyboard of your laptop your own custom keyboard layout as well or your own logo on the lid of your laptop or engraved on your desktop as well they have tons of options so if you need a new computer you want to run Linux on check out the link in the description below and buy one from tuxedo they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it there's the dislike button and the comment section below as well and if you want to support the channel there's a PayPal Link in the description there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video and there are links to my patreon page and my YouTube memberships page both get access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topic that I thought so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and welcome to your first Linux open source and privacy news video of the Year whereby happenstance most of the bigger topics are super inflammatory yay this week we have Arch being touted as the most popular distro although the methodology to reach that conclusion is heavily flawed we have x.org or X11 completely dying off as contributors simply desert the project and we also have meta getting an enormous find from the EU as a confirmation of a previous decision for them breaching privacy laws and we also have more information about system 76's Cosmic desktop environment we have fully AMD GPU and CPUs powered devices running Linux out of the box and we have this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and if you run Centos machines you might be starting to panic about the fast approaching end of life of Centos 7. well you don't have to worry anymore because thanks to tuck scare you can still get four years of free software updates and security patches for Centos when you purchase a kernel Care Enterprise subscription so not only do you get live patching for these servers to stay secure and up to date without any downtime or reboots or maintenance Windows to plan around but you can also keep your current operating system so you have more time to plan your upgrade path check out Coral Care Enterprise and get your free extended support for Centos 7 by clicking the link in the description below so is Arch the most popular Linux distribution because according to Reddit users it is the linuxiak website used the number of members in the various distribution related subreddits as an indicator of popularity and Arch Linux is number number one with 226 000 members followed by Ubuntu with 209 000 members then tales with 91 000 then Fedora meant Kali Linux Manjaro Debian Papa West and red hat and open Souza and Elementary areas follow and then poor Solas kubuntu MX Linux or slackware Trail far far behind of course the methodology here is completely flawed as Reddit is not a good indicator of popularity since it is not something that is widely used by every category of user and people being members of a subreddit doesn't mean they actually like the distribution they might just be here for trolling purposes so basically there's a very visible selection bias which is also why Arch has the most members Reddit isn't used by regular average people that might be more at ease on a more simple distro than Arch and since Arch is more complex it also probably has more members and it's subreddit because there are way more issues to solve while users of more simple distros use them quietly without ever joining the subreddit at all and the fact that Arch users can't help but communicate to everyone around them that they do in fact use Arch by the way is probably another very big bias in terms of community sizes now more seriously X11 development has all but completely stopped in 2022 only 156 comets have been made to the X server Master branch on git half of what was done last year that amounts to 3 600 lines of code added and 888 lines removed now as a comparison in 2021 there were 31 000 new lines of code and 180 000 lines removed so basically in 2022 it's as low as it was in 2003 when they switched from their old development model in the middle of a year these changes were made by 32 people only down from 48 last year and that's also the lowest number of contributors the X server has seen since 2003. of course it is not hard to imagine why most companies that contributed to X11 now contribute to Weyland implementations instead because that's Now the default on the biggest distros out there like Ubuntu or Fedora and the code bases for these implementations they are leaner they're easier to handle and they will let them Implement more modern multi-monitor handling better Hardware acceleration better compositing or HDR support x.org is basically in maintenance mode with no new features being added and if they were they probably wouldn't get any support from most desktop environments who are mostly focused on Wayland right now so yeah goodbye eggs.org you've served us very faithfully and loyally and you will still continue to work for decades to come but you will not be maintained in a few years that's for sure it's such a big big code base two three five or even 10 people can probably not maintain it properly for real world use in real world distribution so either a distro that does not want to use Wayland starts picking up the slack or everybody moves to Weyland then we forget that x.org ever existed now remember that nice little fine meta was going to get from the EU well the Irish data protection commission confirmed the decision this week but they didn't really wanted to Facebook will be fined 210 million euros and Instagram 180 million euros for breaching the gdpr so basically as a recap meta forced users to agree to data collection and data usage for ads in their terms of service without giving them a choice to opt out which is against the European law the EU data protection board confirmed that access to personal data for targeted ads is not a necessary part of the core service that Facebook or Instagram provide what's detailed in the contract this decision means that basically any company that wants access to personal data needs to ask permission of their customers they can't just say if you use our product then you accept the data collection and use for ads and that's huge news now meta has been ordered to bring their products into compliance with the gdpr within three months and they will have to ask their users for consent which will definitely hurt their business at least in the EU as they can still use that behavior in other countries with more lacks privacy laws of course meta announced that they will appeal the decision they're taking the stones that it would be weird for a social media service to not be tailored to the user they also don't think they will have to ask consent from every user saying that other businesses don't and they're looking for ways to avoid doing that now what's more interesting here is that the Irish data protection commission doesn't seem to agree with the EU on the matter as they do think the terms and conditions are not clear enough for users to understand that they signed up for an ad contract but they're also saying that meta should be allowed to just enforce consent through these terms and conditions as long as it's clearly stated that they also include agreement for data usage for ads but since gdpr enforcement is done in cooperation with multiple data protection agencies from multiple European countries they had to agree to a collective decision so basically this is a big mess and Facebook will probably drag this one out in courts for years but I don't think they'll have an easy time arguing that targeted ads are a core part of the experience for the user their core part of the service for them for the company but not for users using the service and you could provide a tailored social media experience without having tailored ads so I don't see how they could win this one but I'm not a lawyer so we'll have fantasy now since everyone always asks where is the full AMD Linux Hardware well there's one computer doing that now Slim book released a brand new desktop the Chimera Ventus AMD in its black limited edition it has a nice black metal case with a stylized tux drawn in white wireframe and it runs as its name implies only AMD Hardware it uses a ryzen 7000 series CPU and it offers a choice between a radian 6750 XT a 7900 XT or 7900 XTX which are the very latest AMD cards it supports ddr5 Ram up to 64 gigs and up to 4 terabytes of storage and of course since it's a limited edition the inventory is finite and it starts at 2 000 Euros taxes included for a 16 gig model with one terabyte of spinning rust not SSD and the ryzen 7 700x CPU and the Radeon 6750 XT card of course you can also trick it out with all the tacky RGB you want to ruin that elegant black look and you can also opt for the non-black Edition which offers a choice between Intel or AMD CPUs and Nvidia gpus as well they also have a mini ATX variant that could make for a nice team console with Steam OS so now people can finally stop asking me on every Hardware review where the full AMD devices are okay that's just only one and we still need a laptop using an AMD GPU instead of an Nvidia GPU so the question is still valid it looks like Google is interested in the risk 5 architecture the open source CPU project that lets manufacturers create either super small and efficient CPUs or monstrous High Core counts beasts with the same set of instructions at the risk 5 Summit conference Google said they wanted the architecture to be seen as a tier 1 platform on Android on par with arm they say there's a lot of work to do to optimize Android for risk 5 and they outlined a multi-year roadmap but still the Android open source project already started to receive patches for risk 5 in September the belt can even already be downloaded by anyone right now and they promised initial Android emulator support for 2023 and support for Java applications in the first quarter now why would Google invest so much time into a yet unproven CPU architecture it's probably because arm is starting to be more of a risk than it was before the company that handles this CPU architecture was almost sold to Nvidia before that company backed out and they now want to have an IPO for the company to publicly trade it which put together are clear signs that investors want to pull out with a nice big amount of money arm also sued one of their biggest consumers Qualcomm because they bought a chip design firm called nuvia an arm would like Qualcomm to destroy nuvia's cheap designs because basically they are fusing their license to use Arm where before there were two licenses so it's kind of a breach of contract in arms eyes it's weird so basically arm feels like a company that doesn't know what it's doing or where it's going and since Android basically relies on arm to even have any hardware to ship on supporting an open source architecture they could use themselves to design their own chips and that couldn't be controlled by a potential competitor is probably a safer bet I personally have no problems with this I would rather have a tech giant like Google contributing and supporting an open source CPU architecture than fighting it tooth and nail or creating their own as a competitor and since the project has existed for a while now and already has governance in place I don't think Google can just hijack it and decide to do whatever they want with it so I think it's good now system 76 shared more details about their upcoming Cosmic desktop environment developed in Rust first they will be integrating the slint toolkit as well as the iced one while iced is made for software written in Rust slint would open the desktop up to other programming languages as well like JavaScript applets and applications they're also looking at access kit which is a project written in Rust as well that aims to combine accessibility related code from multiple toolkits into a single cross-platform framework so stuff like screen readers font size scaling and the like would be easier to integrate with Cosmic they're also reworking the notification indicators that they call applets these are now all integrated into iced and they have applets for audio battery Graphics Network notifications power time and workspaces they're also expanding the feature set people might be used to in these applets like adding the option to limit the batteries charged to 80 to save up on battery cycles and sure every time they share something it kind of looks like they're just re-implementing all the basics and that's probably what they're doing because that's where you start when you make a new project but still it shows that the desktop has a Clear Vision a clear Direction and that's very reassuring for the final product and let's wrap up with the gaming news now it looks like the growth of Linux Gamers has stalled a little bit with the Linux market share on Steam dipping to 1.38 in December compared to around 1.5 in November nothing concerning we'll have to see how the the trend evolves steamos is still the number one distro use with 24 of Linux steam users using it more exciting we have valve teasing HDR support for Linux games at least on Steam OS and the steam deck it's very early work but developers have reported it working on deaths trending and deeprock Galactic for example nothing is available for the general public of course and that work will probably have to be replicated and reworked to be usable in other systems that don't use gamescope which is steamos's compositor and we also have AMD Ray tracing getting closer to being usable Mesa is going to enable support for it in Quake 2 RTX and doom Eternal now why these two games because the work isn't done and it needs more debugging but they also want to start enabling for specific games to get more feedback and allow for wider testing this should land in Mesa 23 later this year pretty exciting stuff with HDR support and full on Ray tracing there won't be much that Linux is missing compared to Windows well except for Destiny 2 because Bungie are a bunch of idiots just like I would be an idiot if I didn't tell you about today's sponsor if you're looking to buy a new device to run Linux on don't just buy any old Windows computer and slap your distro on it and pray that everything works well buy something from tuxedo the link is in the description they're a company that makes laptops and desktops they ship them worldwide and they ship them with Linux out of the box the hardware is picked specifically to work with Linux they have a big range of devices that should satisfy every need and every price point and all of them are customizable upgradable and repairable and you can even do stuff like engrave your own custom keyboard layout on your laptop or your own custom logo on the lid of the laptop so if you need a new device don't hesitate click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well there's also that dislike button you can click it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to help support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and I left links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both will give you access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux Tech open source and general Channel related things and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel for the month that comes after so if you're interested both links are down there and if you're not well it's okay I guess thanks for watching and you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and welcome to your first Linux open source and privacy news video of the Year whereby happenstance most of the bigger topics are super inflammatory yay this week we have Arch being touted as the most popular distro although the methodology to reach that conclusion is heavily flawed we have x.org or X11 completely dying off as contributors simply desert the project and we also have meta getting an enormous find from the EU as a confirmation of a previous decision for them breaching privacy laws and we also have more information about system 76's Cosmic desktop environment we have fully AMD GPU and CPUs powered devices running Linux out of the box and we have this Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and if you run Centos machines you might be starting to panic about the fast approaching end of life of Centos 7. well you don't have to worry anymore because thanks to tuck scare you can still get four years of free software updates and security patches for Centos when you purchase a kernel Care Enterprise subscription so not only do you get live patching for these servers to stay secure and up to date without any downtime or reboots or maintenance Windows to plan around but you can also keep your current operating system so you have more time to plan your upgrade path check out Coral Care Enterprise and get your free extended support for Centos 7 by clicking the link in the description below so is Arch the most popular Linux distribution because according to Reddit users it is the linuxiak website used the number of members in the various distribution related subreddits as an indicator of popularity and Arch Linux is number number one with 226 000 members followed by Ubuntu with 209 000 members then tales with 91 000 then Fedora meant Kali Linux Manjaro Debian Papa West and red hat and open Souza and Elementary areas follow and then poor Solas kubuntu MX Linux or slackware Trail far far behind of course the methodology here is completely flawed as Reddit is not a good indicator of popularity since it is not something that is widely used by every category of user and people being members of a subreddit doesn't mean they actually like the distribution they might just be here for trolling purposes so basically there's a very visible selection bias which is also why Arch has the most members Reddit isn't used by regular average people that might be more at ease on a more simple distro than Arch and since Arch is more complex it also probably has more members and it's subreddit because there are way more issues to solve while users of more simple distros use them quietly without ever joining the subreddit at all and the fact that Arch users can't help but communicate to everyone around them that they do in fact use Arch by the way is probably another very big bias in terms of community sizes now more seriously X11 development has all but completely stopped in 2022 only 156 comets have been made to the X server Master branch on git half of what was done last year that amounts to 3 600 lines of code added and 888 lines removed now as a comparison in 2021 there were 31 000 new lines of code and 180 000 lines removed so basically in 2022 it's as low as it was in 2003 when they switched from their old development model in the middle of a year these changes were made by 32 people only down from 48 last year and that's also the lowest number of contributors the X server has seen since 2003. of course it is not hard to imagine why most companies that contributed to X11 now contribute to Weyland implementations instead because that's Now the default on the biggest distros out there like Ubuntu or Fedora and the code bases for these implementations they are leaner they're easier to handle and they will let them Implement more modern multi-monitor handling better Hardware acceleration better compositing or HDR support x.org is basically in maintenance mode with no new features being added and if they were they probably wouldn't get any support from most desktop environments who are mostly focused on Wayland right now so yeah goodbye eggs.org you've served us very faithfully and loyally and you will still continue to work for decades to come but you will not be maintained in a few years that's for sure it's such a big big code base two three five or even 10 people can probably not maintain it properly for real world use in real world distribution so either a distro that does not want to use Wayland starts picking up the slack or everybody moves to Weyland then we forget that x.org ever existed now remember that nice little fine meta was going to get from the EU well the Irish data protection commission confirmed the decision this week but they didn't really wanted to Facebook will be fined 210 million euros and Instagram 180 million euros for breaching the gdpr so basically as a recap meta forced users to agree to data collection and data usage for ads in their terms of service without giving them a choice to opt out which is against the European law the EU data protection board confirmed that access to personal data for targeted ads is not a necessary part of the core service that Facebook or Instagram provide what's detailed in the contract this decision means that basically any company that wants access to personal data needs to ask permission of their customers they can't just say if you use our product then you accept the data collection and use for ads and that's huge news now meta has been ordered to bring their products into compliance with the gdpr within three months and they will have to ask their users for consent which will definitely hurt their business at least in the EU as they can still use that behavior in other countries with more lacks privacy laws of course meta announced that they will appeal the decision they're taking the stones that it would be weird for a social media service to not be tailored to the user they also don't think they will have to ask consent from every user saying that other businesses don't and they're looking for ways to avoid doing that now what's more interesting here is that the Irish data protection commission doesn't seem to agree with the EU on the matter as they do think the terms and conditions are not clear enough for users to understand that they signed up for an ad contract but they're also saying that meta should be allowed to just enforce consent through these terms and conditions as long as it's clearly stated that they also include agreement for data usage for ads but since gdpr enforcement is done in cooperation with multiple data protection agencies from multiple European countries they had to agree to a collective decision so basically this is a big mess and Facebook will probably drag this one out in courts for years but I don't think they'll have an easy time arguing that targeted ads are a core part of the experience for the user their core part of the service for them for the company but not for users using the service and you could provide a tailored social media experience without having tailored ads so I don't see how they could win this one but I'm not a lawyer so we'll have fantasy now since everyone always asks where is the full AMD Linux Hardware well there's one computer doing that now Slim book released a brand new desktop the Chimera Ventus AMD in its black limited edition it has a nice black metal case with a stylized tux drawn in white wireframe and it runs as its name implies only AMD Hardware it uses a ryzen 7000 series CPU and it offers a choice between a radian 6750 XT a 7900 XT or 7900 XTX which are the very latest AMD cards it supports ddr5 Ram up to 64 gigs and up to 4 terabytes of storage and of course since it's a limited edition the inventory is finite and it starts at 2 000 Euros taxes included for a 16 gig model with one terabyte of spinning rust not SSD and the ryzen 7 700x CPU and the Radeon 6750 XT card of course you can also trick it out with all the tacky RGB you want to ruin that elegant black look and you can also opt for the non-black Edition which offers a choice between Intel or AMD CPUs and Nvidia gpus as well they also have a mini ATX variant that could make for a nice team console with Steam OS so now people can finally stop asking me on every Hardware review where the full AMD devices are okay that's just only one and we still need a laptop using an AMD GPU instead of an Nvidia GPU so the question is still valid it looks like Google is interested in the risk 5 architecture the open source CPU project that lets manufacturers create either super small and efficient CPUs or monstrous High Core counts beasts with the same set of instructions at the risk 5 Summit conference Google said they wanted the architecture to be seen as a tier 1 platform on Android on par with arm they say there's a lot of work to do to optimize Android for risk 5 and they outlined a multi-year roadmap but still the Android open source project already started to receive patches for risk 5 in September the belt can even already be downloaded by anyone right now and they promised initial Android emulator support for 2023 and support for Java applications in the first quarter now why would Google invest so much time into a yet unproven CPU architecture it's probably because arm is starting to be more of a risk than it was before the company that handles this CPU architecture was almost sold to Nvidia before that company backed out and they now want to have an IPO for the company to publicly trade it which put together are clear signs that investors want to pull out with a nice big amount of money arm also sued one of their biggest consumers Qualcomm because they bought a chip design firm called nuvia an arm would like Qualcomm to destroy nuvia's cheap designs because basically they are fusing their license to use Arm where before there were two licenses so it's kind of a breach of contract in arms eyes it's weird so basically arm feels like a company that doesn't know what it's doing or where it's going and since Android basically relies on arm to even have any hardware to ship on supporting an open source architecture they could use themselves to design their own chips and that couldn't be controlled by a potential competitor is probably a safer bet I personally have no problems with this I would rather have a tech giant like Google contributing and supporting an open source CPU architecture than fighting it tooth and nail or creating their own as a competitor and since the project has existed for a while now and already has governance in place I don't think Google can just hijack it and decide to do whatever they want with it so I think it's good now system 76 shared more details about their upcoming Cosmic desktop environment developed in Rust first they will be integrating the slint toolkit as well as the iced one while iced is made for software written in Rust slint would open the desktop up to other programming languages as well like JavaScript applets and applications they're also looking at access kit which is a project written in Rust as well that aims to combine accessibility related code from multiple toolkits into a single cross-platform framework so stuff like screen readers font size scaling and the like would be easier to integrate with Cosmic they're also reworking the notification indicators that they call applets these are now all integrated into iced and they have applets for audio battery Graphics Network notifications power time and workspaces they're also expanding the feature set people might be used to in these applets like adding the option to limit the batteries charged to 80 to save up on battery cycles and sure every time they share something it kind of looks like they're just re-implementing all the basics and that's probably what they're doing because that's where you start when you make a new project but still it shows that the desktop has a Clear Vision a clear Direction and that's very reassuring for the final product and let's wrap up with the gaming news now it looks like the growth of Linux Gamers has stalled a little bit with the Linux market share on Steam dipping to 1.38 in December compared to around 1.5 in November nothing concerning we'll have to see how the the trend evolves steamos is still the number one distro use with 24 of Linux steam users using it more exciting we have valve teasing HDR support for Linux games at least on Steam OS and the steam deck it's very early work but developers have reported it working on deaths trending and deeprock Galactic for example nothing is available for the general public of course and that work will probably have to be replicated and reworked to be usable in other systems that don't use gamescope which is steamos's compositor and we also have AMD Ray tracing getting closer to being usable Mesa is going to enable support for it in Quake 2 RTX and doom Eternal now why these two games because the work isn't done and it needs more debugging but they also want to start enabling for specific games to get more feedback and allow for wider testing this should land in Mesa 23 later this year pretty exciting stuff with HDR support and full on Ray tracing there won't be much that Linux is missing compared to Windows well except for Destiny 2 because Bungie are a bunch of idiots just like I would be an idiot if I didn't tell you about today's sponsor if you're looking to buy a new device to run Linux on don't just buy any old Windows computer and slap your distro on it and pray that everything works well buy something from tuxedo the link is in the description they're a company that makes laptops and desktops they ship them worldwide and they ship them with Linux out of the box the hardware is picked specifically to work with Linux they have a big range of devices that should satisfy every need and every price point and all of them are customizable upgradable and repairable and you can even do stuff like engrave your own custom keyboard layout on your laptop or your own custom logo on the lid of the laptop so if you need a new device don't hesitate click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well there's also that dislike button you can click it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to help support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and I left links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both will give you access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux Tech open source and general Channel related things and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel for the month that comes after so if you're interested both links are down there and if you're not well it's okay I guess thanks for watching and you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and don't worry this is not going to be your average tier list video no sitting in front of cheer maker with my face the whole time because who wants to look at that for that long still keep in mind that this is my personal ranking based on my experiences with my personal preferences it's totally okay if you have completely different opinions and you can jump in the comments and let me know your own ranking for every single one of these desktops now what will definitely be as steel though is this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenod lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nextcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so let's begin with the rankings then they're gonna start at no way then no thanks then decent good and great let's start with no gnome is a desktop environment I've used for a long time it's currently the one I use on my laptop and my desktop both on Fedora but I also used it in the past on Ubuntu Manjaro and other distributions it's extendable with extensions it's customizable if you're okay with using d-conf editor instead of purely graphical settings and it's also themeable but that's getting more and more tricky now gnome has a desktop I find really nice to use but there are things that bug me and that means it will be in good and not in great first some really basic options aren't available by default and that's just stupid second extensions might be awesome but if you move to a new gnome release right after it's out then most of your extensions won't be updated yet and there's the 50 50 chance they won't work anymore still it has in my opinion the best application ecosystem on Linux and it looks amazing by default now that's highly subjective I mean some people think this looks good I don't see it Chrome also has the best touchpad gestures I used on any operating system Mac OS included and it's fast smooth and responsive so good but not great because some options should really really be there by default iPhone settings and startup applications and also because while I personally enjoy the default gnome layout it's very opinionated and if you like a minimize button a maximize button a dark or a notification tray you're gonna have to jump through hoops to get those now on to KDE the most powerful desktop you could ever have on any operating system period it has simple defaults super powerful options plenty of readily available customization and a large ecosystem of applications although not as good looking or up-to-date as gnomes I used KDE a ton I always have a laptop with it installed and it was my main desktop environment for a lot of the time I was running this YouTube channel now it used to have a lot of bugs and stability issues but in my experience that's not the case anymore but I'm certain the comment section will be a nice chorus of people telling me how buggy their experience with it was now for me personally it's not and a few big issues I had with it on laptops notably touchpad gestures are now fixed even though they're not as good as gnomes and still I'm going to put KD in the great category why because its problems are not problems for me the fact that it has tons of options and very crowded Settings app I don't care about that I know where to find things and I would rather have to search for a few seconds to find what I want to change then having to look it up online because the option doesn't exist and I'll need an extension or third-party app to change it and also every problem I have with KDE is generally fixed in the following bug fix release or major release and yes it absolutely means that I plan to switch my main desktop to KDE my laptop will stay on ground because it's better on laptops but on desktops KDE is coming when I get the time now budgie this one I used for a while on Manjaro as my main desktop environment at the time I would have put it in good nowadays it's a no thanks for me budgie is basically gnome plus a few add-ons like the side panel customization options and better notifications the thing is budgie has been kinda stuck in limbos since gnome announced they will use libid Vita the main budgie Dev left Solus the distro that was budgie's Flagship and said he would work on making a brand new version of all budgie apps using the enlightenment Foundation libraries and since then no real news that I could see and the current version of budgie doesn't seem to move at all that doesn't mean the experience is bad or anything but it's still not moving forward at all and hasn't for a full year at least and their decision to try and rewrite everything just because liberta exists makes no sense to me just make because the manager that bypasses lipid Vitae can be done it's been done now most of what you can do with budgie you can do in regular gnome with extensions and get a more up-to-date stack more frequent updates and Bug fixes and the same performance so yeah for me budgie is a no thanks let's move on to xfce and this one is a hard one because on the surface it looks very old and pretty ugly by default it doesn't really support most of the new technological Linux stack like Wayland it's not a complete desktop experience without its own app center for example and it generally seems stuck in the past on the other hand it's extremely fast and responsive it's very customizable with themes layouts panel applets and the like and this means it can use most other desktop environments apps to fill in the gaps xfc I'm going to put in decent because while I personally would not use it I can understand why people do and why they like it which I don't really see for anything that's ranked lower mate is another hard one I loved gnome 2 back in the day and mate is exactly that that layout was wonderful back then but nowadays It suffers from the same problems as xfce no Waylon support no one-to-one touchpad gestures not a complete experience without its own app store or design philosophy or guidelines mate isn't a desktop I use too much apart from the month I spent with it back when I made my mate experiment playlist don't watch it I was even worse back then at this than I am today mate is going in the decent category just like xfc I wouldn't use it personally apart from the novelty of going back to gnome 2 but I can understand why people like it especially if you have your eyes glued to the system monitor to make sure you don't go over 500 megabytes of RAM used at any time for some reason apparently some people do that just buy another stick of ram one gigabyte of RAM usage at idle is not high now cinnamon is what Linux Mint uses and it's pretty damn complete it has applications for basically everything out of the box you can do everything graphically without needing to turn to a third-party app whether it's managing software sources installing applications installing software packages changing every setting you name it bloat is in the eye of the beholder and what some call bloated I call freaking awesome cinnamon is also super customizable you can change the whole layout use different applets change all the themes the icons the cursors and all that out of the box without installing anything extra and it's reasonably fast as well but because there's always a but cinnamon lacks touchpad gesture something that is a huge negative for me and some parts of its interface are really dated notably how you change your panel layout the new look makes it quite fresh and modern in my opinion but it's still not on par with Breeze or advice and also they seem hell bent on not even starting to support Weyland which sucks because even if it's not a hundred percent ready right now it will be very soon and cinnamon taking two years to be as fluid and efficient as other desktops will definitely suck big time so cinnamon goes in the good category it's a really solid choice but next to Katie I can't put it on par with it deep in desktop is one that looks phenomenal on the surface but that I could never use day to day now sure it's beautiful and it has a design Flair and a fluidity that is quite remarkable but as soon as you try to install anything other than the default it all falls apart nothing looks like the default's deep in apps on your desktop becomes a disjointed mess the default apps are way too simple and can do in most cases even less than gnomes which are already pretty bare both the deep in app store is completely useless and even translations are quite hesitant they have that Charming Chinese style of using the subtly wrong word that almost means the thing that they think it means it's quite nice and fun actually especially coming from a non-native English speaker but I just can't see why you would pick deepen unless its default apps are enough for you it's a no thanks for me especially considering you can't get it on most distros and that to default deep in this row is kinda sucks now this one if you had asked me three years ago I would have put in great today I'll put it in no thanks if you're a long time viewer I will give you a little bit of time to pick your draw off of the floor yes the elementary Fanboy In Me Is Dead this is Pantheon Elementary Us's desktop and while I truly feel it had the edge over any other gtk based desktop two or three years ago it has lost every Advantage it had during this time period Pantheon was awesome because they had the best touchpad gestures the best design guidelines and the best app ecosystem they had the best app store and a very simple easy to use experience although not customizable in the slightest they had a rolling release model for apps and the desktop and it was a dream for me but unfortunately the team doesn't feel like it's big enough to tackle a distro a desktop and a suite of apps anymore Elementary us6 is the current release and while 7 should be out in the coming months it won't bring anything revolutionary it still uses X11 it's based on Ubuntu 22.04 almost a year old at that point and while there are a few style changes for icons there are no truly big features on the front or back end and to make things worse gnome now has lipid Vita which has spurred gtk devs that used to make Elementary apps to make gnome apps instead and gnome has better touchpad gestures than Elementary now and they also have a better app center now as well and Elementary OS also has zero support for Wayland right now which is also a big negative in my book The fact they don't ship flat Hub enabled out of the box is a distro decision not a desktop one so I won't knock them for it but it's still stupid so that's a no thanks for me there is no reason nowadays to big Pantheon over gnome because everything that Pantheon does can be replicated in Gnome with a few extensions and you'll get a better Modern stack better gestures better applications a better ecosystem I don't see why you would go for Elementary OS these days now Unity is having a Bible right now with features in the works a new t as it stands right now it's only decent for me back when it was the official default on Ubuntu I would have put it in the great category fight me nowadays it's only decent because it looks pretty dated the panel and its applets are straight from the gnome 2 era there isn't much customization to be had the dash isn't as useful as it once was because filters at the bottom isn't pretty ergonomic with a mouse and while it's a fun trip down memory lane for me it doesn't really appeal to me all that much it still has great stuff like the HUD or the global menu but these things are overshadowed by the general age and feel of unity but the new version 7.7 which will be the default on Ubuntu unity 23.04 in a few months will definitely fix a lot of those appearance related problems a lot of the issues with the dash and they even say they're gonna start working on well and support they say it's coming soon so maybe the next time I make this video if I do make another one it will jump up by one or two categories and finally there's cute fish the it was dead but apparently it's not that the devs are working on it but it still looks pretty dead to me sort of desktop and it's another one that looks great on screenshots but it's going to be a no way for me it is to the point that I had a few videos planned on that desktop environment that I never made because there would have been a single good thing to say about it the default apps can do anything third-party apps look completely out of place you can't change any setting at all it's quite laggy not to mention that the project still seems completely dead despite one of the devs announcing he would pick it back up it feels like a bad clone of Mac OS or iOS and it just serves no purpose there is no way I would use that thing ever just use gnome with extensions or KDE both can replicate that layout better and be more functional and more up-to-date and there are others I can't really rate I never used LX cute but looking at it quickly I would say it's decent Enlightenment I never use that all Lumina either and for me tiling window managers aren't desktops and you really don't want me to say where I would put them well I don't want to say because that would trigger a lot of people of course these are all my opinions based on my experience and my personal tastes so viewers might be totally different so don't hesitate to let me know what you think down in the comments just make your own tier list with the same rankings that I use and we'll discuss them just like I'll discuss today's sponsor tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box now the reason why you would want that over any old Windows device that you would slap Linux on is that with tuxedo you know that it's gonna run Linux because the hardware has been picked specifically to run Linux and you're not limited in your choices either because they have a big big range from laptops to desktops Ultrabooks gaming station gaming laptops gaming Towers workstations whatever you want they have it they're all upgradable repairable and customizable up to your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop or your own custom keyboard layout etched on the keys of your laptop so if you need a new device don't go by your Windows laptop click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's also the dislike button it still works but do tell me why in the comments I bet it's because you disagree on one of my rankings and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to an exclusive weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover so check them out in the description below in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in bye [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and don't worry this is not going to be your average tier list video no sitting in front of cheer maker with my face the whole time because who wants to look at that for that long still keep in mind that this is my personal ranking based on my experiences with my personal preferences it's totally okay if you have completely different opinions and you can jump in the comments and let me know your own ranking for every single one of these desktops now what will definitely be as steel though is this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenod lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nextcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so let's begin with the rankings then they're gonna start at no way then no thanks then decent good and great let's start with no gnome is a desktop environment I've used for a long time it's currently the one I use on my laptop and my desktop both on Fedora but I also used it in the past on Ubuntu Manjaro and other distributions it's extendable with extensions it's customizable if you're okay with using d-conf editor instead of purely graphical settings and it's also themeable but that's getting more and more tricky now gnome has a desktop I find really nice to use but there are things that bug me and that means it will be in good and not in great first some really basic options aren't available by default and that's just stupid second extensions might be awesome but if you move to a new gnome release right after it's out then most of your extensions won't be updated yet and there's the 50 50 chance they won't work anymore still it has in my opinion the best application ecosystem on Linux and it looks amazing by default now that's highly subjective I mean some people think this looks good I don't see it Chrome also has the best touchpad gestures I used on any operating system Mac OS included and it's fast smooth and responsive so good but not great because some options should really really be there by default iPhone settings and startup applications and also because while I personally enjoy the default gnome layout it's very opinionated and if you like a minimize button a maximize button a dark or a notification tray you're gonna have to jump through hoops to get those now on to KDE the most powerful desktop you could ever have on any operating system period it has simple defaults super powerful options plenty of readily available customization and a large ecosystem of applications although not as good looking or up-to-date as gnomes I used KDE a ton I always have a laptop with it installed and it was my main desktop environment for a lot of the time I was running this YouTube channel now it used to have a lot of bugs and stability issues but in my experience that's not the case anymore but I'm certain the comment section will be a nice chorus of people telling me how buggy their experience with it was now for me personally it's not and a few big issues I had with it on laptops notably touchpad gestures are now fixed even though they're not as good as gnomes and still I'm going to put KD in the great category why because its problems are not problems for me the fact that it has tons of options and very crowded Settings app I don't care about that I know where to find things and I would rather have to search for a few seconds to find what I want to change then having to look it up online because the option doesn't exist and I'll need an extension or third-party app to change it and also every problem I have with KDE is generally fixed in the following bug fix release or major release and yes it absolutely means that I plan to switch my main desktop to KDE my laptop will stay on ground because it's better on laptops but on desktops KDE is coming when I get the time now budgie this one I used for a while on Manjaro as my main desktop environment at the time I would have put it in good nowadays it's a no thanks for me budgie is basically gnome plus a few add-ons like the side panel customization options and better notifications the thing is budgie has been kinda stuck in limbos since gnome announced they will use libid Vita the main budgie Dev left Solus the distro that was budgie's Flagship and said he would work on making a brand new version of all budgie apps using the enlightenment Foundation libraries and since then no real news that I could see and the current version of budgie doesn't seem to move at all that doesn't mean the experience is bad or anything but it's still not moving forward at all and hasn't for a full year at least and their decision to try and rewrite everything just because liberta exists makes no sense to me just make because the manager that bypasses lipid Vitae can be done it's been done now most of what you can do with budgie you can do in regular gnome with extensions and get a more up-to-date stack more frequent updates and Bug fixes and the same performance so yeah for me budgie is a no thanks let's move on to xfce and this one is a hard one because on the surface it looks very old and pretty ugly by default it doesn't really support most of the new technological Linux stack like Wayland it's not a complete desktop experience without its own app center for example and it generally seems stuck in the past on the other hand it's extremely fast and responsive it's very customizable with themes layouts panel applets and the like and this means it can use most other desktop environments apps to fill in the gaps xfc I'm going to put in decent because while I personally would not use it I can understand why people do and why they like it which I don't really see for anything that's ranked lower mate is another hard one I loved gnome 2 back in the day and mate is exactly that that layout was wonderful back then but nowadays It suffers from the same problems as xfce no Waylon support no one-to-one touchpad gestures not a complete experience without its own app store or design philosophy or guidelines mate isn't a desktop I use too much apart from the month I spent with it back when I made my mate experiment playlist don't watch it I was even worse back then at this than I am today mate is going in the decent category just like xfc I wouldn't use it personally apart from the novelty of going back to gnome 2 but I can understand why people like it especially if you have your eyes glued to the system monitor to make sure you don't go over 500 megabytes of RAM used at any time for some reason apparently some people do that just buy another stick of ram one gigabyte of RAM usage at idle is not high now cinnamon is what Linux Mint uses and it's pretty damn complete it has applications for basically everything out of the box you can do everything graphically without needing to turn to a third-party app whether it's managing software sources installing applications installing software packages changing every setting you name it bloat is in the eye of the beholder and what some call bloated I call freaking awesome cinnamon is also super customizable you can change the whole layout use different applets change all the themes the icons the cursors and all that out of the box without installing anything extra and it's reasonably fast as well but because there's always a but cinnamon lacks touchpad gesture something that is a huge negative for me and some parts of its interface are really dated notably how you change your panel layout the new look makes it quite fresh and modern in my opinion but it's still not on par with Breeze or advice and also they seem hell bent on not even starting to support Weyland which sucks because even if it's not a hundred percent ready right now it will be very soon and cinnamon taking two years to be as fluid and efficient as other desktops will definitely suck big time so cinnamon goes in the good category it's a really solid choice but next to Katie I can't put it on par with it deep in desktop is one that looks phenomenal on the surface but that I could never use day to day now sure it's beautiful and it has a design Flair and a fluidity that is quite remarkable but as soon as you try to install anything other than the default it all falls apart nothing looks like the default's deep in apps on your desktop becomes a disjointed mess the default apps are way too simple and can do in most cases even less than gnomes which are already pretty bare both the deep in app store is completely useless and even translations are quite hesitant they have that Charming Chinese style of using the subtly wrong word that almost means the thing that they think it means it's quite nice and fun actually especially coming from a non-native English speaker but I just can't see why you would pick deepen unless its default apps are enough for you it's a no thanks for me especially considering you can't get it on most distros and that to default deep in this row is kinda sucks now this one if you had asked me three years ago I would have put in great today I'll put it in no thanks if you're a long time viewer I will give you a little bit of time to pick your draw off of the floor yes the elementary Fanboy In Me Is Dead this is Pantheon Elementary Us's desktop and while I truly feel it had the edge over any other gtk based desktop two or three years ago it has lost every Advantage it had during this time period Pantheon was awesome because they had the best touchpad gestures the best design guidelines and the best app ecosystem they had the best app store and a very simple easy to use experience although not customizable in the slightest they had a rolling release model for apps and the desktop and it was a dream for me but unfortunately the team doesn't feel like it's big enough to tackle a distro a desktop and a suite of apps anymore Elementary us6 is the current release and while 7 should be out in the coming months it won't bring anything revolutionary it still uses X11 it's based on Ubuntu 22.04 almost a year old at that point and while there are a few style changes for icons there are no truly big features on the front or back end and to make things worse gnome now has lipid Vita which has spurred gtk devs that used to make Elementary apps to make gnome apps instead and gnome has better touchpad gestures than Elementary now and they also have a better app center now as well and Elementary OS also has zero support for Wayland right now which is also a big negative in my book The fact they don't ship flat Hub enabled out of the box is a distro decision not a desktop one so I won't knock them for it but it's still stupid so that's a no thanks for me there is no reason nowadays to big Pantheon over gnome because everything that Pantheon does can be replicated in Gnome with a few extensions and you'll get a better Modern stack better gestures better applications a better ecosystem I don't see why you would go for Elementary OS these days now Unity is having a Bible right now with features in the works a new t as it stands right now it's only decent for me back when it was the official default on Ubuntu I would have put it in the great category fight me nowadays it's only decent because it looks pretty dated the panel and its applets are straight from the gnome 2 era there isn't much customization to be had the dash isn't as useful as it once was because filters at the bottom isn't pretty ergonomic with a mouse and while it's a fun trip down memory lane for me it doesn't really appeal to me all that much it still has great stuff like the HUD or the global menu but these things are overshadowed by the general age and feel of unity but the new version 7.7 which will be the default on Ubuntu unity 23.04 in a few months will definitely fix a lot of those appearance related problems a lot of the issues with the dash and they even say they're gonna start working on well and support they say it's coming soon so maybe the next time I make this video if I do make another one it will jump up by one or two categories and finally there's cute fish the it was dead but apparently it's not that the devs are working on it but it still looks pretty dead to me sort of desktop and it's another one that looks great on screenshots but it's going to be a no way for me it is to the point that I had a few videos planned on that desktop environment that I never made because there would have been a single good thing to say about it the default apps can do anything third-party apps look completely out of place you can't change any setting at all it's quite laggy not to mention that the project still seems completely dead despite one of the devs announcing he would pick it back up it feels like a bad clone of Mac OS or iOS and it just serves no purpose there is no way I would use that thing ever just use gnome with extensions or KDE both can replicate that layout better and be more functional and more up-to-date and there are others I can't really rate I never used LX cute but looking at it quickly I would say it's decent Enlightenment I never use that all Lumina either and for me tiling window managers aren't desktops and you really don't want me to say where I would put them well I don't want to say because that would trigger a lot of people of course these are all my opinions based on my experience and my personal tastes so viewers might be totally different so don't hesitate to let me know what you think down in the comments just make your own tier list with the same rankings that I use and we'll discuss them just like I'll discuss today's sponsor tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box now the reason why you would want that over any old Windows device that you would slap Linux on is that with tuxedo you know that it's gonna run Linux because the hardware has been picked specifically to run Linux and you're not limited in your choices either because they have a big big range from laptops to desktops Ultrabooks gaming station gaming laptops gaming Towers workstations whatever you want they have it they're all upgradable repairable and customizable up to your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop or your own custom keyboard layout etched on the keys of your laptop so if you need a new device don't go by your Windows laptop click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's also the dislike button it still works but do tell me why in the comments I bet it's because you disagree on one of my rankings and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to an exclusive weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover so check them out in the description below in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in bye [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this is the last Linux and open source news video I'll make in 2022 they're coming back in 2023 of course they are so before the new year begins well Happy New Year if that's what your calendar says and let's get into it this week we have Linux passing Mac OS as the OS of choice for developers and almost passing Windows if you count WSL we have Mastodon refusing to take silicon Valley's big bucks even though they really want to give them some money and we have Tick Tock again proving that it's the worst social media app if you value your data just like I value this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by talk scare but this time I'm not going to talk about their services to handle and manage your Linux server Fleet this time they are giving you access to an independent study by IDC peerscape that analyzes if when and how to implement open source Solutions alongside commercial ones and know before you ask tux care did not influence this study at all either financially or in terms of messaging it's completely independent we probably all agree that using open source software can be beneficial to any organization companies traditionally focus on using an optimal mix of commercial software and community supported open source software to try and get all the benefits while minimizing the potential risks this study that you can get for free discusses the five best practices for organizations to determine when where and how to use community supported open source software alongside commercially supported software so click the link below to download the full reports and learn about open source best practices so a short little thing to get started Linux is now more popular among developers than Mac OS is according to the 2022 stack Overflow developer survey Linux is used by 40.23 of developers as their primary OS for personal use while almost 40 percent of them use it as their primary OS for professional use Mac OS only reaches 21 for personal and almost 33 for professional technically Linux already overshadowed Mac OS in the same survey last year but only by a very very small margin the uptick in 2022 has been huge and if you add users of WSL on top of that you can attack 15 up for personal use and 14 for professional Windows is still the biggest platform out there though with 62 percent of respondents saying they use it as their main for personal use and 48 for professional of course it's only a survey from one website which might not be a hundred percent representative but I feel that stack Overflow covers most if not all languages across all operating systems so it shouldn't have any huge bias either still it's pretty nice to see that our platform is recognized as a very good desktop operating system for certain professional users then again we all knew that Linux was the best choice for developing software but what's best we also see that WSL isn't erasing Linux like what some people were afraid of then again we'll have to wait and see how this market share evolves in the future Mastodon has been growing enormously since the Twitter acquisition with almost 9 million accounts across all instances and 2.6 million monthly users and while it's still small fry in the world of giant social networks it looks like it's attracting some attention they had to reject more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in the past months you can hoshko the German developer responsible for developing the Mastodon platform told the financial times he had received offers for hundreds of thousands of dollars but decided that he wouldn't take them as he wants the non-profit status of the platform to be Untouchable stating that the independence of Mastodon and the fact that each server can moderate as they please is a big part of what makes it special so for now Mastodon will continue to rely on user donations to fund its development patreon is a big part of that with 8 500 supporters currently raising over 25 Euros per month although bugen says he only pays himself 2 400 euros per month of course this funding only serves to develop the backbone of Mastodon and not for the hosting of all other instances so each server has to secure funding of their own if they want to grow and onboard many more users Eugen also said that his ambition is that Mastodon replaces Twitter in the future as well as other commercial social networks although he admits it's going to take a long while to do so this is clearly the best decision they could make bringing external Capital would also mean relinquishing some amount of control over how Mastodon Works which would probably mean in the end an algorithm engagement statistics or whatever and advertisements and monetization strategies which would turn Mastodon into Twitter basically user funding is absolutely the way to go even though it means that there will be some hiccups features won't be developed as fast as on a commercially funded social network and some instances will die and Rise depending on how much users are willing to pay for their social networks an investigation into bites dance the parent company that makes Tick Tock confirmed what everyone already knew or suspected it's a privacy nightmare employees of the company gained access to multiple journalists IP addresses and user data to identify if they had been in the same place as Tick-Tock employees these journalists were covering Tick Tock and its parent company posting leaks and exposing the links tying the company to the Chinese government and how they use tick tock to access U.S users data employees of bite dance then stalked these journalists to try and identify the internal sources of the leaks resulting in their firing as well as the chief internal auditor who led that team and while it's normal for a company to try and plug leaks them accessing user data willy-nilly without any authorization is definitely not okay and a concerning development which means that they do have access at will to any of their users data what's more is that these journalists had uncovered that Tick Tock was used for surveillance of citizens in various countries and Tick Tock had denied that this was the case and said they didn't have that kind of access to the data this talking problem clearly shows they lied on that account and while tiktok lamented the as they call it misconduct of certain individuals previous reporting clearly shows that Tick Tock is used as a wonderful data Honeypot for the Chinese government and to monitor certain people like rollout Cloutier a U.S Air Force veteran tasked with overseeing the efforts to limit Chinese employees access to American user data Tick Tock is so notorious for being a privacy nightmare that the US Congress even has to bail Banning the app from government devices since Chinese companies are required by law to pass user data to the Chinese government at will hey sure the tick tock algorithm is on point whether you're a government official or not you've got to get those short funny meme videos somehow right but also if you value your privacy even the tiniest bit you should probably delete your account and remove that application good news for Linux drivers as both AMD and Intel announced some work on that front first AMD is working on improving the Linux experience when you're running a brand new GPU that doesn't have proper full driver support AMD is well known for taking ages before having a functional driver for their new gpus Under Linux unless you're willing to also move to the very latest bleeding edge kernel and Mesa which will cause issues for other things well now they want to be able to more easily fall back to the firmware frame buffer when the kernel driver fails to load properly right now if the kernel isn't modern enough or lacks the necessary firmware the whole system can freeze or feel unresponsive because it bypasses the firmware frame buffer the goal would be to recover it and use it if the driver has a hiccup in layman's terms it means newer AMD gpus will be more stable on older Linux systems even though they still won't be able to have the best performance available Intel on the other hand is working on a new XE driver for Linux currently all Intel drivers rely on the good old i915 driver but that thing supports so many older chips it can be hard to have a great experience for newer ones Intel plans to develop a brand new XC driver that will support tiger Lake and onward and they already have usable code that's able to run gnome plus some opengl and Vulcan games this driver will be merged into Mesa so it will be an automatic transition once it's ready always nice to see more work on the Linux drivers front if it means that we can access all the power of our super pricey devices with less doors less crashes and better performance than yeah let's do it Unity as in the desktop environment developed and then abandoned by Ubuntu isn't that version 7.7 is in development and will be available in Ubuntu 223.04 and it's the first version in a long time that will move that desktop environment forward instead of just fixing it for modern use the unity Dash will be redesigned to be more in line with unity 8 also called lomiri and the unity panel will be a bit bigger and will look nicer than what Unity currently ships it looks like it will be flatter with transparency better light theme support and better looking indicators speaking of which notifications will also be improved with their own indicator they will have a better control center a brand new welcome app written in flutter and more importantly desktop widgets it's a brand new plugin system for Unity called you widgets they're written in Python and can float above your desktop background and they're apparently super easy to install as you can just drag and drop them into a folder they already have a clock a system monitor a Spotify widget and another one to set a random unsplash wallpaper but these widgets can also modify unity's appearance and settings they're also planning to have a web store to browse widgets submit new ones and download them and since they removed most default gnome applications and replace them with apps that have menu bars it means that the global menu one of the headline features of unity should work really really well in those latest releases and honestly it's gonna be one more digital review I have to do each year but I'm also kind of excited because Unity is kind of the desktop environment I want on my desktop now for Gnome this week was also productive the sound test panel of the settings has been redesigned libid Vita gained a banner widget to display contextual information and graphs a brand new app is now out to let you plot and manipulate data it can import data and transform it to visualize it in graphs and it can generate data from equations as well live captions the app that lets you add Auto subtitles to a live stream or a video you're watching received a few fixes to be more legible and fosh the mobile shell developed by purism now has a new plugin to display emergency contact info on the lock screen also apparently since they merged the thumbnails in the file picker Linux adoption has skyrocketed and 2023 should definitely be the year of the Linux desktop or maybe you know a lot of people were asking for thumbnails in the file picker and for good reason but it was never really a blocker for anyone to move on to Linux in KDE land Gwen view gained touchpad zoom in and out with pinch gestures Kate and K Wright can now open files in their own Windows instead of in tabs using vpns which use plugins that aren't installed will now prompt you to install the relevant plugin the Color Picker widget can Now display up to 9 colors instead of just one and there were a bunch of bug fixes as usual it's a slower week than usual but I guess you can't really ask volunteers to keep grinding at features and bugs during the holidays if only KDE was owned by a billionaire who would force the developers to sleep on the floor of their offices so we could get more stuff and let's finish this with the gaming news this week the steam deck passed 7 000 titles with close to 2700 being verified and almost 4 400 being playable newly added titles include Dune spice Wars Star Wars Battlefront the good one from 2004 Red Faction 2 crisis 2 and 3 remastered Assassin's Creed Valhalla Dark Souls 2 or the wonderful Tomb Raider 6 the Angel of Darkness just kidding that last one is pure trash and I'm not just saying that because I encountered a game-breaking bug on the last boss fight that prevented me from ever finishing it and also there's the steam replay available which definitely shows that I do not dual boot Windows at all and also apparently I played Skyrim more than anything else this year which is pretty sad and also also compared to the steam average I'm a complete no life who spent way too much time gaming but I'm sure someone has way bigger numbers than me and will tell me that I'm not a gamer and that I didn't spend enough time and that I'm crap at gaming but also pretty cool to see that in my spider graph there's a Warhammer 40K entry on top of other genres of game like 140k is a genre apparently talk about being a fanboy just like I'm a tuxedo Fanboy thankfully because they're today's video sponsor if you need a new device to run Linux on don't buy any old Windows laptop or desktop buy something from tuxedo because all their devices are made to run Linux out of the box you can pick from a selection of popular distros or you can just slap your own on it and it's gonna run perfectly because that's the goal of this entire company and they have tons of choices for every price point for every need whatever you need they have it from laptops desktops nugs gaming laptops gaming Towers you name it they're all repairable and upgradable you can have your own custom keyboard layout engraved on the keys of your laptop or your own custom logo engraved on the lid of your laptop so if you need a new device click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really good so thanks everyone for watching this last video of the year I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can dislike it as well and tell me why in the comments down below and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's the PayPal Link in the description just like there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both give you access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that'll come so thanks for watching happy New Year if that's what your calendar says and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and this is the last Linux and open source news video I'll make in 2022 they're coming back in 2023 of course they are so before the new year begins well Happy New Year if that's what your calendar says and let's get into it this week we have Linux passing Mac OS as the OS of choice for developers and almost passing Windows if you count WSL we have Mastodon refusing to take silicon Valley's big bucks even though they really want to give them some money and we have Tick Tock again proving that it's the worst social media app if you value your data just like I value this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by talk scare but this time I'm not going to talk about their services to handle and manage your Linux server Fleet this time they are giving you access to an independent study by IDC peerscape that analyzes if when and how to implement open source Solutions alongside commercial ones and know before you ask tux care did not influence this study at all either financially or in terms of messaging it's completely independent we probably all agree that using open source software can be beneficial to any organization companies traditionally focus on using an optimal mix of commercial software and community supported open source software to try and get all the benefits while minimizing the potential risks this study that you can get for free discusses the five best practices for organizations to determine when where and how to use community supported open source software alongside commercially supported software so click the link below to download the full reports and learn about open source best practices so a short little thing to get started Linux is now more popular among developers than Mac OS is according to the 2022 stack Overflow developer survey Linux is used by 40.23 of developers as their primary OS for personal use while almost 40 percent of them use it as their primary OS for professional use Mac OS only reaches 21 for personal and almost 33 for professional technically Linux already overshadowed Mac OS in the same survey last year but only by a very very small margin the uptick in 2022 has been huge and if you add users of WSL on top of that you can attack 15 up for personal use and 14 for professional Windows is still the biggest platform out there though with 62 percent of respondents saying they use it as their main for personal use and 48 for professional of course it's only a survey from one website which might not be a hundred percent representative but I feel that stack Overflow covers most if not all languages across all operating systems so it shouldn't have any huge bias either still it's pretty nice to see that our platform is recognized as a very good desktop operating system for certain professional users then again we all knew that Linux was the best choice for developing software but what's best we also see that WSL isn't erasing Linux like what some people were afraid of then again we'll have to wait and see how this market share evolves in the future Mastodon has been growing enormously since the Twitter acquisition with almost 9 million accounts across all instances and 2.6 million monthly users and while it's still small fry in the world of giant social networks it looks like it's attracting some attention they had to reject more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in the past months you can hoshko the German developer responsible for developing the Mastodon platform told the financial times he had received offers for hundreds of thousands of dollars but decided that he wouldn't take them as he wants the non-profit status of the platform to be Untouchable stating that the independence of Mastodon and the fact that each server can moderate as they please is a big part of what makes it special so for now Mastodon will continue to rely on user donations to fund its development patreon is a big part of that with 8 500 supporters currently raising over 25 Euros per month although bugen says he only pays himself 2 400 euros per month of course this funding only serves to develop the backbone of Mastodon and not for the hosting of all other instances so each server has to secure funding of their own if they want to grow and onboard many more users Eugen also said that his ambition is that Mastodon replaces Twitter in the future as well as other commercial social networks although he admits it's going to take a long while to do so this is clearly the best decision they could make bringing external Capital would also mean relinquishing some amount of control over how Mastodon Works which would probably mean in the end an algorithm engagement statistics or whatever and advertisements and monetization strategies which would turn Mastodon into Twitter basically user funding is absolutely the way to go even though it means that there will be some hiccups features won't be developed as fast as on a commercially funded social network and some instances will die and Rise depending on how much users are willing to pay for their social networks an investigation into bites dance the parent company that makes Tick Tock confirmed what everyone already knew or suspected it's a privacy nightmare employees of the company gained access to multiple journalists IP addresses and user data to identify if they had been in the same place as Tick-Tock employees these journalists were covering Tick Tock and its parent company posting leaks and exposing the links tying the company to the Chinese government and how they use tick tock to access U.S users data employees of bite dance then stalked these journalists to try and identify the internal sources of the leaks resulting in their firing as well as the chief internal auditor who led that team and while it's normal for a company to try and plug leaks them accessing user data willy-nilly without any authorization is definitely not okay and a concerning development which means that they do have access at will to any of their users data what's more is that these journalists had uncovered that Tick Tock was used for surveillance of citizens in various countries and Tick Tock had denied that this was the case and said they didn't have that kind of access to the data this talking problem clearly shows they lied on that account and while tiktok lamented the as they call it misconduct of certain individuals previous reporting clearly shows that Tick Tock is used as a wonderful data Honeypot for the Chinese government and to monitor certain people like rollout Cloutier a U.S Air Force veteran tasked with overseeing the efforts to limit Chinese employees access to American user data Tick Tock is so notorious for being a privacy nightmare that the US Congress even has to bail Banning the app from government devices since Chinese companies are required by law to pass user data to the Chinese government at will hey sure the tick tock algorithm is on point whether you're a government official or not you've got to get those short funny meme videos somehow right but also if you value your privacy even the tiniest bit you should probably delete your account and remove that application good news for Linux drivers as both AMD and Intel announced some work on that front first AMD is working on improving the Linux experience when you're running a brand new GPU that doesn't have proper full driver support AMD is well known for taking ages before having a functional driver for their new gpus Under Linux unless you're willing to also move to the very latest bleeding edge kernel and Mesa which will cause issues for other things well now they want to be able to more easily fall back to the firmware frame buffer when the kernel driver fails to load properly right now if the kernel isn't modern enough or lacks the necessary firmware the whole system can freeze or feel unresponsive because it bypasses the firmware frame buffer the goal would be to recover it and use it if the driver has a hiccup in layman's terms it means newer AMD gpus will be more stable on older Linux systems even though they still won't be able to have the best performance available Intel on the other hand is working on a new XE driver for Linux currently all Intel drivers rely on the good old i915 driver but that thing supports so many older chips it can be hard to have a great experience for newer ones Intel plans to develop a brand new XC driver that will support tiger Lake and onward and they already have usable code that's able to run gnome plus some opengl and Vulcan games this driver will be merged into Mesa so it will be an automatic transition once it's ready always nice to see more work on the Linux drivers front if it means that we can access all the power of our super pricey devices with less doors less crashes and better performance than yeah let's do it Unity as in the desktop environment developed and then abandoned by Ubuntu isn't that version 7.7 is in development and will be available in Ubuntu 223.04 and it's the first version in a long time that will move that desktop environment forward instead of just fixing it for modern use the unity Dash will be redesigned to be more in line with unity 8 also called lomiri and the unity panel will be a bit bigger and will look nicer than what Unity currently ships it looks like it will be flatter with transparency better light theme support and better looking indicators speaking of which notifications will also be improved with their own indicator they will have a better control center a brand new welcome app written in flutter and more importantly desktop widgets it's a brand new plugin system for Unity called you widgets they're written in Python and can float above your desktop background and they're apparently super easy to install as you can just drag and drop them into a folder they already have a clock a system monitor a Spotify widget and another one to set a random unsplash wallpaper but these widgets can also modify unity's appearance and settings they're also planning to have a web store to browse widgets submit new ones and download them and since they removed most default gnome applications and replace them with apps that have menu bars it means that the global menu one of the headline features of unity should work really really well in those latest releases and honestly it's gonna be one more digital review I have to do each year but I'm also kind of excited because Unity is kind of the desktop environment I want on my desktop now for Gnome this week was also productive the sound test panel of the settings has been redesigned libid Vita gained a banner widget to display contextual information and graphs a brand new app is now out to let you plot and manipulate data it can import data and transform it to visualize it in graphs and it can generate data from equations as well live captions the app that lets you add Auto subtitles to a live stream or a video you're watching received a few fixes to be more legible and fosh the mobile shell developed by purism now has a new plugin to display emergency contact info on the lock screen also apparently since they merged the thumbnails in the file picker Linux adoption has skyrocketed and 2023 should definitely be the year of the Linux desktop or maybe you know a lot of people were asking for thumbnails in the file picker and for good reason but it was never really a blocker for anyone to move on to Linux in KDE land Gwen view gained touchpad zoom in and out with pinch gestures Kate and K Wright can now open files in their own Windows instead of in tabs using vpns which use plugins that aren't installed will now prompt you to install the relevant plugin the Color Picker widget can Now display up to 9 colors instead of just one and there were a bunch of bug fixes as usual it's a slower week than usual but I guess you can't really ask volunteers to keep grinding at features and bugs during the holidays if only KDE was owned by a billionaire who would force the developers to sleep on the floor of their offices so we could get more stuff and let's finish this with the gaming news this week the steam deck passed 7 000 titles with close to 2700 being verified and almost 4 400 being playable newly added titles include Dune spice Wars Star Wars Battlefront the good one from 2004 Red Faction 2 crisis 2 and 3 remastered Assassin's Creed Valhalla Dark Souls 2 or the wonderful Tomb Raider 6 the Angel of Darkness just kidding that last one is pure trash and I'm not just saying that because I encountered a game-breaking bug on the last boss fight that prevented me from ever finishing it and also there's the steam replay available which definitely shows that I do not dual boot Windows at all and also apparently I played Skyrim more than anything else this year which is pretty sad and also also compared to the steam average I'm a complete no life who spent way too much time gaming but I'm sure someone has way bigger numbers than me and will tell me that I'm not a gamer and that I didn't spend enough time and that I'm crap at gaming but also pretty cool to see that in my spider graph there's a Warhammer 40K entry on top of other genres of game like 140k is a genre apparently talk about being a fanboy just like I'm a tuxedo Fanboy thankfully because they're today's video sponsor if you need a new device to run Linux on don't buy any old Windows laptop or desktop buy something from tuxedo because all their devices are made to run Linux out of the box you can pick from a selection of popular distros or you can just slap your own on it and it's gonna run perfectly because that's the goal of this entire company and they have tons of choices for every price point for every need whatever you need they have it from laptops desktops nugs gaming laptops gaming Towers you name it they're all repairable and upgradable you can have your own custom keyboard layout engraved on the keys of your laptop or your own custom logo engraved on the lid of your laptop so if you need a new device click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really good so thanks everyone for watching this last video of the year I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can dislike it as well and tell me why in the comments down below and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's the PayPal Link in the description just like there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both give you access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that'll come so thanks for watching happy New Year if that's what your calendar says and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and probably no one will watch this Linux and open source news video because everyone is too busy spending the holidays with their friends and their family now wait you need to tell me that not everyone celebrates Christmas well in this case welcome friends and this week kind of feels like Groundhog Day because once again the EU slaps meta across the face this time for a dominant position of views we also have Wayland finally getting fractional scaling support like good fractional scaling support so no more blurry apps and we have the release of linuxbin 21.1 which is a small version number but a very big Improvement and talking about Improvement how about you improve your control over your own internet connection thanks to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to try so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster so another week another slap from meta administered by the European Union the European commission informed the company that they think they have breached antitrust rules for online classified ads through their Facebook Marketplace service the problem seems to be that this Marketplace is tied into Facebook which obviously gives that service an insane Reach Out of the Box something no competitor could hope to match they say that all Facebook users automatically have access to Marketplace whether they want it or not and that it gives Facebook a substantial Advantage they also say Facebook imposes unfair trading conditions on other services that advertise on Facebook or Instagram another of Midas companies the terms and conditions stipulate that Facebook can use advertising data from competitors to improve their own service and this is considered unjustified disproportionate and not necessary to the marketplace service basically they say it's a burden on competitors and doesn't benefit the market as a whole the commission will still need to rule on whether this constitutes a breach but if they do so it will be an abuse of a dominant Market position and thus be sanctioned with a fine up to 10 percent of meta's annual worldwide turnover Facebook of course has a right to defend themselves and will probably also be given some time to fix these practices it is just great to see these companies taken down a bag and being brought back by the EU into a normal Fair competitive market that doesn't artificially erase any potential competitor just by the sheer size of the service they have to compete against the EU really is on fire these days and I love it but Nick Katie sucks at multi-monitors and fractional scaling they say on my comment section every time I talk about KDE well I guess I will lose some engagement in the future because the next releases of plasma should bring nice fixes for all of that first the Weyland fractional scaling protocol has landed and will be used in plasma 6. it will let cute the toolkit used by KDE turn on the fractional scaling support it always had on X11 so they won't render at 2X and then scale it down thus making everything blurry and performance should also be better along with less battery use gtk apps currently don't support that just yet but it should happen pretty soon and when is plasma 6 going to be available well if I'm not mistaken it will be the version after plasma 5.27 so in a few months on top of that Katie also fixed their multi-screen implementation they now use an index-based system to list monitors which means that disconnecting and reconnecting displays should result in better stability reliability and stuff should generally not switch positions randomly Jump Around the screen or display on the wrong monitor it won't magically fix every multi-monitor bug but it should still make for a much better experience other stuff they've been working on include the ability for X11 apps under Wayland to still access Global shortcuts and key presses discover got a steamos backend which means it will be able to perform system updates on the desktop mode of the steam deck and the user interface keeps getting some nice fixes and improvements plasma 5.27 is shaping up to be an amazing is but I'm really looking forward to KDE 6. they will work on activities redefining what they do and how they work they'll have wallpapers that span across multiple displays more multi-monitor fixes a theming engine that's comparable to Quantum but out of the box fractional scaling and a lot more so yeah I'm really looking forward to plasma 6. and another privacy violation this week this time from epic games they have agreed to pay 520 million dollars to the US Federal Trade Commission due to violating children's privacy laws and tricking users into making unwanted charges the fine is split between 275 million for violating children's privacy and 245 million that they will have to refund customers they tracked into paying this all applies to Fortnight specifically where epic used dark patterns to push kids to buy skins and other digital worthless goods and they also specifically targeted children with that game and collected data on these kids without obtaining their parents consent first the default settings in game enabling live text and voice communication are also to blame here as it had the potential to harm kids and teenagers through online bullying threats harassment and exposure to dangerous material including incitation to suicide epic employees already had expressed concerns about all of this as early as 2017 but they were ignored epic put out their own statement saying they never intended to reach that point and that they want to be at the Forefront of consumer protection they'll make significant changes to these various systems including parental controls daily spending limits and more something that's easy to do and say after you willfully ignored all the complaints that your employees had for five freaking years so I guess that defines must not be high enough if these companies still feel like they can just pay the fine or settle afterwards and it will still make them a profit Linux mean 21.1 is now out for everyone after they released their beta last week for a small dot update it's a big release with tons of look and feel changes the main one being that it loses its green Theme by default going to a blue one with yellow folders kinda emulating windows I guess of course previous themes are still available use of color has been toned down certain desktop icons have been removed from the default since they weren't that useful there are new mouse pointers and sounds out of the box plus more icon themes to choose from on top of that it now fully supports flat pack in the update manager and the software installer as well letting you choose between the repo version of an app or its flat pack counterpart there's a new ISO verification tool to ensure everything is okay before installing and cinnamon gained a configurable corner bar that lets you pick a few actions to perform when clicking it hovering it or middle clicking it mint will also ask you for your password a lot less notably when removing a flat back app if it was installed for the user only and the password will be remembered between actions in the same app so you won't be prompted every time you uninstall multiple apps one after the other the mate variant also will gain all these new features and lock changes and so will the xfce version although none of these gain the Corner Bar of cinnamon or any updates to their desktop environment themselves it looks like a pretty great release that I will definitely cover in the next video on the channel next week and also please Linux Mint team stop releasing your freaking updates two days before Christmas it's becoming a bit of a habit and it's not great okay now on The Gnome side of things not as many big changes as in KDE but there's still a huge one the file picker finally gets a grid view with thumbnails 18 years after people started asking for it and that's pretty good now on top of that the settings got a bunch of Polish dropped on various panels like the Thunderbolt one the about panel and the printer panel the portal service that lets sandboxed apps interact with the system and each other securely has been updated as well with the new service detecting sandboxed apps running without a window we should let desktop environments better interact with these background services and there's the global shortcuts portal that lets applications use keyboard shortcuts even when they're not focused gnome doesn't Implement that portal just yet but I would be surprised if they didn't really soon there's also a new app called live captions which captions your desktop audio or mic in real time in English something that's really really awesome and that I will take a look at while I'm working on starting a Linux News podcast pods the podman client now lets you download and upload files to and from a container and gets tons of visual improvements and loop the new image viewer shows way more of the image's exif data including the GPS location where the picture was taken with the ability to open the maps app to look at it now finally thumbnails in the file picker jeez why did it take so long but yeah it's finally going to happen when they update it in I guess gtk or The Gnome core libraries and also that portal for desktop applications for using Global shortcuts one of the main things that held Wayland back finally fixed cool and now for the gaming news first we have the release of steamos 3.4 a big big update that updates the desktop mode using KDE all the way up to version 5.26 and it rebases the operating system on the latest Arch Linux packages it fixes a lot of bugs and performance issues it lets users use the performance heads-up display in a more space efficient horizontal layout and the OS now supports trim again for its internal SSD and your SD card they quickly released two small fixes afterwards to fix issues with SD cards and HDMI audio going to sleep there's also a new Vulcan video API which lets applications use Vulcan to Hardware decode and encode video files now this could be used in video games thus solving the various video format problems that we have in apps running with proton or even in desktop applications like media players for now it only supports h.264 and h.265 but more codecs should come in the future on top of that the steam deck is now shipping to Asia customers from Japan South Korea Hong Kong and Taiwan will now receive their devices as well which hopefully should increase the number of deck analytics users a bit and that's always good for more game support and finally if you're old like me and you played the old Star Wars FPS called Dark Forces you'll be happy to know that there's an open source Force engine that allows you to play play that game on Modern computers with a bunch of cool enhancements like mod support high resolution and widescreen support GPU rendering mouse sensitivity settings full Mouse look controller support a new safe system and more and of course you can also play it like it was back in the day at 320 by 200 why you'd want to do that I don't know unless you hate your retinas and if you love your retinas well today's sponsors devices are A Feast for the eyes tuxedo is a company based in Germany but they ship worldwide a wide range of Linux desktops and laptops and the main reason why you would want that instead of any old Windows computer that you would slap Linux on it is because they are designed to run Linux the hardware has been picked specifically to run well with Linux which means that when you buy from tuxedo you know that you can just install anything on it and it's gonna run smoothly and perfectly plus they have a big range which should cover every need and every price point whether you're looking for a laptop a gaming device a tower a knock they have everything they're all customizable upgradable repairable and you can even really customize your devices with your own keyboard layout for example laser etched on the keys of your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop or even on your desktop you decide so if you need a new device to make sure it runs Linux well and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it and if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well there's that dislike button and there's also a comment to tell me why you disliked it and if you really enjoyed the channel and you want me to make more of these videos give the gift of the super thanks button or the paper Link in the description or become a patreon or a YouTube member and get access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel and if you don't care about that well the links are still in the description and I can just wish you happy holidays a merry Christmas if you celebrate that and I'll see you in the next one bye [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and while I truly believe that the Linux desktop can work a hundred percent for most people it doesn't mean I can't admit it has some rough edges and I'm not talking about sweeping big issues with Linux as a desktop operating system I'm talking day-to-day stuff here so here are a bunch of pain points that affect me and a lot of people that I moved to Linux of course these are personal and you might have others so let me know down there in the comments the stuff that annoys you annoys you like this segue to today's sponsor damn it I need to watch more LTT to fix these Segways thanks to linode for sponsoring this video Leonard is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own nexcloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or game games for example focal board if you don't know about it it's an open source alternative to tools like Trello Azana or notion it lets you create Milestones keep track of your notes have a bird's eye view of your project and it basically helps you get stuff done and you can deploy your focal board server in one click from your Linux dashboard something I should probably do to ensure that I keep delivering my videos on time and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below now the first one and I think a lot of people will feel my pain is how to handle PDFs on Linux to read PDF documents it's extremely easy every desktop environment has a nice PDF reader that's quite fast it works perfectly you can zoom in zoom out to handle multiple Pages everything you might need to read but as soon as you need to interact with a PDF things start sucking big time to fill in PDF fields for starters you can always use your web browser on its PDF viewer but it's not amazing the native tools just are terrible at it here for example is the gnome PDF viewer trying to edit a document that I already filled in what I entered doesn't show in the fields unless I click on the field on Getty ocular at least has a button that lets me enable or disable these forms and at least it shows what I entered although why it's not the default it's B on me if I took the time to enter data into a PDF document and saved it chances are the next time I open that document I want that data to be shown immediately but maybe that has been developed by somebody who really loves magical or invisible ink that you have to heat up or something who knows and that's just the basics now if I want to sign a PDF document on gnome I simply can't there is no option to do it in any way in ocular on KDE I can digitally sign a document but that opens an error message saying I need to configure a digital signature which takes me to the online manual which says I need digital signing certificates or whatever without any simple way to add one myself straight from the application or create one on the fly from another KDE app hey you know what would actually work better being able to just grab a photo of your actual signature and pasting it on the document or drawing it with your touchpad or your mouse yeah that works for most people most of the time who wants to sign PDS you don't need digital certificates but gnome doesn't let you do that and ocular doesn't either if you try to drag an image of your signature it will just open in a new document there is no menu entry to add an image and overlay it on top of the PDF so by default you literally cannot sign a PDF document what you can do is open the PDF document with LibreOffice draw which will open it in an editable stance let you fill in the form field and add your signature image by simple drag and drop but it also completely breaks the layout of the document in a lot of cases and editing the actual PDF is a nightmare as each line of text is its own object that you'll as often move around as managed to edit it's a pure freaking nightmare and the Knight isn't over yet if you want to reorder Pages inside of a PDF or move one and add another one you need a third party tool a Kai I personally use PDF arranger on Chrome because the default PDF readers do not let you move pages around or delete them or just add another PDF document inside of what you're currently viewing and if you're thinking wow this guy has completely unrealistic expectations about PDFs Mac OS does that out of the box and has done it for 10 years you can add signatures manually you can just drop them onto the document you can fill the forms and they stay filled when you reopen the document you can move pages around you can delete them you can add new ones by just simple drag and drop it works and that's what we need oh and it's free free of charge like having a third-party tool that you need to pay to do these things ridiculous next thing I don't like on linux's email and calendar handling simply put we don't have good desktop applications for managing these things on Linux Thunderbird is the closest we have but the interface is insanely confusing and it looks like something that's 20 years old now sure they're working on a big redesign and I have High Hopes about it but for now I can't use that thing it's way too clunky it opens tabs for everything adding an account is insanely convoluted it doesn't fit well with gnome or caddy in terms of look and feel or behavior it's just weird to use and I never could get used to it I want to use it but until it's gotten that complete ux redesign I just can't it adds too much friction to do anything it's not a matter of locks it's just illegible as an application the default suite for Gnome is also pretty underwhelming you have gnome calendar and Geary and gnome contacts and the calendar option is decent enough very simple for personal calendars and definitely not something you can use professionally if you need stuff like seeing who is available at which time or handling of time zones for example the contacts app is ridiculously simple without any way to add any form of accounts that wouldn't be supported by the gnome online accounts so no card DAV or iCloud contacts for example its integration with the default apps is also mediocre as for example you can't automatically create a new contact when you answer to an email address for example something that should at least be an option and the email app Geary while it's decent is also very very simple it can't create folders to triage your inbox or labels for Gmail it can't unify your inboxes in a single View and more importantly it doesn't seem to access all IMAP folders for example my archive folder which is a huge dump of everything I want to save for later isn't accessible through gearing it can only access the males I dropped in that folder from this exact device which is obviously not what you want unless maybe it is then you archive your emails by device eyes in which case why and you're a monster and stop it then there's the caddy Suite of email contacts and calendars but this thing well it's insanely powerful and customizable doesn't look like it has been touched in decades even just adding an email account that is able to send and receive messages is insanely complicated you have to manually look into the settings for that account and map the folders yourself to IMAP folders or everything will be stored locally and you won't be able to send anything at all it thoroughly lacks Auto configuration tools and same defaults on all the apps of The Suite although their integration in a single shell is actually pretty good if you're looking for an Outlook alternative once it's configured it's awesome but a lot of people will just have flats super far away way before this configuration can happen hey in a way these apps are the perfect symbolic representation of their desktops gnome apps are way too simple in the name of ease of use and like critical crucial features and caddy apps are way too complex in the name of having all the features which means that your last resort is basically Evolution and honestly it's great but it also looks pretty outdated like a gnome 2 app that barely has received the tiniest of touches to make it feel more modern it does everything it's pretty cool but man when you use it on KDE it looks atrocious and when you use it on a recent gnome desktop it doesn't feel like the rest of your applications either so yeah major pain Point here I just cannot find a good legible powerful enough but not insanely complex Suite of applications for email calendar and contacts and all the people I installed Linux 4 told me the exact same thing to the point that they are all using webmails and that tells you something about the quality of your email and calendar apps when people prefer using a Webmail to a desktop app now next pain point is display related stuff we are so late on that stuff display scaling we have but fractional scaling it's a damn mess it's going to have huge performance impacts it doesn't work well on hybrid devices with Nvidia Graphics where you will get screen tearing it doesn't apply to all apps like steam DaVinci Resolve only office and a lot more which will either go 2X or 1X but nothing in between and it's just messy and 10 years behind even Windows which also sucks at this by the way HDR isn't a thing at all on Linux and I don't even know how you could go about turning it on and watching HDR content or playing games with HDR enabled and font rendering kinda sucks as well although it's easy enough to not make it suck that much at least on gnome and Katie gnome tweaks phones enable sub pixel NT aliasing and full hinting on KDE the same setting things are in the system settings in the fonts panel your eyes will thank me after a reboot unless your panel is already high DPI and using scaling of any type in which case you absolutely do not need to enable these things now seriously why isn't the anti-aliasing technology used to smooth phones on an LCD screen turned on by default when every screen is an LCD these days okay you've got some OLED but come on it's mostly LCDs or at least let people change it easily instead of hiding it in an additional third-party app on no now Katie does have settings for that but again the defaults aren't really set for most people to have a pleasant experience with Weyland some of those things are going away slowly but in the meantime we're way behind and it's turning stuff that should be an advantage like a high DPI display on the laptop into a drawback that will prevent you from buying that thing because it's gonna suck and you know it another pain point for me personally is automation like graphically creating a suite of events that happens when a condition is met for example when a file is dropped in the downloads folder and it's an image maybe I want it compressed as a JPEG to save some space and then moved to another folder if it's a screen cap from Firefox which has a specific name pattern or maybe I want to be able to launch a quick one-click shortcut that automatically adds rounded Corners to certain images or deletes all old invoices I have in my download folder since I know I've already sent them out stuff like that is crucial to gain some time on repetitive tasks or even on video editing and I can't do it right now on Linux at least not graphically and sure I could spend some time and create bash scripts to do this exact same thing but I don't want to I want to do it graphically because if we're able to have complete giant settings for everything on Getty we should be able to have an automation a graphical automation app like shortcuts on iOS or on Mac OS now something that doesn't affect me at all but seems to be a big pain point for parents I moved to Linux is the lack of good Parental Control software we have some basic things like blocking certain applications or web browsers or even preventing application installs and limiting these by age range so kids can't install stuff that isn't allowed but first these age limits are often not set by the applications you can install especially when using old repos and not flat back and second you can't interact with screen time at all limiting a computer session to a certain number of minutes or hours or certain days in the week at least not out of the box there seem to be third-party Solutions but default ones will always be better integrated and also all these third-party ones look like they are 20 years old at least so I would be a bit concerned about their abilities and how well they are maintained for rental control apps need to be in that weird limbo where they need to feel like they're older than the kid you're trying to control but they also need to not feel like they're 20 or 30 years old because you want them to be able to handle and catch the new stuff that your kid might be exposed to not that I would care at all about that since I do not have kids and I do not plan to have any anytime soon but still apparently it's a big problem okay so these are the pain points I encounter myself on a regular basis or that I've been told about by people close to me PDF handling is for me at least the worst offender it's the one that almost makes me want to use another OS just for doing that and every time I have to handle a PDF I put the task off by days because I know it's going to be a mess HDR and fractional scaling are mostly issues when looking at new hardware where you know that you won't be able to take advantage of all the capabilities or where high-res screen is actually a problem for you and not a feature which sucks and parental controls well I don't care at all about it but maybe you do so if you have other pain points if you agree or disagree with mine let me know down there in the comments and maybe we can help each other finding solutions to fix those problems and in the meantime I can help you find a solution to your my computer doesn't read Linux well problem thanks to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer that you want to run Linux on don't go buying any old Windows computer buy a laptop or a desktop that actually super Sports Linux out of the box from tuxedo for example they are based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a huge range of devices that run Linux natively the hardware has been specifically picked to run well with Linux and they have that big big range of devices from small Ultravox nugs big towers gaming laptops workstations gaming PCs and they're all configurable easy to open and repairable and upgradable you can change the SSD the ram you can configure another CPU another SSD you can add Blu-ray Optical drives you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid it's really really great so if you need a new device don't buy a Windows computer buy one from tuxedo that actually supports Linux so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well there's a dislike button and you can also tell me why in the comments down there and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon page and YouTube memberships both get you access to a weekly podcast where I talk about the channel Linux open source technology and everything in between and you also get the right to vote on the next topic that I cover for the next month so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and for such a small version number change Linux Mint 21.1 is a big big release not necessarily in how you use it or it's new features but more in terms of how it looks and it definitely looks like Windows but of course it also adds a ton of features that Propel Linux Mint into the more modern Linux world we currently live in so let's take a look at everything new in mint 21.1 and let's take a look at today's sponsor thanks to Chasm for sponsoring this video Chasm workspaces lets you stream containerized apps and Linux desktops straight to your browser without anything to install whether you need to run a full desktop for development use different browsers safely without compromising your own computer or try a specific application without an install Chasm has Linux based images for everything they're all open source and available directly on Docker Hub and they even have support for any arbitrary virtual machine including Linux Android windows and other virtual machines that can't be containerized and they refresh the whole user experience to be more legible and easier to use the chasm VNC rendering technology which is used to stream all of this to your browser is also open source and now supports resolutions up to 4K 60 and Chasm workspaces Community Edition can be used for self-hosting and it's available for free directly on their website click the link in the description below to get started with Chasm workspaces OK let's open with the elephant in the room and that's how Linux Mint looks mint has always looked kind of bland and old in my opinion that muted green with pale gray accent colors on virtually everything you overall click it always kind of felt stale but green has been mint's brand basically since it started and it's still a huge part of its look even on its website and logo and well mint 21.1 does away with all of that the default look is completely different first the green accent color is gone it's now a very usual blue probably a bit lighter and more vibrant than what you would find in gnome's advice maybe more on par with Katie's Breeze and this accent color is also used in less places hovering over menu items doesn't highlight them in blue it's now kinda gray same goes for the panel clicking on something doesn't turn it green anymore and the window buttons now use blue as well the whole theme has been tweaked to be lighter on the eyes in the file manager for example you don't get that big black background for the side panel it's now pale gray and selectors and buttons also now use gray instead of the accent color even selecting a folder or file in that file manager only highlights the name of the item and not the whole icon and speaking of icons gone other colored folders now they're your basic Manila yellow color with a stripe on top of them to use your favorite ax encounter even window controls have changed icons and now look well more familiar if you're coming from a certain popular operating system and look before you panic you can still revert to the older Linux Min theme including the colored folder icons and all the green everywhere you can they're still there that default look is also complemented by a new cursor theme called bibata which is thicker and loses the traditional pointer tail but again you can still use the previous ones if you prefer which I do sounds received an update as well and are now using material design V2 sounds from Android and okay I have to say it all these f efforts to make Linux Mint look more modern and less green and gray and drab they're really appreciated I always felt that men's default looks were holding it back in the eyes of potential switchers to Linux saying that mint is often the number one distro people recommend even if you could change those looks after the fact The Faults matter but this change this is controversial first and foremost because it's very clear that it aims to emulate how Windows looks the default blue the manila folders the window controls coupled with the traditional mint cinnamon layout which is a carbon copy of what Windows 7 8 and 10 offered it all makes for a pretty simple to understand goal mint has always been the number one distro recommended for Windows users and this move makes it even clearer that it's the goal it sets out for itself and I'm okay with it I mean if I can point anyone who wants to switch to Linux to a distro that looks good is stable robust and kind of emulates what you already know even if it's only on the surface if you're coming from Windows then I'm fine with it it works and in that I think mint 21.1 accomplishes that goal whether it was their design or not it now looks very much more like Windows more modern and I personally really like these looks but it's also a big dilution of men's visual identity and I can understand why people are a bit annoyed by it but in the end what is important is what Linux Mint represents and that's the perfect Gateway for potential window switchers and with these changes mint is an even better Gateway so I think goal accomplished now the second big change in mint 21.1 is its flat back support mint already supported installing flat back applications but it wasn't really designed around it well that's now the case the update manager means tool to update your applications and your system now supports flatback applications and runtimes so you can update everything in one place and you don't need the command line or a separate App Store like gnome software and mint software manager their App Store that only handles application installs not updates also gets the usual drop down menu to let you pick between the flat package or the regular dab package from the repos mint uses flat Hub by the way so you should get everything you need from there it's great to see mint adopt this packaging format they're one of the biggest user-facing distros and having them support flat pack better is a good step flat pack isn't perfect but it's very very clear that going forward it will be the default packaging format for all beginner friendly and user-facing distro so that support is welcome it's really not perfect though as Searchers in the software manager will return multiple instances of the same application which might confuse users compared to just letting them ignore the packaging formats or pick it on the application's details page another change is the way mint handles drivers first the driver manager the tool that lets you see if there are drivers you could install and install them well that now runs in user mode so you don't need to enter your password just to open the application if you're offline you will also get a dedicated screen to let you know why the app is empty and you can also use USB drives to install drivers for example if you plug in a live USB mint will be able to detect it and offer to mount it so you can install drivers from that that tool also now supports Deb conf which means that installing proprietary NVIDIA drivers with your boot enable should be more robust mint still comes with cinnamon as its default desktop environment and the desktop got some changes this time around as well cinnamon 5.6 comes with a new Corner Bar which is another callback to Windows default layout it's a small vertical applet stuck to the far right of the default panel hovering over it allows you to peek at the desktop by hiding all windows complete with a blur effect if you want but you can also click that corner bar with the left Mouse button or the middle Mouse button and configure what which click does between either showing the desktop showing the desk lats showing the workspace selector or showing the window selector that little applet replaces the previous show desktop button that was on the right of the main menu in the context menu when right clicking on the desktop you can now directly access the display settings and the default desktop icons were cleaned up with the removal of the home folder the computer the trash and the network icon since these are all available from the file manager there is no reason to have them on by default but you can restore them in the preferences if you want now this reasoning also applies to all desktop icons since everything is accessible through the file manager you should just not have any desktop icons at all or you should have as many as you want it's your computer after all Nemo the file manager also gets a few changes like showing the dates in the list view in a mono space font improving the path bar by letting you click on the current path to toggle the location URL bar while navigating to a different folder will bring the path bar back smaller changes include a search entry in the shortcut settings so you can look at all the various shortcuts you might want to change preferred applications are now featured by categories you can configure the duration for which notifications will stay visible the themes list is now sorted between dark and light themes and current and Legacy themes and you also get window placement mode back in the window manager those are all pretty small tweaks but they should still make the experience a little bit nicer now still that themes list should really just be split between a theme selector and an accent color selector because that current list is getting very crowded oh and also mint won't bug you for your password as often as it once did for example uninstalling a flat pack app that you install for your user and not the whole system won't require a password same goes for removing local shortcuts and local applications you only installed for yourself and synaptic and the update manager will also remember if you entered your password recently so they won't ask for it for every single action and finally you can also now configure the mouse pointer theme and size for the login screen if you use wapinator the file sharing app on a local network you'll be happy to know it is now more secure and the web app manager now lets you tweak more settings when creating a web app especially the presence of a navigation bar in the window and if you want to browse privately for that web app not many changes to the default apps in mint 21.1 but then again it's not like they were missing a lot of features as per the mate or xfce variants they get the exact same changes for the themes the cursors the applications and the desktop the only thing they don't get is the Corner Bar the display entry in the right click menu on the desktop the file manager improvements and the reorganization of the various settings pages now there are the usual caveats for every version of Linux Mint it's still based on Ubuntu although you do have an addition based on Debian just in case which means that if Ubuntu messes up at some point they have a backup plan they still remove snaps from Ubuntu which is also pretty good for a desktop distro Snaps are great on servers but on the desktop there is no reason to prefer them over flat pack or regular packages there are still no touch pad gestures for laptops which sucks and the big thing is still no word on Weyland support X11 still works for the moment but mint hasn't started working on Wayland at all as far as I know or they've been super quiet about it they use a window manager based on matter and they use gtk which are gnome components which do have Waylon support but there are still going to be some work to be done for cinnamon itself to support Weyland and Implement portals and Global shortcuts and desktop and windows sharing all that stuff and not having any idea if the men's team is going to work on Wayland support or not is not great Weyland as a protocol is now feature complete with the recent edition of real fractional scaling and X11 isn't getting more secure or isn't getting any new features at all so I don't think mint wants to be stranded as the only last distro and desktop that doesn't support it apart from that though mint is still mint despite its branding changes that really make it clear they want to be the number one distro for Windows switchers they retain their main goal which I always took to be provide tools and graphical utilities for everything you can out of the box provide a simple and logical experience customization options for people who want to work differently and generally a robust and stable experience for day-to-day computer use and whether they're green blue pink or yellow hello they still provide that they are still the number one distro I would recommend to anyone moving from Windows maybe even more so now so men's 21.1 it's now become basically Windows as the default desktop experience but it's still a fantastic distro that I still heavily recommend and if you don't like the new look changes don't worry you can revert all of them all the themes are still there so it's no problem just like it's no problem to run Linux on any of today's sponsors devices because tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they ship worldwide a big range of desktops and laptops that ship Linux out of the box so don't bother buying a Windows computer and trying to install Linux on it because you never know if things are going to run right now or in the future when you buy from tuxedo you know that Linux is going to run well on it and they have devices for every price point and every use case whether you want to game or just a lightweight laptop or a workstation they have it all and they're all customizable upgradable repairable you can even have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid so check out the link in the description below if you want a device that runs Linux and you want to support linux's development tuxedo device are really great so thanks for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it there's always that dislike button it still works and you can write me a comment to let me know what you didn't like exactly and if you really enjoyed the channel and what I'm doing here you can always click on the super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux tag open source my personal life and the channel and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel as well so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and for such a small version number change Linux Mint 21.1 is a big big release not necessarily in how you use it or it's new features but more in terms of how it looks and it definitely looks like Windows but of course it also adds a ton of features that Propel Linux Mint into the more modern Linux world we currently live in so let's take a look at everything new in mint 21.1 and let's take a look at today's sponsor thanks to Chasm for sponsoring this video Chasm workspaces lets you stream containerized apps and Linux desktops straight to your browser without anything to install whether you need to run a full desktop for development use different browsers safely without compromising your own computer or try a specific application without an install Chasm has Linux based images for everything they're all open source and available directly on Docker Hub and they even have support for any arbitrary virtual machine including Linux Android windows and other virtual machines that can't be containerized and they refresh the whole user experience to be more legible and easier to use the chasm VNC rendering technology which is used to stream all of this to your browser is also open source and now supports resolutions up to 4K 60 and Chasm workspaces Community Edition can be used for self-hosting and it's available for free directly on their website click the link in the description below to get started with Chasm workspaces OK let's open with the elephant in the room and that's how Linux Mint looks mint has always looked kind of bland and old in my opinion that muted green with pale gray accent colors on virtually everything you overall click it always kind of felt stale but green has been mint's brand basically since it started and it's still a huge part of its look even on its website and logo and well mint 21.1 does away with all of that the default look is completely different first the green accent color is gone it's now a very usual blue probably a bit lighter and more vibrant than what you would find in gnome's advice maybe more on par with Katie's Breeze and this accent color is also used in less places hovering over menu items doesn't highlight them in blue it's now kinda gray same goes for the panel clicking on something doesn't turn it green anymore and the window buttons now use blue as well the whole theme has been tweaked to be lighter on the eyes in the file manager for example you don't get that big black background for the side panel it's now pale gray and selectors and buttons also now use gray instead of the accent color even selecting a folder or file in that file manager only highlights the name of the item and not the whole icon and speaking of icons gone other colored folders now they're your basic Manila yellow color with a stripe on top of them to use your favorite ax encounter even window controls have changed icons and now look well more familiar if you're coming from a certain popular operating system and look before you panic you can still revert to the older Linux Min theme including the colored folder icons and all the green everywhere you can they're still there that default look is also complemented by a new cursor theme called bibata which is thicker and loses the traditional pointer tail but again you can still use the previous ones if you prefer which I do sounds received an update as well and are now using material design V2 sounds from Android and okay I have to say it all these f efforts to make Linux Mint look more modern and less green and gray and drab they're really appreciated I always felt that men's default looks were holding it back in the eyes of potential switchers to Linux saying that mint is often the number one distro people recommend even if you could change those looks after the fact The Faults matter but this change this is controversial first and foremost because it's very clear that it aims to emulate how Windows looks the default blue the manila folders the window controls coupled with the traditional mint cinnamon layout which is a carbon copy of what Windows 7 8 and 10 offered it all makes for a pretty simple to understand goal mint has always been the number one distro recommended for Windows users and this move makes it even clearer that it's the goal it sets out for itself and I'm okay with it I mean if I can point anyone who wants to switch to Linux to a distro that looks good is stable robust and kind of emulates what you already know even if it's only on the surface if you're coming from Windows then I'm fine with it it works and in that I think mint 21.1 accomplishes that goal whether it was their design or not it now looks very much more like Windows more modern and I personally really like these looks but it's also a big dilution of men's visual identity and I can understand why people are a bit annoyed by it but in the end what is important is what Linux Mint represents and that's the perfect Gateway for potential window switchers and with these changes mint is an even better Gateway so I think goal accomplished now the second big change in mint 21.1 is its flat back support mint already supported installing flat back applications but it wasn't really designed around it well that's now the case the update manager means tool to update your applications and your system now supports flatback applications and runtimes so you can update everything in one place and you don't need the command line or a separate App Store like gnome software and mint software manager their App Store that only handles application installs not updates also gets the usual drop down menu to let you pick between the flat package or the regular dab package from the repos mint uses flat Hub by the way so you should get everything you need from there it's great to see mint adopt this packaging format they're one of the biggest user-facing distros and having them support flat pack better is a good step flat pack isn't perfect but it's very very clear that going forward it will be the default packaging format for all beginner friendly and user-facing distro so that support is welcome it's really not perfect though as Searchers in the software manager will return multiple instances of the same application which might confuse users compared to just letting them ignore the packaging formats or pick it on the application's details page another change is the way mint handles drivers first the driver manager the tool that lets you see if there are drivers you could install and install them well that now runs in user mode so you don't need to enter your password just to open the application if you're offline you will also get a dedicated screen to let you know why the app is empty and you can also use USB drives to install drivers for example if you plug in a live USB mint will be able to detect it and offer to mount it so you can install drivers from that that tool also now supports Deb conf which means that installing proprietary NVIDIA drivers with your boot enable should be more robust mint still comes with cinnamon as its default desktop environment and the desktop got some changes this time around as well cinnamon 5.6 comes with a new Corner Bar which is another callback to Windows default layout it's a small vertical applet stuck to the far right of the default panel hovering over it allows you to peek at the desktop by hiding all windows complete with a blur effect if you want but you can also click that corner bar with the left Mouse button or the middle Mouse button and configure what which click does between either showing the desktop showing the desk lats showing the workspace selector or showing the window selector that little applet replaces the previous show desktop button that was on the right of the main menu in the context menu when right clicking on the desktop you can now directly access the display settings and the default desktop icons were cleaned up with the removal of the home folder the computer the trash and the network icon since these are all available from the file manager there is no reason to have them on by default but you can restore them in the preferences if you want now this reasoning also applies to all desktop icons since everything is accessible through the file manager you should just not have any desktop icons at all or you should have as many as you want it's your computer after all Nemo the file manager also gets a few changes like showing the dates in the list view in a mono space font improving the path bar by letting you click on the current path to toggle the location URL bar while navigating to a different folder will bring the path bar back smaller changes include a search entry in the shortcut settings so you can look at all the various shortcuts you might want to change preferred applications are now featured by categories you can configure the duration for which notifications will stay visible the themes list is now sorted between dark and light themes and current and Legacy themes and you also get window placement mode back in the window manager those are all pretty small tweaks but they should still make the experience a little bit nicer now still that themes list should really just be split between a theme selector and an accent color selector because that current list is getting very crowded oh and also mint won't bug you for your password as often as it once did for example uninstalling a flat pack app that you install for your user and not the whole system won't require a password same goes for removing local shortcuts and local applications you only installed for yourself and synaptic and the update manager will also remember if you entered your password recently so they won't ask for it for every single action and finally you can also now configure the mouse pointer theme and size for the login screen if you use wapinator the file sharing app on a local network you'll be happy to know it is now more secure and the web app manager now lets you tweak more settings when creating a web app especially the presence of a navigation bar in the window and if you want to browse privately for that web app not many changes to the default apps in mint 21.1 but then again it's not like they were missing a lot of features as per the mate or xfce variants they get the exact same changes for the themes the cursors the applications and the desktop the only thing they don't get is the Corner Bar the display entry in the right click menu on the desktop the file manager improvements and the reorganization of the various settings pages now there are the usual caveats for every version of Linux Mint it's still based on Ubuntu although you do have an addition based on Debian just in case which means that if Ubuntu messes up at some point they have a backup plan they still remove snaps from Ubuntu which is also pretty good for a desktop distro Snaps are great on servers but on the desktop there is no reason to prefer them over flat pack or regular packages there are still no touch pad gestures for laptops which sucks and the big thing is still no word on Weyland support X11 still works for the moment but mint hasn't started working on Wayland at all as far as I know or they've been super quiet about it they use a window manager based on matter and they use gtk which are gnome components which do have Waylon support but there are still going to be some work to be done for cinnamon itself to support Weyland and Implement portals and Global shortcuts and desktop and windows sharing all that stuff and not having any idea if the men's team is going to work on Wayland support or not is not great Weyland as a protocol is now feature complete with the recent edition of real fractional scaling and X11 isn't getting more secure or isn't getting any new features at all so I don't think mint wants to be stranded as the only last distro and desktop that doesn't support it apart from that though mint is still mint despite its branding changes that really make it clear they want to be the number one distro for Windows switchers they retain their main goal which I always took to be provide tools and graphical utilities for everything you can out of the box provide a simple and logical experience customization options for people who want to work differently and generally a robust and stable experience for day-to-day computer use and whether they're green blue pink or yellow hello they still provide that they are still the number one distro I would recommend to anyone moving from Windows maybe even more so now so men's 21.1 it's now become basically Windows as the default desktop experience but it's still a fantastic distro that I still heavily recommend and if you don't like the new look changes don't worry you can revert all of them all the themes are still there so it's no problem just like it's no problem to run Linux on any of today's sponsors devices because tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they ship worldwide a big range of desktops and laptops that ship Linux out of the box so don't bother buying a Windows computer and trying to install Linux on it because you never know if things are going to run right now or in the future when you buy from tuxedo you know that Linux is going to run well on it and they have devices for every price point and every use case whether you want to game or just a lightweight laptop or a workstation they have it all and they're all customizable upgradable repairable you can even have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid so check out the link in the description below if you want a device that runs Linux and you want to support linux's development tuxedo device are really great so thanks for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it there's always that dislike button it still works and you can write me a comment to let me know what you didn't like exactly and if you really enjoyed the channel and what I'm doing here you can always click on the super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux tag open source my personal life and the channel and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel as well so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and while I truly believe that the Linux desktop can work a hundred percent for most people it doesn't mean I can't admit it has some rough edges and I'm not talking about sweeping big issues with Linux as a desktop operating system I'm talking day-to-day stuff here so here are a bunch of pain points that affect me and a lot of people that I moved to Linux of course these are personal and you might have others so let me know down there in the comments the stuff that annoys you annoys you like this segue to today's sponsor damn it I need to watch more LTT to fix these Segways thanks to linode for sponsoring this video Leonard is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own nexcloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or game games for example focal board if you don't know about it it's an open source alternative to tools like Trello Azana or notion it lets you create Milestones keep track of your notes have a bird's eye view of your project and it basically helps you get stuff done and you can deploy your focal board server in one click from your Linux dashboard something I should probably do to ensure that I keep delivering my videos on time and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link in the description below now the first one and I think a lot of people will feel my pain is how to handle PDFs on Linux to read PDF documents it's extremely easy every desktop environment has a nice PDF reader that's quite fast it works perfectly you can zoom in zoom out to handle multiple Pages everything you might need to read but as soon as you need to interact with a PDF things start sucking big time to fill in PDF fields for starters you can always use your web browser on its PDF viewer but it's not amazing the native tools just are terrible at it here for example is the gnome PDF viewer trying to edit a document that I already filled in what I entered doesn't show in the fields unless I click on the field on Getty ocular at least has a button that lets me enable or disable these forms and at least it shows what I entered although why it's not the default it's B on me if I took the time to enter data into a PDF document and saved it chances are the next time I open that document I want that data to be shown immediately but maybe that has been developed by somebody who really loves magical or invisible ink that you have to heat up or something who knows and that's just the basics now if I want to sign a PDF document on gnome I simply can't there is no option to do it in any way in ocular on KDE I can digitally sign a document but that opens an error message saying I need to configure a digital signature which takes me to the online manual which says I need digital signing certificates or whatever without any simple way to add one myself straight from the application or create one on the fly from another KDE app hey you know what would actually work better being able to just grab a photo of your actual signature and pasting it on the document or drawing it with your touchpad or your mouse yeah that works for most people most of the time who wants to sign PDS you don't need digital certificates but gnome doesn't let you do that and ocular doesn't either if you try to drag an image of your signature it will just open in a new document there is no menu entry to add an image and overlay it on top of the PDF so by default you literally cannot sign a PDF document what you can do is open the PDF document with LibreOffice draw which will open it in an editable stance let you fill in the form field and add your signature image by simple drag and drop but it also completely breaks the layout of the document in a lot of cases and editing the actual PDF is a nightmare as each line of text is its own object that you'll as often move around as managed to edit it's a pure freaking nightmare and the Knight isn't over yet if you want to reorder Pages inside of a PDF or move one and add another one you need a third party tool a Kai I personally use PDF arranger on Chrome because the default PDF readers do not let you move pages around or delete them or just add another PDF document inside of what you're currently viewing and if you're thinking wow this guy has completely unrealistic expectations about PDFs Mac OS does that out of the box and has done it for 10 years you can add signatures manually you can just drop them onto the document you can fill the forms and they stay filled when you reopen the document you can move pages around you can delete them you can add new ones by just simple drag and drop it works and that's what we need oh and it's free free of charge like having a third-party tool that you need to pay to do these things ridiculous next thing I don't like on linux's email and calendar handling simply put we don't have good desktop applications for managing these things on Linux Thunderbird is the closest we have but the interface is insanely confusing and it looks like something that's 20 years old now sure they're working on a big redesign and I have High Hopes about it but for now I can't use that thing it's way too clunky it opens tabs for everything adding an account is insanely convoluted it doesn't fit well with gnome or caddy in terms of look and feel or behavior it's just weird to use and I never could get used to it I want to use it but until it's gotten that complete ux redesign I just can't it adds too much friction to do anything it's not a matter of locks it's just illegible as an application the default suite for Gnome is also pretty underwhelming you have gnome calendar and Geary and gnome contacts and the calendar option is decent enough very simple for personal calendars and definitely not something you can use professionally if you need stuff like seeing who is available at which time or handling of time zones for example the contacts app is ridiculously simple without any way to add any form of accounts that wouldn't be supported by the gnome online accounts so no card DAV or iCloud contacts for example its integration with the default apps is also mediocre as for example you can't automatically create a new contact when you answer to an email address for example something that should at least be an option and the email app Geary while it's decent is also very very simple it can't create folders to triage your inbox or labels for Gmail it can't unify your inboxes in a single View and more importantly it doesn't seem to access all IMAP folders for example my archive folder which is a huge dump of everything I want to save for later isn't accessible through gearing it can only access the males I dropped in that folder from this exact device which is obviously not what you want unless maybe it is then you archive your emails by device eyes in which case why and you're a monster and stop it then there's the caddy Suite of email contacts and calendars but this thing well it's insanely powerful and customizable doesn't look like it has been touched in decades even just adding an email account that is able to send and receive messages is insanely complicated you have to manually look into the settings for that account and map the folders yourself to IMAP folders or everything will be stored locally and you won't be able to send anything at all it thoroughly lacks Auto configuration tools and same defaults on all the apps of The Suite although their integration in a single shell is actually pretty good if you're looking for an Outlook alternative once it's configured it's awesome but a lot of people will just have flats super far away way before this configuration can happen hey in a way these apps are the perfect symbolic representation of their desktops gnome apps are way too simple in the name of ease of use and like critical crucial features and caddy apps are way too complex in the name of having all the features which means that your last resort is basically Evolution and honestly it's great but it also looks pretty outdated like a gnome 2 app that barely has received the tiniest of touches to make it feel more modern it does everything it's pretty cool but man when you use it on KDE it looks atrocious and when you use it on a recent gnome desktop it doesn't feel like the rest of your applications either so yeah major pain Point here I just cannot find a good legible powerful enough but not insanely complex Suite of applications for email calendar and contacts and all the people I installed Linux 4 told me the exact same thing to the point that they are all using webmails and that tells you something about the quality of your email and calendar apps when people prefer using a Webmail to a desktop app now next pain point is display related stuff we are so late on that stuff display scaling we have but fractional scaling it's a damn mess it's going to have huge performance impacts it doesn't work well on hybrid devices with Nvidia Graphics where you will get screen tearing it doesn't apply to all apps like steam DaVinci Resolve only office and a lot more which will either go 2X or 1X but nothing in between and it's just messy and 10 years behind even Windows which also sucks at this by the way HDR isn't a thing at all on Linux and I don't even know how you could go about turning it on and watching HDR content or playing games with HDR enabled and font rendering kinda sucks as well although it's easy enough to not make it suck that much at least on gnome and Katie gnome tweaks phones enable sub pixel NT aliasing and full hinting on KDE the same setting things are in the system settings in the fonts panel your eyes will thank me after a reboot unless your panel is already high DPI and using scaling of any type in which case you absolutely do not need to enable these things now seriously why isn't the anti-aliasing technology used to smooth phones on an LCD screen turned on by default when every screen is an LCD these days okay you've got some OLED but come on it's mostly LCDs or at least let people change it easily instead of hiding it in an additional third-party app on no now Katie does have settings for that but again the defaults aren't really set for most people to have a pleasant experience with Weyland some of those things are going away slowly but in the meantime we're way behind and it's turning stuff that should be an advantage like a high DPI display on the laptop into a drawback that will prevent you from buying that thing because it's gonna suck and you know it another pain point for me personally is automation like graphically creating a suite of events that happens when a condition is met for example when a file is dropped in the downloads folder and it's an image maybe I want it compressed as a JPEG to save some space and then moved to another folder if it's a screen cap from Firefox which has a specific name pattern or maybe I want to be able to launch a quick one-click shortcut that automatically adds rounded Corners to certain images or deletes all old invoices I have in my download folder since I know I've already sent them out stuff like that is crucial to gain some time on repetitive tasks or even on video editing and I can't do it right now on Linux at least not graphically and sure I could spend some time and create bash scripts to do this exact same thing but I don't want to I want to do it graphically because if we're able to have complete giant settings for everything on Getty we should be able to have an automation a graphical automation app like shortcuts on iOS or on Mac OS now something that doesn't affect me at all but seems to be a big pain point for parents I moved to Linux is the lack of good Parental Control software we have some basic things like blocking certain applications or web browsers or even preventing application installs and limiting these by age range so kids can't install stuff that isn't allowed but first these age limits are often not set by the applications you can install especially when using old repos and not flat back and second you can't interact with screen time at all limiting a computer session to a certain number of minutes or hours or certain days in the week at least not out of the box there seem to be third-party Solutions but default ones will always be better integrated and also all these third-party ones look like they are 20 years old at least so I would be a bit concerned about their abilities and how well they are maintained for rental control apps need to be in that weird limbo where they need to feel like they're older than the kid you're trying to control but they also need to not feel like they're 20 or 30 years old because you want them to be able to handle and catch the new stuff that your kid might be exposed to not that I would care at all about that since I do not have kids and I do not plan to have any anytime soon but still apparently it's a big problem okay so these are the pain points I encounter myself on a regular basis or that I've been told about by people close to me PDF handling is for me at least the worst offender it's the one that almost makes me want to use another OS just for doing that and every time I have to handle a PDF I put the task off by days because I know it's going to be a mess HDR and fractional scaling are mostly issues when looking at new hardware where you know that you won't be able to take advantage of all the capabilities or where high-res screen is actually a problem for you and not a feature which sucks and parental controls well I don't care at all about it but maybe you do so if you have other pain points if you agree or disagree with mine let me know down there in the comments and maybe we can help each other finding solutions to fix those problems and in the meantime I can help you find a solution to your my computer doesn't read Linux well problem thanks to today's sponsor if you're looking for a new computer that you want to run Linux on don't go buying any old Windows computer buy a laptop or a desktop that actually super Sports Linux out of the box from tuxedo for example they are based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a huge range of devices that run Linux natively the hardware has been specifically picked to run well with Linux and they have that big big range of devices from small Ultravox nugs big towers gaming laptops workstations gaming PCs and they're all configurable easy to open and repairable and upgradable you can change the SSD the ram you can configure another CPU another SSD you can add Blu-ray Optical drives you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid it's really really great so if you need a new device don't buy a Windows computer buy one from tuxedo that actually supports Linux so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well there's a dislike button and you can also tell me why in the comments down there and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon page and YouTube memberships both get you access to a weekly podcast where I talk about the channel Linux open source technology and everything in between and you also get the right to vote on the next topic that I cover for the next month so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and apparently people are expecting gifts in about a week and I haven't bought anything so I guess my family is just getting these Linux and open source news this year this week we have an Unholy Association of big tech companies bending together to make an open source competitor to Google Maps we have the death of ad blockers and tracker blockers being pushed back and we have apple finally working on opening up iOS to third-party app stores after the EU mandated it just like the EU forced me to tell you about today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nextcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming server for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started in a weird Association of big tech companies the Linux Foundation decided to partner with meta Microsoft AWS and TomTom to launch the Overture Maps Foundation the goal is to develop an interoperable set of mapping data that's also open they want to have completely open data sets that can be reused across any application and any business and each member of the foundation will throw their own data and resources into the foundation to make sure everything is as good as can be TomTom will probably be the biggest contributor here as they have a lot of data they can use but they will also use maps from open street maps and open data provided by municipalities they're working on releasing their first data sets in the first half of 2023 with basic layers like roads buildings and administrative information and over time they will add routing navigation and 3D building data while this project isn't yet live and will probably take some time before it reaches maturity it's still going to be an insane competitor to Google Maps as an open source project managed by the Linux Foundation I'm pretty confident it will stay private and trustworthy but with involvement from huge companies like Microsoft meta or AWS you never know still the good thing is that it should grow quite fast and be pushed heavily by these companies as a replacement to Google Maps wherever it is used with the price hikes for companies using Google Maps on their websites that made it insanely expensive this might be another nail in the coffin of one of Google's biggest services and now you might wonder why not just contribute to open street map directly and as someone who has worked with openstreetmap in my previous product owner of life it's probably because openstreetmap gets broken all the time by contributions like we had a map and half the time France was underwater because a contributor just broke the coastline and so the map just reflected where water was going so it was all over France this New Foundation is probably looking to build something that is a little bit more data controlled with a little bit more quality assessment and so that's probably why they are not contributing directly to osm instead Google will push back the death of good ad blockers on Chrome by a few more months they had planned to deprecate the Manifest V2 API for browser extensions in early 2023 but this has now been postponed now this API allowed extension developers to access browser requests thus letting them build tracker blockers and ad blockers that actually work well and the new manifest V3 API that Google proposed will hamstring these capabilities on Chrome so it's good to see that deadline moved back they plan to stop featuring extensions using manifest V2 in the Chrome Store starting in January then plan to experiment with turning off manifest V2 support entirely on the Chrome stable channel in June before completely removing all manifest V2 extensions in January 2024. the first step is postponed and the two others are currently under review to know if they will also be pushed back or not the move isn't apparently prompted by the ad blocker issue though as Google identified other problems like the service workers inability to use Dom capabilities which means this new version of the Manifest API could not manipulate the contents of a web page after it's loaded something that is used by a lot of extensions they are trying to find a solution or at least to mitigate the problem before dumping the older API if you want to know more about this issue I have a video Linked In the description or in the card here on YouTube and yes it's just an extension it's not like they're revamping the whole manifest V3 extension to keep developers happy and letting them just use the web as it's meant to be but still it's better than nothing and if you don't use Chrome then you have nothing to worry about because most other browsers while they will support manifest V3 will also keep the capabilities needed by manifest V2 extensions so your ad blockers and tracker block workers will still work nicely looks like apple will finally open iOS up as they're working on a project to allow alternative app stores on its mobile devices now they're not doing that from the good of their heart of course but thanks to a new set of regulations in the EU that prompt Gatekeepers to allow more competition on their platforms Gatekeepers being the term used in this set of laws to describe companies that have a Stranglehold on certain markets or devices and that have historically used that power to limit what other companies can do to reach customers apparently apple is dedicating a significant amount of resources to enable that and the end result would be that users will be able to download third-party app stores to their iPhones and iPads and evade the App Store if they so choose some engineers at Apple seem to see it as a distraction from the day-to-day development of new features and I've seen some articles online saying that it would make iOS less secure as companies would refuse to use the app store and push people to less secure third-party ones but it looks like apple will still mandate certain security requirements for these app stores and the apps they distribute as in they will verify each app anyway with a developer fee just like what already exists today on the App Store I have three thoughts on this first the less secure argument is pure nonsense Android has had third-party app stores from probably the beginning of Android and we can't really say that most companies have ditched the Play Store to install their own third-party stores most companies if not 99.9 of them still published to the Play Store so it's just going to be an additional option but it will not lower security for iOS users and second it's obviously great news as it means that people who want to support developers directly will be able to do so with third-party app stores instead of paying that 30 extra fee to Apple which is insanely High let's be honest and third I'm pretty sure Apple will still find a way to keep complete control over these app stores and what they can publish or not which means that the EU will probably find them or have to revise their sets of laws in the future to make sure that iOS is actually open xfc 4.18 is now out it's the result of two years of work and it has some major new features it gains a new shortcut editor widget that can be used in any app to let users customize how they use their nice little keyboard to interact with them and it's currently used in thunar xfc terminal and mouse pad the thumbnailer engine is now faster and should generate thumbnails appropriate for high resolution screens they merge the date and time and the clock plugin for the xfc panel the search field for the settings is now always visible and when switching gtk themes you will also have an option to automatically use the corresponding Window Manager theme now the file manager got the ability to display the file count in folders in a column and you can also add the file creation date as well it has a new image preview panel which can be either embedded above the places sidebar or it can use a separate panel on the right tunar also gained undo and redo capabilities for basic file operations like move rename trash or create files can have a highlight color over their name and you can set that in the properties dialog of each file the toolbar can be configured as you want by removing items adding new ones and reordering them and there's a split view option now to have two folders open side by side on top of that the file manager gained recursive search a recent files item in the places sidebar an easy to access restore items button in the trash and the ability to create custom actions to apply on files that will pop up in the right click menu there are also a lot of other improvements like better UI scaling support for adaptive vsync in the compositor and more and sure for two years of work if you compare that to what gnome or KDE have accomplished it might seem small but xfc has never been about huge sweeping changes to a formula that they like they just want to keep their desktop working as it is and incrementally improve the experience which is exactly what this release is doing the new version of the Linux kernel is out version 6.1 and its major addition is the support of rust which will let developers write code or drivers in that language they also added mglru for multi-generational least recently used a system that optimal is memory usage and performance under Ram pressure the system isn't enabled by default yet but I am sure some distributions will turn it on anyways the kernel also supports the pine phone Pro entirely so no more custom kernels needed and there's a new bunch of sound Hardware drivers like for Apple silicon AMD Ram Brandt or mediatek socs Xbox One Elite controllers will now have support for their back pedals through the expats driver and there's more Hardware support for gaming peripherals as well future CPUs also get their first implementations here like Intel's meteor Lake Arc gpus or future ryzen chips and if you prefer your kernel to be entirely free software the new Linux Libra kernel has been updated as well and it removes firmware blobs for various drivers to ensure you have a completely fast experience depending on your distro you'll get the update sooner or later but it's always better to wait for your distribution to package and ship that update to you rather than compile it yourself or install it from other sources the pine64 makers of the pine phone Pine time and more have announced the pine tab 2. a tablet that runs Linux is powered by a rock chip 3566 SOC which is a quad-core arm CPU with a Mali GPU it comes with two USB C ports a micro HDMI port a Micro SD slot and a headphone jack plus front-facing and rear cameras it comes with up to 8 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of flash storage with a cheaper version at 4 gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of storage it has a metal chassis and a detachable keyboard like a surface and it's stated to be easy to open and repairable it uses a 10.1 inch display although there is no word on the resolution and we don't know the price or availability just yet but the previous Pine tab came at 99 so if they can maintain that price or even double it it will be a very interesting little tablet to run Linux on although that SOC isn't a Powerhouse as it's going to be less powerful than what came in the pine Book Pro around two-thirds of that amount of computing power I don't expect it to perform really well but it still could be a nice cheap option for day-to-day Computing or at least having an on-the-go Linux device now if you want a more powerful Linux tablet though I made a video recently about the fight tab Duo I left a link in the description below and in the card around here and let's finish this with the gaming news first The Verge talked to valve developers and it looks like we will be getting a revised version of the steam deck in the future with a more serviceable battery as in easier to remove and replace better buttons better battery life and a better display although the performance won't be a focus point it will stay the same they also said they want to make a steam controller too saying it's likely they will explore that and they also talked about steam machines and confirmed again that they will release steamos3 for everyone and that they're excited to see other manufacturers using it to make gaming devices they're testing additional concepts for the living room as in a regular steam console but since they're focused on the deck it might not amount to anything in the end and they would prefer third parties to create these kinds of devices wine on Wayland is getting closer as well thanks to the work of colabora as of now if you run a wine app under Weyland or a proton game it's going to use x-wayland basically an X server running on top of Wayland but it might soon change and this means better stability and performance they provided a video with various applications and games running and it looks pretty good and also steam is now available in various Tesla cars notably the model S and the model X it runs on Linux so you will be able to play a big chunk of your steam Library while your car is charging and it all runs directly locally because these cars actually have pretty decent AMD Navi gpus the touchscreen can be used to navigate and play and the steering wheel as well hey if you have to wait 30 minutes for your car to recharge in the middle of your trip you might as well try and decrease the amount of games in your steam backlog right and you might as well try your device from today's sponsor if you're looking to buy a computer to run Linux on it don't go ahead and buy any old Windows laptop or desktop buy something from tuxedo their computers are designed to run Linux specifically which means that when you buy one you know that Linux will run perfectly on it they have a big big range of devices from the smallest Ultrabooks and laptops to the biggest gaming workstations gaming Towers or just laptop workstations and gaming laptops as well and they're all pretty configurable repairable with options for CPUs gpus ssds Ram even Optical Blu-ray players anything you want you can even have your own keyboard layout laser etched on your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid of the laptop so if you need a new device and you want to make sure it runs Linux perfectly and you want to support Linux development click the link in the description below and buy yourself a tuxedo laptop they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's always that dislike button and also do tell me why in the comments it's just nicer this way and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath the video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux open source tag the channel my general life everything and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover for the next month so if you're interested both links are down there in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and apparently people are expecting gifts in about a week and I haven't bought anything so I guess my family is just getting these Linux and open source news this year this week we have an Unholy Association of big tech companies bending together to make an open source competitor to Google Maps we have the death of ad blockers and tracker blockers being pushed back and we have apple finally working on opening up iOS to third-party app stores after the EU mandated it just like the EU forced me to tell you about today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nextcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming server for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started in a weird Association of big tech companies the Linux Foundation decided to partner with meta Microsoft AWS and TomTom to launch the Overture Maps Foundation the goal is to develop an interoperable set of mapping data that's also open they want to have completely open data sets that can be reused across any application and any business and each member of the foundation will throw their own data and resources into the foundation to make sure everything is as good as can be TomTom will probably be the biggest contributor here as they have a lot of data they can use but they will also use maps from open street maps and open data provided by municipalities they're working on releasing their first data sets in the first half of 2023 with basic layers like roads buildings and administrative information and over time they will add routing navigation and 3D building data while this project isn't yet live and will probably take some time before it reaches maturity it's still going to be an insane competitor to Google Maps as an open source project managed by the Linux Foundation I'm pretty confident it will stay private and trustworthy but with involvement from huge companies like Microsoft meta or AWS you never know still the good thing is that it should grow quite fast and be pushed heavily by these companies as a replacement to Google Maps wherever it is used with the price hikes for companies using Google Maps on their websites that made it insanely expensive this might be another nail in the coffin of one of Google's biggest services and now you might wonder why not just contribute to open street map directly and as someone who has worked with openstreetmap in my previous product owner of life it's probably because openstreetmap gets broken all the time by contributions like we had a map and half the time France was underwater because a contributor just broke the coastline and so the map just reflected where water was going so it was all over France this New Foundation is probably looking to build something that is a little bit more data controlled with a little bit more quality assessment and so that's probably why they are not contributing directly to osm instead Google will push back the death of good ad blockers on Chrome by a few more months they had planned to deprecate the Manifest V2 API for browser extensions in early 2023 but this has now been postponed now this API allowed extension developers to access browser requests thus letting them build tracker blockers and ad blockers that actually work well and the new manifest V3 API that Google proposed will hamstring these capabilities on Chrome so it's good to see that deadline moved back they plan to stop featuring extensions using manifest V2 in the Chrome Store starting in January then plan to experiment with turning off manifest V2 support entirely on the Chrome stable channel in June before completely removing all manifest V2 extensions in January 2024. the first step is postponed and the two others are currently under review to know if they will also be pushed back or not the move isn't apparently prompted by the ad blocker issue though as Google identified other problems like the service workers inability to use Dom capabilities which means this new version of the Manifest API could not manipulate the contents of a web page after it's loaded something that is used by a lot of extensions they are trying to find a solution or at least to mitigate the problem before dumping the older API if you want to know more about this issue I have a video Linked In the description or in the card here on YouTube and yes it's just an extension it's not like they're revamping the whole manifest V3 extension to keep developers happy and letting them just use the web as it's meant to be but still it's better than nothing and if you don't use Chrome then you have nothing to worry about because most other browsers while they will support manifest V3 will also keep the capabilities needed by manifest V2 extensions so your ad blockers and tracker block workers will still work nicely looks like apple will finally open iOS up as they're working on a project to allow alternative app stores on its mobile devices now they're not doing that from the good of their heart of course but thanks to a new set of regulations in the EU that prompt Gatekeepers to allow more competition on their platforms Gatekeepers being the term used in this set of laws to describe companies that have a Stranglehold on certain markets or devices and that have historically used that power to limit what other companies can do to reach customers apparently apple is dedicating a significant amount of resources to enable that and the end result would be that users will be able to download third-party app stores to their iPhones and iPads and evade the App Store if they so choose some engineers at Apple seem to see it as a distraction from the day-to-day development of new features and I've seen some articles online saying that it would make iOS less secure as companies would refuse to use the app store and push people to less secure third-party ones but it looks like apple will still mandate certain security requirements for these app stores and the apps they distribute as in they will verify each app anyway with a developer fee just like what already exists today on the App Store I have three thoughts on this first the less secure argument is pure nonsense Android has had third-party app stores from probably the beginning of Android and we can't really say that most companies have ditched the Play Store to install their own third-party stores most companies if not 99.9 of them still published to the Play Store so it's just going to be an additional option but it will not lower security for iOS users and second it's obviously great news as it means that people who want to support developers directly will be able to do so with third-party app stores instead of paying that 30 extra fee to Apple which is insanely High let's be honest and third I'm pretty sure Apple will still find a way to keep complete control over these app stores and what they can publish or not which means that the EU will probably find them or have to revise their sets of laws in the future to make sure that iOS is actually open xfc 4.18 is now out it's the result of two years of work and it has some major new features it gains a new shortcut editor widget that can be used in any app to let users customize how they use their nice little keyboard to interact with them and it's currently used in thunar xfc terminal and mouse pad the thumbnailer engine is now faster and should generate thumbnails appropriate for high resolution screens they merge the date and time and the clock plugin for the xfc panel the search field for the settings is now always visible and when switching gtk themes you will also have an option to automatically use the corresponding Window Manager theme now the file manager got the ability to display the file count in folders in a column and you can also add the file creation date as well it has a new image preview panel which can be either embedded above the places sidebar or it can use a separate panel on the right tunar also gained undo and redo capabilities for basic file operations like move rename trash or create files can have a highlight color over their name and you can set that in the properties dialog of each file the toolbar can be configured as you want by removing items adding new ones and reordering them and there's a split view option now to have two folders open side by side on top of that the file manager gained recursive search a recent files item in the places sidebar an easy to access restore items button in the trash and the ability to create custom actions to apply on files that will pop up in the right click menu there are also a lot of other improvements like better UI scaling support for adaptive vsync in the compositor and more and sure for two years of work if you compare that to what gnome or KDE have accomplished it might seem small but xfc has never been about huge sweeping changes to a formula that they like they just want to keep their desktop working as it is and incrementally improve the experience which is exactly what this release is doing the new version of the Linux kernel is out version 6.1 and its major addition is the support of rust which will let developers write code or drivers in that language they also added mglru for multi-generational least recently used a system that optimal is memory usage and performance under Ram pressure the system isn't enabled by default yet but I am sure some distributions will turn it on anyways the kernel also supports the pine phone Pro entirely so no more custom kernels needed and there's a new bunch of sound Hardware drivers like for Apple silicon AMD Ram Brandt or mediatek socs Xbox One Elite controllers will now have support for their back pedals through the expats driver and there's more Hardware support for gaming peripherals as well future CPUs also get their first implementations here like Intel's meteor Lake Arc gpus or future ryzen chips and if you prefer your kernel to be entirely free software the new Linux Libra kernel has been updated as well and it removes firmware blobs for various drivers to ensure you have a completely fast experience depending on your distro you'll get the update sooner or later but it's always better to wait for your distribution to package and ship that update to you rather than compile it yourself or install it from other sources the pine64 makers of the pine phone Pine time and more have announced the pine tab 2. a tablet that runs Linux is powered by a rock chip 3566 SOC which is a quad-core arm CPU with a Mali GPU it comes with two USB C ports a micro HDMI port a Micro SD slot and a headphone jack plus front-facing and rear cameras it comes with up to 8 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of flash storage with a cheaper version at 4 gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of storage it has a metal chassis and a detachable keyboard like a surface and it's stated to be easy to open and repairable it uses a 10.1 inch display although there is no word on the resolution and we don't know the price or availability just yet but the previous Pine tab came at 99 so if they can maintain that price or even double it it will be a very interesting little tablet to run Linux on although that SOC isn't a Powerhouse as it's going to be less powerful than what came in the pine Book Pro around two-thirds of that amount of computing power I don't expect it to perform really well but it still could be a nice cheap option for day-to-day Computing or at least having an on-the-go Linux device now if you want a more powerful Linux tablet though I made a video recently about the fight tab Duo I left a link in the description below and in the card around here and let's finish this with the gaming news first The Verge talked to valve developers and it looks like we will be getting a revised version of the steam deck in the future with a more serviceable battery as in easier to remove and replace better buttons better battery life and a better display although the performance won't be a focus point it will stay the same they also said they want to make a steam controller too saying it's likely they will explore that and they also talked about steam machines and confirmed again that they will release steamos3 for everyone and that they're excited to see other manufacturers using it to make gaming devices they're testing additional concepts for the living room as in a regular steam console but since they're focused on the deck it might not amount to anything in the end and they would prefer third parties to create these kinds of devices wine on Wayland is getting closer as well thanks to the work of colabora as of now if you run a wine app under Weyland or a proton game it's going to use x-wayland basically an X server running on top of Wayland but it might soon change and this means better stability and performance they provided a video with various applications and games running and it looks pretty good and also steam is now available in various Tesla cars notably the model S and the model X it runs on Linux so you will be able to play a big chunk of your steam Library while your car is charging and it all runs directly locally because these cars actually have pretty decent AMD Navi gpus the touchscreen can be used to navigate and play and the steering wheel as well hey if you have to wait 30 minutes for your car to recharge in the middle of your trip you might as well try and decrease the amount of games in your steam backlog right and you might as well try your device from today's sponsor if you're looking to buy a computer to run Linux on it don't go ahead and buy any old Windows laptop or desktop buy something from tuxedo their computers are designed to run Linux specifically which means that when you buy one you know that Linux will run perfectly on it they have a big big range of devices from the smallest Ultrabooks and laptops to the biggest gaming workstations gaming Towers or just laptop workstations and gaming laptops as well and they're all pretty configurable repairable with options for CPUs gpus ssds Ram even Optical Blu-ray players anything you want you can even have your own keyboard layout laser etched on your laptop or your own logo laser etched on the lid of the laptop so if you need a new device and you want to make sure it runs Linux perfectly and you want to support Linux development click the link in the description below and buy yourself a tuxedo laptop they are really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's always that dislike button and also do tell me why in the comments it's just nicer this way and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath the video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux open source tag the channel my general life everything and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover for the next month so if you're interested both links are down there in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and we can all agree that KDE is the most powerful desktop environment on any operating system the sheer number of options and customizations lets you make basically whatever you want on that desktop but the problem with that is that users are left to discover All That Power by themselves for example did you know that you can turn K win the window manager into a tiling window manager in two clicks did you know you could change the layout and entire theme of everything in just one click for your whole plasma desktop or did you know that you could have multiple sets of multiple desktop environments all with their different wallpapers and plasma widgets and applications and rules well maybe you do but I can guarantee you that most users of KDE haven't heard of one or all of these features so let's talk about hidden stuff in KDE and how we could make all of that a lot more accessible and how I could make this segue to today's sponsor more accessible as well thanks to tax care for sponsoring this video if you've ever worked on a project using PHP you know how frustrating it is to know that the version you're using is going end of life and that you're gonna have to upgrade to it quickly with a bunch of refactoring and code rewrites well duck skater can now help you to plan that transition thanks to their PHP extended lifecycle support with that new service you can keep your existing code base and still receive security updates and patches to PHP even if it's no longer officially supported this means that if your code base still meets your operational requirements it can also still meet your security requirements and you get some more time to plan the transition if you want to learn more about tax Care's PHP extended lifecycle support you can click on the link in the description below so let's begin with the power of KDE because I'm certain that there are things you can do in KDE that even you don't know about even if you're a seasoned KDE user by default KDE is super simple with its Windows like layout its menu bars being stripped from most default apps but if you open the settings there are a ton of things you can do visually and functionally you probably already know how you can change the theme for basically everything or how you can change the layout of your panels but there are also a ton of things most people probably don't know about so let's look at a few and then we'll see how KDE can make these more visible so people actually learn about them and maybe use them I mean that's the goal of the developers right to make these things so that people know about them and use them right I'm not crazy so let's start with activities something Katie never really talks about or promotes in any way an activity is a group of virtual desktops you can switch activities easily with a keyboard shortcut and they have their own switcher tool each activity can have it own name wallpaper set of plasma widgets and virtual desktops which means that you can create a work activity with a certain set of widgets that let you work more easily and unless this writing wallpaper and you can create a personal activity where you can have all the anime characters you want as a background different widgets and even different apps running hey if you have enough RAM you could even just start all your work apps during the day and when you're done just leave them open and switch to the personal activity play a while do what you need to do and the next morning when you need to get back to work just switch back to your work activity and everything is just right there how you opened it how you left it it's amazing it's a truly underrated feature that is never really explained or spoken about or demonstrated but it's something only KD does out of all desktops across all operating systems and most plasma users either don't know about it or never tried it because it was never blade now let's talk about K win the window manager slash compositor you might know that kwin will get native tiling features in plasma 5.27 letting you create custom tiling zones and resize and move Windows more easily but you can already do that in plasma right now thanks to custom kwin scripts those can force background blur on certain Windows you can have sticky window snapping so you can resize two adjacent windows in one go there's Cronkite a scribe that turns kwin into a full-blown tiling Window Manager you can maximize new windows to a new virtual desktop like on Mac OS or shake a window to minimize all others the possibilities are virtually endless and all you have to do to access that is find the right panel and the right option and the right button to get some new scripts it's never explained and it's never put forward as an advantage or a feature Now by default KD plasma also has KD connect a wonderful tool that lets you basically replicate what Apple does with their iOS and Mac OS devices you just install the companion app on your Android phone or iPhone and you pair the two on iOS the feature set is limited but it still lets you quickly exchange files use the phone as a touchpad or a remote or run commands but on Android you also get full-on clipboard sharing between the two devices you get the ability to receive phone notifications on your computer and to answer messages directly from the computer as well or vice versa kdeconnect is a super powerful tool that KD installs by default Apple tells you about those sets of features Windows has the my phone app that they also push heavily at setup KD doesn't even tell you it exists doesn't showcase it or doesn't even tell you there's something to install on your phone and that's just a few things most KD users probably never even knew existed they are tons more like K Runner press alt plus space and you get a full-on search box the spotlight of Mac OS if it was hidden and never talked about you can also have an application launcher as a right click on the desktop instead of a context menu you can apply your whole theme that covers the plasma layout the look the application theme the login screen the mouse cursor and More in just one click from the appearance tab you can replace any plasma widget by another through the show Alternatives context menu item you can replicate any desktop from any operating system whether it's Windows 11 or Mac OS or Linux desktop and still I get tons of comments every time I talk about caddy telling me Katie is too much like Windows KDE is too complex KDE doesn't work the way I want and every time I answer would you can change that the thing is no one ever told those new KDE users that these are things that they could do and so all that power is going to waste because while all the options are there in front of the user no one ever makes them realize that they can combine a certain set of these options to make something that works better for them all they see is tons of options not combinations of options so what could KDE do to solve all that hidden power going to waste now fortunately KD developers seem to have understood that problem because they are already working on a welcome application it should make its debut in plasma 5.27 it's extendable by distros to present the things they want and as a first set of pages they will have one about discover they'll have one to donate the project one to Showcase system settings one for the network and one for system updates it's a good step forward but that does not solve our power problem because all these Pages do is tell people about things they they already know they can do on any other desktop or any other OS what it's not telling them is what they can do specifically with KDE here I would take example on what zorian OS does with all the layouts you can apply for example it's one of the biggest users for KDE over gnome changing the layout of the desktop the welcome app should offer predefined layouts to let people know that this is a capability they have offer the default one a Mac OS like one a gnome-like one anything you want and in good KDE fashion you could also have a small help indicator that tells people what has been changed to make that layout possible or even better have a plus button to let someone create their own layout with a nice on-screen tutorial pointing out that by right-clicking a panel you can move it around and resize it and they could show you how to add widgets how to pick alternatives to already existing ones and then give the ability to save that layout to get back to it later basically when you have these kinds of intricate and Powerful systems that depend on the user's creativity you can just tell them that it exists you have to show them how to use them much like in a video game the tutorial should never just be lines of text telling you hey if you click this button you can open this Barrel it needs to be tutorialized by example and it's the same thing for advanced features on a desktop environment you pick the user's curiosity with multiple layouts you very clearly tell them that they can create their own and if they decide to do so you guide them to show them how they can replicate one or create their own now the welcome app should probably also be the entry point for themes KDE has a few out of the box just as a light or dark mode or the midnight mode but you could also use that opportunity to tell people about the get new stuff buttons that permeate all the customization throughout the desktop display all your normal default all-in-one themes and a very visible get more themes button right from the start then the user can understand they can get one click layout plus theme Plus login screens plus mouse cursor combos directly from their desktop and by extension that they can tweak all of these items individually if they are not interested they just skip it with one click if they are interested though then it lets them know that there's a whole community of themes Mouse cursors icon themes and plasma themes and layouts that they could just get out in one click from the appearance settings the welcome app would also be the perfect entry point to talk about KD connect and let users is no there's an app they can install on their phone to get all these amazing stuff again a simple step guided and easy to understand just open the notifications area as well to show people where KDE connect lives and they'll remember that if they want to use it next time and not right now of course not all features should live in the welcome app unless you want a 20 000 Pages intro installation slider like what Microsoft has on Windows which is terrible don't do that for example activities that's not something all users might be interested in but there's still a simple path as well when a user enters the settings for activities or maybe uses virtual desktops for a while you can just prompt them with a small notification easily dismissed and not disturbing or just a simple Banner in the settings that might be related to Virtual desktops just tell people if you use this computer for work and personal use do you want to separate these tasks using activities yes or no if the user clicks no you will never bother them again if they click yes you can have a simple wizard explaining what an activity is what it can do and just helping someone set it up by choosing a new wallpaper a name for the activity telling them how to switch from one to the other maybe automatically adding a plasma widget to their panel to help them do that maybe show them the different plasma widgets they could pick for each activity maybe have a simple UI to decide which app open on which activity a simple guided experience to let users understand first the use case of the feature and second how it works how to use it once it's set up same goes for all K win scripts and all extensions keep the settings Pages separate because that's less confusing for people who are not looking for your scripts but there are more multiple Pages where what a user might actually want to do is find a script to install it except they don't know they need a script for that feature they're looking for a checkbox or radio button if they can't find it they'll assume that it cannot be done but you could also tell them maybe there's a script for you to let you do what you're looking for and that you're obviously not finding now all that power needs explain if people don't know it exists then it doesn't exist and all the time you spent working on these features is wasted because only one percent of your users will ever use them instead of being helpful to 100 of your users okay let's be realistic instead of being useful to maybe 20 of your users but still it if your car could fly you'd want to know that right off the bat right you wouldn't want to find out in a semi-popular YouTube video or in a weird article on a website that is super Niche and small you'd want to know that and if you're the guy who made the flying car you want your users to know that your car can fly so they will actually want to buy and use your car same goes for desktop environments you need to tell people that there are features in there that no one else has and that they can use to make their work to make their computer more productive right now no one knows KD has that and so you're not getting users based on these features all the development time on these features is kind of wasted people who don't wait through the settings or don't look at YouTube videos just don't know what can be done all they see is huge complexity tons of settings and a Windows like layout they don't even know they can change so come on KDE developers you need to explain all that power and every new feature you add should have a clear plan on how it's being communicated to your users and how they can know that it exists and what they can do with it you have the most powerful desktop experience anyone can have whatever the operating system they decided to use and you still get people that don't want to use it because they think it's a Windows clone it's time to change that and it's time to change computers thanks to today's sponsor tuxedo makes laptops and desktops that ship with Linux pre-instop which is obviously a way simpler solution if you want a computer to run Linux on then buying anything that runs windows and praying that Linux will run on it when you buy from tuxedo you know Linux will run on it that's kind of the point and they have a big big range of devices to cover every price point and every need they are all modifiable upgradable Parable you can have your own custom keyboard laser etched on the keys of your laptop your own custom logo laser etched on the back of your laptop they have everything basically for anyone so if you need a new device you want to support linux's development and you want to make sure that what you buy will run Linux head over to the link in the description below buy yourself a tuxedo device they're really good so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's always that thumbs down button it still works but do tell me why in the comments come on and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday which is exclusive to patreon supporters and YouTube members and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and we can all agree that KDE is the most powerful desktop environment on any operating system the sheer number of options and customizations lets you make basically whatever you want on that desktop but the problem with that is that users are left to discover All That Power by themselves for example did you know that you can turn K win the window manager into a tiling window manager in two clicks did you know you could change the layout and entire theme of everything in just one click for your whole plasma desktop or did you know that you could have multiple sets of multiple desktop environments all with their different wallpapers and plasma widgets and applications and rules well maybe you do but I can guarantee you that most users of KDE haven't heard of one or all of these features so let's talk about hidden stuff in KDE and how we could make all of that a lot more accessible and how I could make this segue to today's sponsor more accessible as well thanks to tax care for sponsoring this video if you've ever worked on a project using PHP you know how frustrating it is to know that the version you're using is going end of life and that you're gonna have to upgrade to it quickly with a bunch of refactoring and code rewrites well duck skater can now help you to plan that transition thanks to their PHP extended lifecycle support with that new service you can keep your existing code base and still receive security updates and patches to PHP even if it's no longer officially supported this means that if your code base still meets your operational requirements it can also still meet your security requirements and you get some more time to plan the transition if you want to learn more about tax Care's PHP extended lifecycle support you can click on the link in the description below so let's begin with the power of KDE because I'm certain that there are things you can do in KDE that even you don't know about even if you're a seasoned KDE user by default KDE is super simple with its Windows like layout its menu bars being stripped from most default apps but if you open the settings there are a ton of things you can do visually and functionally you probably already know how you can change the theme for basically everything or how you can change the layout of your panels but there are also a ton of things most people probably don't know about so let's look at a few and then we'll see how KDE can make these more visible so people actually learn about them and maybe use them I mean that's the goal of the developers right to make these things so that people know about them and use them right I'm not crazy so let's start with activities something Katie never really talks about or promotes in any way an activity is a group of virtual desktops you can switch activities easily with a keyboard shortcut and they have their own switcher tool each activity can have it own name wallpaper set of plasma widgets and virtual desktops which means that you can create a work activity with a certain set of widgets that let you work more easily and unless this writing wallpaper and you can create a personal activity where you can have all the anime characters you want as a background different widgets and even different apps running hey if you have enough RAM you could even just start all your work apps during the day and when you're done just leave them open and switch to the personal activity play a while do what you need to do and the next morning when you need to get back to work just switch back to your work activity and everything is just right there how you opened it how you left it it's amazing it's a truly underrated feature that is never really explained or spoken about or demonstrated but it's something only KD does out of all desktops across all operating systems and most plasma users either don't know about it or never tried it because it was never blade now let's talk about K win the window manager slash compositor you might know that kwin will get native tiling features in plasma 5.27 letting you create custom tiling zones and resize and move Windows more easily but you can already do that in plasma right now thanks to custom kwin scripts those can force background blur on certain Windows you can have sticky window snapping so you can resize two adjacent windows in one go there's Cronkite a scribe that turns kwin into a full-blown tiling Window Manager you can maximize new windows to a new virtual desktop like on Mac OS or shake a window to minimize all others the possibilities are virtually endless and all you have to do to access that is find the right panel and the right option and the right button to get some new scripts it's never explained and it's never put forward as an advantage or a feature Now by default KD plasma also has KD connect a wonderful tool that lets you basically replicate what Apple does with their iOS and Mac OS devices you just install the companion app on your Android phone or iPhone and you pair the two on iOS the feature set is limited but it still lets you quickly exchange files use the phone as a touchpad or a remote or run commands but on Android you also get full-on clipboard sharing between the two devices you get the ability to receive phone notifications on your computer and to answer messages directly from the computer as well or vice versa kdeconnect is a super powerful tool that KD installs by default Apple tells you about those sets of features Windows has the my phone app that they also push heavily at setup KD doesn't even tell you it exists doesn't showcase it or doesn't even tell you there's something to install on your phone and that's just a few things most KD users probably never even knew existed they are tons more like K Runner press alt plus space and you get a full-on search box the spotlight of Mac OS if it was hidden and never talked about you can also have an application launcher as a right click on the desktop instead of a context menu you can apply your whole theme that covers the plasma layout the look the application theme the login screen the mouse cursor and More in just one click from the appearance tab you can replace any plasma widget by another through the show Alternatives context menu item you can replicate any desktop from any operating system whether it's Windows 11 or Mac OS or Linux desktop and still I get tons of comments every time I talk about caddy telling me Katie is too much like Windows KDE is too complex KDE doesn't work the way I want and every time I answer would you can change that the thing is no one ever told those new KDE users that these are things that they could do and so all that power is going to waste because while all the options are there in front of the user no one ever makes them realize that they can combine a certain set of these options to make something that works better for them all they see is tons of options not combinations of options so what could KDE do to solve all that hidden power going to waste now fortunately KD developers seem to have understood that problem because they are already working on a welcome application it should make its debut in plasma 5.27 it's extendable by distros to present the things they want and as a first set of pages they will have one about discover they'll have one to donate the project one to Showcase system settings one for the network and one for system updates it's a good step forward but that does not solve our power problem because all these Pages do is tell people about things they they already know they can do on any other desktop or any other OS what it's not telling them is what they can do specifically with KDE here I would take example on what zorian OS does with all the layouts you can apply for example it's one of the biggest users for KDE over gnome changing the layout of the desktop the welcome app should offer predefined layouts to let people know that this is a capability they have offer the default one a Mac OS like one a gnome-like one anything you want and in good KDE fashion you could also have a small help indicator that tells people what has been changed to make that layout possible or even better have a plus button to let someone create their own layout with a nice on-screen tutorial pointing out that by right-clicking a panel you can move it around and resize it and they could show you how to add widgets how to pick alternatives to already existing ones and then give the ability to save that layout to get back to it later basically when you have these kinds of intricate and Powerful systems that depend on the user's creativity you can just tell them that it exists you have to show them how to use them much like in a video game the tutorial should never just be lines of text telling you hey if you click this button you can open this Barrel it needs to be tutorialized by example and it's the same thing for advanced features on a desktop environment you pick the user's curiosity with multiple layouts you very clearly tell them that they can create their own and if they decide to do so you guide them to show them how they can replicate one or create their own now the welcome app should probably also be the entry point for themes KDE has a few out of the box just as a light or dark mode or the midnight mode but you could also use that opportunity to tell people about the get new stuff buttons that permeate all the customization throughout the desktop display all your normal default all-in-one themes and a very visible get more themes button right from the start then the user can understand they can get one click layout plus theme Plus login screens plus mouse cursor combos directly from their desktop and by extension that they can tweak all of these items individually if they are not interested they just skip it with one click if they are interested though then it lets them know that there's a whole community of themes Mouse cursors icon themes and plasma themes and layouts that they could just get out in one click from the appearance settings the welcome app would also be the perfect entry point to talk about KD connect and let users is no there's an app they can install on their phone to get all these amazing stuff again a simple step guided and easy to understand just open the notifications area as well to show people where KDE connect lives and they'll remember that if they want to use it next time and not right now of course not all features should live in the welcome app unless you want a 20 000 Pages intro installation slider like what Microsoft has on Windows which is terrible don't do that for example activities that's not something all users might be interested in but there's still a simple path as well when a user enters the settings for activities or maybe uses virtual desktops for a while you can just prompt them with a small notification easily dismissed and not disturbing or just a simple Banner in the settings that might be related to Virtual desktops just tell people if you use this computer for work and personal use do you want to separate these tasks using activities yes or no if the user clicks no you will never bother them again if they click yes you can have a simple wizard explaining what an activity is what it can do and just helping someone set it up by choosing a new wallpaper a name for the activity telling them how to switch from one to the other maybe automatically adding a plasma widget to their panel to help them do that maybe show them the different plasma widgets they could pick for each activity maybe have a simple UI to decide which app open on which activity a simple guided experience to let users understand first the use case of the feature and second how it works how to use it once it's set up same goes for all K win scripts and all extensions keep the settings Pages separate because that's less confusing for people who are not looking for your scripts but there are more multiple Pages where what a user might actually want to do is find a script to install it except they don't know they need a script for that feature they're looking for a checkbox or radio button if they can't find it they'll assume that it cannot be done but you could also tell them maybe there's a script for you to let you do what you're looking for and that you're obviously not finding now all that power needs explain if people don't know it exists then it doesn't exist and all the time you spent working on these features is wasted because only one percent of your users will ever use them instead of being helpful to 100 of your users okay let's be realistic instead of being useful to maybe 20 of your users but still it if your car could fly you'd want to know that right off the bat right you wouldn't want to find out in a semi-popular YouTube video or in a weird article on a website that is super Niche and small you'd want to know that and if you're the guy who made the flying car you want your users to know that your car can fly so they will actually want to buy and use your car same goes for desktop environments you need to tell people that there are features in there that no one else has and that they can use to make their work to make their computer more productive right now no one knows KD has that and so you're not getting users based on these features all the development time on these features is kind of wasted people who don't wait through the settings or don't look at YouTube videos just don't know what can be done all they see is huge complexity tons of settings and a Windows like layout they don't even know they can change so come on KDE developers you need to explain all that power and every new feature you add should have a clear plan on how it's being communicated to your users and how they can know that it exists and what they can do with it you have the most powerful desktop experience anyone can have whatever the operating system they decided to use and you still get people that don't want to use it because they think it's a Windows clone it's time to change that and it's time to change computers thanks to today's sponsor tuxedo makes laptops and desktops that ship with Linux pre-instop which is obviously a way simpler solution if you want a computer to run Linux on then buying anything that runs windows and praying that Linux will run on it when you buy from tuxedo you know Linux will run on it that's kind of the point and they have a big big range of devices to cover every price point and every need they are all modifiable upgradable Parable you can have your own custom keyboard laser etched on the keys of your laptop your own custom logo laser etched on the back of your laptop they have everything basically for anyone so if you need a new device you want to support linux's development and you want to make sure that what you buy will run Linux head over to the link in the description below buy yourself a tuxedo device they're really good so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's always that thumbs down button it still works but do tell me why in the comments come on and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday which is exclusive to patreon supporters and YouTube members and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you're trying to escape the Microsoft ecosystem or Suite of apps there might be one key part you're having trouble replacing and that's one note thankfully there are plenty of options to replace one note on Linux Mac OS or Windows whether they're open source or not and whether you need the whole feature set or not so we're gonna take a look at that and if you use something specific to replace OneNote let me know down there in the comments and let everyone else know it's always useful useful like this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nexcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started okay so let's begin with open source Alternatives because if you're leaving Microsoft you might as well not jump into another proprietary piece of software a simple note-taking alternative is note kit it works on Linux and windows and it's written in gtk so it should look at home on gnome desktops while it doesn't have the same notebooks organization as OneNote it still has the ability to organize notes into folders all accessible through a sidebar it supports written notes using a mouse a touchscreen or a pen it lets you create tasks with checkboxes lets you add images text formatting it supports math formulas it auto saves and it lets you highlight Syntax for various programming languages it uses markdown which spoiler alert is going to be the case for most of the Alternatives I'll talk about here node kit is available as a dab it has a PPA a copper repo for Fedora an open Susa build service package and is available in the Aur as well it's fast and free of charge but it doesn't have a mobile app companion or any syncing capabilities although you can sync your files yourself something a bit different but that might just suit you as well if you're more interested in the collaborative features of OneNote its next Cloud collectives this lets you create knowledge bases straight from your next Cloud Server you can create collectives which are basically notebooks and Pages inside of these they support text formatting adding images to-do lists emojis code blocks or tables you can create templates for sub pages and link to other pages in your next Cloud collectives and of course you can manage who gets access to which collective in your next Cloud Server it is free of charge as long as you have access to adding applications to your next Cloud Server still it's a fantastic choice to replace any kind of note-taking application whether you're on Windows Mac OS or Linux and is accessible through the web browser but there is no desktop app or mobile app to access these and also it sounds like something straight out of the USSR next cloud is communist confirmed of course I have to mention obsidian because if I don't I will get swarmed by comments asking me what I didn't include it and most of these comments usually sound like it's a huge conspiracy or something I'm really wondering why you didn't include obsidian so obsidian is open source it's available for Linux Windows Mac OS IOS and Android it lets you organize text documents in one place with a focus on connecting your documents with a graph view that represents all the links from one note to another it supports the markdown and won't bother you with a toolbar with text formatting you write it yourself using markdown syntax although like anything else in obsidian you can change that thanks to a big plug-in system you can create notebooks notes but they're all just files and you can use obsidian as a text editor as well if you want it has plenty of cool features like powerful search that also lets you switch to the right tab if your file is already open you have templates you have a command bar that lets you type what you want to do and find the associated command or keyboard shortcut it's really powerful you can sync your notebooks or vaults as they call them for ten dollars a month but they don't support handwritten notes if you're coming from OneNote obsidian is probably not the easiest app to get used to but it's really really powerful settler is another open source and free of charge alternative more geared towards research it supports tabs in the interface it has full markdown capabilities including yaml front matter variables it lets you organize your files through folders and it handles external reference documents that you can link to your notes and always have accessible through the interface it also won't just display markdown tags but will render them into a more legible format although you can pick and choose which tags are rendered and which just stay as plain markdown it lets you link to other nodes it handles citations through Json or bibtex it has dark mode and themes search hashtags and you can even create projects that group multiple nodes but can be exported all at once into a PDF for example nodes are saved individually as markdown files so you can sync them to your favorite cloud storage solution of choice there's no handwritten note support and no mobile applications but it is one of the most powerful alternatives on this list it might look a bit busy at first and it will take a few notes to get used to it but afterwards it's a joy to use it's available for Linux as a Dev and RPM or an app image and also for Windows and Mac OS now all of the previous Solutions did not include mobile apps or native syncing capabilities so let's look at one option that does all that it's Joplin it supports images videos documents audio files math formulas as well as note sharing and collaboration you can save web pages as nodes with a browser extension and you can write in markdown Joplin is also open source and can use end-to-end encryption if you want it doesn't do handwritten notes but it does virtually everything else that OneNote does and it has mobile apps for IOS and Android and you can sync your notes using your own cloud storage like nexcloud Dropbox or OneDrive or you can use Joplin Cloud which will be a paid option from 149 Euros a month up to 669 Euros per month nice for more storage space and more features Joplin is probably the most competent OneNote alternative on this whole list if you don't need handwritten notes that's probably what you should go and use get it while you can and say Bye Bye Baby to OneNote let's hope it doesn't get the cosmic Blues okay so yeah I'll stop now summertime and if all you want is handwritten notes then there's our note it supports writing notes using a stylus with pressure sensitivity it has shape tools selection tools you can customize the page background and format configure stylus buttons it supports drag and drop importing from various file formats and it has a modern gtk interface that looks pretty great at least ongo you can work with Pages or continuous documents and you can still type text normally if you don't have your stylus handy it's available from Linux on flat Hub it doesn't have a mobile application and it also doesn't do Native sync so you will have to sync your files manually through any service of your choice but if all you need is handwritten notes it's really really good of course that's not all the options you have fqo notes okay the app that works with next Cloud nodes and has basically all the features you might ever want in a note-taking application although its interface is far from being beautiful you also have xerno plus plus which takes R node further with more handwritten note-taking features but an older UI as well as for open source Alternatives my favorites in that list will be Joplin because it's so complete it syncs with everything you can use your own storage and the only thing it lacks handwritten notes is a no-brainer for me I never use that but if you do then you probably should use a combination of Joplin and maybe drawing your notes in R nodes on a Linux device now let's look at some non-open Source options now while personally I will always pick a false option over a proprietary one if it can do the same thing some people just don't care beyond though since they are not open source you don't know what they're doing with the data so they might not be very private I've talked about Zoho as an alternative to the whole Microsoft or Google suite and Zoho has a good note-taking application called Zoho notebooks as its name implies it lets you create notebooks with notes inside of them they support Rich Text formatting adding media files like images or audio linking other file types like PDFs you can set reminders in notes have to-do lists tables quotes code blocks and it supports handwritten notes as well they have a mobile app for IOS and Android a web clipper extension to save web pages to your notes and it has a Linux version as well although it seems to only come as a Dev package it's not open source but it's free of charge with two gigabytes of storage if you want unlimited storage it's going to cost you 20 euros per year which is not unacceptable in general if you can't self-host anything and you don't want to pay anything the Zoho Suite of apps is probably your best bet to replace every single service that Google or Microsoft has seriously Zoho has more services and applications available for you right now than what Google killed since it started killing stuff now you probably already know about this next one it's notion something a lot of people have been talking about in the note taking sphere it's an extremely flexible program that lets you create not only text notes but also to-do lists project management tools tables knowledge bases meeting notes road maps kanban boards and more you can create your own templates or grab them from the community and you can organize all of that into one single workspace so yeah it's basically exactly like one node but with more templates it's free of charge with paid plans to unlock more features including more space for collaboration revision history guests that can view your notes but not modify them and notion is pretty great and they have mobile apps a Windows and a Mac OS client and since it's all electron based anyways there's an unofficial Linux client unfortunately called lotion it puts the lotion on its desktop or it gets the hose again or there's notion enhancer which does the same thing but is more maintained and has a less creepy name and one last one you probably also already know about Evernote it does everything from tudos text Rich formatting audio notes web clippings notebooks tags advanced search tables calendars task management it basically evolved past its note-taking routes and now it became a full-on workspace where you can do anything you need that is work related it even lets you scan documents to import as nodes or lets you connect to Google Calendar to add notes to meetings you can create templates and of course sync everything with an Evernote okay account Evernote is free but the free version is really Limited in storage space and node sizes the paid plans get rid of these limitations and will cost you at least 5 Euros and 83 cents per month Evernote is the Grand Daddy of note taking on a computer it does everything it might even be more powerful than OneNote but there is no native Linux client that I could find apparently they did used to have a beta version of that client but I could not find it anywhere anymore but you do have unofficial ones like Nix notes or Tusk I often hear it's really hard to move away from OneNote and well now you know it's actually really easy there are plenty of Alternatives that will suit you if you don't use every single feature of OneNote there are tons of options to replace it and if you do use every single feature you have less options but you still have a lot of them although they most likely won't be open source course personally my favorites of the bunch would be Joplin if you don't need handwritten notes or zettler if what you do is more research oriented if you try to write papers for example so I hope there was something that floats your boat in this list if there was let me know in the comments down there and if you were already using something that I didn't mention in the video also let me know because I'm always happy to have new note-taking apps to try instead of actually writing stuff that I need to write and I'm always happy about this segue to today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new device and you want to run Linux on it do not go and buy Windows laptops and try to slap Linux on it go buy your tuxedo device they are designed to run Linux out of the box and the hardware they pick is designed to support Linux they have a big range of devices that they ship worldwide and they have a whole range of configuration options from CPUs gpus Ram SSD your own logo like laser etched on the lid of your laptop your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys it's repairable it's customizable it's upgradable it's a really good choice and they have laptops desktops for all price points and all use cases so if you need a new device and you want to support Linux development and you want to make sure that your device will run Linux well click the link in the description below and buy yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's that dislike button but also tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy what I do you can support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast exclusive to those members and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks for watching and again yes you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and man am I excited for this news video because once again meta is getting their ass handed to them and who would not love that so this week we have meta being told by the EU that no they can't just force people to accept the collection of their data and its use for targeted ads just because they decide to use their service we also have Linux Mint 21.1 beta which is full of new stuff even for Point release and we have the azahi Linux team managing to develop a functional GPU driver for all Apple silicon Macs and of course there's a lot more good stuff about Linux and open source like today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application portmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to track so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster So Meta has suffered yet another blow to its business model this time delivered by the European Union Facebook and Instagram forced users to agree to targeted ads using their data inside of Facebook and Instagram just by accepting to use the service by adding a clause in their terms of service which basically said they agreed to be targeted if they wanted to access the platforms meta lets users opt out of targeted ads from other applications and websites but they don't let users say that they don't want what they do on meta's own apps to be used to Target them this Clause has been declared illegal on Monday by the EU the ruling hasn't been disclosed publicly but the European commission called for Ireland's data protection commission to issue public orders that do reflect this new decision along with significant fines for Meta Meta can still appeal this ruling which will suspend the decision until the final verdict is reached and the company was very quick to point that out saying that gdpr still allowed them to process data Beyond consent or performance of a contract which is probably just a panic statement to avoid the stock price falling even lower the company says it's cooperating with Ireland's data protection commission and the final decision is expected in January but if it's upheld it will deal another crucial blow to metas business model which very heavily relies on these targeted ads and has already been hurt a lot by Apple's tracking protection features in iOS basically meta would have to offer a visible opt out for users to decide to not allow them to use data from their apps to Target them with ads which would lead to their ad Network being less interesting for advertisers and so less money in the end and I truly hope that this decision is upheld if only because I've really disliked meta and all their stuff but also because targeted ads are only okay if users are aware that their data is being used to Target them and if they actually agree to it what meta does right now hiding this into the terms of service is absolutely contrary at least to the spirit of gdpr and so I don't see the European commission backing down on this hopefully Linux Mint 21.1 Vera had its first public Beta release it still has critical bugs and should obviously only be used if you're okay with losing work or having to fix issues manually but the list of new features isn't small by any means with desktop icons being tidied up only showing essential items color for the various teams are now more vibrant and look nicer and this also means that they use less of the scholars throughout the system with these not being used on the panel anymore or in the menus folder icons are now yellow with a colored stripe the first steps app still lets you pick the theme and colors so you will be able to experiment a bit the mouse pointer also was changed to the bibata theme which looks pretty cool and the system sounds have been changed to use material design V2 sounds and more icon themes have been added including Breeze Papyrus numix and yaru now looks aren't the only focus though with the driver manager running without needing a password and being able to use live USB drives to install drivers flat pack is now fully integrated in the update manager letting you update everything in a single place and the software manager now has a refreshed user interface letting you distinguish between flat packs and regular packages and switch from one to the other with the usual drop down menu the default apps got a bit of attention as well with the ability to configure the login screen's Mouse pointer warpinator getting more security and the web app manager letting you edit more settings like adding a navigation bar or private browsing mint 21.1 uses cinnamon 5.6 with its new Corner Bar which lets you set a custom action when clicking or middle clicking that small applet in the bottom right corner of the panel selected files will no longer be overlaid with the color that your theme uses the display settings are now accessible right from the context menu of the desktop Nemo is getting a much improved path bar and there's a lot more than that Mains 21.1 looks like like a really really huge update especially for a small Point release I wasn't planning to make a video on it but if my release schedule allows it I might do so if you wanted an apple silicon Mac to run Linux you'll be happy to know that the azahi Linux developers now have added support for the GPU and for Hardware acceleration now of course it's still in Alpha it's pre-release like most of the azaki Linux project but it's already enough to run your desktop environment smoothly and even some games it supports opengl 2.1 and opengl Es 2.0 on M1 and M2 systems it doesn't support Vulcan yet so don't expect to play your whole library of Windows games on Linux running on a Mac just yet this new driver should work on all Apple silicon devices including the pro Max or Ultra variants and to get them you just need to run the azahi edge kernel and install the Mesa azahi Edge package obviously you should expect bugs block ups or crashes but it's still an amazing development and quite fast too and you can expect this code to land in the regular Mesa packages once it's fully ready just like you can expect all the azahi Linux code to land in the Linux kernel the main one when it's ready as well which means that all these rules will be able to benefit from that work which is pretty freaking awesome now this week gnome developers have been working on automating the testing of their compositor which is responsible for displaying windows and handling their interactions the tests will be ran after each merge request to test that the basic stuff is still working which should save some debugging time in the future they also plan to expand these tests to more scenarios on top of that they improve performance for g-streamer the media engine to use a lot less CPU from 400 to 500 percent down to 10 to 15 percent the settings app is also having some work done for the device security panel the accessibility panel which is now redesigned with a more modern navigation which should make its way to other settings pages in the future and other panels received more polish and became more mobile friendly there's also a new application called meeting point which is a big blue button client it's early days but it lets you watch the webcam stream of participants access the group chat listen to audio and join meetings of course there's also black fennec a new app to view and edit Json files in a more graphical way good work on the automated testing and performance not that I had any of these issues on gnome recently but it's still good to make sure that whatever they try to develop or Implement is going to be automatically tested and so there should be less bugs and less regressions and less performance issues in the future and in KDE land we have the new Advanced tiling system which landed well it won't replace a dedicated tiling Window Manager it will be a good middle ground for people who want to keep the stock compositor and Window Manager K win but want some more advanced features it lets you create custom tile layouts and resize all windows at once if they are adjacent the apis it uses can also be used by third-party scripts that want to do more and that's also coming in plasma 5.27 early next year now like I said last week you can now also browse iOS devices natively in dolphin and console got a hamburger menu like most other default KDE apps KDE also got support for the global shortcuts portal which means that on Wayland you will be able to use these a lot more this was a big pain point so it's nice to see it fixed on top of that the screen Chooser dialog when sharing your screen on Wayland will Now display thumbnails of the windows you can share and there are a lot of smaller user interface related improvements for Dolphin discover and the plasma panels this new tiling feature is probably going to be the headline one for plasma 5.27 and honestly when I used pop OS the auto tiling stuff was really really awesome so if plasma can have something like that out of the box I think it's gonna make a big big Improvement something I missed last week but it looks like proton the Privacy Suite of online tools not the compatibility layer for Linux gaming has released a roadmap for what they will be working on in 2023 and there's some very interesting stuff protonmail will get scheduled sent to program emails in advance and send them later and it will get new tracking protections to block trackers in emails so they won't know if you've opened the mail at all it will also gain reminders to well remind you to respond to a certain email or you can snooze an email so they are out of the way but they are not discarded emails will also be automatically categorized in the inbox there will be full text search in emails in the mobile apps and deeper integration with the whole proton Suite like automatically generating a link to Proton Drive for large email attachments single sign-on for mobile apps and more proton calendar will gain tasks and to-do lists better sharing to let people view your availability and a full agenda view to see what's up next in your day you will also be able to view local holidays at contacts birthdays and a local weather forecast now that proton Suite is improving really really fast and sure it's not a full replacement for all Google services they don't have a Google search they don't have a Google Docs they're lacking a few things but if what you use is Gmail Google Calendar and Google drive basically use proton instead let's move on to the gaming news luteris also got a new release version 0.5.12 which adds support for emulate OG Xbox games with xmu and fixes authentication issues with origin the epic game store and Ubisoft connect it also adds Discord Rich presence the ability to extract icons from Windows executables and setting custom cover art for games the flat pack isn't yet up to date but it should be soon there's also a new graphical tool to manage your proton versions called proton plus it's basically like proton up but designed with gtk so it will look a lot better on gnome it's early days but it lets you view all the versions you have installed where they are located and install new ones it works with steam and lootress with support for Heroic and Bottles planned but not currently working and it's available on flat Hub now speaking of proton there's a new release version 7.0-5 which makes a bunch of games playable like Rift unravel 2 battle Realms Bullet Storm and a lot more a huge bunch of bugs and performance issues are also fixed in this one and as always you don't have anything to do to get it steam will download it for you and as a last little thing it looks like Intel is actually using dxvk to power the DirectX 9 part of their Intel Arc GPU Drive drivers yes they're using dxvk to run games because they couldn't be bothered to develop a dx9 implementation for the whole new gpus now admittedly all these games using dx9 run absolutely horribly on this GPU so I don't know what they've been doing with dxvk but still it's cool that they've implemented it I guess cool like today's sponsor if you're looking for a new device to run Linux on stop trying to buy Windows laptops and trying to slap Linux and pray and hope and use some elbow grease to fix what doesn't work click the link in the description below to get a tuxedo device instead because their computers desktops and laptops are all made to run Linux specifically actually they ship with Linux out of the box The Tuxedo is based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a big big selection from small desktops nox Ultrabooks cheap laptops powerful laptops gaming workstations gaming hours whatever you need they have it and they have a big range of configurations for each of these devices including your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop or your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop so if you need a new device to run Linux on why bother with manufacturers that don't give a crap about Linux go to tuxedo instead I left a link in the description below grab yourself a laptop or a desktop if you need one they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well there's always that small dislike button and a comment down there would be appreciated to let me know what I can do better and if you really enjoy the channel and you want to help me make more of these videos you can always click the super thanks button on YouTube underneath this video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships subscribers of both get access to a weekly podcast on Monday where I talk about Linux stack open source my personal life the channel everything really and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel and you also get a preview of what I'll be covering next month so if you're interested both links are in the description below in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and while I'm not a keyboard nerd I'm absolutely a computer nerd which means I spend most of my days in front of you guessed it a keyboard and system 76 just sent me their launch heavy keyboard which is a full numpad included 10 key design but they also sent me everything in the background no over here so there's the launch light and the normal launch keyboard right now I'm using a faux mechanical slim book RGB keyboard which is decent enough but definitely not something mechanical fans would love so let's see how this heavy boy compares to its smaller siblings and how much I like it and also how much I like today's sponsor only office thanks to only office for sponsoring this video on the office is the only office suite I use on all my Linux PCS nowadays it's open source it's fast it looks good and it's super compatible with Microsoft Office formats you can download it for free and run on it locally on any computer whatever the operating system including Android and iOS or you can couple that with a free personal cloud that lets you edit online and can be connected to a lot of storage Services you might already use like Google Drive Dropbox next Cloud OneDrive and a lot more this personal cloud has received a big update recently with a dark theme a Free Library of templates it supports a ton more languages and it has a lot of hotkeys you can use to navigate on top of having an interface refresh if you need a powerful cloud ready and compatible Office Suite for Linux or any other operating system I don't think you can do better than only office so head over to the link in the description below to download it or create your own personal cloud okay so this is the system 76 launch heavy keyboard it was just released today and it's already available from system 76's website it works on Linux on Windows on Mac OS and just to be fully transparent it was sent me as a review unit so I have to send it back later just like both other keyboards in the background the light and the normal one I don't get to keep them so the launch heavy is a full 10 key design complete with numpad and media Keys something that was missing from the previous launch keyboard whether it was the standard or the light variant it comes in a US QWERTY layout by default in ANSI ANSI ANSI the not ISO layout but as we'll see you can basically do anything you want with that layout it's not that big as far as full size keyboards go with dimensions of 39 centimeters by 13.5 and 2.8 centimeters in height for people who use the imperial system that's 15.5 inches by 5.32 and 1 inch in height it might be relatively small but it is very very heavy who could have guessed that keyboard weighs 1.3 kilograms or 2.8 pounds and that's due to the insane Bill the whole frame is aluminum and the back is held in place with eight huge screws this thing will not Purge or bend or Flex or slide around on your desk now of course if you carry your keyboard around with you at all times it's basically your second laptop in your backpack and you will probably be better served with the launch light and in that case stick around because we're gonna take a look at this one as well in the video now the layout itself will probably feel weird at first I'm more of a French azrt layout dude being French myself but I'm used to qwerty keyboards on most devices I review and this one is definitely not standard your keys underneath the Tab Key are indented to the right and everything from the enter key is indented to the left with the arrow keys touching the shift key the home row floats up all by itself and then you you have the numpad in a compact rectangle the function keys are just FN Keys you don't get any specific logos or pictograms on them for system functions and you also get two spacebar keys this will absolutely feel weird at first and it absolutely did for me but after a few days it made sense you never hit the spacebar key right smack in the middle you hit it from the side with one of your thumbs and honestly having two different ones for your two different thumbs is probably a better idea than having a full length space bar anyway this layout is just the base default one all keycaps are removable and you can completely remap the whole keyboard thanks to a configuration tool which we will also look at in a bit my review unit came with the KL box silent pink switches which I kinda like they are linear which means the stroke will be smooth all the way without a bump or a click they are quiet enough for mechanical keyboard although the key travel on that board isn't huge compared to other keyboards I've tried you can also get kale box Jade Royal or silent Brown switches which I have on the standard and light keyboard I'll take a look at in a minute it is a very pleasant typing experience even when you really get into the flow of things you just move the keys the keyboard doesn't move at all it doesn't bend it doesn't Flex it's just super sturdy and solid and I really like it the keyboard is wired through USBC it doesn't have any Wireless capabilities and it's also a USB hub with two additional USBC ports which are 3.2 gen 1 and 2 USB a ports also 3.2 gen 1 so you can plug your mouse charge your phone or anything in between and the keyboard also has perky RGB which you can adjust using the Configuration utility of course since it's a modular keyboard you also get a ton of stuff in the Box first you have two USBC cables One USB a to USBC and one USB C to USBC both are braided and and pretty long and they feel high quality you also get a keycap remover tool and a lot of additional keycaps you can use to make your keyboard your own there are additional arrow keys in a nice vibrant blue or a deep red the Escape key also has these two colors and you also get larger Escape keys in all three colors brown blue and red so you can swap the one slot Escape key for a 2 slot if you want and map that using the configurator tool they're also longer shift backspace and function keys and a bunch of cool ones you can use for your super key or anything else like a system 76 logo a pop OS logo some robots or a spaceship and if you don't like the colors the phones or the size well they are replaceable so you can always bring your own custom set of keycaps especially if you want a different layout than the QWERTY one in the Box you also get two small magnetically attached bars of aluminum with rubber feet that you can just slot in at the back of the keyboard to raise it by a 15gb is angle if you prefer typing with a keyboard a bit higher it's an interesting design there are basically three 's on that keyboard design there's the one slot the two slot and the three slot and you can hot swap them all you want all you like as long as you have the keycaps to go over them and then you can map them in real time with the configurator utility so let's talk about that then so by now it should be clear that this keyboard doesn't reach its full potential unless you use the configuration tool it's available in the pop shop for pop OS users or you can download it of their website as an app image a DMG for Mac users and an MSI installer for Windows users it's a super visual tool with the full layout of your keyboard on display and a list of actions you can map to each key click the key you want to change then click the action it does and the layout will reflect that change and be applied immediately to the keyboard no saving or applying action needed you can select multiple keys to change their actions all at once using shift and clicking as well and what's more you can configure the keyboard with four different layer which all have their own set of actions per keys by default all these layers will reuse the main first layer so you don't have to remap everything for each layer and if you change something in the first layer it will automatically be reflected on all the other three this lets you just change a few Keys per layer if you want or have a completely different layout like a French one for example and more importantly you can set RGB patterns per layer so yes you could use these four different layouts just to have different color patterns vibrating all over a keyboard and distracting you if that's something you want by default you get a pattern called SpaceTime which pulsates light in a rainbow effect but that's pretty distracting pretty and distracting I mean you can change that for a lot of other different patterns or you can set a global solid color for the whole keyboard or a solid color for each key in that case click the keys you want and set the color you using the color wheel you can also change the brightness of it all and you can do that for each of the four layers and the best thing is all these layers and all these RGB settings and key maps they're all saved directly to the keyboard not to your computer which means that you can just unplug the keyboard bring it to another computer and it will have the exact same mappings layers and RGB patterns that's super awesome another important thing to mention is the fully open design of that keyboard the chassis design is open source you can download the cad files and mail or 3D print your own the PCB design is also fully open you can access it on GitHub and so is the firmware and the configuration tool so I just love the launch heavy keyboard the launch the basic one never appealed to me because it doesn't have a numpad and I need a numpad I'm French doing number Keys is hard you need to use shift and the number key a numpad is a Time Saver for everything I do and and also it's super solid it's very sturdy you get a nice choice of switches and you can configure it any way you want it's a really really good board but now let's compare it to its smaller siblings all other launch keyboards the regular one and the light have the same advantages they've got a fully open design access to the configuration tool a choice of four different switch types and additional keycaps in the box with the keycap removing tool and the two USBC cables where they differ of course isn't the number of keys the launch the standard one is a 10 key less design so without the numpad but apart from that it has all the same great features including the USBC and usba ports it doesn't get the additional super key with icons on it though and its Razer bar is a single piece not two small ones my review unit of the launch keyboard came with the kale box Jade switches which feel amazing with a short travel distance before you have to push a bit harder to get that click which signifies the switch actually actuated it feels super good but it's also noisy as hell so there is no way I could use that myself if you have colleagues or your work in the same office as other people I give them about 10 minutes before they staple your head to your desk if you start using that thing not that I would know what it feels like because I work from home all alone and I don't have colleagues ah man I wish I had somebody to staple my head to my desk now since that launch keyboard is smaller it's also lighter at right under a kilogram which makes it a bit easier to carry around as per the light it's an ultra small design with the numbers row and the function row merged into one it also of course doesn't have a numpad but it has all the same accessories additional keycaps and cables RGB and access to the configuration tool like its bigger siblings what it doesn't have though is the USB hub it's just one USBC cable to plug it in and that's it my review unit came with the kale box Royal switches which are tactile you have an initial bump to pass when you press a key and that's when it actuates it requires a bit more Force to push the key down but you don't have to press it all the way to get a result so it's probably better if you like to type really fast with really hard Strokes on the keys personally after using the silent pink the Jade and the Royal switches my favorites are the silent pink I would really enjoy using the Jade switches because I love the feel of pressing the keys but the sound would drive me completely insane and they also have the brown silence which is which are tactile but also a little bit more quiet I'm not gonna lie these keyboards are pricey the light is 200 US dollars the regular launch keyboard is 285 US Dollars and at the time I'm writing this script the heaviest price hasn't been announced yet although I would expect it to be around 350 US dollars but what you get for that price is actually really really good value you get a super solid board a solid choice of four different switch options which should work for basically everyone you get a ton of keycap replacement if you need you get the ability to swap everything out and you get the ability to configure everything with four different different layers saving that on the boards taking all that config On The Go including your RGB patterns it's a great value for the price now after using these for a few weeks going back to my old faux mechanical keyboard feels like a huge downgrade unfortunately while you can get one shipped to Europe the shipping costs are prohibitive right now so if you want one it's probably better to wait for system 76 to open their Distribution Center in Europe which they've talked about this year if you're in Northern America no worries it's gonna ship to you with like the regular price if you like keyboards if you like open source and if you like gear configuration then I don't think there's a better option than these keyboards if you have the cache that is and I don't think there's a better option than today's sponsor tuxedo makes laptops and desktops that ship with Linux pre-installed and that's probably a way better option than buying any old Windows laptop of the shelves and hoping praying and researching the whole internet to make sure that it actually runs Linux well and that everything is well supported when you buy from tuxedo you know that Linux is going to run on that Hardware because it has been picked specifically to run Linux out of the box they have a big range of devices that they ship worldwide and they're all pretty configurable and repairable with options for all the internal components plus the ability to have your own keyboard layout laser etched on the keys or your logo laser etched on the back of your laptop for example so if you need a new device you want to make sure that it runs Linux perfectly and you also want to support Linux development which tuxedo does click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday where I talk about Linux Tech open source the channel my personal life everything and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover for the next month so if you're interested both links are down there as well in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and man am I excited for this news video because once again meta is getting their ass handed to them and who would not love that so this week we have meta being told by the EU that no they can't just force people to accept the collection of their data and its use for targeted ads just because they decide to use their service we also have Linux Mint 21.1 beta which is full of new stuff even for Point release and we have the azahi Linux team managing to develop a functional GPU driver for all Apple silicon Macs and of course there's a lot more good stuff about Linux and open source like today's sponsor this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application portmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to track so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster So Meta has suffered yet another blow to its business model this time delivered by the European Union Facebook and Instagram forced users to agree to targeted ads using their data inside of Facebook and Instagram just by accepting to use the service by adding a clause in their terms of service which basically said they agreed to be targeted if they wanted to access the platforms meta lets users opt out of targeted ads from other applications and websites but they don't let users say that they don't want what they do on meta's own apps to be used to Target them this Clause has been declared illegal on Monday by the EU the ruling hasn't been disclosed publicly but the European commission called for Ireland's data protection commission to issue public orders that do reflect this new decision along with significant fines for Meta Meta can still appeal this ruling which will suspend the decision until the final verdict is reached and the company was very quick to point that out saying that gdpr still allowed them to process data Beyond consent or performance of a contract which is probably just a panic statement to avoid the stock price falling even lower the company says it's cooperating with Ireland's data protection commission and the final decision is expected in January but if it's upheld it will deal another crucial blow to metas business model which very heavily relies on these targeted ads and has already been hurt a lot by Apple's tracking protection features in iOS basically meta would have to offer a visible opt out for users to decide to not allow them to use data from their apps to Target them with ads which would lead to their ad Network being less interesting for advertisers and so less money in the end and I truly hope that this decision is upheld if only because I've really disliked meta and all their stuff but also because targeted ads are only okay if users are aware that their data is being used to Target them and if they actually agree to it what meta does right now hiding this into the terms of service is absolutely contrary at least to the spirit of gdpr and so I don't see the European commission backing down on this hopefully Linux Mint 21.1 Vera had its first public Beta release it still has critical bugs and should obviously only be used if you're okay with losing work or having to fix issues manually but the list of new features isn't small by any means with desktop icons being tidied up only showing essential items color for the various teams are now more vibrant and look nicer and this also means that they use less of the scholars throughout the system with these not being used on the panel anymore or in the menus folder icons are now yellow with a colored stripe the first steps app still lets you pick the theme and colors so you will be able to experiment a bit the mouse pointer also was changed to the bibata theme which looks pretty cool and the system sounds have been changed to use material design V2 sounds and more icon themes have been added including Breeze Papyrus numix and yaru now looks aren't the only focus though with the driver manager running without needing a password and being able to use live USB drives to install drivers flat pack is now fully integrated in the update manager letting you update everything in a single place and the software manager now has a refreshed user interface letting you distinguish between flat packs and regular packages and switch from one to the other with the usual drop down menu the default apps got a bit of attention as well with the ability to configure the login screen's Mouse pointer warpinator getting more security and the web app manager letting you edit more settings like adding a navigation bar or private browsing mint 21.1 uses cinnamon 5.6 with its new Corner Bar which lets you set a custom action when clicking or middle clicking that small applet in the bottom right corner of the panel selected files will no longer be overlaid with the color that your theme uses the display settings are now accessible right from the context menu of the desktop Nemo is getting a much improved path bar and there's a lot more than that Mains 21.1 looks like like a really really huge update especially for a small Point release I wasn't planning to make a video on it but if my release schedule allows it I might do so if you wanted an apple silicon Mac to run Linux you'll be happy to know that the azahi Linux developers now have added support for the GPU and for Hardware acceleration now of course it's still in Alpha it's pre-release like most of the azaki Linux project but it's already enough to run your desktop environment smoothly and even some games it supports opengl 2.1 and opengl Es 2.0 on M1 and M2 systems it doesn't support Vulcan yet so don't expect to play your whole library of Windows games on Linux running on a Mac just yet this new driver should work on all Apple silicon devices including the pro Max or Ultra variants and to get them you just need to run the azahi edge kernel and install the Mesa azahi Edge package obviously you should expect bugs block ups or crashes but it's still an amazing development and quite fast too and you can expect this code to land in the regular Mesa packages once it's fully ready just like you can expect all the azahi Linux code to land in the Linux kernel the main one when it's ready as well which means that all these rules will be able to benefit from that work which is pretty freaking awesome now this week gnome developers have been working on automating the testing of their compositor which is responsible for displaying windows and handling their interactions the tests will be ran after each merge request to test that the basic stuff is still working which should save some debugging time in the future they also plan to expand these tests to more scenarios on top of that they improve performance for g-streamer the media engine to use a lot less CPU from 400 to 500 percent down to 10 to 15 percent the settings app is also having some work done for the device security panel the accessibility panel which is now redesigned with a more modern navigation which should make its way to other settings pages in the future and other panels received more polish and became more mobile friendly there's also a new application called meeting point which is a big blue button client it's early days but it lets you watch the webcam stream of participants access the group chat listen to audio and join meetings of course there's also black fennec a new app to view and edit Json files in a more graphical way good work on the automated testing and performance not that I had any of these issues on gnome recently but it's still good to make sure that whatever they try to develop or Implement is going to be automatically tested and so there should be less bugs and less regressions and less performance issues in the future and in KDE land we have the new Advanced tiling system which landed well it won't replace a dedicated tiling Window Manager it will be a good middle ground for people who want to keep the stock compositor and Window Manager K win but want some more advanced features it lets you create custom tile layouts and resize all windows at once if they are adjacent the apis it uses can also be used by third-party scripts that want to do more and that's also coming in plasma 5.27 early next year now like I said last week you can now also browse iOS devices natively in dolphin and console got a hamburger menu like most other default KDE apps KDE also got support for the global shortcuts portal which means that on Wayland you will be able to use these a lot more this was a big pain point so it's nice to see it fixed on top of that the screen Chooser dialog when sharing your screen on Wayland will Now display thumbnails of the windows you can share and there are a lot of smaller user interface related improvements for Dolphin discover and the plasma panels this new tiling feature is probably going to be the headline one for plasma 5.27 and honestly when I used pop OS the auto tiling stuff was really really awesome so if plasma can have something like that out of the box I think it's gonna make a big big Improvement something I missed last week but it looks like proton the Privacy Suite of online tools not the compatibility layer for Linux gaming has released a roadmap for what they will be working on in 2023 and there's some very interesting stuff protonmail will get scheduled sent to program emails in advance and send them later and it will get new tracking protections to block trackers in emails so they won't know if you've opened the mail at all it will also gain reminders to well remind you to respond to a certain email or you can snooze an email so they are out of the way but they are not discarded emails will also be automatically categorized in the inbox there will be full text search in emails in the mobile apps and deeper integration with the whole proton Suite like automatically generating a link to Proton Drive for large email attachments single sign-on for mobile apps and more proton calendar will gain tasks and to-do lists better sharing to let people view your availability and a full agenda view to see what's up next in your day you will also be able to view local holidays at contacts birthdays and a local weather forecast now that proton Suite is improving really really fast and sure it's not a full replacement for all Google services they don't have a Google search they don't have a Google Docs they're lacking a few things but if what you use is Gmail Google Calendar and Google drive basically use proton instead let's move on to the gaming news luteris also got a new release version 0.5.12 which adds support for emulate OG Xbox games with xmu and fixes authentication issues with origin the epic game store and Ubisoft connect it also adds Discord Rich presence the ability to extract icons from Windows executables and setting custom cover art for games the flat pack isn't yet up to date but it should be soon there's also a new graphical tool to manage your proton versions called proton plus it's basically like proton up but designed with gtk so it will look a lot better on gnome it's early days but it lets you view all the versions you have installed where they are located and install new ones it works with steam and lootress with support for Heroic and Bottles planned but not currently working and it's available on flat Hub now speaking of proton there's a new release version 7.0-5 which makes a bunch of games playable like Rift unravel 2 battle Realms Bullet Storm and a lot more a huge bunch of bugs and performance issues are also fixed in this one and as always you don't have anything to do to get it steam will download it for you and as a last little thing it looks like Intel is actually using dxvk to power the DirectX 9 part of their Intel Arc GPU Drive drivers yes they're using dxvk to run games because they couldn't be bothered to develop a dx9 implementation for the whole new gpus now admittedly all these games using dx9 run absolutely horribly on this GPU so I don't know what they've been doing with dxvk but still it's cool that they've implemented it I guess cool like today's sponsor if you're looking for a new device to run Linux on stop trying to buy Windows laptops and trying to slap Linux and pray and hope and use some elbow grease to fix what doesn't work click the link in the description below to get a tuxedo device instead because their computers desktops and laptops are all made to run Linux specifically actually they ship with Linux out of the box The Tuxedo is based in Germany but they ship worldwide and they have a big big selection from small desktops nox Ultrabooks cheap laptops powerful laptops gaming workstations gaming hours whatever you need they have it and they have a big range of configurations for each of these devices including your own logo laser etched on the lid of your laptop or your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop so if you need a new device to run Linux on why bother with manufacturers that don't give a crap about Linux go to tuxedo instead I left a link in the description below grab yourself a laptop or a desktop if you need one they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well there's always that small dislike button and a comment down there would be appreciated to let me know what I can do better and if you really enjoy the channel and you want to help me make more of these videos you can always click the super thanks button on YouTube underneath this video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships subscribers of both get access to a weekly podcast on Monday where I talk about Linux stack open source my personal life the channel everything really and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel and you also get a preview of what I'll be covering next month so if you're interested both links are in the description below in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you're trying to escape the Microsoft ecosystem or Suite of apps there might be one key part you're having trouble replacing and that's one note thankfully there are plenty of options to replace one note on Linux Mac OS or Windows whether they're open source or not and whether you need the whole feature set or not so we're gonna take a look at that and if you use something specific to replace OneNote let me know down there in the comments and let everyone else know it's always useful useful like this segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nexcloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started okay so let's begin with open source Alternatives because if you're leaving Microsoft you might as well not jump into another proprietary piece of software a simple note-taking alternative is note kit it works on Linux and windows and it's written in gtk so it should look at home on gnome desktops while it doesn't have the same notebooks organization as OneNote it still has the ability to organize notes into folders all accessible through a sidebar it supports written notes using a mouse a touchscreen or a pen it lets you create tasks with checkboxes lets you add images text formatting it supports math formulas it auto saves and it lets you highlight Syntax for various programming languages it uses markdown which spoiler alert is going to be the case for most of the Alternatives I'll talk about here node kit is available as a dab it has a PPA a copper repo for Fedora an open Susa build service package and is available in the Aur as well it's fast and free of charge but it doesn't have a mobile app companion or any syncing capabilities although you can sync your files yourself something a bit different but that might just suit you as well if you're more interested in the collaborative features of OneNote its next Cloud collectives this lets you create knowledge bases straight from your next Cloud Server you can create collectives which are basically notebooks and Pages inside of these they support text formatting adding images to-do lists emojis code blocks or tables you can create templates for sub pages and link to other pages in your next Cloud collectives and of course you can manage who gets access to which collective in your next Cloud Server it is free of charge as long as you have access to adding applications to your next Cloud Server still it's a fantastic choice to replace any kind of note-taking application whether you're on Windows Mac OS or Linux and is accessible through the web browser but there is no desktop app or mobile app to access these and also it sounds like something straight out of the USSR next cloud is communist confirmed of course I have to mention obsidian because if I don't I will get swarmed by comments asking me what I didn't include it and most of these comments usually sound like it's a huge conspiracy or something I'm really wondering why you didn't include obsidian so obsidian is open source it's available for Linux Windows Mac OS IOS and Android it lets you organize text documents in one place with a focus on connecting your documents with a graph view that represents all the links from one note to another it supports the markdown and won't bother you with a toolbar with text formatting you write it yourself using markdown syntax although like anything else in obsidian you can change that thanks to a big plug-in system you can create notebooks notes but they're all just files and you can use obsidian as a text editor as well if you want it has plenty of cool features like powerful search that also lets you switch to the right tab if your file is already open you have templates you have a command bar that lets you type what you want to do and find the associated command or keyboard shortcut it's really powerful you can sync your notebooks or vaults as they call them for ten dollars a month but they don't support handwritten notes if you're coming from OneNote obsidian is probably not the easiest app to get used to but it's really really powerful settler is another open source and free of charge alternative more geared towards research it supports tabs in the interface it has full markdown capabilities including yaml front matter variables it lets you organize your files through folders and it handles external reference documents that you can link to your notes and always have accessible through the interface it also won't just display markdown tags but will render them into a more legible format although you can pick and choose which tags are rendered and which just stay as plain markdown it lets you link to other nodes it handles citations through Json or bibtex it has dark mode and themes search hashtags and you can even create projects that group multiple nodes but can be exported all at once into a PDF for example nodes are saved individually as markdown files so you can sync them to your favorite cloud storage solution of choice there's no handwritten note support and no mobile applications but it is one of the most powerful alternatives on this list it might look a bit busy at first and it will take a few notes to get used to it but afterwards it's a joy to use it's available for Linux as a Dev and RPM or an app image and also for Windows and Mac OS now all of the previous Solutions did not include mobile apps or native syncing capabilities so let's look at one option that does all that it's Joplin it supports images videos documents audio files math formulas as well as note sharing and collaboration you can save web pages as nodes with a browser extension and you can write in markdown Joplin is also open source and can use end-to-end encryption if you want it doesn't do handwritten notes but it does virtually everything else that OneNote does and it has mobile apps for IOS and Android and you can sync your notes using your own cloud storage like nexcloud Dropbox or OneDrive or you can use Joplin Cloud which will be a paid option from 149 Euros a month up to 669 Euros per month nice for more storage space and more features Joplin is probably the most competent OneNote alternative on this whole list if you don't need handwritten notes that's probably what you should go and use get it while you can and say Bye Bye Baby to OneNote let's hope it doesn't get the cosmic Blues okay so yeah I'll stop now summertime and if all you want is handwritten notes then there's our note it supports writing notes using a stylus with pressure sensitivity it has shape tools selection tools you can customize the page background and format configure stylus buttons it supports drag and drop importing from various file formats and it has a modern gtk interface that looks pretty great at least ongo you can work with Pages or continuous documents and you can still type text normally if you don't have your stylus handy it's available from Linux on flat Hub it doesn't have a mobile application and it also doesn't do Native sync so you will have to sync your files manually through any service of your choice but if all you need is handwritten notes it's really really good of course that's not all the options you have fqo notes okay the app that works with next Cloud nodes and has basically all the features you might ever want in a note-taking application although its interface is far from being beautiful you also have xerno plus plus which takes R node further with more handwritten note-taking features but an older UI as well as for open source Alternatives my favorites in that list will be Joplin because it's so complete it syncs with everything you can use your own storage and the only thing it lacks handwritten notes is a no-brainer for me I never use that but if you do then you probably should use a combination of Joplin and maybe drawing your notes in R nodes on a Linux device now let's look at some non-open Source options now while personally I will always pick a false option over a proprietary one if it can do the same thing some people just don't care beyond though since they are not open source you don't know what they're doing with the data so they might not be very private I've talked about Zoho as an alternative to the whole Microsoft or Google suite and Zoho has a good note-taking application called Zoho notebooks as its name implies it lets you create notebooks with notes inside of them they support Rich Text formatting adding media files like images or audio linking other file types like PDFs you can set reminders in notes have to-do lists tables quotes code blocks and it supports handwritten notes as well they have a mobile app for IOS and Android a web clipper extension to save web pages to your notes and it has a Linux version as well although it seems to only come as a Dev package it's not open source but it's free of charge with two gigabytes of storage if you want unlimited storage it's going to cost you 20 euros per year which is not unacceptable in general if you can't self-host anything and you don't want to pay anything the Zoho Suite of apps is probably your best bet to replace every single service that Google or Microsoft has seriously Zoho has more services and applications available for you right now than what Google killed since it started killing stuff now you probably already know about this next one it's notion something a lot of people have been talking about in the note taking sphere it's an extremely flexible program that lets you create not only text notes but also to-do lists project management tools tables knowledge bases meeting notes road maps kanban boards and more you can create your own templates or grab them from the community and you can organize all of that into one single workspace so yeah it's basically exactly like one node but with more templates it's free of charge with paid plans to unlock more features including more space for collaboration revision history guests that can view your notes but not modify them and notion is pretty great and they have mobile apps a Windows and a Mac OS client and since it's all electron based anyways there's an unofficial Linux client unfortunately called lotion it puts the lotion on its desktop or it gets the hose again or there's notion enhancer which does the same thing but is more maintained and has a less creepy name and one last one you probably also already know about Evernote it does everything from tudos text Rich formatting audio notes web clippings notebooks tags advanced search tables calendars task management it basically evolved past its note-taking routes and now it became a full-on workspace where you can do anything you need that is work related it even lets you scan documents to import as nodes or lets you connect to Google Calendar to add notes to meetings you can create templates and of course sync everything with an Evernote okay account Evernote is free but the free version is really Limited in storage space and node sizes the paid plans get rid of these limitations and will cost you at least 5 Euros and 83 cents per month Evernote is the Grand Daddy of note taking on a computer it does everything it might even be more powerful than OneNote but there is no native Linux client that I could find apparently they did used to have a beta version of that client but I could not find it anywhere anymore but you do have unofficial ones like Nix notes or Tusk I often hear it's really hard to move away from OneNote and well now you know it's actually really easy there are plenty of Alternatives that will suit you if you don't use every single feature of OneNote there are tons of options to replace it and if you do use every single feature you have less options but you still have a lot of them although they most likely won't be open source course personally my favorites of the bunch would be Joplin if you don't need handwritten notes or zettler if what you do is more research oriented if you try to write papers for example so I hope there was something that floats your boat in this list if there was let me know in the comments down there and if you were already using something that I didn't mention in the video also let me know because I'm always happy to have new note-taking apps to try instead of actually writing stuff that I need to write and I'm always happy about this segue to today's sponsor if you're in the market for a new device and you want to run Linux on it do not go and buy Windows laptops and try to slap Linux on it go buy your tuxedo device they are designed to run Linux out of the box and the hardware they pick is designed to support Linux they have a big range of devices that they ship worldwide and they have a whole range of configuration options from CPUs gpus Ram SSD your own logo like laser etched on the lid of your laptop your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys it's repairable it's customizable it's upgradable it's a really good choice and they have laptops desktops for all price points and all use cases so if you need a new device and you want to support Linux development and you want to make sure that your device will run Linux well click the link in the description below and buy yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well there's that dislike button but also tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy what I do you can support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast exclusive to those members and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks for watching and again yes you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and while I'm not a keyboard nerd I'm absolutely a computer nerd which means I spend most of my days in front of you guessed it a keyboard and system 76 just sent me their launch heavy keyboard which is a full numpad included 10 key design but they also sent me everything in the background no over here so there's the launch light and the normal launch keyboard right now I'm using a faux mechanical slim book RGB keyboard which is decent enough but definitely not something mechanical fans would love so let's see how this heavy boy compares to its smaller siblings and how much I like it and also how much I like today's sponsor only office thanks to only office for sponsoring this video on the office is the only office suite I use on all my Linux PCS nowadays it's open source it's fast it looks good and it's super compatible with Microsoft Office formats you can download it for free and run on it locally on any computer whatever the operating system including Android and iOS or you can couple that with a free personal cloud that lets you edit online and can be connected to a lot of storage Services you might already use like Google Drive Dropbox next Cloud OneDrive and a lot more this personal cloud has received a big update recently with a dark theme a Free Library of templates it supports a ton more languages and it has a lot of hotkeys you can use to navigate on top of having an interface refresh if you need a powerful cloud ready and compatible Office Suite for Linux or any other operating system I don't think you can do better than only office so head over to the link in the description below to download it or create your own personal cloud okay so this is the system 76 launch heavy keyboard it was just released today and it's already available from system 76's website it works on Linux on Windows on Mac OS and just to be fully transparent it was sent me as a review unit so I have to send it back later just like both other keyboards in the background the light and the normal one I don't get to keep them so the launch heavy is a full 10 key design complete with numpad and media Keys something that was missing from the previous launch keyboard whether it was the standard or the light variant it comes in a US QWERTY layout by default in ANSI ANSI ANSI the not ISO layout but as we'll see you can basically do anything you want with that layout it's not that big as far as full size keyboards go with dimensions of 39 centimeters by 13.5 and 2.8 centimeters in height for people who use the imperial system that's 15.5 inches by 5.32 and 1 inch in height it might be relatively small but it is very very heavy who could have guessed that keyboard weighs 1.3 kilograms or 2.8 pounds and that's due to the insane Bill the whole frame is aluminum and the back is held in place with eight huge screws this thing will not Purge or bend or Flex or slide around on your desk now of course if you carry your keyboard around with you at all times it's basically your second laptop in your backpack and you will probably be better served with the launch light and in that case stick around because we're gonna take a look at this one as well in the video now the layout itself will probably feel weird at first I'm more of a French azrt layout dude being French myself but I'm used to qwerty keyboards on most devices I review and this one is definitely not standard your keys underneath the Tab Key are indented to the right and everything from the enter key is indented to the left with the arrow keys touching the shift key the home row floats up all by itself and then you you have the numpad in a compact rectangle the function keys are just FN Keys you don't get any specific logos or pictograms on them for system functions and you also get two spacebar keys this will absolutely feel weird at first and it absolutely did for me but after a few days it made sense you never hit the spacebar key right smack in the middle you hit it from the side with one of your thumbs and honestly having two different ones for your two different thumbs is probably a better idea than having a full length space bar anyway this layout is just the base default one all keycaps are removable and you can completely remap the whole keyboard thanks to a configuration tool which we will also look at in a bit my review unit came with the KL box silent pink switches which I kinda like they are linear which means the stroke will be smooth all the way without a bump or a click they are quiet enough for mechanical keyboard although the key travel on that board isn't huge compared to other keyboards I've tried you can also get kale box Jade Royal or silent Brown switches which I have on the standard and light keyboard I'll take a look at in a minute it is a very pleasant typing experience even when you really get into the flow of things you just move the keys the keyboard doesn't move at all it doesn't bend it doesn't Flex it's just super sturdy and solid and I really like it the keyboard is wired through USBC it doesn't have any Wireless capabilities and it's also a USB hub with two additional USBC ports which are 3.2 gen 1 and 2 USB a ports also 3.2 gen 1 so you can plug your mouse charge your phone or anything in between and the keyboard also has perky RGB which you can adjust using the Configuration utility of course since it's a modular keyboard you also get a ton of stuff in the Box first you have two USBC cables One USB a to USBC and one USB C to USBC both are braided and and pretty long and they feel high quality you also get a keycap remover tool and a lot of additional keycaps you can use to make your keyboard your own there are additional arrow keys in a nice vibrant blue or a deep red the Escape key also has these two colors and you also get larger Escape keys in all three colors brown blue and red so you can swap the one slot Escape key for a 2 slot if you want and map that using the configurator tool they're also longer shift backspace and function keys and a bunch of cool ones you can use for your super key or anything else like a system 76 logo a pop OS logo some robots or a spaceship and if you don't like the colors the phones or the size well they are replaceable so you can always bring your own custom set of keycaps especially if you want a different layout than the QWERTY one in the Box you also get two small magnetically attached bars of aluminum with rubber feet that you can just slot in at the back of the keyboard to raise it by a 15gb is angle if you prefer typing with a keyboard a bit higher it's an interesting design there are basically three 's on that keyboard design there's the one slot the two slot and the three slot and you can hot swap them all you want all you like as long as you have the keycaps to go over them and then you can map them in real time with the configurator utility so let's talk about that then so by now it should be clear that this keyboard doesn't reach its full potential unless you use the configuration tool it's available in the pop shop for pop OS users or you can download it of their website as an app image a DMG for Mac users and an MSI installer for Windows users it's a super visual tool with the full layout of your keyboard on display and a list of actions you can map to each key click the key you want to change then click the action it does and the layout will reflect that change and be applied immediately to the keyboard no saving or applying action needed you can select multiple keys to change their actions all at once using shift and clicking as well and what's more you can configure the keyboard with four different layer which all have their own set of actions per keys by default all these layers will reuse the main first layer so you don't have to remap everything for each layer and if you change something in the first layer it will automatically be reflected on all the other three this lets you just change a few Keys per layer if you want or have a completely different layout like a French one for example and more importantly you can set RGB patterns per layer so yes you could use these four different layouts just to have different color patterns vibrating all over a keyboard and distracting you if that's something you want by default you get a pattern called SpaceTime which pulsates light in a rainbow effect but that's pretty distracting pretty and distracting I mean you can change that for a lot of other different patterns or you can set a global solid color for the whole keyboard or a solid color for each key in that case click the keys you want and set the color you using the color wheel you can also change the brightness of it all and you can do that for each of the four layers and the best thing is all these layers and all these RGB settings and key maps they're all saved directly to the keyboard not to your computer which means that you can just unplug the keyboard bring it to another computer and it will have the exact same mappings layers and RGB patterns that's super awesome another important thing to mention is the fully open design of that keyboard the chassis design is open source you can download the cad files and mail or 3D print your own the PCB design is also fully open you can access it on GitHub and so is the firmware and the configuration tool so I just love the launch heavy keyboard the launch the basic one never appealed to me because it doesn't have a numpad and I need a numpad I'm French doing number Keys is hard you need to use shift and the number key a numpad is a Time Saver for everything I do and and also it's super solid it's very sturdy you get a nice choice of switches and you can configure it any way you want it's a really really good board but now let's compare it to its smaller siblings all other launch keyboards the regular one and the light have the same advantages they've got a fully open design access to the configuration tool a choice of four different switch types and additional keycaps in the box with the keycap removing tool and the two USBC cables where they differ of course isn't the number of keys the launch the standard one is a 10 key less design so without the numpad but apart from that it has all the same great features including the USBC and usba ports it doesn't get the additional super key with icons on it though and its Razer bar is a single piece not two small ones my review unit of the launch keyboard came with the kale box Jade switches which feel amazing with a short travel distance before you have to push a bit harder to get that click which signifies the switch actually actuated it feels super good but it's also noisy as hell so there is no way I could use that myself if you have colleagues or your work in the same office as other people I give them about 10 minutes before they staple your head to your desk if you start using that thing not that I would know what it feels like because I work from home all alone and I don't have colleagues ah man I wish I had somebody to staple my head to my desk now since that launch keyboard is smaller it's also lighter at right under a kilogram which makes it a bit easier to carry around as per the light it's an ultra small design with the numbers row and the function row merged into one it also of course doesn't have a numpad but it has all the same accessories additional keycaps and cables RGB and access to the configuration tool like its bigger siblings what it doesn't have though is the USB hub it's just one USBC cable to plug it in and that's it my review unit came with the kale box Royal switches which are tactile you have an initial bump to pass when you press a key and that's when it actuates it requires a bit more Force to push the key down but you don't have to press it all the way to get a result so it's probably better if you like to type really fast with really hard Strokes on the keys personally after using the silent pink the Jade and the Royal switches my favorites are the silent pink I would really enjoy using the Jade switches because I love the feel of pressing the keys but the sound would drive me completely insane and they also have the brown silence which is which are tactile but also a little bit more quiet I'm not gonna lie these keyboards are pricey the light is 200 US dollars the regular launch keyboard is 285 US Dollars and at the time I'm writing this script the heaviest price hasn't been announced yet although I would expect it to be around 350 US dollars but what you get for that price is actually really really good value you get a super solid board a solid choice of four different switch options which should work for basically everyone you get a ton of keycap replacement if you need you get the ability to swap everything out and you get the ability to configure everything with four different different layers saving that on the boards taking all that config On The Go including your RGB patterns it's a great value for the price now after using these for a few weeks going back to my old faux mechanical keyboard feels like a huge downgrade unfortunately while you can get one shipped to Europe the shipping costs are prohibitive right now so if you want one it's probably better to wait for system 76 to open their Distribution Center in Europe which they've talked about this year if you're in Northern America no worries it's gonna ship to you with like the regular price if you like keyboards if you like open source and if you like gear configuration then I don't think there's a better option than these keyboards if you have the cache that is and I don't think there's a better option than today's sponsor tuxedo makes laptops and desktops that ship with Linux pre-installed and that's probably a way better option than buying any old Windows laptop of the shelves and hoping praying and researching the whole internet to make sure that it actually runs Linux well and that everything is well supported when you buy from tuxedo you know that Linux is going to run on that Hardware because it has been picked specifically to run Linux out of the box they have a big range of devices that they ship worldwide and they're all pretty configurable and repairable with options for all the internal components plus the ability to have your own keyboard layout laser etched on the keys or your logo laser etched on the back of your laptop for example so if you need a new device you want to make sure that it runs Linux perfectly and you also want to support Linux development which tuxedo does click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday where I talk about Linux Tech open source the channel my personal life everything and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover for the next month so if you're interested both links are down there as well in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you've been following the channel for a while you'll know I've been burned by Linux Tablets before but this time I can confidently say that this is how you should do a Linux tablet open bootloader open default OS open specs great arm CPU and well supported as well and a plan to open all drivers firmwares and specifications in the future and also open Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and Alma Linux Alma Linux is an open source Enterprise Linux distribution which is completely binary compatible with red hat Enterprise Linux and Centos pre Centos stream it's owned and governed by the community and it's supported financially by Cloud Linux and other sponsors while you can use Alma Linux for free on your servers or desktops tax care offers a range of services around it to ensure you get live patching without any reboots or downtime as well as 24 7 365 support so you can manage your Fleet without any stress so click the link in the description below to learn more about Alma Linux and tax care Support options okay so what exactly is this thing and how well is it built this is the fight tab Duo it's a prototype for now and it will be released at the end of their Indiegogo Campaign which is already fully funded and should start shipping in January 2023. I'm usually not a fan of crowdfunding campaigns and this time is no different but this hardware and this device really has a lot going for it so I'll let you watch the review and I'll let you make up your mind on whether you like it or not the tablet is 12.3 inches with a QHD display at a resolution of 2560 by 1600 so it's 16 by 10. it's not an OLED display but it's actually really good and bright at 500 nits it's enclosed by relatively big bezels but for a tablet that size it gives you a good grip on it with some space for your fingers so it's not that bad it is a heavy boy at 755 grams and 1.3 kilograms when you attach the accessories as in the kickstand and the keyboard which we'll talk about in a minute the fights tab is powered by a rock chip 3588 s which is an 8 core arm CPU with four performance cores running at 2.4 gigahertz and four efficiency cores running at 1.8 gigahertz it's coupled with a Mali g610 GPU which is also pretty decent as we'll see in the video it has 8 gigabytes of ddr4 RAM and 128 gigabytes of emmc memory and on top of that you get a nice aluminum build with a headphone jack a USBC Port that supports fast charging and DisplayPort and you get a slot for MicroSD to expand the storage and for a nano SIM card if you want to use a Cellular Connection you also get Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 4.2 and it also embarks a 42 watt hour battery three and the battery life is definitely quite impressive with 10 hours of YouTube videos playing in a loop over wi-fi at 50 brightness really not bad for a tablet especially since in idle mode when it's suspended it really sips power I left it completely unattended for about 24 maybe a little bit more than that 24 hours and it only used up five percent of its battery life which is really good with that you also get a run-of-the-mill webcam which also doesn't seem to know in which orientation it's supposed to be in a decent enough microphone for video calls and dual speakers that actually sound really good you also get a power button which doubles as a fingerprint scanner and a volume rocker now this Hardware is really really nice it's not lightweight at all think Surface Pro 3 levels of heft and weight but honestly it feels extremely solid very well built it inspires confidence with every single detail especially with the kickstand and the keyboard attached it's heavy as a laptop but it also feels really really well built and what it embarks inside is also no joke because that arm CPU is four times more powerful than what you would find in a pine Book Pro now the fight tab Duo comes with everything you need to turn it into a Microsoft Surface clone there's a magnetically attached back that has a kickstand with some very strong magnets and a keyboard that uses Pogo pins and charges of the tablet's battery my review unit came in red but there will be a gray option as well both have a felt like exterior and a soft touch plastic face where it touches the tablet the kickstand feels super sturdy with a very solid hinge but I wish it could be angled more so you could use the tablet in a more flat manner for drawing or annotating documents the keyboard is decent with a bit of flex of course much like a surface keyboard but it's definitely usable the keys have decent travel although they are in the Chrome OS layout so you don't get a Super Key and you have some weird function keys it also has a touch pad that is fairly small but pretty smooth and efficient with a solid click even though it's resting on that flexing material the whole keyboard can be laid flat or magnetically propped up against the tablet exactly like a surface keyboard oh and you also get a stylus with it which uses quadruple a batteries and it also works really really well with a low latency it's not on par with an apple pencil or a Samsung S Pen but it's really not bad at all it's a very good selection of accessories and it already inspires way more confidence than what the jinkpad shipped with the box and even in terms of Hardware build quality for the tablet itself it just feels more sturdy and more solid more Hefty but also a lot better in the hand and also all these accessories will come in the box if you buy this tablet now enough with the hardware and let's talk software the fight tab Duo runs five OS out of the box which is a d Googled version of Chrome OS it's free of charge but you have paid for options for support or Remote device management stuff that will be more interesting for companies basically by default it has an end user license agreement and a privacy policy that lists the data it collects although it feels like it's only Telemetry data and you can either use it with a fide account that lets you sync all your apps and settings across devices or when you reinstall or you can just use a local account that doesn't have these Sync features the fight account thing felt weird to me especially when they asked me to use telegram to verify my phone number instead of just sending an SMS so I went for the local account they also have open fight which is the fully open source version of fide OS that you can install on that tablet but you can also install it on any other computer if you like and while it's based on chromium OS and as such has various ux problems that I listed in my Chrome OS Flex video it is still much better than Chrome OS Flex notably because it has Android app support baked in with the ability to add Google apps in one click from the store with full Google Play store access Android apps ran pretty well for me with decent performance but there is one big glaring issue with video playback anything that is supposed to play video just won't and that's a major problem especially if you want to access video streaming services other applications worked well I installed alto's Odyssey to try out how a game would run I tried a few others and they performed perfectly GPU acceleration is here performance is great you can absolutely play Android games on that thing and run any app that doesn't require video you can also sideload APK apps like F Droid and other applications of course and like Chrome OS it can also run Linux apps in a container that you can also install in one click from the developer options in the settings and the performance there is also decent although much lower than what you would get on a native Linux install it's a Debian container so everything is relatively old in the repos but you can also install flat pack and flat back apps I tried krita with the stylus and while it works it's definitely not the best experience you could hope for with stutters and not the best responsiveness and the stylus is lagging behind it was the same on the laptop running Chrome OS Flex though so it's not specific to this tablet it's just that the Linux container is not speedy the on-screen keyboard also doesn't work on Linux apps yet apart from the terminal so you will have to use the keyboard add-on that is shipping with the tablet so yes it can run Android apps and it can run Linux apps but in both cases the experience is not perfect now for the Linux thing they can't really do anything it's a container it's never going to be Speedy for Android I guess a few app updates or a few system updates might be able to fix that video playback issue and make this a pretty interesting tablet now generally though the performance of fight OS is pretty great everything is reactive whether you use the touchscreen or the keyboard the OS runs fast and smoothly it boots up insanely fast and it resumes really really quickly and you have plenty of web apps that you can install from the fight store the Chrome OS store it is a very serviceable OS on a tablet it adapts well enough for keyboard and mouse and for touch it's really fluid now I really did not enjoy Chrome OS Flex when I used it on a separate laptop because the ux isn't great and it's basically useless compared to a normal Linux distro but on this tablet since you have Android app support it makes it actually a pretty great OS for a tablet but of course the real appeal of this thing if you're like me and if you're a Linux nerd is the fact that it has an open bootloader you can install other operating systems on this and for now as of testing on the Prototype I had the choice for four os's I had fight OS I had open file the open source version of find OS I had Debian 11 and I had the Android open source project I went for Debian 11 and it runs pretty well installing it isn't too tricky either now the experience on Debian felt alright the keyboard display Bluetooth Wi-Fi suspend and resume GPU acceleration everything worked well and the battery life wasn't too shabby either although it is worse than in the default Fido as it lasted for 7 hours in a YouTube playback test instead of 10 hours on fight OS and the top screen doesn't work which is a bummer and the default Debian image is in Chinese and I could not figure out how to change the language we which made it really really hard to use it's not a bad experience but it's obviously early days of course it is not the distro I would have picked I would have preferred using Fedora workstation and gnome on that tablet that feels like a way better fit for a touchscreen than xfce but there are no images for it just yet I don't know if this tablet will run any distro that has an ARM version or if an image has to be made specifically for it what I'm sure of is that I really really do hope that they release more distros for this thing once it's out because I would love to use a well adapted to touch desktop environment on that thing it would feel great so I was really impressed by the fight tab Duo it's very well built it has a great screen and good speakers the accessories are really nice and useful and the fact that it will actually be able to have any EOS it wants once other os's are developed or at least have support for it that's very very cool the OS it ships with while I'm not a fan of on a laptop because basically Chrome OS Flex sucks and any Linux distro will will be better because it will be able to run web apps and have a better graphical experience than Chrome OS on this tablet with Android app support Linux app support and web app support and a very fluid operating system I think it's a hit I think it really works well of course Android app support isn't perfect and no video playback for now if it doesn't get fixed in the future is a big Miss because for watching streaming services using the browser will be less battery efficient and less comfortable than using the dedicated Android apps for anything else though even games it's going to be amazing now the end user license agreement and data collection also ticked me off since I don't know much about this company I don't know if I can trust them or not though you can still pre-order the fight tab through their Indiegogo campaign currently at 570 euros for the whole package and it should ship in January 2023. now I'm not going to tell you whether you should back that project or buy one or not the decision to trust this company is yours they didn't sponsor the video they didn't pay me a Cent and I have to send the tablet back once I'm done with it but honestly what I can tell you is that if it ends up supporting a full Linux distro I'm probably buying one still it's a crowdfunding campaign and the last time this happened for a tablet was for the jinkpad and it was really crappy and ended up dying without any support and now it's just a big paper weight unless you want to install Ubuntu touch on it so the decision on this one is yours but if what you're looking for is a Linux laptop or desktop not a tablet then this sponsor segue is for you tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box which is inherently way more clever if you want to run Linux than buying any old windows devices and praying hoping and researching to find if it's gonna run Linux correctly or not when you buy from the link in the description below from tuxedo you know that Linux is going to run on your device and everything will be supported and they have a big big range that will suit any price point any use case whether you need a tower a small form factor PC a cheap laptop a super powerful workstation laptop or desktop they have it they're all upgradable repairable customizable you can have your own keyboard layout laser etched on your laptop you can have your own logo laser engraved at the back of the laptop they're just really good so if you need a new device you want to support Linux development and you want to make sure that your device actually runs Linux no doubt click the link in the description and get yourself a laptop or desktop from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon page and to my YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday where I talk about tech Linux open source the channel my personal life some hot takes everything and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel if you're interested both links are underneath the video so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you've been following the channel for a while you'll know I've been burned by Linux Tablets before but this time I can confidently say that this is how you should do a Linux tablet open bootloader open default OS open specs great arm CPU and well supported as well and a plan to open all drivers firmwares and specifications in the future and also open Segway to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by tax care and Alma Linux Alma Linux is an open source Enterprise Linux distribution which is completely binary compatible with red hat Enterprise Linux and Centos pre Centos stream it's owned and governed by the community and it's supported financially by Cloud Linux and other sponsors while you can use Alma Linux for free on your servers or desktops tax care offers a range of services around it to ensure you get live patching without any reboots or downtime as well as 24 7 365 support so you can manage your Fleet without any stress so click the link in the description below to learn more about Alma Linux and tax care Support options okay so what exactly is this thing and how well is it built this is the fight tab Duo it's a prototype for now and it will be released at the end of their Indiegogo Campaign which is already fully funded and should start shipping in January 2023. I'm usually not a fan of crowdfunding campaigns and this time is no different but this hardware and this device really has a lot going for it so I'll let you watch the review and I'll let you make up your mind on whether you like it or not the tablet is 12.3 inches with a QHD display at a resolution of 2560 by 1600 so it's 16 by 10. it's not an OLED display but it's actually really good and bright at 500 nits it's enclosed by relatively big bezels but for a tablet that size it gives you a good grip on it with some space for your fingers so it's not that bad it is a heavy boy at 755 grams and 1.3 kilograms when you attach the accessories as in the kickstand and the keyboard which we'll talk about in a minute the fights tab is powered by a rock chip 3588 s which is an 8 core arm CPU with four performance cores running at 2.4 gigahertz and four efficiency cores running at 1.8 gigahertz it's coupled with a Mali g610 GPU which is also pretty decent as we'll see in the video it has 8 gigabytes of ddr4 RAM and 128 gigabytes of emmc memory and on top of that you get a nice aluminum build with a headphone jack a USBC Port that supports fast charging and DisplayPort and you get a slot for MicroSD to expand the storage and for a nano SIM card if you want to use a Cellular Connection you also get Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 4.2 and it also embarks a 42 watt hour battery three and the battery life is definitely quite impressive with 10 hours of YouTube videos playing in a loop over wi-fi at 50 brightness really not bad for a tablet especially since in idle mode when it's suspended it really sips power I left it completely unattended for about 24 maybe a little bit more than that 24 hours and it only used up five percent of its battery life which is really good with that you also get a run-of-the-mill webcam which also doesn't seem to know in which orientation it's supposed to be in a decent enough microphone for video calls and dual speakers that actually sound really good you also get a power button which doubles as a fingerprint scanner and a volume rocker now this Hardware is really really nice it's not lightweight at all think Surface Pro 3 levels of heft and weight but honestly it feels extremely solid very well built it inspires confidence with every single detail especially with the kickstand and the keyboard attached it's heavy as a laptop but it also feels really really well built and what it embarks inside is also no joke because that arm CPU is four times more powerful than what you would find in a pine Book Pro now the fight tab Duo comes with everything you need to turn it into a Microsoft Surface clone there's a magnetically attached back that has a kickstand with some very strong magnets and a keyboard that uses Pogo pins and charges of the tablet's battery my review unit came in red but there will be a gray option as well both have a felt like exterior and a soft touch plastic face where it touches the tablet the kickstand feels super sturdy with a very solid hinge but I wish it could be angled more so you could use the tablet in a more flat manner for drawing or annotating documents the keyboard is decent with a bit of flex of course much like a surface keyboard but it's definitely usable the keys have decent travel although they are in the Chrome OS layout so you don't get a Super Key and you have some weird function keys it also has a touch pad that is fairly small but pretty smooth and efficient with a solid click even though it's resting on that flexing material the whole keyboard can be laid flat or magnetically propped up against the tablet exactly like a surface keyboard oh and you also get a stylus with it which uses quadruple a batteries and it also works really really well with a low latency it's not on par with an apple pencil or a Samsung S Pen but it's really not bad at all it's a very good selection of accessories and it already inspires way more confidence than what the jinkpad shipped with the box and even in terms of Hardware build quality for the tablet itself it just feels more sturdy and more solid more Hefty but also a lot better in the hand and also all these accessories will come in the box if you buy this tablet now enough with the hardware and let's talk software the fight tab Duo runs five OS out of the box which is a d Googled version of Chrome OS it's free of charge but you have paid for options for support or Remote device management stuff that will be more interesting for companies basically by default it has an end user license agreement and a privacy policy that lists the data it collects although it feels like it's only Telemetry data and you can either use it with a fide account that lets you sync all your apps and settings across devices or when you reinstall or you can just use a local account that doesn't have these Sync features the fight account thing felt weird to me especially when they asked me to use telegram to verify my phone number instead of just sending an SMS so I went for the local account they also have open fight which is the fully open source version of fide OS that you can install on that tablet but you can also install it on any other computer if you like and while it's based on chromium OS and as such has various ux problems that I listed in my Chrome OS Flex video it is still much better than Chrome OS Flex notably because it has Android app support baked in with the ability to add Google apps in one click from the store with full Google Play store access Android apps ran pretty well for me with decent performance but there is one big glaring issue with video playback anything that is supposed to play video just won't and that's a major problem especially if you want to access video streaming services other applications worked well I installed alto's Odyssey to try out how a game would run I tried a few others and they performed perfectly GPU acceleration is here performance is great you can absolutely play Android games on that thing and run any app that doesn't require video you can also sideload APK apps like F Droid and other applications of course and like Chrome OS it can also run Linux apps in a container that you can also install in one click from the developer options in the settings and the performance there is also decent although much lower than what you would get on a native Linux install it's a Debian container so everything is relatively old in the repos but you can also install flat pack and flat back apps I tried krita with the stylus and while it works it's definitely not the best experience you could hope for with stutters and not the best responsiveness and the stylus is lagging behind it was the same on the laptop running Chrome OS Flex though so it's not specific to this tablet it's just that the Linux container is not speedy the on-screen keyboard also doesn't work on Linux apps yet apart from the terminal so you will have to use the keyboard add-on that is shipping with the tablet so yes it can run Android apps and it can run Linux apps but in both cases the experience is not perfect now for the Linux thing they can't really do anything it's a container it's never going to be Speedy for Android I guess a few app updates or a few system updates might be able to fix that video playback issue and make this a pretty interesting tablet now generally though the performance of fight OS is pretty great everything is reactive whether you use the touchscreen or the keyboard the OS runs fast and smoothly it boots up insanely fast and it resumes really really quickly and you have plenty of web apps that you can install from the fight store the Chrome OS store it is a very serviceable OS on a tablet it adapts well enough for keyboard and mouse and for touch it's really fluid now I really did not enjoy Chrome OS Flex when I used it on a separate laptop because the ux isn't great and it's basically useless compared to a normal Linux distro but on this tablet since you have Android app support it makes it actually a pretty great OS for a tablet but of course the real appeal of this thing if you're like me and if you're a Linux nerd is the fact that it has an open bootloader you can install other operating systems on this and for now as of testing on the Prototype I had the choice for four os's I had fight OS I had open file the open source version of find OS I had Debian 11 and I had the Android open source project I went for Debian 11 and it runs pretty well installing it isn't too tricky either now the experience on Debian felt alright the keyboard display Bluetooth Wi-Fi suspend and resume GPU acceleration everything worked well and the battery life wasn't too shabby either although it is worse than in the default Fido as it lasted for 7 hours in a YouTube playback test instead of 10 hours on fight OS and the top screen doesn't work which is a bummer and the default Debian image is in Chinese and I could not figure out how to change the language we which made it really really hard to use it's not a bad experience but it's obviously early days of course it is not the distro I would have picked I would have preferred using Fedora workstation and gnome on that tablet that feels like a way better fit for a touchscreen than xfce but there are no images for it just yet I don't know if this tablet will run any distro that has an ARM version or if an image has to be made specifically for it what I'm sure of is that I really really do hope that they release more distros for this thing once it's out because I would love to use a well adapted to touch desktop environment on that thing it would feel great so I was really impressed by the fight tab Duo it's very well built it has a great screen and good speakers the accessories are really nice and useful and the fact that it will actually be able to have any EOS it wants once other os's are developed or at least have support for it that's very very cool the OS it ships with while I'm not a fan of on a laptop because basically Chrome OS Flex sucks and any Linux distro will will be better because it will be able to run web apps and have a better graphical experience than Chrome OS on this tablet with Android app support Linux app support and web app support and a very fluid operating system I think it's a hit I think it really works well of course Android app support isn't perfect and no video playback for now if it doesn't get fixed in the future is a big Miss because for watching streaming services using the browser will be less battery efficient and less comfortable than using the dedicated Android apps for anything else though even games it's going to be amazing now the end user license agreement and data collection also ticked me off since I don't know much about this company I don't know if I can trust them or not though you can still pre-order the fight tab through their Indiegogo campaign currently at 570 euros for the whole package and it should ship in January 2023. now I'm not going to tell you whether you should back that project or buy one or not the decision to trust this company is yours they didn't sponsor the video they didn't pay me a Cent and I have to send the tablet back once I'm done with it but honestly what I can tell you is that if it ends up supporting a full Linux distro I'm probably buying one still it's a crowdfunding campaign and the last time this happened for a tablet was for the jinkpad and it was really crappy and ended up dying without any support and now it's just a big paper weight unless you want to install Ubuntu touch on it so the decision on this one is yours but if what you're looking for is a Linux laptop or desktop not a tablet then this sponsor segue is for you tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box which is inherently way more clever if you want to run Linux than buying any old windows devices and praying hoping and researching to find if it's gonna run Linux correctly or not when you buy from the link in the description below from tuxedo you know that Linux is going to run on your device and everything will be supported and they have a big big range that will suit any price point any use case whether you need a tower a small form factor PC a cheap laptop a super powerful workstation laptop or desktop they have it they're all upgradable repairable customizable you can have your own keyboard layout laser etched on your laptop you can have your own logo laser engraved at the back of the laptop they're just really good so if you need a new device you want to support Linux development and you want to make sure that your device actually runs Linux no doubt click the link in the description and get yourself a laptop or desktop from tuxedo so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon page and to my YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday where I talk about tech Linux open source the channel my personal life some hot takes everything and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel if you're interested both links are underneath the video so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you think the title of this video looks like the EU are aliens that abducted Tick Tock to do unsanctioned stuff to them well you're right but I also need to keep those titles short so yeah Pro anyway this week we have the aforementioned EU looking into Tick Tock for potential privacy breaches and violations and problems with compliance with gdpr we have Tumblr looking into joining the fedivers by implementing the activity Pub standard and Flickr thinking about doing the same thing and we have Fedora unveiling some screens of their brand new installer which looks to be a lot lot better than the previous horrendous Anaconda so let's dive in right after I tell you how you can get a hundred dollars of free credit to start your own Linux or gaming server this video is sponsored by linode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so it looks like the EU is finally taking a look at Tick Tock the chinese-based short form video application you probably all know about the EU will look into how the data from European citizens flows to China as well as ads that are targeted to miners basically they just want to see if tiktok respects the gdpr the European rules for data handling the nightmare of most big tech companies and also the president of the European commission said they are launching several proceedings including one from Ireland focused on data transfers to China and how miners data is processed and another one from the Netherlands regarding targeted advertisements Tick Tock had already committed to better practices like allowing people to report ads that Target children Banning promotion of inappropriate products and services like alcohol scams or cigarettes or reviewing videos from people who have more than 10 000 followers since Tick Tock already made concessions to the US to store data on U.S servers I have no doubt they will also comply with the rules the eucs fit to impose on the company personally Tick Tock is a platform I have zero trust in it's probably what many people will call a boomer tank but I don't understand the point of this application like watching cringy videos of people dancing or trying to be funny is not my thing except most of my videos also fall into that category apart from the dancing oh wait no I did a dance once okay well I guess I should be on Tick Tock then Tumblr will soon join the fediverse that giant social network linking multiple Services Tumblr will add support for activity purp the w3c standard that lets Mastodon pixel fed peer tube and a ton of other services talk to each other and interact Tumblr might not be as big as it once was but it's still sizable and this means a potential influx of hundreds of thousands of users to the fedivers which might be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you like your social networks if you're wondering what this means well you could follow Tumblr posts on Mastodon for example and have a unified feed for multiple social networks Tumblr is owned by automatic a company that already owns WordPress another part of the fativerse there is no date yet for when this will come to Tumblr it's just marked as ASAP for now this move seems like it also Kindle some amount of interest in the activity Pub standard with the CEO of Flickr asking people on Twitter if Flickr should also add activity Pub support he's not promising anything but is looking at the idea personally I'm all for more major Services connecting with the fedivers it's how social networks should always have work not being locked into a specific platform but being able to talk to people from any other service and comment on their stuff and follow them wherever you want it's what the internet is supposed to be and that's what the fediverse and the activity Pub standard allows so if you want to learn more about the fediverse and most of its major services that you might want to use I have a video it's linked in the description below or in the cards somewhere up here fedora's installer called Anaconda is one of the least intuitive there is on Linux badly placed buttons unclear error messages messy partitioning tool is just really confusing and it looks like people agree as there's the new installer in development it has a web-based user interface and uses cockpit to power it it's a web-based graphical interface for servers this new installer isn't finished yet but it already lets you choose the install language select the disks automatically partition them let you look at what you've selected and displaying a progress screen so it can basically let you install Fedora completely already the screenshots while they look a bit Bland definitely look a lot more legible than anaconda ever was with a clear progress indicator on the left to see where you're at and some text help on the right to let you understand what exactly it is that you're doing the install process window also shows nice steps that you can understand easily it just looks like a way more user-friendly option now at best it should be included in Fedora 38 in April 2023 but depending on how things go it could be deployed at the end of next year instead hey they managed to start working on it and almost have a Deployable version in less than a year that's more than we can say about ubuntu's new flutter based installer which we haven't heard anything about for months now and also yes you can comment why so many installers down there because I'm wondering the same thing seriously why do we need so many Microsoft finally brought its badly named windows subsystem for Linux which does the opposite of what it's called because it runs Linux on Windows not the opposite well they brought it out of beta version 1.0 can be installed from the Windows store in one click and it works on Windows 10 and windows 11. it still lets you install a distro of your choosing inside of Windows and it runs it at near native speeds complete with GPU acceleration and support for graphical Linux applications so you could run any KDE or gnome app inside of Windows if you wanted to it also supports system D now apparently WSL is a love it or hate it kind of system I thought you think it's great because it means more people can discover Linux try its apps and see how much better it is for development or command line based workflows and ultimately lead more people to try Linux as a real install or you think it's going to kill Linux by making people stick to Windows and perform the tasks that are easier on Linux using WSL I really don't know where I stand on WSL on the one hand it gives people more options to try and run Linux which is cool but on the other hand it also means that people are not going to get out of their comfort zone and try another operating system iCloud Apple service that lets you store everything in the cloud and sync stuff across devices looks like it has a major security problem at least for Windows users apple offers an iCloud app for Windows that lets you sync bookmarks photos and more and this app has problems first it's corrupting videos taken on iPhones when downloading them on Windows that's bad enough but there's a bigger problem users are reporting that they're seeing photos and videos that don't belong to them showing up in their libraries some users report seeing images of other people's families soccer games and other things that have nothing to do with them which might imply that iCloud has an issue with authenticating user accounts and knowing what goes where and this is obviously a major problem if it's confirmed as it would mean your data isn't private at all and could pop up randomly on other people's computers it kind of puts a little dent in the apple is more private thingy and yeah sure it looks like it's only happening on the Windows app for iCloud and not on other services and yeah I clamored for this app to be supported on Linux for a while now but now I think it's a good thing that we don't have it cinnamon 5.6 is the latest update to Linux means desktop environment and it brings a bunch of cool new stuff mint users should get it before the end of the year and it will be the default version in mint 21.1 which should release in December the big headline feature is what they call a corner bar which is basically just a slim button at the bottom right of the taskbar that you can configure to do what you want when you click it or middle click it it lets you show the desktop the desk Lads the workspace selector or the window selector you can also just hover it to show the desktop Nemo the file manager will now only highlight the file names When selecting files instead of also highlighting the icon and this looks much better and they added a shortcut to access the display settings straight from the right click menu of the desktop on top of that you will see less password prompts for example when removing a flatback app removing shortcuts or local applications that are only installed for the user the update manager will also remember your password so you don't have to enter it for each operation finally flat pack support was added to that update manager which should make it easier to handle this format in mint cinnamon is a really really good desktop and show their rate of progress is isn't as fast as gnome or caddy but honestly they don't really need to move that fast their desktop already does pretty much everything you might want and has one of the most complete Suites of applications and utilities out of the box or they are lacking now is Wayland support now let's talk about what's new in our desktop environments on The Gnome side there's Dynamic wallpaper a new app that lets you create wallpapers that change with the light or dark mode of your desktop or there's upscaler an application that lets you enhance and increase the resolution of images like in any police investigation show money the personal finance manager has a new release with the ability to group transactions into categories with automatic currency detection and Bug fixes buttholes the all-in-one Windows app and game launcher has a completely redesigned detailed view without a sidebar and with all the various Pages merged into one the settings have been rearranged to be more legible and a lot of stuff has been rephrased and in KDE land discover error messages will now use a normal dialog instead of overlays that disappeared too quickly the system monitor widget lets you monitor power usage for NVIDIA gpus and you can display the current temperature directly on the panel discover also gets more legible progress bars for installing and updating and it won't try to check for updates on a metered internet connection the developers also are working on a new welcome app that will better introduce plasma features to new users it should make its debut in plasma 5.27 early next year and that's pretty awesome because next month I'll have a video talking about how kde's power is kinda useless if you don't explain to the user how you can make use of it and I think this welcome app will slot in nicely with this video now let's move on to the gaming news Nintendo proved once again that it's a terrible company going after steam grid DB because it talked about switch emulation on the steam deck the company sent some dmca takedowns to remove cover art images from the website which does just that it hosts images that you can use as covers for your non-steam games on Steam or the steam deck removed images include ones for Pokemon Splatoon Xenoblade Chronicles Super Mario Odyssey and breath of the wild sure Nintendo go after pngs and jpegs of your games because they imply that people might emulate your games which is totally legal if you own the game physically what a dumb move seriously valve introduced proton next which is a new proton flavor as they call it that gives people the chance to have access to the latest testing proton release with this announcement comes the ability to test proton 7.0-5 which makes a bunch of games playable like Bullet Storm Rift unravel 2 battle Realms and more and the steam deck won best gaming Hardware at the 40th golden joystick Awards these are presented by Games Radar and it's unsurprising seeing as this chungus of a portable computer has absolutely taken the World by storm since it released still it's nice to see the steam deck getting the recognition it deserves and its proof once more if it was still needed that Linux is an excellent gaming platform and that's great because today's sponsors devices ship with Linux pre-installed tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they sell worldwide a big big range of laptops and desktops that run Lin Linux out of the box and why that would be better than just buying any old PC that runs windows and replacing windows with Linux but it's because it removes all the guesswork you just slap your distro on it it runs everything is supported and you're good to go and they have a big big range of devices from the smallest Ultrabooks to nux to gaming Towers gaming laptops any price point any need you have can be filled with one of their devices and they're also pretty customizable they are repairable you can have your own logo on the lid of the laptop or you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keyboard of the laptop basically there are choices for everyone so if you need a new device and you want to make sure that you support Linux development and you want to make sure that your device actually runs well with Linux click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well you can also click the dislike button and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics I'll cover so thanks everyone for watching and I guess we'll see you in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and whether you like apple or not it's undeniable that they managed to create a well integrated experience between all of their devices and their online services that's what we call the Apple ecosystem but once you're in it makes it also very hard to get out what happens if you try to replace one part of that ecosystem let's say for example Mac OS with Linux oh I bet you didn't see that one coming and so that's what we're going to talk about today how well you can still use all your Apple services and devices if you move to Linux and also how well I can segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nexclown out WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft Arc CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started the first thing will be the basic necessities as in your Apple account email contacts calendars the general stuff this is pretty easy to add your iCloud email address to any desktop mail client on Linux all you have to do is enter these parameters the server for receiving email is imap.mail.me.com and it uses SSL so turn that on and make sure the port is 993 the email is your iCloud address and for the password you can't just use your regular Apple ID password you will need to generate an app specific password from this page for which there's a link in the description of the video remember to copy that password you will need it for the next steps as per sending email the server is smtp.mail.me.com SSL is also needed and the board is 587. the address and password are the same that you entered for email reception now for contacts and calendars depending on the program you use it will be more or less easy gnome calendar can add Apple iCloud calendars but gnome contacts doesn't let you add it as an address book because it's not supported in The Gnome online accounts with Thunderbird with the TB sync and caldav provider extensions installed then it makes it super easy you just have an iCloud logo when you set up an account and it works Evolution and the KDE Pim Suite should also support all of that out of the box inside your application of choice the parameters to enter are the following as the calendar address enter caldaf dot icloud.com your username is your iCloud email address and your password is the app password you generated earlier same goes for contacts except the address to enter is contacts.icloud.com everything should now sync nicely to the app you use and with your other eye devices I think adding a gnome or KDE online accounts provider for iCloud would be relatively easy since it's all static server addresses and just one login and password combo so if anyone is inclined to try and work on that it could be cool just saying [Music] foreign you pause the video to watch that didn't you if you prefer using a web interface you will be happy to know that there is a new iCloud portal that lets you access all of that online by logging into icloud.com not only does it let you access your email calendars and contacts but it also has web apps for a lot of your iCloud stuff including notes Drive photos reminders and the I work Suite so Pages numbers and Keynotes so let's take a look at notes and reminders first then you can access both through the web portal which means you can also create a web app for these two things using either a chromium-based browser that supports that feature or with the web Apps Manager app from Linux Mint which you can also install on other distributions this will be your most convenient way as there is no way to access iCloud nodes or reminders on a third-party application they don't use an open protocol as far as I could find the good news is that these web apps are kind of fast and so they won't be terrible to use and also they will be added to your menu you can add them to your favorites so there's that the bad news is that they only have the basic features notes has phone Styles check boxes and tables but it can't add images to a note it can preview them though if they're already there reminders is even more basic with no support for any of the advanced conditions like date time repeat tags locations and more it just handles lists and tasks and marking them as done which is very disappointing I work apps like numbers pages and keynote are also all accessible from here there are the web versions and they aren't as feature complete as the desktop clients but for quick edits to documents people send you they will do the trick nicely you can create new documents download them locally and upload them as you want on top of sharing them and exporting them to various formats I'd love to be able to dismiss that I work Suite as useless but honestly pages and keynote are actually really good for what they do now numbers is an Abomination that we won't talk about here it's terrible now for photos the web interface is serviceable as well you will get your albums a list of pictures you can upload photos manually and have them show up on all your other devices but you won't be able to edit them from here there is also no auto upload app that will let you send pictures from your desktop to your iCloud photo library either you will have to do manual uploads but that's okay it's generally the opposite that you'll want to do regularly send pictures from your iPhone to your desktop but there is no way to automatically sync these photos to your desktop you can't automatically download them when there's a new one added by another device you will have to download them manually each time okay that's not entirely true there's a command line utility called iCloud photos downloader that you can run as a chrome task or manually that will download these automatically but it hasn't been updated in a while so use it at your own risk I left a link to it in the description as per files stored in iCloud drive this one will also only be accessible through the web interface you can't mount it as external storage or auto sync files to a Linux desktop which kinda sucks the web interface is good good it lets you download and upload files but if you want to use your iCloud drive as a syncing solution to have your documents shared between devices that won't work if you want to automatically sync your files between a Linux desktop and I devices your best bet is probably to use something like next cloud or pcloud or Mega there are a ton out there that work with all your devices and they're probably all better than iCloud drive as a storage solution anyway if you use apple music then you will be happy to know there's a fantastic Linux desktop client called Cider you can install it from Flat Hub or as a snap a Debian package and an app image as well as from the Aur once you're logged in it will pick up all your music from Apple music playlists and all it has a system tray icon and integrates with the media controls of your desktop which why does it have a system tray icon then it's very very customizable and it even offers the various mixes and Discovery features of Apple music on top of having two different uis you can use Discord Rich presence integration and a plugin system it's an electron app though so don't expect it to be light on resources or Ultra fast but honestly after using it for a month or so it's really really fantastic great application here highly recommended if you use apple music iMessage the thing most U.S citizens cite as the reason they stick with apple and that the rest of the world generally completely ignores because there are far better options out there iMessage doesn't exist on Linux or anywhere else than on Apple products there is simply no way to access your iMessages on Linux no web interface no app no third-party client it's a closed Source program and protocol and so unless Apple decides to offer a web interface or to open the protocol you will have to keep using your smartphone or tablet to answer these as someone who lives in Europe this is really not a big deal like literally no one uses iMessage or excludes you or if you're not using iMessage people use what's up Facebook Messenger telegram signal whatever else and they're all better options than iMessage now what if you want to plug in a device and grab its contents on Linux though well that's supported by default when plugging in your iPhone or iPad it will show up as a camera device provided you accept that access on the pop-up that appears on that device it will show up with a DCIM folder although the folders inside won't have explicit names or anything so locating a specific album will be tricky you will also get a documents Mount point which has files for some applications but honestly I didn't find a use for that specifically it will be mounted as read only so you can't transfer files to it but you can do that using ifuse I left a link on how to do it in the description of the video it requires the command line but it's pretty efficient not as efficient as using KDE connect though KD connect lets you sync stuff between a phone or tablet and a Linux desktop the Android version has more features but the iOS 1 still supports a few cool things the desktop component should be installed by default on your KD plasma desktop and on gnome you can install the JS connect extension don't forget to reboot your computer afterwards it never worked right after install for me once that's done open the IOS app on your idevice open the KDE connect or JS connect settings and provided your device and computers on the same local network they should appear and you can pair them on iOS you can share the contents of the clipboard you can send photos or videos send regular files use the device as a slideshow remote run commands or use it as a virtual touchpad you can also send files to your idevice from your Linux desktop and they will show up in the files app in local files in the KD connect folder note that on iOS KD connect cannot really run in the background all that much which means that you will have to keep it open for these features to work on Android it works better in the background and it also has notification support because the OS is more permissive with what applications can do now can we conclude that Android is a better OS than iOS was if I say no will I get a ton of angry comments now of course there are plenty of things you won't get like airdrop which doesn't work on Linux but that you can replace with Getty connect or the continuity features you won't be able to start an email on your iPhone and pick it up on your Linux computer you can share the clipboard with KD connect though but it's a manual operation there is no apple podcast integration so you won't be able to sync playback with your desktop and there is no mouse pointer sharing between iOS and Linux and you also can't sync your Safari bookmarks and passwords to Linux although you can always use Firefox or any Chrome based browser on your Linux desktop and on iOS because on iOS every browser is basically Safari in Disguise so you'll get the same performance and compatibility but with a thinking option so yeah that's not really an issue either but still if you're deep in the Apple ecosystem but you would like to move to a more open OS like Linux on your desktop or laptop it is feasible you will lose some features but not that many so yeah I would say it's pretty usable if you don't mind using web applications and you could always replace all or most of that stuff with any open source alternative like nexcloud for example which is what I use on my desktop and all my eye devices as well but if you want to stay in the Apple ecosystem or progressively leave it by replacing each part one by one then you can absolutely switch to Linux and do that and if you want to replace that Mac with a computer that supports Linux then there's always today's sponsor tuxedo is based in Germany but they ship worldwide a huge huge selection of Linux laptops and desktops by which I mean that they run Linux out of the box which makes them way more suitable to run Linux than buying any old Windows computer and crossing your fingers for everything to be supported and to run or spending hours in research when you click the link in the description to buy a tuxedo laptop or desktop you know that Linux is going to run on it with minimal or zero tweaking needed which is pretty cool they have a big big selection for every price point and every need whether it's nux gaming laptops high-end workstations small laptops big laptops you name it and you can configure them with a ton of various options you can have your own keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop you can have your own logo engraved on the back as well it's just very very customizable so if you need a new device you want to support Linux development you want to make sure it runs Linux click the link in the description below and get yourself a laptop or desktop from tuxedo they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux open source Tech my personal life the channel everything it's on every Monday and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover for the next month on the channel so if you're interested both links are in the description in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and whether you like apple or not it's undeniable that they managed to create a well integrated experience between all of their devices and their online services that's what we call the Apple ecosystem but once you're in it makes it also very hard to get out what happens if you try to replace one part of that ecosystem let's say for example Mac OS with Linux oh I bet you didn't see that one coming and so that's what we're going to talk about today how well you can still use all your Apple services and devices if you move to Linux and also how well I can segue to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from nexclown out WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft Arc CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started the first thing will be the basic necessities as in your Apple account email contacts calendars the general stuff this is pretty easy to add your iCloud email address to any desktop mail client on Linux all you have to do is enter these parameters the server for receiving email is imap.mail.me.com and it uses SSL so turn that on and make sure the port is 993 the email is your iCloud address and for the password you can't just use your regular Apple ID password you will need to generate an app specific password from this page for which there's a link in the description of the video remember to copy that password you will need it for the next steps as per sending email the server is smtp.mail.me.com SSL is also needed and the board is 587. the address and password are the same that you entered for email reception now for contacts and calendars depending on the program you use it will be more or less easy gnome calendar can add Apple iCloud calendars but gnome contacts doesn't let you add it as an address book because it's not supported in The Gnome online accounts with Thunderbird with the TB sync and caldav provider extensions installed then it makes it super easy you just have an iCloud logo when you set up an account and it works Evolution and the KDE Pim Suite should also support all of that out of the box inside your application of choice the parameters to enter are the following as the calendar address enter caldaf dot icloud.com your username is your iCloud email address and your password is the app password you generated earlier same goes for contacts except the address to enter is contacts.icloud.com everything should now sync nicely to the app you use and with your other eye devices I think adding a gnome or KDE online accounts provider for iCloud would be relatively easy since it's all static server addresses and just one login and password combo so if anyone is inclined to try and work on that it could be cool just saying [Music] foreign you pause the video to watch that didn't you if you prefer using a web interface you will be happy to know that there is a new iCloud portal that lets you access all of that online by logging into icloud.com not only does it let you access your email calendars and contacts but it also has web apps for a lot of your iCloud stuff including notes Drive photos reminders and the I work Suite so Pages numbers and Keynotes so let's take a look at notes and reminders first then you can access both through the web portal which means you can also create a web app for these two things using either a chromium-based browser that supports that feature or with the web Apps Manager app from Linux Mint which you can also install on other distributions this will be your most convenient way as there is no way to access iCloud nodes or reminders on a third-party application they don't use an open protocol as far as I could find the good news is that these web apps are kind of fast and so they won't be terrible to use and also they will be added to your menu you can add them to your favorites so there's that the bad news is that they only have the basic features notes has phone Styles check boxes and tables but it can't add images to a note it can preview them though if they're already there reminders is even more basic with no support for any of the advanced conditions like date time repeat tags locations and more it just handles lists and tasks and marking them as done which is very disappointing I work apps like numbers pages and keynote are also all accessible from here there are the web versions and they aren't as feature complete as the desktop clients but for quick edits to documents people send you they will do the trick nicely you can create new documents download them locally and upload them as you want on top of sharing them and exporting them to various formats I'd love to be able to dismiss that I work Suite as useless but honestly pages and keynote are actually really good for what they do now numbers is an Abomination that we won't talk about here it's terrible now for photos the web interface is serviceable as well you will get your albums a list of pictures you can upload photos manually and have them show up on all your other devices but you won't be able to edit them from here there is also no auto upload app that will let you send pictures from your desktop to your iCloud photo library either you will have to do manual uploads but that's okay it's generally the opposite that you'll want to do regularly send pictures from your iPhone to your desktop but there is no way to automatically sync these photos to your desktop you can't automatically download them when there's a new one added by another device you will have to download them manually each time okay that's not entirely true there's a command line utility called iCloud photos downloader that you can run as a chrome task or manually that will download these automatically but it hasn't been updated in a while so use it at your own risk I left a link to it in the description as per files stored in iCloud drive this one will also only be accessible through the web interface you can't mount it as external storage or auto sync files to a Linux desktop which kinda sucks the web interface is good good it lets you download and upload files but if you want to use your iCloud drive as a syncing solution to have your documents shared between devices that won't work if you want to automatically sync your files between a Linux desktop and I devices your best bet is probably to use something like next cloud or pcloud or Mega there are a ton out there that work with all your devices and they're probably all better than iCloud drive as a storage solution anyway if you use apple music then you will be happy to know there's a fantastic Linux desktop client called Cider you can install it from Flat Hub or as a snap a Debian package and an app image as well as from the Aur once you're logged in it will pick up all your music from Apple music playlists and all it has a system tray icon and integrates with the media controls of your desktop which why does it have a system tray icon then it's very very customizable and it even offers the various mixes and Discovery features of Apple music on top of having two different uis you can use Discord Rich presence integration and a plugin system it's an electron app though so don't expect it to be light on resources or Ultra fast but honestly after using it for a month or so it's really really fantastic great application here highly recommended if you use apple music iMessage the thing most U.S citizens cite as the reason they stick with apple and that the rest of the world generally completely ignores because there are far better options out there iMessage doesn't exist on Linux or anywhere else than on Apple products there is simply no way to access your iMessages on Linux no web interface no app no third-party client it's a closed Source program and protocol and so unless Apple decides to offer a web interface or to open the protocol you will have to keep using your smartphone or tablet to answer these as someone who lives in Europe this is really not a big deal like literally no one uses iMessage or excludes you or if you're not using iMessage people use what's up Facebook Messenger telegram signal whatever else and they're all better options than iMessage now what if you want to plug in a device and grab its contents on Linux though well that's supported by default when plugging in your iPhone or iPad it will show up as a camera device provided you accept that access on the pop-up that appears on that device it will show up with a DCIM folder although the folders inside won't have explicit names or anything so locating a specific album will be tricky you will also get a documents Mount point which has files for some applications but honestly I didn't find a use for that specifically it will be mounted as read only so you can't transfer files to it but you can do that using ifuse I left a link on how to do it in the description of the video it requires the command line but it's pretty efficient not as efficient as using KDE connect though KD connect lets you sync stuff between a phone or tablet and a Linux desktop the Android version has more features but the iOS 1 still supports a few cool things the desktop component should be installed by default on your KD plasma desktop and on gnome you can install the JS connect extension don't forget to reboot your computer afterwards it never worked right after install for me once that's done open the IOS app on your idevice open the KDE connect or JS connect settings and provided your device and computers on the same local network they should appear and you can pair them on iOS you can share the contents of the clipboard you can send photos or videos send regular files use the device as a slideshow remote run commands or use it as a virtual touchpad you can also send files to your idevice from your Linux desktop and they will show up in the files app in local files in the KD connect folder note that on iOS KD connect cannot really run in the background all that much which means that you will have to keep it open for these features to work on Android it works better in the background and it also has notification support because the OS is more permissive with what applications can do now can we conclude that Android is a better OS than iOS was if I say no will I get a ton of angry comments now of course there are plenty of things you won't get like airdrop which doesn't work on Linux but that you can replace with Getty connect or the continuity features you won't be able to start an email on your iPhone and pick it up on your Linux computer you can share the clipboard with KD connect though but it's a manual operation there is no apple podcast integration so you won't be able to sync playback with your desktop and there is no mouse pointer sharing between iOS and Linux and you also can't sync your Safari bookmarks and passwords to Linux although you can always use Firefox or any Chrome based browser on your Linux desktop and on iOS because on iOS every browser is basically Safari in Disguise so you'll get the same performance and compatibility but with a thinking option so yeah that's not really an issue either but still if you're deep in the Apple ecosystem but you would like to move to a more open OS like Linux on your desktop or laptop it is feasible you will lose some features but not that many so yeah I would say it's pretty usable if you don't mind using web applications and you could always replace all or most of that stuff with any open source alternative like nexcloud for example which is what I use on my desktop and all my eye devices as well but if you want to stay in the Apple ecosystem or progressively leave it by replacing each part one by one then you can absolutely switch to Linux and do that and if you want to replace that Mac with a computer that supports Linux then there's always today's sponsor tuxedo is based in Germany but they ship worldwide a huge huge selection of Linux laptops and desktops by which I mean that they run Linux out of the box which makes them way more suitable to run Linux than buying any old Windows computer and crossing your fingers for everything to be supported and to run or spending hours in research when you click the link in the description to buy a tuxedo laptop or desktop you know that Linux is going to run on it with minimal or zero tweaking needed which is pretty cool they have a big big selection for every price point and every need whether it's nux gaming laptops high-end workstations small laptops big laptops you name it and you can configure them with a ton of various options you can have your own keyboard layout laser etched on the keys of your laptop you can have your own logo engraved on the back as well it's just very very customizable so if you need a new device you want to support Linux development you want to make sure it runs Linux click the link in the description below and get yourself a laptop or desktop from tuxedo they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux open source Tech my personal life the channel everything it's on every Monday and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover for the next month on the channel so if you're interested both links are in the description in the meantime thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and since I just turned 35 it's only fitting that this is the 35th Linux and open source news video this year except no it isn't but I just thought it would be nice for my birthday anyway this time we have system 76 unveiling more details about their new cosmic desktop environment we have apple siding with the Chinese government against protesters by limiting certain features there and we have a big security and privacy issues with some smart cameras and we also have Mozilla trying to build their own metaverse ooh disgusting like this segue to today's sponsor wait no that doesn't work this video is sponsored by lenote lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get get started system 76 unveiled a lot more details about their future Cosmic desktop environment set to replace gnome in pop OS they've done a lot of work on a compositor which provides support for HDR High DPI and fractional scaling they're also working on Cosmic text which is a text rendering engine to improve how fonts look on Cosmic applications and they also worked on lib Cosmic which is their equivalent to lipid Vita it's a library that contains all the widgets applications can use like buttons check boxes menus or pop-ups it uses the iced toolkit and it will be used to convert existing gtk4 applications from pop OS to Cosmic applications that are able to make use of a new compositor the launcher the ARP library and the new workspace list will all be created using that toolkit as well and they also said that they were working on a new panel or dock that lets third party the applets integrate with it like system statistics media players or even running a game like doom on top of that they shared screenshots of various settings like the workspaces and their Associated gestures which look comprehensive or from a navigation sidebar which seems adaptive and responds to various window sizes they also contributed directly to IST to improve the toolkit apart from some screenshots there's not much to look at but it's still interesting to see that they're working on various features that are really often overlooked by Linux desktops like HDR or fractional scaling there's no planned release date yet not even for an alpha and we will also have to wait and see how these new cosmic applications will be able to integrate with non-cosmic applications Apple has decidedly sided with the Chinese government in the recent wave of protests that challenge the Communist Party protesters used airdrop in its most open setting to let anyone exchange messages and literature linked to the protests to bypass the Chinese government surveillance of all messaging applications available there and to protect their identity and privacy now Apple decided in early November to release a china-only update that stopped that feature for working for anything more than 10 minutes before having to be re-enabled manually they didn't mention that change in the update notes only citing bug fixes and security updates which is pretty shady of them Apple apparently plans to make that update Global next year but that's not how they usually proceed as they generally release updates worldwide for every device this move is definitely in bad faith and concerning but it's only the newest one in the long list of concessions Apple made to China like removing a privacy protection feature from Safari or removing several vpns from its App Store in China it looks like doing business in China is more important to Apple than privacy and human rights two things that they regularly tout as some of their core values which is a sobering reminders that companies are never your friend they're in here to make money if you own a so-called smart camera from the yuffie brand it's time to disconnect it and dispose of it the company prided itself on protecting user privacy by storing videos and data locally only but this seems to have all been completely untrue as some cameras are uploading photos facial recognition imagery and private data to the company's Cloud servers without the content of their users this data is uploaded without encryption and stored with a username and identifiable information even though this data had been deleted from the ufe app to make matters worse the videos from the cameras can be streamed via a web browser or VLC without any authentication needed which means anyone could basically look at what your camera is seeing inside your house if they can guess or Brute Force the right URL the encryption applied to videos is also terrible using a super simple AES 128 key that can be cracked relatively easily yuffie allegedly already patched some of the issues and explained that by default no photos are taken or uploaded but that changing some settings in the app like receiving notifications make that happen it always seemed pretty obvious to me that putting a camera connected to the internet inside of your house was a terrible idea if you don't control the servers or the data don't put it in your home if you thought Facebook or meta was the only company to invest in the metaverse think again looks like Mozilla also wants to be a part of that weird trip as they bought active replica a startup based in Canada developing a web-based metaverse Mozilla bought it to support their own work on hubs which is an Open Source service of VR chat rooms with stuff like virtual events more interaction inside of hubs a better onboarding experience or personalized subscription tiers mozilla's hubs is already following web standards supports most headsets like the rift or the Vive and is open to users who don't have VR Hardware being usable on desktops laptops or smartphones they already had a twenty dollars per month subscription for it and with the addition of active replica they plan to add a free version in the future plus kits to create custom spaces and avatars and also add more pricing tiers and okay the metaverse is just a dumb idea it's a less convenient and less comfortable way of doing stuff that we can already do much better and much faster but if it's going to happen despite our will and our best judgment I'd rather it be an open metaverse controlled by Open Standards than Facebook's vision of it now let's take a look at what's new in Gnome there's a new app called boatswain that lets you Control elgato's stream decks it's now part of gnome Circle and it lets you set custom icons for actions organize these actions in pages and profiles control a music player play sounds or control OBS Studio money the personal finance manager has been revamped quite a lot with a new way of organizing groups and transactions there's a new transfer money action that lets you transfer money from one account file to another you can filter transactions by type group or date and a bunch of issues were also fixed it looks like a pretty nice app to keep track of you're spending honestly Loop the new image viewer now has support for zooming and scrolling in images with touchpad and touchscreen gestures and gradients the advaita theme manager got a lot of fixes to ensure that your gnome desktop looks its best I must say I'm really interested in money no that doesn't sound right I'm really interested in the money application it looks like quite a cool app to keep track of your budget and spending which I definitely need to do more of as per KDE they've been working on accessing iOS devices easily in Dolphin they've worked on a Kio module which is their system to handle file management and it will show any iPhone you plug into your computer in the disk and devices applet and in the dolphin sidebar it will let you browse the file system and documents shared by various applications which is pretty cool on top of that they overhauled the dragon player UI with a hamburger menu and a welcome screen and also plays glitches on Wayland they added a sidebar to Fire Light the disk usage viewer app they simplified how to add or change a weather location and rolling fingerprints to unlock your desktop is now much more intuitive and you can now remove certain fingerprints from the system and as if that wasn't enough there's a new release of plasma mobile gear the application compilation for the mobile version of KDE with a much improved weather application the recorder app has been reworked to be more intuitive the SMS app called spacebar now supports tap back reactions casts the podcast application now lets you play episodes without downloading them and audio tube the YouTube music client now has album cover support and all of these apps can also be used on a regular KD plasma desktop because they're adaptive so they'll work as well on the smartphone as on the desktop or laptop let's move on to the gaming news first we have a new NVIDIA drivers stable release version 525.60.11 has a few improvements and Bug fixes notably to improve the performance of applications running using the prime render offload so on hybrid devices with two gpus and they fixed a bug that prevented gnome systems with Wayland to correctly suspend they also added support for dynamic boost on the AMD CPU systems which is a feature that lets the system shift power from the CPU to the GPU on laptops so the GPU can run faster not to be outdone the Mesa drivers also have a release version 22.3 it now supports the rdna3 architecture so radiant 7000 series gpus and the Vulcan Ray tracing support has been improved a lot they also added support for Rusty CL which is a rust-based implementation of opencl with opencl 3.0 support hopefully this might help DaVinci Resolve work on Linux on AMD gpus and we also have the release of wine 7.22 with the beginning of 32 bits on 64-bit support for Vulcan and opengl and support for the raw print process in windprint they also fixed 38 bucks including for games like Siberia Gothic 2 Knight of the Raven or Saints Row 2022 I'm pretty excited about that new opencl support in the Mesa drivers because if DaVinci Resolve supports that opencl implementation it means that I can finally ditch my Nvidia GPU and replace it with an AMD one and run on full open source drivers that would be pretty cool pretty cool just like today's sponsor if you're looking for a device that runs Linux great out of the box stop buying generic Windows devices and trying to slap Linux on it just buy from tuxedo they have a huge range of laptops and desktops for all price points for all needs they are all upgradable repairable and have plenty of configuration options up to having your own custom keyboard layout laser edged on the keys or your own logo on the lid of your laptop and they run Linux out of the box they ship worldwide and while you can select a few specific popular distribution at configuration when you buy your device you can also just slap the distro you prefer and things will just run perfectly because those are devices that have Hardware that support Linux so if you need a new device and you want to support Linux development and you want to make sure that Linux runs well on what you buy head over to the link in the description below and grab yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well there's also that dislike button and a comment down there would be appreciated as well and if you really like the channel you can also support it with the super thanks button underneath the video with the PayPal Link in the description or by joining my patreon members or YouTube members both links are in the description as well and will give you access to a weekly podcast on Monday and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you're using Linux as your desktop or if you just like free software chances are you're using Library office as your office suite and chances are you also wished it worked more like Microsoft Office or it was more compatible with Microsoft Office formats hey Microsoft's formats are open it's not their fault if they Implement them in a way that basically makes them incompatible with the way their own standard is written still today is your lucky day because we're going to look at a ton of ways we can make LibreOffice more compatible with Microsoft Office and work more like it and though it's not just moving to the tabbed interface there's a lot more that we can do so let's get started right after I tell you how today's sponsor can help you Monitor and secure your internet connection this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to try so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster so remember how I said it wasn't going to be just moving to the tabbed interface in library office well we're still going to look at how to do that because by default Library office is more Office 2003 than modern Microsoft Office and while it's fine for some people most people are now used to the ribbon interface now fortunately this is super easy to do in LibreOffice just open any of the applications of The Suite here is LibreOffice writer click on The View menu then user interface by default it's the standard menu bar and toolbar combo but if you click on tabbed you'll see that you can now use a ribbon interface just like what Microsoft Office uses there are other options as well like a single toolbar for smaller screens a sidebar more like what IBM Lotus did back in the day a compact tabbed variant that will be reminiscent of Microsoft Office online and grouped bars which puts the menu bar underneath groups of icons now for our purposes here select tab and click apply to all this will make the ribbon interface the default for all LibreOffice programs of the suite so you don't have to repeat this action for each app why this isn't the default yet I don't really know because I'm pretty sure that most people are now used and are learning an office suite with a ribbon interface which was introduced with Office 2007 so 15 years ago but hey at least you've got the option next we'll look at the icons depending on your system and your theme and whether you use doc mode or not it's possible that your icons can be black on a black background and illegible we can change that as well from the tabbed interface click the main menu in the top right corner and select options then click the view menu and in the theme drop down menu you will have plenty of options Breeze is the default but if you want something that looks more like Microsoft Office select colebra or sukapur if you want something more like gnome select the elementary theme and if you want something symbolic the C4 theme is for you you can also change the icon size in the notebook bar drop down if everything feels too small the SVG variants of these icon themes will be useful for example if you use fractional scaling as the icons will scale better and they are dark variants if you use dark mode to make icons more legible on a black background so just try them out click apply to see how they look and pick the one you prefer they will apply to all programs in the suite and finally if you really want to push it you can also reorder any of the icons from any of the tabs of the ribbon click the main menu again and then customize then click the notebook bar tab here you will see the target drop down menu that lets you select which tab you want to change you can earn track icons you don't want to see or reorder them by drag and drop if you want you can spend some time reordering the icons to be exactly in the same order as as Microsoft Office I personally would not do it because it feels like a big waste of time but if there are two or three actions that don't really feel well placed and you want to keep your muscle memory you can always change them and you can also change keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard tab okay now that this is out of the way let's make LibreOffice more usable first are the fonts if you're using Library office on Windows chances are you already have the Microsoft fonts installed if you're on Linux though they're probably not there and you'll probably want to use these phones just to make sure that the documents you create are the ones you edit respect the formatting by default Linux and LibreOffice use almost compatible fonts which are almost exactly the same but not perfectly Pixel Perfect so you will need the Microsoft phones to ensure that the formatting isn't lost or moved around to install Microsoft fonts you'll generally have a package in your distros repositories provided you enable the non-free software repos the package is generally called ttf- Ms core phones or ttf- Ms core phones Dash installer on Ubuntu or Ubuntu based distros for example you can open a terminal and run sudo apt install ttf Dash Ms core fonts Dash installer if you're using an arch-based distro you can find it in your graphical package manager through the Aur and for Fedora I left a link in the description of the video once you have the fonts installed Library office should detect them automatically if that's not the case quit all LibreOffice apps and reopen them now you can open Office documents without messing up the formatting and if you want to use these phones by default you can configure that as well click the main menu then options then go to the name of the app you're using here it's Library office writer and select the basic fonts tab here you can change the defaults to the font you prefer like calibri or Times New Roman or comic and now let's apply a few tweaks to make sure that documents you create or edit are as compatible with Microsoft Office as possible first you will want to enable all compatibility features to do that open the main menu then options in the load and save tab click on Microsoft Office and make sure all the checkboxes are ticked generally they all are apart from the smartart one which you should also check next in writer if you want to ensure that forms you create are fully Word compatible open the options menu again then delivery office writer Tab and the compatibility tab click the reorganize form menu to have it Microsoft compatible checkbox and also tick the word compatible trailing blanks check mark So Library office automatically adds a space after a paragraph like Microsoft Word does next if you interact with Microsoft Office users a lot you will want to send them documents using the office formats click on the general tab of the load save panel and in always save as select Word 2007 365 docx then in the document type drop down you can select spreadsheet and change the always save as field to Excel 2007 365 xlsx and you can repeat that step for presentations and the pptx format this means that all your future documents that you create using Library office will use the Microsoft Office formats now personally I prefer the odf Open document format because they are technically the standard everyone should use and technically Microsoft Office is able to open them but since everyone mostly uses Microsoft Office formats it's probably easier to just change the default for you for what you create you will also get an annoying pop-up when saving using these formats you can disable it by unchecking the warn when not saving in odf or default format checkbox in the same settings page we used previously now if you also had custom Styles and templates that you used in Microsoft Office you can also import them into Library office just click the file tab in writer and then templates there click the manage button in the top right corner and click import then you can select templates presentations or Styles click the one you want then OK and you will get a file picker to go grab your templates or your Styles if you're using Windows by default these are located in your C drive in users your username app data roaming Microsoft and then templates or quick styles for Styles and that's also where you can grab them if you want to make a backup of them now let's take a look at extensions Library office lets you install extensions to add features to the suite you can head over to extensions.librayoffice.org to view a full list there are plenty of excellent ones including alt search which is a more powerful find and replace tool for LibreOffice writer you have multi-save which lets you save files in multiple formats at once like a PDF and a Microsoft format for example or one of the most useful to check for compatibility called Papito cleaner this will open a window with a list of all formatting mistakes in your document there's also transcriber which lets you have play and pause buttons from media files inside of LibreOffice which means you can transcribe an interview without switching apps back and forth all the time for Library office calc you have librew web which lets you fill the cells of your spreadsheet with data sourced from a web page or calendar which opens a calendar pop-up to let you select a date range and add it in ISO format there are a ton of other great extensions in their extensions portal and there are also document templates for cover letters or resumes or everything else in between so check the link in the description to see what you might want to install or add now to install extensions download them from the extensions portal and you will get a DOT oxt file then in LibreOffice click the extensions tab then the extensions menu and extension manager click the add button and go find your oxt file to import it after that these extensions will all display their commands in the extensions tab even with all these tweaks and changes you need to know that Library office will not be a hundred percent fully compatible with all Microsoft Office documents especially for complex ones like giant reports with tons of features or super complex data sheets there will be discrepancies and that's pretty normal but still it should give you a very nice experience for simple documents like the one you regularly exchange with other co-workers if you want to check the exact differences between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice there's a super complete table that points out all of them I left a link to it in the description below generally writer is very very compatible with word you shouldn't get major issues impress is also very nicely compatible with PowerPoint but calc will have the biggest differences with Excel and also remember these office formats are meant to be edited if what you want the person to do is just read or sign send a PDF now you're sure that it's always always compatible and that's what it's made for still LibreOffice is probably one of the most feature complete and compatible options to replace Microsoft Office but there are other options only office is open source and generally more compatible with Microsoft formats but it doesn't have as many features as Library office you can also use WPS office or free office which both boast perfect Microsoft Office compatibility at least on paper but they are not open source I have a video comparing and listing all these alternatives to Microsoft Office I left a link to it in the description or in the card up top I think it's right there for YouTube viewers so hopefully this video will help you ensure that LibreOffice documents you create or edit are as compatible with Microsoft Office as possible and also it will help ensure that you don't send broken stuff to your co-workers too often and today's sponsor will ensure that you have a Linux compatible desktop or laptop tuxedo is a German company that ships worldwide a wide range of devices that are pre-installed with Linux and the reason you might want that is because it ensures that your device is compatible with Linux compare that to buying any old Windows laptop or desktop and praying crossing your fingers and and hoping and researching to ensure that everything runs well with tuxedo you don't don't have to worry about that you just slap your distro and it runs because the components were picked to be compatible with Linux and they have devices for every price point and for every need with plenty of customization options for the SSD the ram the CPU the GPU you can get your own custom keyboard laser etched on the keys so if you want a specific layout you can get that you can get your own logo laser etched as well on the lid of your laptop it's just great so if you need a new device you want to support Linux development you want to make sure that what you buy runs Linux well click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did you know what to do just click like click subscribe click the Bell leave a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can also click dislike and tell me why down there in the comments and if you want to help support the channel there's a super thanks button down there on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description of the video and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast on Monday where I talk about Linux Tech open source my personal life the channel my interest and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so both links are in the description and in the meantime thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and since I just turned 35 it's only fitting that this is the 35th Linux and open source news video this year except no it isn't but I just thought it would be nice for my birthday anyway this time we have system 76 unveiling more details about their new cosmic desktop environment we have apple siding with the Chinese government against protesters by limiting certain features there and we have a big security and privacy issues with some smart cameras and we also have Mozilla trying to build their own metaverse ooh disgusting like this segue to today's sponsor wait no that doesn't work this video is sponsored by lenote lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get get started system 76 unveiled a lot more details about their future Cosmic desktop environment set to replace gnome in pop OS they've done a lot of work on a compositor which provides support for HDR High DPI and fractional scaling they're also working on Cosmic text which is a text rendering engine to improve how fonts look on Cosmic applications and they also worked on lib Cosmic which is their equivalent to lipid Vita it's a library that contains all the widgets applications can use like buttons check boxes menus or pop-ups it uses the iced toolkit and it will be used to convert existing gtk4 applications from pop OS to Cosmic applications that are able to make use of a new compositor the launcher the ARP library and the new workspace list will all be created using that toolkit as well and they also said that they were working on a new panel or dock that lets third party the applets integrate with it like system statistics media players or even running a game like doom on top of that they shared screenshots of various settings like the workspaces and their Associated gestures which look comprehensive or from a navigation sidebar which seems adaptive and responds to various window sizes they also contributed directly to IST to improve the toolkit apart from some screenshots there's not much to look at but it's still interesting to see that they're working on various features that are really often overlooked by Linux desktops like HDR or fractional scaling there's no planned release date yet not even for an alpha and we will also have to wait and see how these new cosmic applications will be able to integrate with non-cosmic applications Apple has decidedly sided with the Chinese government in the recent wave of protests that challenge the Communist Party protesters used airdrop in its most open setting to let anyone exchange messages and literature linked to the protests to bypass the Chinese government surveillance of all messaging applications available there and to protect their identity and privacy now Apple decided in early November to release a china-only update that stopped that feature for working for anything more than 10 minutes before having to be re-enabled manually they didn't mention that change in the update notes only citing bug fixes and security updates which is pretty shady of them Apple apparently plans to make that update Global next year but that's not how they usually proceed as they generally release updates worldwide for every device this move is definitely in bad faith and concerning but it's only the newest one in the long list of concessions Apple made to China like removing a privacy protection feature from Safari or removing several vpns from its App Store in China it looks like doing business in China is more important to Apple than privacy and human rights two things that they regularly tout as some of their core values which is a sobering reminders that companies are never your friend they're in here to make money if you own a so-called smart camera from the yuffie brand it's time to disconnect it and dispose of it the company prided itself on protecting user privacy by storing videos and data locally only but this seems to have all been completely untrue as some cameras are uploading photos facial recognition imagery and private data to the company's Cloud servers without the content of their users this data is uploaded without encryption and stored with a username and identifiable information even though this data had been deleted from the ufe app to make matters worse the videos from the cameras can be streamed via a web browser or VLC without any authentication needed which means anyone could basically look at what your camera is seeing inside your house if they can guess or Brute Force the right URL the encryption applied to videos is also terrible using a super simple AES 128 key that can be cracked relatively easily yuffie allegedly already patched some of the issues and explained that by default no photos are taken or uploaded but that changing some settings in the app like receiving notifications make that happen it always seemed pretty obvious to me that putting a camera connected to the internet inside of your house was a terrible idea if you don't control the servers or the data don't put it in your home if you thought Facebook or meta was the only company to invest in the metaverse think again looks like Mozilla also wants to be a part of that weird trip as they bought active replica a startup based in Canada developing a web-based metaverse Mozilla bought it to support their own work on hubs which is an Open Source service of VR chat rooms with stuff like virtual events more interaction inside of hubs a better onboarding experience or personalized subscription tiers mozilla's hubs is already following web standards supports most headsets like the rift or the Vive and is open to users who don't have VR Hardware being usable on desktops laptops or smartphones they already had a twenty dollars per month subscription for it and with the addition of active replica they plan to add a free version in the future plus kits to create custom spaces and avatars and also add more pricing tiers and okay the metaverse is just a dumb idea it's a less convenient and less comfortable way of doing stuff that we can already do much better and much faster but if it's going to happen despite our will and our best judgment I'd rather it be an open metaverse controlled by Open Standards than Facebook's vision of it now let's take a look at what's new in Gnome there's a new app called boatswain that lets you Control elgato's stream decks it's now part of gnome Circle and it lets you set custom icons for actions organize these actions in pages and profiles control a music player play sounds or control OBS Studio money the personal finance manager has been revamped quite a lot with a new way of organizing groups and transactions there's a new transfer money action that lets you transfer money from one account file to another you can filter transactions by type group or date and a bunch of issues were also fixed it looks like a pretty nice app to keep track of you're spending honestly Loop the new image viewer now has support for zooming and scrolling in images with touchpad and touchscreen gestures and gradients the advaita theme manager got a lot of fixes to ensure that your gnome desktop looks its best I must say I'm really interested in money no that doesn't sound right I'm really interested in the money application it looks like quite a cool app to keep track of your budget and spending which I definitely need to do more of as per KDE they've been working on accessing iOS devices easily in Dolphin they've worked on a Kio module which is their system to handle file management and it will show any iPhone you plug into your computer in the disk and devices applet and in the dolphin sidebar it will let you browse the file system and documents shared by various applications which is pretty cool on top of that they overhauled the dragon player UI with a hamburger menu and a welcome screen and also plays glitches on Wayland they added a sidebar to Fire Light the disk usage viewer app they simplified how to add or change a weather location and rolling fingerprints to unlock your desktop is now much more intuitive and you can now remove certain fingerprints from the system and as if that wasn't enough there's a new release of plasma mobile gear the application compilation for the mobile version of KDE with a much improved weather application the recorder app has been reworked to be more intuitive the SMS app called spacebar now supports tap back reactions casts the podcast application now lets you play episodes without downloading them and audio tube the YouTube music client now has album cover support and all of these apps can also be used on a regular KD plasma desktop because they're adaptive so they'll work as well on the smartphone as on the desktop or laptop let's move on to the gaming news first we have a new NVIDIA drivers stable release version 525.60.11 has a few improvements and Bug fixes notably to improve the performance of applications running using the prime render offload so on hybrid devices with two gpus and they fixed a bug that prevented gnome systems with Wayland to correctly suspend they also added support for dynamic boost on the AMD CPU systems which is a feature that lets the system shift power from the CPU to the GPU on laptops so the GPU can run faster not to be outdone the Mesa drivers also have a release version 22.3 it now supports the rdna3 architecture so radiant 7000 series gpus and the Vulcan Ray tracing support has been improved a lot they also added support for Rusty CL which is a rust-based implementation of opencl with opencl 3.0 support hopefully this might help DaVinci Resolve work on Linux on AMD gpus and we also have the release of wine 7.22 with the beginning of 32 bits on 64-bit support for Vulcan and opengl and support for the raw print process in windprint they also fixed 38 bucks including for games like Siberia Gothic 2 Knight of the Raven or Saints Row 2022 I'm pretty excited about that new opencl support in the Mesa drivers because if DaVinci Resolve supports that opencl implementation it means that I can finally ditch my Nvidia GPU and replace it with an AMD one and run on full open source drivers that would be pretty cool pretty cool just like today's sponsor if you're looking for a device that runs Linux great out of the box stop buying generic Windows devices and trying to slap Linux on it just buy from tuxedo they have a huge range of laptops and desktops for all price points for all needs they are all upgradable repairable and have plenty of configuration options up to having your own custom keyboard layout laser edged on the keys or your own logo on the lid of your laptop and they run Linux out of the box they ship worldwide and while you can select a few specific popular distribution at configuration when you buy your device you can also just slap the distro you prefer and things will just run perfectly because those are devices that have Hardware that support Linux so if you need a new device and you want to support Linux development and you want to make sure that Linux runs well on what you buy head over to the link in the description below and grab yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well there's also that dislike button and a comment down there would be appreciated as well and if you really like the channel you can also support it with the super thanks button underneath the video with the PayPal Link in the description or by joining my patreon members or YouTube members both links are in the description as well and will give you access to a weekly podcast on Monday and the right to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you think the title of this video looks like the EU are aliens that abducted Tick Tock to do unsanctioned stuff to them well you're right but I also need to keep those titles short so yeah Pro anyway this week we have the aforementioned EU looking into Tick Tock for potential privacy breaches and violations and problems with compliance with gdpr we have Tumblr looking into joining the fedivers by implementing the activity Pub standard and Flickr thinking about doing the same thing and we have Fedora unveiling some screens of their brand new installer which looks to be a lot lot better than the previous horrendous Anaconda so let's dive in right after I tell you how you can get a hundred dollars of free credit to start your own Linux or gaming server this video is sponsored by linode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started so it looks like the EU is finally taking a look at Tick Tock the chinese-based short form video application you probably all know about the EU will look into how the data from European citizens flows to China as well as ads that are targeted to miners basically they just want to see if tiktok respects the gdpr the European rules for data handling the nightmare of most big tech companies and also the president of the European commission said they are launching several proceedings including one from Ireland focused on data transfers to China and how miners data is processed and another one from the Netherlands regarding targeted advertisements Tick Tock had already committed to better practices like allowing people to report ads that Target children Banning promotion of inappropriate products and services like alcohol scams or cigarettes or reviewing videos from people who have more than 10 000 followers since Tick Tock already made concessions to the US to store data on U.S servers I have no doubt they will also comply with the rules the eucs fit to impose on the company personally Tick Tock is a platform I have zero trust in it's probably what many people will call a boomer tank but I don't understand the point of this application like watching cringy videos of people dancing or trying to be funny is not my thing except most of my videos also fall into that category apart from the dancing oh wait no I did a dance once okay well I guess I should be on Tick Tock then Tumblr will soon join the fediverse that giant social network linking multiple Services Tumblr will add support for activity purp the w3c standard that lets Mastodon pixel fed peer tube and a ton of other services talk to each other and interact Tumblr might not be as big as it once was but it's still sizable and this means a potential influx of hundreds of thousands of users to the fedivers which might be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you like your social networks if you're wondering what this means well you could follow Tumblr posts on Mastodon for example and have a unified feed for multiple social networks Tumblr is owned by automatic a company that already owns WordPress another part of the fativerse there is no date yet for when this will come to Tumblr it's just marked as ASAP for now this move seems like it also Kindle some amount of interest in the activity Pub standard with the CEO of Flickr asking people on Twitter if Flickr should also add activity Pub support he's not promising anything but is looking at the idea personally I'm all for more major Services connecting with the fedivers it's how social networks should always have work not being locked into a specific platform but being able to talk to people from any other service and comment on their stuff and follow them wherever you want it's what the internet is supposed to be and that's what the fediverse and the activity Pub standard allows so if you want to learn more about the fediverse and most of its major services that you might want to use I have a video it's linked in the description below or in the cards somewhere up here fedora's installer called Anaconda is one of the least intuitive there is on Linux badly placed buttons unclear error messages messy partitioning tool is just really confusing and it looks like people agree as there's the new installer in development it has a web-based user interface and uses cockpit to power it it's a web-based graphical interface for servers this new installer isn't finished yet but it already lets you choose the install language select the disks automatically partition them let you look at what you've selected and displaying a progress screen so it can basically let you install Fedora completely already the screenshots while they look a bit Bland definitely look a lot more legible than anaconda ever was with a clear progress indicator on the left to see where you're at and some text help on the right to let you understand what exactly it is that you're doing the install process window also shows nice steps that you can understand easily it just looks like a way more user-friendly option now at best it should be included in Fedora 38 in April 2023 but depending on how things go it could be deployed at the end of next year instead hey they managed to start working on it and almost have a Deployable version in less than a year that's more than we can say about ubuntu's new flutter based installer which we haven't heard anything about for months now and also yes you can comment why so many installers down there because I'm wondering the same thing seriously why do we need so many Microsoft finally brought its badly named windows subsystem for Linux which does the opposite of what it's called because it runs Linux on Windows not the opposite well they brought it out of beta version 1.0 can be installed from the Windows store in one click and it works on Windows 10 and windows 11. it still lets you install a distro of your choosing inside of Windows and it runs it at near native speeds complete with GPU acceleration and support for graphical Linux applications so you could run any KDE or gnome app inside of Windows if you wanted to it also supports system D now apparently WSL is a love it or hate it kind of system I thought you think it's great because it means more people can discover Linux try its apps and see how much better it is for development or command line based workflows and ultimately lead more people to try Linux as a real install or you think it's going to kill Linux by making people stick to Windows and perform the tasks that are easier on Linux using WSL I really don't know where I stand on WSL on the one hand it gives people more options to try and run Linux which is cool but on the other hand it also means that people are not going to get out of their comfort zone and try another operating system iCloud Apple service that lets you store everything in the cloud and sync stuff across devices looks like it has a major security problem at least for Windows users apple offers an iCloud app for Windows that lets you sync bookmarks photos and more and this app has problems first it's corrupting videos taken on iPhones when downloading them on Windows that's bad enough but there's a bigger problem users are reporting that they're seeing photos and videos that don't belong to them showing up in their libraries some users report seeing images of other people's families soccer games and other things that have nothing to do with them which might imply that iCloud has an issue with authenticating user accounts and knowing what goes where and this is obviously a major problem if it's confirmed as it would mean your data isn't private at all and could pop up randomly on other people's computers it kind of puts a little dent in the apple is more private thingy and yeah sure it looks like it's only happening on the Windows app for iCloud and not on other services and yeah I clamored for this app to be supported on Linux for a while now but now I think it's a good thing that we don't have it cinnamon 5.6 is the latest update to Linux means desktop environment and it brings a bunch of cool new stuff mint users should get it before the end of the year and it will be the default version in mint 21.1 which should release in December the big headline feature is what they call a corner bar which is basically just a slim button at the bottom right of the taskbar that you can configure to do what you want when you click it or middle click it it lets you show the desktop the desk Lads the workspace selector or the window selector you can also just hover it to show the desktop Nemo the file manager will now only highlight the file names When selecting files instead of also highlighting the icon and this looks much better and they added a shortcut to access the display settings straight from the right click menu of the desktop on top of that you will see less password prompts for example when removing a flatback app removing shortcuts or local applications that are only installed for the user the update manager will also remember your password so you don't have to enter it for each operation finally flat pack support was added to that update manager which should make it easier to handle this format in mint cinnamon is a really really good desktop and show their rate of progress is isn't as fast as gnome or caddy but honestly they don't really need to move that fast their desktop already does pretty much everything you might want and has one of the most complete Suites of applications and utilities out of the box or they are lacking now is Wayland support now let's talk about what's new in our desktop environments on The Gnome side there's Dynamic wallpaper a new app that lets you create wallpapers that change with the light or dark mode of your desktop or there's upscaler an application that lets you enhance and increase the resolution of images like in any police investigation show money the personal finance manager has a new release with the ability to group transactions into categories with automatic currency detection and Bug fixes buttholes the all-in-one Windows app and game launcher has a completely redesigned detailed view without a sidebar and with all the various Pages merged into one the settings have been rearranged to be more legible and a lot of stuff has been rephrased and in KDE land discover error messages will now use a normal dialog instead of overlays that disappeared too quickly the system monitor widget lets you monitor power usage for NVIDIA gpus and you can display the current temperature directly on the panel discover also gets more legible progress bars for installing and updating and it won't try to check for updates on a metered internet connection the developers also are working on a new welcome app that will better introduce plasma features to new users it should make its debut in plasma 5.27 early next year and that's pretty awesome because next month I'll have a video talking about how kde's power is kinda useless if you don't explain to the user how you can make use of it and I think this welcome app will slot in nicely with this video now let's move on to the gaming news Nintendo proved once again that it's a terrible company going after steam grid DB because it talked about switch emulation on the steam deck the company sent some dmca takedowns to remove cover art images from the website which does just that it hosts images that you can use as covers for your non-steam games on Steam or the steam deck removed images include ones for Pokemon Splatoon Xenoblade Chronicles Super Mario Odyssey and breath of the wild sure Nintendo go after pngs and jpegs of your games because they imply that people might emulate your games which is totally legal if you own the game physically what a dumb move seriously valve introduced proton next which is a new proton flavor as they call it that gives people the chance to have access to the latest testing proton release with this announcement comes the ability to test proton 7.0-5 which makes a bunch of games playable like Bullet Storm Rift unravel 2 battle Realms and more and the steam deck won best gaming Hardware at the 40th golden joystick Awards these are presented by Games Radar and it's unsurprising seeing as this chungus of a portable computer has absolutely taken the World by storm since it released still it's nice to see the steam deck getting the recognition it deserves and its proof once more if it was still needed that Linux is an excellent gaming platform and that's great because today's sponsors devices ship with Linux pre-installed tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they sell worldwide a big big range of laptops and desktops that run Lin Linux out of the box and why that would be better than just buying any old PC that runs windows and replacing windows with Linux but it's because it removes all the guesswork you just slap your distro on it it runs everything is supported and you're good to go and they have a big big range of devices from the smallest Ultrabooks to nux to gaming Towers gaming laptops any price point any need you have can be filled with one of their devices and they're also pretty customizable they are repairable you can have your own logo on the lid of the laptop or you can have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keyboard of the laptop basically there are choices for everyone so if you need a new device and you want to make sure that you support Linux development and you want to make sure that your device actually runs well with Linux click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't well you can also click the dislike button and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this YouTube video there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast and the right to vote on the next topics I'll cover so thanks everyone for watching and I guess we'll see you in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you're using Linux as your desktop or if you just like free software chances are you're using Library office as your office suite and chances are you also wished it worked more like Microsoft Office or it was more compatible with Microsoft Office formats hey Microsoft's formats are open it's not their fault if they Implement them in a way that basically makes them incompatible with the way their own standard is written still today is your lucky day because we're going to look at a ton of ways we can make LibreOffice more compatible with Microsoft Office and work more like it and though it's not just moving to the tabbed interface there's a lot more that we can do so let's get started right after I tell you how today's sponsor can help you Monitor and secure your internet connection this video is sponsored by safing safeing makes the portmaster an open source tool to take back control of your internet connection it's free of charge and it lets you see every connection every application makes and it lets you act on these connections by blocking ads and trackers malware not safe for work stuff or scams with auto blocking capabilities and even the ability to use a DNS provider of your choice you can of course create your own rules globally or per application boardmaster is available as a Dev or an RPM package it's in the Aur or you can also install it on Windows using it is free of charge and they have paid tiers starting at 3 Euros per month to support the development or 9.9 Euros per month if you want the total package including the SPN which is a VPN on steroids that uses a different IP address for every connection so you're truly impossible to try so click the link in the description to download the boardmaster so remember how I said it wasn't going to be just moving to the tabbed interface in library office well we're still going to look at how to do that because by default Library office is more Office 2003 than modern Microsoft Office and while it's fine for some people most people are now used to the ribbon interface now fortunately this is super easy to do in LibreOffice just open any of the applications of The Suite here is LibreOffice writer click on The View menu then user interface by default it's the standard menu bar and toolbar combo but if you click on tabbed you'll see that you can now use a ribbon interface just like what Microsoft Office uses there are other options as well like a single toolbar for smaller screens a sidebar more like what IBM Lotus did back in the day a compact tabbed variant that will be reminiscent of Microsoft Office online and grouped bars which puts the menu bar underneath groups of icons now for our purposes here select tab and click apply to all this will make the ribbon interface the default for all LibreOffice programs of the suite so you don't have to repeat this action for each app why this isn't the default yet I don't really know because I'm pretty sure that most people are now used and are learning an office suite with a ribbon interface which was introduced with Office 2007 so 15 years ago but hey at least you've got the option next we'll look at the icons depending on your system and your theme and whether you use doc mode or not it's possible that your icons can be black on a black background and illegible we can change that as well from the tabbed interface click the main menu in the top right corner and select options then click the view menu and in the theme drop down menu you will have plenty of options Breeze is the default but if you want something that looks more like Microsoft Office select colebra or sukapur if you want something more like gnome select the elementary theme and if you want something symbolic the C4 theme is for you you can also change the icon size in the notebook bar drop down if everything feels too small the SVG variants of these icon themes will be useful for example if you use fractional scaling as the icons will scale better and they are dark variants if you use dark mode to make icons more legible on a black background so just try them out click apply to see how they look and pick the one you prefer they will apply to all programs in the suite and finally if you really want to push it you can also reorder any of the icons from any of the tabs of the ribbon click the main menu again and then customize then click the notebook bar tab here you will see the target drop down menu that lets you select which tab you want to change you can earn track icons you don't want to see or reorder them by drag and drop if you want you can spend some time reordering the icons to be exactly in the same order as as Microsoft Office I personally would not do it because it feels like a big waste of time but if there are two or three actions that don't really feel well placed and you want to keep your muscle memory you can always change them and you can also change keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard tab okay now that this is out of the way let's make LibreOffice more usable first are the fonts if you're using Library office on Windows chances are you already have the Microsoft fonts installed if you're on Linux though they're probably not there and you'll probably want to use these phones just to make sure that the documents you create are the ones you edit respect the formatting by default Linux and LibreOffice use almost compatible fonts which are almost exactly the same but not perfectly Pixel Perfect so you will need the Microsoft phones to ensure that the formatting isn't lost or moved around to install Microsoft fonts you'll generally have a package in your distros repositories provided you enable the non-free software repos the package is generally called ttf- Ms core phones or ttf- Ms core phones Dash installer on Ubuntu or Ubuntu based distros for example you can open a terminal and run sudo apt install ttf Dash Ms core fonts Dash installer if you're using an arch-based distro you can find it in your graphical package manager through the Aur and for Fedora I left a link in the description of the video once you have the fonts installed Library office should detect them automatically if that's not the case quit all LibreOffice apps and reopen them now you can open Office documents without messing up the formatting and if you want to use these phones by default you can configure that as well click the main menu then options then go to the name of the app you're using here it's Library office writer and select the basic fonts tab here you can change the defaults to the font you prefer like calibri or Times New Roman or comic and now let's apply a few tweaks to make sure that documents you create or edit are as compatible with Microsoft Office as possible first you will want to enable all compatibility features to do that open the main menu then options in the load and save tab click on Microsoft Office and make sure all the checkboxes are ticked generally they all are apart from the smartart one which you should also check next in writer if you want to ensure that forms you create are fully Word compatible open the options menu again then delivery office writer Tab and the compatibility tab click the reorganize form menu to have it Microsoft compatible checkbox and also tick the word compatible trailing blanks check mark So Library office automatically adds a space after a paragraph like Microsoft Word does next if you interact with Microsoft Office users a lot you will want to send them documents using the office formats click on the general tab of the load save panel and in always save as select Word 2007 365 docx then in the document type drop down you can select spreadsheet and change the always save as field to Excel 2007 365 xlsx and you can repeat that step for presentations and the pptx format this means that all your future documents that you create using Library office will use the Microsoft Office formats now personally I prefer the odf Open document format because they are technically the standard everyone should use and technically Microsoft Office is able to open them but since everyone mostly uses Microsoft Office formats it's probably easier to just change the default for you for what you create you will also get an annoying pop-up when saving using these formats you can disable it by unchecking the warn when not saving in odf or default format checkbox in the same settings page we used previously now if you also had custom Styles and templates that you used in Microsoft Office you can also import them into Library office just click the file tab in writer and then templates there click the manage button in the top right corner and click import then you can select templates presentations or Styles click the one you want then OK and you will get a file picker to go grab your templates or your Styles if you're using Windows by default these are located in your C drive in users your username app data roaming Microsoft and then templates or quick styles for Styles and that's also where you can grab them if you want to make a backup of them now let's take a look at extensions Library office lets you install extensions to add features to the suite you can head over to extensions.librayoffice.org to view a full list there are plenty of excellent ones including alt search which is a more powerful find and replace tool for LibreOffice writer you have multi-save which lets you save files in multiple formats at once like a PDF and a Microsoft format for example or one of the most useful to check for compatibility called Papito cleaner this will open a window with a list of all formatting mistakes in your document there's also transcriber which lets you have play and pause buttons from media files inside of LibreOffice which means you can transcribe an interview without switching apps back and forth all the time for Library office calc you have librew web which lets you fill the cells of your spreadsheet with data sourced from a web page or calendar which opens a calendar pop-up to let you select a date range and add it in ISO format there are a ton of other great extensions in their extensions portal and there are also document templates for cover letters or resumes or everything else in between so check the link in the description to see what you might want to install or add now to install extensions download them from the extensions portal and you will get a DOT oxt file then in LibreOffice click the extensions tab then the extensions menu and extension manager click the add button and go find your oxt file to import it after that these extensions will all display their commands in the extensions tab even with all these tweaks and changes you need to know that Library office will not be a hundred percent fully compatible with all Microsoft Office documents especially for complex ones like giant reports with tons of features or super complex data sheets there will be discrepancies and that's pretty normal but still it should give you a very nice experience for simple documents like the one you regularly exchange with other co-workers if you want to check the exact differences between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice there's a super complete table that points out all of them I left a link to it in the description below generally writer is very very compatible with word you shouldn't get major issues impress is also very nicely compatible with PowerPoint but calc will have the biggest differences with Excel and also remember these office formats are meant to be edited if what you want the person to do is just read or sign send a PDF now you're sure that it's always always compatible and that's what it's made for still LibreOffice is probably one of the most feature complete and compatible options to replace Microsoft Office but there are other options only office is open source and generally more compatible with Microsoft formats but it doesn't have as many features as Library office you can also use WPS office or free office which both boast perfect Microsoft Office compatibility at least on paper but they are not open source I have a video comparing and listing all these alternatives to Microsoft Office I left a link to it in the description or in the card up top I think it's right there for YouTube viewers so hopefully this video will help you ensure that LibreOffice documents you create or edit are as compatible with Microsoft Office as possible and also it will help ensure that you don't send broken stuff to your co-workers too often and today's sponsor will ensure that you have a Linux compatible desktop or laptop tuxedo is a German company that ships worldwide a wide range of devices that are pre-installed with Linux and the reason you might want that is because it ensures that your device is compatible with Linux compare that to buying any old Windows laptop or desktop and praying crossing your fingers and and hoping and researching to ensure that everything runs well with tuxedo you don't don't have to worry about that you just slap your distro and it runs because the components were picked to be compatible with Linux and they have devices for every price point and for every need with plenty of customization options for the SSD the ram the CPU the GPU you can get your own custom keyboard laser etched on the keys so if you want a specific layout you can get that you can get your own logo laser etched as well on the lid of your laptop it's just great so if you need a new device you want to support Linux development you want to make sure that what you buy runs Linux well click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo laptop or desktop so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did you know what to do just click like click subscribe click the Bell leave a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can also click dislike and tell me why down there in the comments and if you want to help support the channel there's a super thanks button down there on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description of the video and there are links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast on Monday where I talk about Linux Tech open source my personal life the channel my interest and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so both links are in the description and in the meantime thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and chances are if you use Linux as your desktop you probably like the ideas of free and open source software openness exchanging of ideas user contributions and all of that stuff and if you're not currently using Linux chances are that there's a specific proprietary app that you depend on which isn't available so today I'd like to talk about proprietary software on Linux should we push for more proprietary commercial apps to bring in more users or should we try and keep the system pure free and open source let's discuss right after I tell you everything about today's sponsor which is definitely in the open source camp this video is sponsored by tax care and Alma Linux Alma Linux is an open source Enterprise Linux distribution which is completely binary compatible with red hat Enterprise Linux and Centos pre-sento S3 it's owned and governed by the community and it's supported financially by Cloud Linux and other sponsors while you can use Alma Linux for free on your servers or desktops tax care offers a range of services around it to ensure that you get live patching without any reboots or downtime as well as 24 7 365 support so you can manage your Fleet without any stress so click the link in the description below to learn more about Alma Linux and Tuck scares Support options so let's begin with a quick tour of the state of proprietary software on Linux modern Linux desktops can use proprietary software NVIDIA drivers are the prime example for now there are no valuable full-featured open source drivers for NVIDIA gpus this might change in the future but for now if your team green you're using proprietary drivers depending on your Hardware you might also use more proprietary blobs that enable your Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to work these things are crucial to ensure that certain components run well to the point where even Debian a distro that historically has always refused to include any proprietary stuff on their ISO installer even they have decided to allow these proprietary firmware bits to be included by default so the experience is better out of the box for everyone and that's just what needed for Hardware support chances are you're also using proprietary applications and websites like yeah most websites are proprietary if you're a chrome user you're using proprietary software Chrome is built on an open foundation chromium but they do add some non-open code like codecs for certain file playback Vivaldi isn't open source either neither is Microsoft Edge or Opera if you're a gamer chances are you're also using proprietary platforms like steam the epic game store Ubisoft connect origin and most if not all of the games available there are proprietary you know bootloader is probably not open and Source if you use RAR to unzip raw files if you use Spotify Mega or Dropbox bit wig Maya DaVinci Resolve and a ton of others you're using proprietary software on Linux so yeah Linux might be free software and so are our desktop environments and most of our applications but chances are you're not running a completely free and open source system unless you're Richard stallman but this guy also eats stuff off of his food so okay now I even regret talking about it there's a link in the description you should not watch it but if you don't believe me check it out now personally I use DaVinci Resolve to edit videos with NVIDIA drivers I came through Steam and other platforms and I play proprietary games and I'm okay with that it makes my computer work as I want to and I can do what I want to with it it doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer using exclusively free and open source software but for my needs it's just not doable and the real question is since the most used applications in the world are mostly proprietary should we try and push to get them all on Linux or should we not want them and encourage their free and open source software Alternatives so let's begin with the reasons you might want more commercial proprietary applications and these probably all boil down to I need these apps to use Linux as a daily driver the applications people generally clamor for on a Microsoft Office the Adobe suite CAD software like AutoCAD a lot of games although proton has kind of solved that problem at least for the most part streaming software OCR software voice synthesizers plenty of VFX related software this type of stuff generally things that you would need to use Linux professionally in certain fields we have tons of alternatives for most if not all of these applications and they're probably more than good enough for the Enthusiast the one that's learning or someone who wants to use them for fun but for a professional whose livelihood depends on the software and the tool they picked with years and years of older files and projects that does not do the trick the lazy basters what's the complete change of Hardware or muscle memory and habit and retraining of employees they're not even trying now this is the main reason it's a make or break thing for a lot of Professionals for them personally to be able to move to Linux and by extension it's also a problem for people who would like Linux to have more users even if you don't need these apps yourself you might want Linux to have access to them just so that more people would hop onto the Linux train we could also say that using proprietary apps could lure users to Linux well they would realize the advantage of using free and open source software and get them to use this type of application slowly over time replacing their proprietary apps with fast applications I personally don't subscribe to that last idea because I think that if your favorite application is available you're not going to try and relearn something else just because you could like the real barriers to switching workflows are still there even if you moved from Windows to Linux but what I agree on and I'm basically agreeing with myself there which is probably pretty sane what I agree on is that Linux does benefit from having more users getting more users is the only way we will all get a better experience all around not only because having more users means potentially finally getting these AAA commercial apps like Microsoft Office or the Adobe suite but also because the more users you have the more chance you have of them becoming contributors whether they'll contribute code or ideas or designs or marketing or just tell people around them about the stuff they like on Linux and the fast apps they use it's always great to have more people involved in open source open source is a game of scale the more contributions you have the more chances you have of making each project better or Fork a project that's dying or just create something that is still missing on Linux and more users means more feedback more potential contributions more potential funding and that's always good of course whether we need commercial proprietary apps to draw more users to Linux is the question I don't have the answer to especially since if we get more users through these proprietary apps I'm not sure that these new users would actually be interested in contributing to alternatives to the software they actually use maybe we should have more Hardware available in stores to get more people maybe that won't work if we don't have the major apps people are used to what I'm certain of is that we need more users if we want to progress faster and be a more appealing Target for developers and stores to push Linux forward the steam deck is the perfect example since it launched a ton of developers have optimized their games to run better on Linux or to run better with proton they've enabled anti-cheat support basically having a Linux gaming platform made Linux gaming better now let's look at the reasons to keep Linux desktops as free and open source as possible first we have amazing applications that are free of charge and free software krita is a wonderful drawing and digital painting app pretty much the standard these days blender is an awesome 3D modeling tool and can also do video editing as much as people like to mock it is an excellent alternative to photoshop for people who are okay with learning a new way of doing things or who have never used Photoshop and don't want to pay LibreOffice is a full featured alternative to Microsoft Office that most regular users could switch to without losing anything in the process these are only a few examples but there are plenty more and we could argue that if we want these applications to thrive and to get more development and funding then we need to have only these Alternatives available and not their proprietary counterparts some kind of throw the baby in the pool to see if it can learn to swim sort of thing what this boils down to is people don't like to change their habits and if we want the false ecosystem to develop and grow and improve we need to make sure that people who move to Linux use these applications and not the ones they're already familiar with because that would mean a big reason for contributing or using these fast apps would disappear and I can get behind this reason if DaVinci Resolve was not on Linux I would probably still be using Caden live and since I would never have used DaVinci resolver wouldn't know what I was missing and I would just notice the stuff that it could do better and have encouraged the devs to fix that there's also the philosophical aspects If You Love free and open source software you want these ideas to spread Linux as a desktop might be a nice Enclave your escape from a world controlled by huge companies having their offerings on Linux might end up tainting this enclave and making it worse by encouraging the commercial practices of these companies and erasing the mentality that many Linux users like some push that reasoning to the EXT stream and think that if we bring commercial proprietary apps to Linux then Linux itself will become commercial and proprietary and the fast Alternatives will disappear I don't agree with that I think a lot of contributors to free and open source alternatives to Big proprietary apps do so because they specifically want a fast alternative to these apps and so they would keep developing them even though the proprietary app would be available on Linux wherever you stand on this we always go back to the chicken and egg problem with Underdog systems and alternative systems if you don't have users you don't have applications from Big developers and your Alternatives also don't get better fast enough if you don't have these applications or these really high quality Alternatives that have all the same features as the competitors in the same time frame then you don't have more users this isn't always true as proven by certain Services lately like Mastodon it was really small but a lot of people gave it a shot despite the already huge alternative Twitter still existing for now but for Linux it's definitely a thing our small market share on the desktop means that stores don't sell Hardware with Linux on it developers rarely make Linux versions of their apps and so we don't get that many more users and the cycle repeats and again I'm not saying that Linux cannot grow without commercial proprietary applications but it's probably more difficult and also I don't think Linux needs to beat Windows or Mac OS in terms of market share some people think Linux should remain as small as possible to stay pure Niche and to keep the spirit of having to work to get your perfect system I don't think this is the right mentality but I also don't think that Linux needs to be the number one OS on the desktop in terms of market share honestly what I'd like it to be is that around the same market share as Mac OS enough to be a viable alternative for developers to be interested in for games to be ported for Linux Hardware to be sold in stores that would be enough and it will also be enough for AAA commercial proprietary apps to be ported to Linux as well which means that Linux would be viable for a lot of professionals which it isn't really right now so either you think proprietary apps are necessary to have more market share more users and for everyone to be able to use Linux as a desktop or you think proprietary apps will taint Linux and damage our existing fast applications you might think Linux needs more users or that it doesn't and in both cases you might be right I don't know personally I'm in the camp of use whatever works which means I have a reference for fast applications and fast systems but if there's no alternative that works for me then I will definitely use the proprietary app that lets me do what I want to do if you're not in the same camp that's perfectly okay too that's the beauty of the Linux desktop whether it gets proprietary apps or not it will still be a viable option for us who already use it because with Foss if anything starts threatening the ideals of a project it quickly gets for it and so everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too and everyone can have a nice Linux device thanks to today's sponsor tuxedo is a German company that ships Linux desktops and laptops worldwide while you would want to use that instead of a generic device made to run Windows well it's because it removes all the guesswork you know when you buy from tuxedo that everything will run you can pick from a selection of popular distros at install or you can just slap your own and you know that the hardware has been selected because it's supports Linux and if there are a few tweaks needed here and there they have repos and packages to allow everything to run perfectly they have a nice big choice of devices for every price point and every need and all devices are very customizable with various CPUs gpus ssds your logo on the lid your own custom keyboard layout engraved laser etched on the keys their devices are really good so if you need a new laptop or a new desktop and you want to support Linux development and you want to make sure that Linux runs well on it check out the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo device they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video If you enjoyed it don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well click the dislike button and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel there are plenty of links down there to follow me on Twitter Mastodon pixel fed peertube Instagram whatever you like and you can also support the Channel with the super thanks button with the paper following in the description or the link to my patreon page and YouTube members page both of them get access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux Tech open source the channel my personal life everything and you also get to vote on the next topic that I'll cover for the next month so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and chances are if you use Linux as your desktop you probably like the ideas of free and open source software openness exchanging of ideas user contributions and all of that stuff and if you're not currently using Linux chances are that there's a specific proprietary app that you depend on which isn't available so today I'd like to talk about proprietary software on Linux should we push for more proprietary commercial apps to bring in more users or should we try and keep the system pure free and open source let's discuss right after I tell you everything about today's sponsor which is definitely in the open source camp this video is sponsored by tax care and Alma Linux Alma Linux is an open source Enterprise Linux distribution which is completely binary compatible with red hat Enterprise Linux and Centos pre-sento S3 it's owned and governed by the community and it's supported financially by Cloud Linux and other sponsors while you can use Alma Linux for free on your servers or desktops tax care offers a range of services around it to ensure that you get live patching without any reboots or downtime as well as 24 7 365 support so you can manage your Fleet without any stress so click the link in the description below to learn more about Alma Linux and Tuck scares Support options so let's begin with a quick tour of the state of proprietary software on Linux modern Linux desktops can use proprietary software NVIDIA drivers are the prime example for now there are no valuable full-featured open source drivers for NVIDIA gpus this might change in the future but for now if your team green you're using proprietary drivers depending on your Hardware you might also use more proprietary blobs that enable your Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to work these things are crucial to ensure that certain components run well to the point where even Debian a distro that historically has always refused to include any proprietary stuff on their ISO installer even they have decided to allow these proprietary firmware bits to be included by default so the experience is better out of the box for everyone and that's just what needed for Hardware support chances are you're also using proprietary applications and websites like yeah most websites are proprietary if you're a chrome user you're using proprietary software Chrome is built on an open foundation chromium but they do add some non-open code like codecs for certain file playback Vivaldi isn't open source either neither is Microsoft Edge or Opera if you're a gamer chances are you're also using proprietary platforms like steam the epic game store Ubisoft connect origin and most if not all of the games available there are proprietary you know bootloader is probably not open and Source if you use RAR to unzip raw files if you use Spotify Mega or Dropbox bit wig Maya DaVinci Resolve and a ton of others you're using proprietary software on Linux so yeah Linux might be free software and so are our desktop environments and most of our applications but chances are you're not running a completely free and open source system unless you're Richard stallman but this guy also eats stuff off of his food so okay now I even regret talking about it there's a link in the description you should not watch it but if you don't believe me check it out now personally I use DaVinci Resolve to edit videos with NVIDIA drivers I came through Steam and other platforms and I play proprietary games and I'm okay with that it makes my computer work as I want to and I can do what I want to with it it doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer using exclusively free and open source software but for my needs it's just not doable and the real question is since the most used applications in the world are mostly proprietary should we try and push to get them all on Linux or should we not want them and encourage their free and open source software Alternatives so let's begin with the reasons you might want more commercial proprietary applications and these probably all boil down to I need these apps to use Linux as a daily driver the applications people generally clamor for on a Microsoft Office the Adobe suite CAD software like AutoCAD a lot of games although proton has kind of solved that problem at least for the most part streaming software OCR software voice synthesizers plenty of VFX related software this type of stuff generally things that you would need to use Linux professionally in certain fields we have tons of alternatives for most if not all of these applications and they're probably more than good enough for the Enthusiast the one that's learning or someone who wants to use them for fun but for a professional whose livelihood depends on the software and the tool they picked with years and years of older files and projects that does not do the trick the lazy basters what's the complete change of Hardware or muscle memory and habit and retraining of employees they're not even trying now this is the main reason it's a make or break thing for a lot of Professionals for them personally to be able to move to Linux and by extension it's also a problem for people who would like Linux to have more users even if you don't need these apps yourself you might want Linux to have access to them just so that more people would hop onto the Linux train we could also say that using proprietary apps could lure users to Linux well they would realize the advantage of using free and open source software and get them to use this type of application slowly over time replacing their proprietary apps with fast applications I personally don't subscribe to that last idea because I think that if your favorite application is available you're not going to try and relearn something else just because you could like the real barriers to switching workflows are still there even if you moved from Windows to Linux but what I agree on and I'm basically agreeing with myself there which is probably pretty sane what I agree on is that Linux does benefit from having more users getting more users is the only way we will all get a better experience all around not only because having more users means potentially finally getting these AAA commercial apps like Microsoft Office or the Adobe suite but also because the more users you have the more chance you have of them becoming contributors whether they'll contribute code or ideas or designs or marketing or just tell people around them about the stuff they like on Linux and the fast apps they use it's always great to have more people involved in open source open source is a game of scale the more contributions you have the more chances you have of making each project better or Fork a project that's dying or just create something that is still missing on Linux and more users means more feedback more potential contributions more potential funding and that's always good of course whether we need commercial proprietary apps to draw more users to Linux is the question I don't have the answer to especially since if we get more users through these proprietary apps I'm not sure that these new users would actually be interested in contributing to alternatives to the software they actually use maybe we should have more Hardware available in stores to get more people maybe that won't work if we don't have the major apps people are used to what I'm certain of is that we need more users if we want to progress faster and be a more appealing Target for developers and stores to push Linux forward the steam deck is the perfect example since it launched a ton of developers have optimized their games to run better on Linux or to run better with proton they've enabled anti-cheat support basically having a Linux gaming platform made Linux gaming better now let's look at the reasons to keep Linux desktops as free and open source as possible first we have amazing applications that are free of charge and free software krita is a wonderful drawing and digital painting app pretty much the standard these days blender is an awesome 3D modeling tool and can also do video editing as much as people like to mock it is an excellent alternative to photoshop for people who are okay with learning a new way of doing things or who have never used Photoshop and don't want to pay LibreOffice is a full featured alternative to Microsoft Office that most regular users could switch to without losing anything in the process these are only a few examples but there are plenty more and we could argue that if we want these applications to thrive and to get more development and funding then we need to have only these Alternatives available and not their proprietary counterparts some kind of throw the baby in the pool to see if it can learn to swim sort of thing what this boils down to is people don't like to change their habits and if we want the false ecosystem to develop and grow and improve we need to make sure that people who move to Linux use these applications and not the ones they're already familiar with because that would mean a big reason for contributing or using these fast apps would disappear and I can get behind this reason if DaVinci Resolve was not on Linux I would probably still be using Caden live and since I would never have used DaVinci resolver wouldn't know what I was missing and I would just notice the stuff that it could do better and have encouraged the devs to fix that there's also the philosophical aspects If You Love free and open source software you want these ideas to spread Linux as a desktop might be a nice Enclave your escape from a world controlled by huge companies having their offerings on Linux might end up tainting this enclave and making it worse by encouraging the commercial practices of these companies and erasing the mentality that many Linux users like some push that reasoning to the EXT stream and think that if we bring commercial proprietary apps to Linux then Linux itself will become commercial and proprietary and the fast Alternatives will disappear I don't agree with that I think a lot of contributors to free and open source alternatives to Big proprietary apps do so because they specifically want a fast alternative to these apps and so they would keep developing them even though the proprietary app would be available on Linux wherever you stand on this we always go back to the chicken and egg problem with Underdog systems and alternative systems if you don't have users you don't have applications from Big developers and your Alternatives also don't get better fast enough if you don't have these applications or these really high quality Alternatives that have all the same features as the competitors in the same time frame then you don't have more users this isn't always true as proven by certain Services lately like Mastodon it was really small but a lot of people gave it a shot despite the already huge alternative Twitter still existing for now but for Linux it's definitely a thing our small market share on the desktop means that stores don't sell Hardware with Linux on it developers rarely make Linux versions of their apps and so we don't get that many more users and the cycle repeats and again I'm not saying that Linux cannot grow without commercial proprietary applications but it's probably more difficult and also I don't think Linux needs to beat Windows or Mac OS in terms of market share some people think Linux should remain as small as possible to stay pure Niche and to keep the spirit of having to work to get your perfect system I don't think this is the right mentality but I also don't think that Linux needs to be the number one OS on the desktop in terms of market share honestly what I'd like it to be is that around the same market share as Mac OS enough to be a viable alternative for developers to be interested in for games to be ported for Linux Hardware to be sold in stores that would be enough and it will also be enough for AAA commercial proprietary apps to be ported to Linux as well which means that Linux would be viable for a lot of professionals which it isn't really right now so either you think proprietary apps are necessary to have more market share more users and for everyone to be able to use Linux as a desktop or you think proprietary apps will taint Linux and damage our existing fast applications you might think Linux needs more users or that it doesn't and in both cases you might be right I don't know personally I'm in the camp of use whatever works which means I have a reference for fast applications and fast systems but if there's no alternative that works for me then I will definitely use the proprietary app that lets me do what I want to do if you're not in the same camp that's perfectly okay too that's the beauty of the Linux desktop whether it gets proprietary apps or not it will still be a viable option for us who already use it because with Foss if anything starts threatening the ideals of a project it quickly gets for it and so everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too and everyone can have a nice Linux device thanks to today's sponsor tuxedo is a German company that ships Linux desktops and laptops worldwide while you would want to use that instead of a generic device made to run Windows well it's because it removes all the guesswork you know when you buy from tuxedo that everything will run you can pick from a selection of popular distros at install or you can just slap your own and you know that the hardware has been selected because it's supports Linux and if there are a few tweaks needed here and there they have repos and packages to allow everything to run perfectly they have a nice big choice of devices for every price point and every need and all devices are very customizable with various CPUs gpus ssds your logo on the lid your own custom keyboard layout engraved laser etched on the keys their devices are really good so if you need a new laptop or a new desktop and you want to support Linux development and you want to make sure that Linux runs well on it check out the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo device they are really really good so thanks everyone for watching the video If you enjoyed it don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like it well click the dislike button and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel there are plenty of links down there to follow me on Twitter Mastodon pixel fed peertube Instagram whatever you like and you can also support the Channel with the super thanks button with the paper following in the description or the link to my patreon page and YouTube members page both of them get access to a weekly podcast where I talk about Linux Tech open source the channel my personal life everything and you also get to vote on the next topic that I'll cover for the next month so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and today we're taking a look at Chrome OS Flex the install it anywhere you want OS for people who want a full Google Experience so it's based on Linux it has quite a nice user interface and it has evolved past its its only web apps Roots so I installed it on a spare laptop but while on the surface it might look like a good option when you start digging you'll notice that there's basically no reason at all to go with Chrome OS Flex instead of any Linux distribution so let's take a look at this thing and see why it's basically mediocre unlike today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft Arc CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started okay let's go over the install process quickly to install Chrome OS Flex you will first need to give Google a bunch of personal information before you can access the help pages that tell you how to do it to install it you need to use anything based on chromium install Chromebook recovery extension launch it select Chrome OS Flex as the manufacturer and the device model and this will let you create a USB drive to install from instead of providing an ISO and a small utility you could use from anywhere not a web browser they decided to make it way more difficult than it needed to be and also it only works from Mac OS and windows if you're using Linux they will tell you to download the script to make it executable to run it using the command line and then pass through a list of more than 400 models to find Chrome OS flex and enter its model number which isn't even on the list but if you look online you'll find link to a DOT bin disk image that you can Flash using any USB drive creation tool so they made the USB flashing process even harder than it actually needs to be good job now apart from that the install process was super simple I just slapped it on my slim Book Pro x14 everything worked out of the box except some function keys that didn't do the thing that the label said they would do but that's about it okay now let's take a look at the user interface for Chrome OS because Chrome OS Flex uses the same desktop environment let's call it as the regular Chrome OS so let's see if it's actually any good the interface is extremely simple you have a basic Bottom bar with a main menu and a search field at the far left app icons that also serve as a taskbar in the middle and a calendar and system menu on the right if you have something playing in an app you also get a media indicator next to the calendar to let you control playback Now by default everything was way too big this laptop I'm running Chrome OS on has a 1920 by 1080 display and for some reason the 100 scaling setting makes everything huge you can change that but I had to put it to 80 for it to actually look like the native resolution now you cannot change anything apart from the wallpaper and the position of that taskbar bottom left or right there is no top option and you also have access to a dark mode the rest of the interface is super easy to use you press the super key to open the menu you type to search or you just click on the icon you want you can click an apps icon to minimize it to the taskbar you can reorder icons on that bar you can add them through drag and drop or remove them by dragging them out and you have the ability to tile Windows just by dragging them to a screen Edge including maximizing a window by dragging it to the top although for some reason there's a delay there before it actually does it now still already window management is better than Mac OS you have touchpad gestures with a three finger swipe up to display an overview of all your windows and virtual desktops and four finger swipes left or right to switch between desktops now while this last one is a one-to-one gesture where stuff moves with your fingers the overview gesture isn't and doesn't feel responsive as a result stuff only moves when you finish the gesture not as you perform it the windows use the Windows button layout on the right hand side with minimize maximize and close plus a menu to interact with the window itself you can run any web app from the Chrome web store which has a lot of stuff you can add any website as a shortcut that will appear in the main menu and be usable as an app or you can enable the Linux development environment from the settings it gives you a Debian container with access to basic repos but you can install flat pack at flat Hub and run anything you'd like although since it's a container some stuff won't work like OBS for example you'll also have to use the command line at least to get a graphical app store installed but it's not that tricky to get access to stuff even though there is a performance penalty that you will definitely feel in most applications all in all the desktop is really nice you've got subtle understated animations views of frosted glass blur it's quite pretty but then the issues start to appear first the killer feature for Chrome OS is that it has its own Android container that runs any Android app really well with great performance and it means that Chromebooks can have a large catalog of apps that aren't widely available on Linux distros even Windows can't match that well you can get some Android apps running on Windows 11 they're from the Amazon app store which is very limited Chrome OS has access to virtually the whole Google Play Store which is a lot better and Linux well don't tell me that Linux has way Droid because first it's super convoluted to install and use and second it has access to individual apks no store to install anything it's just not a solution but anyways the point is moved because Chrome OS Flex cannot do that it doesn't have access to Android apps which is a big bummer now you obviously won't get firmware updates directly from Chrome OS Flex it also doesn't support running Windows VMS with Parallels Desktop something that Chrome OS can do natively on Chromebooks and the Linux development environment isn't available to all devices now finally some ports might not work including Thunderbolt which will be treated as USB 3 fingerprint readers CD and DVD drives or even styluses won't work now whether Google will add support for any of this to Chrome OS Flags I do not know probably Google doesn't even know either maybe they will kill off Chrome OS Flex before they even think of adding that support I mean it's been out for a few months now so it must start to feel the icy grip of death then we have more factual ux based problems like the window inconsistencies Chrome OS users web apps and passes them for desktop applications now honestly everything is fast and responsive and I don't really have an issue with that the problem is not all apps are treated in the same way opening YouTube or the file manager brings a window that looks like an application a short title bar and standard controls but if I open Google drive then I get a browser window with a URL bar tabs and a different title bar then if I open Google Sheets I don't get a separate application window it opens in a tab inside of the Google Drive window so I don't get an app icon in the taskbar for Google Sheets but if I already had a Google Sheets icon in the taskbar then it shows as if there's a Google sheet window open and clicking it focuses the tab inside of the Google Drive window or even minimizes the whole window with all its tabs it's completely illegible you never know what to expect when you run a new application will it open in a window or in the browser Tab and in that case in which other browser window will it appear is it minimized is it visible it's just a mess and you will also get multiple indicators in the taskbar for a single window for example if I have one window with a Google Drive Tab and a Google Sheets tab I have three indicators one for Chrome one for Google Drive one for Google Sheets clicking on any of these focuses the same window but with a different Tab and sometimes will minimize the whole browser window with all its apps so I have three indicators but I only have two apps running and only one window it's a nightmare then you have that atrocious visual aid when resizing a window as your mouse pointer gets towards the windows side you get this black bar that appears around that side but the mouse pointer already changes into a resizing cursor so it serves no purpose apart from being distracting when you move your mouse around or as you're aiming for the title bar to move the window oh yeah that's another problem moving Windows around sucks see the theme is either completely white or dark the title bar merges with the header or the toolbar except you can only drag a window from its title bar and you don't know exactly where it starts or ends because the title bar doesn't show window title just buttons and you cannot press super or alt while dragging anywhere on the window to move it either which means you're constantly trying to aim for a 20 pixel or so Zone to move anything and then there's the settings oh my the settings they're all displayed in a single page with a sidebar clicking the sidebar moves you to the relevance section of that single settings page moves you not Scrolls you so you don't immediately realize that it's a single page it's a small nitpick but yeah it's bad except that if you scroll yourself the sidebar selected item doesn't change so the sidebar is now telling me I'm in the accessibility settings when I'm looking at the network settings pretty bad design none of the settings apart from the network have icons so navigating them is hard since you have no visual aid you just have rho upon row of settings with header category titles that don't pop because they have no icon no bold text nothing some things are hidden behind an advanced category which unfolds now what's behind there doesn't make much sense like how is the date and time or language and inputs or even printing an advanced setting and if you close down that advanced header while you're still inside these advanced settings and they're still visible in the main settings page when you scroll it's only closed in the sidebar it is illegible as well and unless you're willing to use the search feature you will never find anything in here and the sidebar is completely disconnected from the main content that it serves to navigate to which is also a very very bad ux and then you've got the overview it lists all your open windows it's pretty useful oh but wait Chrome OS doesn't know what is a window or not so no I don't see all my windows I see all individual apps and then a chrome window with multiple tabs that should be separate apps so right now I can't directly go back to my Google Sheets document because it's lumped in the Chrome window with another tab that is currently selected apps are also laid out using all the same size by rows which means the space is poorly utilized and window thumbnails are smaller than they need to and thus harder to identify at a glance especially since everything is all white or all dark so telling stuff apart is not easy and then there are some smaller nitpicks the calendar pop-up has a back arrow to go back except go back where you open that pop-up by clicking on it does it close the calendar no it takes you to the system menu which is located to the right of the calendar so you're clicking your left pointing Arrow to move to the next element on the right that's stupid the search in the main menu is also weird typing settings for example doesn't prioritize the settings app but some kind of Google search for the term settings the shortcuts list display stuff using a key named search that doesn't exist on non-chromebook devices and the list goes on okay so who is the target for Chrome OS Flex exactly because I can't see any as a general OS it's broken the way it handles apps and browser tabs makes no sense and isn't predictable which means the most basic of interactions which is switching between applications is made difficult all Linux desktops handle that much better Windows or Mac OS also do anything else is a better choice in terms of ergonomics and ux now for companies using Chrome OS Flex is super limiting no company can run on web apps exclusively at least none I worked at previously you're not going to configure a Linux developer environment for each device and install Linux apps to compensate and run them with bad performance because in that case it would have been way easier to just deploy any Linux distro on your Fleet of computers and for regular users Chrome OS Flex would only make sense if you have a device that is not a Chromebook and so either runs Windows or Mac OS if you don't want to use these or if the latest versions are unsupported you might consider using Chrome OS Flex except here as well a Linux distro will be easier to install have more features better Hardware support more applications out of the box and a better desktop for any general user there is no reason to go Chrome OS Flex instead of any Linux distribution because all Linux distributions can install Chrome and run web apps like Chrome OS even better because they will be in their separate own windows with the same level of integration in the system menu but with more desktop applications on the site better Hardware support more customization and a generally better user experience I really do not see any use case where Chrome OS Flex would make any sense whether you're a company an individual you're in education you already own a Chromebook for all of these choices Chrome OS Flex is a worse option than any Linux distro or even Windows or Mac OS the OS is not great in terms of ux it has pretty bad app support it will run Linux apps but with worse performance than a Linux distro and you don't even get the Android app support that Chrome OS usually has so there is basically no reason to run that thing at all so what do you think have you tried Chrome OS Flex have you tried Chrome OS on a Chromebook what do you think of this OS let me know down in the comments and in the meantime I let you know about today's sponsor tuxedo tuxedo is based in Germany and they're making Linux desktops and laptops they ship with Linux out of the box and they ship worldwide and why you would want that is simply because it completely removes all the guesswork and elbow grease to try and make a laptop that's made to run Windows to run Linux with tuxedo you know that the device will run Linux perfectly and contributes to help linux's development and Linux Hardware support they have a big range of devices from Ultrabooks nux gaming laptops workstations gaming Towers anything that you might want and all devices are very customizable with CPU options GPU options ssds you can have your own logo on the lid you can change the keyboard layout or even have your own keyboard layout engraved laser etched on the keyboard of your laptop so if you need a new device and you want it to run Linux and you want to support Linux development click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo they are really good now thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to help me make more of this stuff there's a super thanks button underneath the video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast on Mondays where I talk about Linux open source tag my personal life the channel alternative platforms anything goes really and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so if you're interested both links are in the description box in the meantime thank you for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and since you gravitate in the Linux and free and open source software circles you probably already heard about the terms sveniverse or Mastodon pixel fed or peer tube and whatever your opinions are on this whole Twitter acquisition thing it makes it clear that it is vital to have social networks that are not owned by a single company or a single individual and that's exactly what the fediverse is but what is it exactly and how does its major components like Mastodon pixel fed or peer tube work exactly well that's what we're going to discuss today but first we're going to discuss today's sponsor thanks to tax care for sponsoring this video if you've ever worked on a project using python you know how frustrating it is to discover that the version you're using is going end of life and you're gonna have to speed through and hurry up to refactor and rewrite a bunch of code well text gear can now help you plan that transition thanks to their python an extended life cycle support with that new service you can keep your existing code base and still receive security updates and patches to python even if that version is no longer officially supported this means that if your code base is still working for you you can still have it meet your security requirements and you can plan the transition to the new version of python with a bit more peace of mind so you can learn more about tax cares python extended lifecycle support by clicking on the link in the description below okay let's start with a simple explanation of what the fedivers actually is fediverse is a contraction of Federated Universe it's basically a giant network of servers that form a social network but contrary to the ones you might be used to like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and others the fediverse is composed of different services from microblogging to image sharing video platforms and more so you can think of it as a mega social network that regroups multiple platforms as a Facebook Twitter Instagram and all others had fused into an interoperable blob a thought that is extremely scary and creepy if you think about one company controlling all these social networks but something that is actually really cool when it's all free and open source and decentralized so the fediverse is made of many different Services the more well-known are Mastodon a Twitter like microblog service peer tube a youtube-like platform or pixel fed an instagram-like social network but there are a ton of others like diaspora which is more like Facebook or even WordPress for building websites Casto pod for hosting podcasts or Bookworm for talking about books and a lot more each service is also decentralized which means that there is not one big server form where everything is hosted each service is split into instances basically independent servers with different goals on Mastodon for example you have instances that are General like Twitter would be or instances that are specialized around a specific topic hobby or community when you create an account on Mastodon you don't create a general Mastodon account like you would create a Twitter account you make an account on a specific instance Each of which have their own rules for moderation and who can get in or not the same is true when you create a pixel fed account or a peer tube account you make an account on one specific instance but what a lot of people don't understand at first and what's really awesome is that this account on one specific instance doesn't mean that you can only talk to people from that instance if your instance is Federated to the whole Mastodon Network for example then your account on that instance lets you interact with follow and talk to anyone else that is also Federated to the whole network for example my account on Mastodon is on the mastodon.social instance but I can talk to the Thunderbird team whose account is on the mastodon.online instance those are two different servers but we can talk talk to each other as if we were on the same one it's all transparent and you don't need to do anything specific for it to work you just search for the account you want to follow and you follow it now in reality it's a bit more granular than that certain servers can decide to block other servers so guys from these blocked servers can't interact with you and you can't interact with them but in general most instances are Federated to the whole network and so with one account on one server you can talk to anybody else that is on another server but where it gets even more awesome is that all the different services like Mastodon pixel fed or puretube can talk to each other thanks to the activity Pub standard activity Pub Is An Open standard endorsed by the w3c which is the organization that works on web standards what it does is let all services on the fedivers talk to each other now how does that work well in practice it means you can use your Mastodon app to follow a peer tube channel or someone that posts pictures on Pixel fed or see new articles from a WordPress website it's very basic every time my account posts a picture on Pixel fat for example it creates an activity that is then sent to everyone that follows my account wherever they follow it it can be on the pixel fed mobile app or website or on a mastodon app anywhere where they support the activity Pub format that's also why on the Mastodon app if you look for Thunderbird for example you will see multiple accounts one is their Mastodon account the other is their peer tube account and the third is the channel they created on that peer tube account and this goes a bit further for example if I comment on Mastodon on a post from peer tube that comment will also appear on peer tube underneath the video all services are interoperable like that the tldr or tldw for too long didn't watch is that you can basically follow anyone from any fediver service with your account and your app from any other service you can basically just create one Mastodon account and start following people that post pictures on Pixel fed people that post videos on peertube and people that write posts on Mastodon One account and you get access to everything you don't need to juggle three or four different apps go in and out of them you can just follow everyone in just one place so now let's see how the biggest Services work and we'll start with mastodon Mastodon is basically Twitter but open source and decentralized it lets you post messages with up to 500 characters it supports images videos polls content warnings animated Avatar pictures emojis links mentions hashtags anything you're used to on Twitter Mastodon has 1.5 million active users probably more since this video has been published which might seem small compared to Twitter but it's more than enough to have interesting conversations with a lot of people to join Mastodon all you need to do is pick a server also called an instance the main one is mastodon.social but there are a ton of others some are generalist servers where people talk about anything some are focused on tech gaming journalism art or music you can pick any server you like and it will let you interact with everyone else on any other server as long as the server you picked is Federated so connected to the whole Mastodon network but most servers are some servers will let you join outright and some will need you to apply for an account a process that is in place to ensure people joining aren't here to troll or harass others and each server has its own moderation rules some are super super open to anything and some moderate more heavily so once you picked a server just create your account or wait for your application for an account to be accepted and then to access it all you have to do is type the name of your instance in your browser's url bar for me for example it's mastodon.social but for you it might be different or you can also use their mobile apps on IOS and Android they have an official Mastodon app which is the one I use but there are also a ton of alternative clients if you prefer now let's talk about peer tube it's a YouTube alternative although it's much much smaller it's developed by framasoft which is a French organization that has tons of cool free software and online services and works to promote files pear tube is also decentralized being split into different servers that are Federated together so you can follow people from different instances and still have a complete subscription feed of course it's free software and it also works on a peer-to-peer protocol when people watch the same videos as you they also help the server deliver that same content to you by sending a few bits of the video to you as well so the load on the main server isn't too high in practice it works just like YouTube does you can watch content without an account or with one and if you have an account you can subscribe to various channels and have a subscription feed and notifications if you want to follow me I'm on the tailvids instance the link is in the description as well and as a Creator it also lets you sync your YouTube channel to peer tube so you can Auto publish all your videos to peer tube in a few clicks which is also a great help to watch beer tube just type the address of your instance in your browser's bar for me it's stillvids.com they don't have official mobile apps yet but you can always use the Mastodon app to subscribe to peer tube channels and use that as a subscription feed if you want obviously you will not get ads before during or after videos there but you will still get my sponsored segments because well it's basically a copy of the YouTube video on peer tube but if you like the idea of peer tube follow the link in the description below or just click another link that I left in the description below to find the instance that you want to get in another cool service on the fediverse is pixel fed it's basically Instagram without all the crap they tacked on lately like reels or lives it's just pictures and videos it's free software it also uses the activity Pub standard so you can follow pixel fed users on Mastodon for example and it's ad free it also lets you add filters just like Instagram or crop resize add alt text and you can use hashtags locations or create collections which are basically photo albums and just like Mastodon or peer tube pixel fed is split into instances that can talk to each other I use pixelfets.social my handle there is tle Nick you can find the link in the description but there are plenty of other instances you can join if you prefer pixel fed is pretty small as a social network because it's not super well known but there are still plenty of amazing and beautiful pictures to see from people that you might know or not know if you want to access it just like with any other Federated service you can just type the name of your instance in the URL bar for me it's pixelfed.social or you can use applications on your mobile phone there's pixel Droid on Android and the official pixel fed 1 on iOS which is still in beta so you will need to install test flight to get it both links are in the description below and that's only the tip of the iceberg there are tons of other services you can use these three are just the ones I use personally and since it's all free software if there is no server you trust with your data you can also host your own since it's all Federated just because you have your own instance doesn't mean you can't talk to anyone you can still follow people from any other instance or any other service and other people can still follow you from anywhere and most services on the fedivers feel really good to use sort of like what the internet and social networks were meant to be decentralized open modular talking to each other and not controlled by giant companies locked down and shoving ads and algorithms down your throats now of course there are not a complete replacement for traditional social networks because you will not find everyone you usually follow on these valuable services but I still think it's really worth worth it to give them a shot so as I said all my accounts on the fedivers are in the description below and if you want a more complete list of services that are part of that 30 verse I also left a link to a website that lists a ton of various services so have fun with all the things you can do find some cool people to follow or talk to and enjoy social networks as they were meant to be and you can also enjoy this segue to today's sponsor tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box and they ship worldwide now when you buy from tuxedo compared to buying from any regular Windows PC manufacturer you basically remove all the guesswork on whether things are going to work or not you can slap any Linux distro on it and it's gonna work out of the box and if there are a few configs or tweaks needed here and there they have ppas and repos that you can add to make sure that everything just works perfectly and their whole range is pretty big with devices for every price point and every need whether you want a workstation a small Ultra bug the cheapest laptop or computer you might want you have everything and you have options to configure them with ram CPU GPU SSD or even logos on the lid of your laptops or even engraving your own custom keyboard layout on the keyboard of your laptop for example so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and buy a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really really good now thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to ring the bell to write a comment anything else you might want to do and if you didn't like it well there's also a dislike button that you can click but please tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to help me make more of these videos well you can you can click the super thanks button underneath the video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description of the video or links to my patreon account and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast on Monday where I talk about Linux open source technology the channel or the platforms my personal life anything or you can also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover for the next month on the channel so if you're interested both links are in the description below in the meantime thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and today we're taking a look at Chrome OS Flex the install it anywhere you want OS for people who want a full Google Experience so it's based on Linux it has quite a nice user interface and it has evolved past its its only web apps Roots so I installed it on a spare laptop but while on the surface it might look like a good option when you start digging you'll notice that there's basically no reason at all to go with Chrome OS Flex instead of any Linux distribution so let's take a look at this thing and see why it's basically mediocre unlike today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace of of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft Arc CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started okay let's go over the install process quickly to install Chrome OS Flex you will first need to give Google a bunch of personal information before you can access the help pages that tell you how to do it to install it you need to use anything based on chromium install Chromebook recovery extension launch it select Chrome OS Flex as the manufacturer and the device model and this will let you create a USB drive to install from instead of providing an ISO and a small utility you could use from anywhere not a web browser they decided to make it way more difficult than it needed to be and also it only works from Mac OS and windows if you're using Linux they will tell you to download the script to make it executable to run it using the command line and then pass through a list of more than 400 models to find Chrome OS flex and enter its model number which isn't even on the list but if you look online you'll find link to a DOT bin disk image that you can Flash using any USB drive creation tool so they made the USB flashing process even harder than it actually needs to be good job now apart from that the install process was super simple I just slapped it on my slim Book Pro x14 everything worked out of the box except some function keys that didn't do the thing that the label said they would do but that's about it okay now let's take a look at the user interface for Chrome OS because Chrome OS Flex uses the same desktop environment let's call it as the regular Chrome OS so let's see if it's actually any good the interface is extremely simple you have a basic Bottom bar with a main menu and a search field at the far left app icons that also serve as a taskbar in the middle and a calendar and system menu on the right if you have something playing in an app you also get a media indicator next to the calendar to let you control playback Now by default everything was way too big this laptop I'm running Chrome OS on has a 1920 by 1080 display and for some reason the 100 scaling setting makes everything huge you can change that but I had to put it to 80 for it to actually look like the native resolution now you cannot change anything apart from the wallpaper and the position of that taskbar bottom left or right there is no top option and you also have access to a dark mode the rest of the interface is super easy to use you press the super key to open the menu you type to search or you just click on the icon you want you can click an apps icon to minimize it to the taskbar you can reorder icons on that bar you can add them through drag and drop or remove them by dragging them out and you have the ability to tile Windows just by dragging them to a screen Edge including maximizing a window by dragging it to the top although for some reason there's a delay there before it actually does it now still already window management is better than Mac OS you have touchpad gestures with a three finger swipe up to display an overview of all your windows and virtual desktops and four finger swipes left or right to switch between desktops now while this last one is a one-to-one gesture where stuff moves with your fingers the overview gesture isn't and doesn't feel responsive as a result stuff only moves when you finish the gesture not as you perform it the windows use the Windows button layout on the right hand side with minimize maximize and close plus a menu to interact with the window itself you can run any web app from the Chrome web store which has a lot of stuff you can add any website as a shortcut that will appear in the main menu and be usable as an app or you can enable the Linux development environment from the settings it gives you a Debian container with access to basic repos but you can install flat pack at flat Hub and run anything you'd like although since it's a container some stuff won't work like OBS for example you'll also have to use the command line at least to get a graphical app store installed but it's not that tricky to get access to stuff even though there is a performance penalty that you will definitely feel in most applications all in all the desktop is really nice you've got subtle understated animations views of frosted glass blur it's quite pretty but then the issues start to appear first the killer feature for Chrome OS is that it has its own Android container that runs any Android app really well with great performance and it means that Chromebooks can have a large catalog of apps that aren't widely available on Linux distros even Windows can't match that well you can get some Android apps running on Windows 11 they're from the Amazon app store which is very limited Chrome OS has access to virtually the whole Google Play Store which is a lot better and Linux well don't tell me that Linux has way Droid because first it's super convoluted to install and use and second it has access to individual apks no store to install anything it's just not a solution but anyways the point is moved because Chrome OS Flex cannot do that it doesn't have access to Android apps which is a big bummer now you obviously won't get firmware updates directly from Chrome OS Flex it also doesn't support running Windows VMS with Parallels Desktop something that Chrome OS can do natively on Chromebooks and the Linux development environment isn't available to all devices now finally some ports might not work including Thunderbolt which will be treated as USB 3 fingerprint readers CD and DVD drives or even styluses won't work now whether Google will add support for any of this to Chrome OS Flags I do not know probably Google doesn't even know either maybe they will kill off Chrome OS Flex before they even think of adding that support I mean it's been out for a few months now so it must start to feel the icy grip of death then we have more factual ux based problems like the window inconsistencies Chrome OS users web apps and passes them for desktop applications now honestly everything is fast and responsive and I don't really have an issue with that the problem is not all apps are treated in the same way opening YouTube or the file manager brings a window that looks like an application a short title bar and standard controls but if I open Google drive then I get a browser window with a URL bar tabs and a different title bar then if I open Google Sheets I don't get a separate application window it opens in a tab inside of the Google Drive window so I don't get an app icon in the taskbar for Google Sheets but if I already had a Google Sheets icon in the taskbar then it shows as if there's a Google sheet window open and clicking it focuses the tab inside of the Google Drive window or even minimizes the whole window with all its tabs it's completely illegible you never know what to expect when you run a new application will it open in a window or in the browser Tab and in that case in which other browser window will it appear is it minimized is it visible it's just a mess and you will also get multiple indicators in the taskbar for a single window for example if I have one window with a Google Drive Tab and a Google Sheets tab I have three indicators one for Chrome one for Google Drive one for Google Sheets clicking on any of these focuses the same window but with a different Tab and sometimes will minimize the whole browser window with all its apps so I have three indicators but I only have two apps running and only one window it's a nightmare then you have that atrocious visual aid when resizing a window as your mouse pointer gets towards the windows side you get this black bar that appears around that side but the mouse pointer already changes into a resizing cursor so it serves no purpose apart from being distracting when you move your mouse around or as you're aiming for the title bar to move the window oh yeah that's another problem moving Windows around sucks see the theme is either completely white or dark the title bar merges with the header or the toolbar except you can only drag a window from its title bar and you don't know exactly where it starts or ends because the title bar doesn't show window title just buttons and you cannot press super or alt while dragging anywhere on the window to move it either which means you're constantly trying to aim for a 20 pixel or so Zone to move anything and then there's the settings oh my the settings they're all displayed in a single page with a sidebar clicking the sidebar moves you to the relevance section of that single settings page moves you not Scrolls you so you don't immediately realize that it's a single page it's a small nitpick but yeah it's bad except that if you scroll yourself the sidebar selected item doesn't change so the sidebar is now telling me I'm in the accessibility settings when I'm looking at the network settings pretty bad design none of the settings apart from the network have icons so navigating them is hard since you have no visual aid you just have rho upon row of settings with header category titles that don't pop because they have no icon no bold text nothing some things are hidden behind an advanced category which unfolds now what's behind there doesn't make much sense like how is the date and time or language and inputs or even printing an advanced setting and if you close down that advanced header while you're still inside these advanced settings and they're still visible in the main settings page when you scroll it's only closed in the sidebar it is illegible as well and unless you're willing to use the search feature you will never find anything in here and the sidebar is completely disconnected from the main content that it serves to navigate to which is also a very very bad ux and then you've got the overview it lists all your open windows it's pretty useful oh but wait Chrome OS doesn't know what is a window or not so no I don't see all my windows I see all individual apps and then a chrome window with multiple tabs that should be separate apps so right now I can't directly go back to my Google Sheets document because it's lumped in the Chrome window with another tab that is currently selected apps are also laid out using all the same size by rows which means the space is poorly utilized and window thumbnails are smaller than they need to and thus harder to identify at a glance especially since everything is all white or all dark so telling stuff apart is not easy and then there are some smaller nitpicks the calendar pop-up has a back arrow to go back except go back where you open that pop-up by clicking on it does it close the calendar no it takes you to the system menu which is located to the right of the calendar so you're clicking your left pointing Arrow to move to the next element on the right that's stupid the search in the main menu is also weird typing settings for example doesn't prioritize the settings app but some kind of Google search for the term settings the shortcuts list display stuff using a key named search that doesn't exist on non-chromebook devices and the list goes on okay so who is the target for Chrome OS Flex exactly because I can't see any as a general OS it's broken the way it handles apps and browser tabs makes no sense and isn't predictable which means the most basic of interactions which is switching between applications is made difficult all Linux desktops handle that much better Windows or Mac OS also do anything else is a better choice in terms of ergonomics and ux now for companies using Chrome OS Flex is super limiting no company can run on web apps exclusively at least none I worked at previously you're not going to configure a Linux developer environment for each device and install Linux apps to compensate and run them with bad performance because in that case it would have been way easier to just deploy any Linux distro on your Fleet of computers and for regular users Chrome OS Flex would only make sense if you have a device that is not a Chromebook and so either runs Windows or Mac OS if you don't want to use these or if the latest versions are unsupported you might consider using Chrome OS Flex except here as well a Linux distro will be easier to install have more features better Hardware support more applications out of the box and a better desktop for any general user there is no reason to go Chrome OS Flex instead of any Linux distribution because all Linux distributions can install Chrome and run web apps like Chrome OS even better because they will be in their separate own windows with the same level of integration in the system menu but with more desktop applications on the site better Hardware support more customization and a generally better user experience I really do not see any use case where Chrome OS Flex would make any sense whether you're a company an individual you're in education you already own a Chromebook for all of these choices Chrome OS Flex is a worse option than any Linux distro or even Windows or Mac OS the OS is not great in terms of ux it has pretty bad app support it will run Linux apps but with worse performance than a Linux distro and you don't even get the Android app support that Chrome OS usually has so there is basically no reason to run that thing at all so what do you think have you tried Chrome OS Flex have you tried Chrome OS on a Chromebook what do you think of this OS let me know down in the comments and in the meantime I let you know about today's sponsor tuxedo tuxedo is based in Germany and they're making Linux desktops and laptops they ship with Linux out of the box and they ship worldwide and why you would want that is simply because it completely removes all the guesswork and elbow grease to try and make a laptop that's made to run Windows to run Linux with tuxedo you know that the device will run Linux perfectly and contributes to help linux's development and Linux Hardware support they have a big range of devices from Ultrabooks nux gaming laptops workstations gaming Towers anything that you might want and all devices are very customizable with CPU options GPU options ssds you can have your own logo on the lid you can change the keyboard layout or even have your own keyboard layout engraved laser etched on the keyboard of your laptop so if you need a new device and you want it to run Linux and you want to support Linux development click the link in the description below and get yourself a device from tuxedo they are really good now thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to help me make more of this stuff there's a super thanks button underneath the video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description and there are also links to my patreon memberships and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast on Mondays where I talk about Linux open source tag my personal life the channel alternative platforms anything goes really and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so if you're interested both links are in the description box in the meantime thank you for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and since you gravitate in the Linux and free and open source software circles you probably already heard about the terms sveniverse or Mastodon pixel fed or peer tube and whatever your opinions are on this whole Twitter acquisition thing it makes it clear that it is vital to have social networks that are not owned by a single company or a single individual and that's exactly what the fediverse is but what is it exactly and how does its major components like Mastodon pixel fed or peer tube work exactly well that's what we're going to discuss today but first we're going to discuss today's sponsor thanks to tax care for sponsoring this video if you've ever worked on a project using python you know how frustrating it is to discover that the version you're using is going end of life and you're gonna have to speed through and hurry up to refactor and rewrite a bunch of code well text gear can now help you plan that transition thanks to their python an extended life cycle support with that new service you can keep your existing code base and still receive security updates and patches to python even if that version is no longer officially supported this means that if your code base is still working for you you can still have it meet your security requirements and you can plan the transition to the new version of python with a bit more peace of mind so you can learn more about tax cares python extended lifecycle support by clicking on the link in the description below okay let's start with a simple explanation of what the fedivers actually is fediverse is a contraction of Federated Universe it's basically a giant network of servers that form a social network but contrary to the ones you might be used to like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and others the fediverse is composed of different services from microblogging to image sharing video platforms and more so you can think of it as a mega social network that regroups multiple platforms as a Facebook Twitter Instagram and all others had fused into an interoperable blob a thought that is extremely scary and creepy if you think about one company controlling all these social networks but something that is actually really cool when it's all free and open source and decentralized so the fediverse is made of many different Services the more well-known are Mastodon a Twitter like microblog service peer tube a youtube-like platform or pixel fed an instagram-like social network but there are a ton of others like diaspora which is more like Facebook or even WordPress for building websites Casto pod for hosting podcasts or Bookworm for talking about books and a lot more each service is also decentralized which means that there is not one big server form where everything is hosted each service is split into instances basically independent servers with different goals on Mastodon for example you have instances that are General like Twitter would be or instances that are specialized around a specific topic hobby or community when you create an account on Mastodon you don't create a general Mastodon account like you would create a Twitter account you make an account on a specific instance Each of which have their own rules for moderation and who can get in or not the same is true when you create a pixel fed account or a peer tube account you make an account on one specific instance but what a lot of people don't understand at first and what's really awesome is that this account on one specific instance doesn't mean that you can only talk to people from that instance if your instance is Federated to the whole Mastodon Network for example then your account on that instance lets you interact with follow and talk to anyone else that is also Federated to the whole network for example my account on Mastodon is on the mastodon.social instance but I can talk to the Thunderbird team whose account is on the mastodon.online instance those are two different servers but we can talk talk to each other as if we were on the same one it's all transparent and you don't need to do anything specific for it to work you just search for the account you want to follow and you follow it now in reality it's a bit more granular than that certain servers can decide to block other servers so guys from these blocked servers can't interact with you and you can't interact with them but in general most instances are Federated to the whole network and so with one account on one server you can talk to anybody else that is on another server but where it gets even more awesome is that all the different services like Mastodon pixel fed or puretube can talk to each other thanks to the activity Pub standard activity Pub Is An Open standard endorsed by the w3c which is the organization that works on web standards what it does is let all services on the fedivers talk to each other now how does that work well in practice it means you can use your Mastodon app to follow a peer tube channel or someone that posts pictures on Pixel fed or see new articles from a WordPress website it's very basic every time my account posts a picture on Pixel fat for example it creates an activity that is then sent to everyone that follows my account wherever they follow it it can be on the pixel fed mobile app or website or on a mastodon app anywhere where they support the activity Pub format that's also why on the Mastodon app if you look for Thunderbird for example you will see multiple accounts one is their Mastodon account the other is their peer tube account and the third is the channel they created on that peer tube account and this goes a bit further for example if I comment on Mastodon on a post from peer tube that comment will also appear on peer tube underneath the video all services are interoperable like that the tldr or tldw for too long didn't watch is that you can basically follow anyone from any fediver service with your account and your app from any other service you can basically just create one Mastodon account and start following people that post pictures on Pixel fed people that post videos on peertube and people that write posts on Mastodon One account and you get access to everything you don't need to juggle three or four different apps go in and out of them you can just follow everyone in just one place so now let's see how the biggest Services work and we'll start with mastodon Mastodon is basically Twitter but open source and decentralized it lets you post messages with up to 500 characters it supports images videos polls content warnings animated Avatar pictures emojis links mentions hashtags anything you're used to on Twitter Mastodon has 1.5 million active users probably more since this video has been published which might seem small compared to Twitter but it's more than enough to have interesting conversations with a lot of people to join Mastodon all you need to do is pick a server also called an instance the main one is mastodon.social but there are a ton of others some are generalist servers where people talk about anything some are focused on tech gaming journalism art or music you can pick any server you like and it will let you interact with everyone else on any other server as long as the server you picked is Federated so connected to the whole Mastodon network but most servers are some servers will let you join outright and some will need you to apply for an account a process that is in place to ensure people joining aren't here to troll or harass others and each server has its own moderation rules some are super super open to anything and some moderate more heavily so once you picked a server just create your account or wait for your application for an account to be accepted and then to access it all you have to do is type the name of your instance in your browser's url bar for me for example it's mastodon.social but for you it might be different or you can also use their mobile apps on IOS and Android they have an official Mastodon app which is the one I use but there are also a ton of alternative clients if you prefer now let's talk about peer tube it's a YouTube alternative although it's much much smaller it's developed by framasoft which is a French organization that has tons of cool free software and online services and works to promote files pear tube is also decentralized being split into different servers that are Federated together so you can follow people from different instances and still have a complete subscription feed of course it's free software and it also works on a peer-to-peer protocol when people watch the same videos as you they also help the server deliver that same content to you by sending a few bits of the video to you as well so the load on the main server isn't too high in practice it works just like YouTube does you can watch content without an account or with one and if you have an account you can subscribe to various channels and have a subscription feed and notifications if you want to follow me I'm on the tailvids instance the link is in the description as well and as a Creator it also lets you sync your YouTube channel to peer tube so you can Auto publish all your videos to peer tube in a few clicks which is also a great help to watch beer tube just type the address of your instance in your browser's bar for me it's stillvids.com they don't have official mobile apps yet but you can always use the Mastodon app to subscribe to peer tube channels and use that as a subscription feed if you want obviously you will not get ads before during or after videos there but you will still get my sponsored segments because well it's basically a copy of the YouTube video on peer tube but if you like the idea of peer tube follow the link in the description below or just click another link that I left in the description below to find the instance that you want to get in another cool service on the fediverse is pixel fed it's basically Instagram without all the crap they tacked on lately like reels or lives it's just pictures and videos it's free software it also uses the activity Pub standard so you can follow pixel fed users on Mastodon for example and it's ad free it also lets you add filters just like Instagram or crop resize add alt text and you can use hashtags locations or create collections which are basically photo albums and just like Mastodon or peer tube pixel fed is split into instances that can talk to each other I use pixelfets.social my handle there is tle Nick you can find the link in the description but there are plenty of other instances you can join if you prefer pixel fed is pretty small as a social network because it's not super well known but there are still plenty of amazing and beautiful pictures to see from people that you might know or not know if you want to access it just like with any other Federated service you can just type the name of your instance in the URL bar for me it's pixelfed.social or you can use applications on your mobile phone there's pixel Droid on Android and the official pixel fed 1 on iOS which is still in beta so you will need to install test flight to get it both links are in the description below and that's only the tip of the iceberg there are tons of other services you can use these three are just the ones I use personally and since it's all free software if there is no server you trust with your data you can also host your own since it's all Federated just because you have your own instance doesn't mean you can't talk to anyone you can still follow people from any other instance or any other service and other people can still follow you from anywhere and most services on the fedivers feel really good to use sort of like what the internet and social networks were meant to be decentralized open modular talking to each other and not controlled by giant companies locked down and shoving ads and algorithms down your throats now of course there are not a complete replacement for traditional social networks because you will not find everyone you usually follow on these valuable services but I still think it's really worth worth it to give them a shot so as I said all my accounts on the fedivers are in the description below and if you want a more complete list of services that are part of that 30 verse I also left a link to a website that lists a ton of various services so have fun with all the things you can do find some cool people to follow or talk to and enjoy social networks as they were meant to be and you can also enjoy this segue to today's sponsor tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box and they ship worldwide now when you buy from tuxedo compared to buying from any regular Windows PC manufacturer you basically remove all the guesswork on whether things are going to work or not you can slap any Linux distro on it and it's gonna work out of the box and if there are a few configs or tweaks needed here and there they have ppas and repos that you can add to make sure that everything just works perfectly and their whole range is pretty big with devices for every price point and every need whether you want a workstation a small Ultra bug the cheapest laptop or computer you might want you have everything and you have options to configure them with ram CPU GPU SSD or even logos on the lid of your laptops or even engraving your own custom keyboard layout on the keyboard of your laptop for example so if you need a new device and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and buy a tuxedo laptop or desktop they're really really good now thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to ring the bell to write a comment anything else you might want to do and if you didn't like it well there's also a dislike button that you can click but please tell me why in the comments as well and if you want to help me make more of these videos well you can you can click the super thanks button underneath the video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description of the video or links to my patreon account and YouTube memberships both get access to a weekly podcast on Monday where I talk about Linux open source technology the channel or the platforms my personal life anything or you can also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover for the next month on the channel so if you're interested both links are in the description below in the meantime thank you all for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you manage to look away from the burning blue bird for a second welcome to this Linux and open source news video this week we have a lawsuit against GitHub and Microsoft to look into how copilot might be breaking licenses terms and conditions from GitHub and copyright law we have new insights into the new upcoming redesign of Thunderbird and we have Google working on a massive new AI project and also we have Microsoft doing some anti-competitive stuff in the cloud space we have the snap version of Firefox finally catching up in terms of features and some great gaming news so let's dive in right after I tell you everything about today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace place of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started GitHub is being sued especially for the use of GitHub co-pilot it's often been called the copyright laundering machine because it basically takes free and open source code to train a code generating algorithm and sometimes even copy and paste entire Snippets of set code into proprietary projects it's always been a Hot Topic and now there's a class action led by Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Savari law firm based in San Francisco they filed that suit against GitHub Microsoft and open AI on the grounds that training the AI on GitHub repos violates the attribution requirements of the various fast licenses used like the MIT GPL or Apache license they also claim that GitHub in doing so has violated its own terms of services and its own privacy policy as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by removing copyright management information and the copyright consumer privacy app and other laws they state that the class action could be joined by millions of GitHub users of course filing a lawsuit is just the first step and it will no doubt be a hard one as it not only impacts GitHub and copilot but how AI is trained and works in general I'm very excited to see where this thing goes because it could very well redefine how you can work with AI what you can feed your algorithm who the outputs belong to in relation to what you fed it it's going to be game changing depending on the ruling now I'm very much of the opinion that GitHub copilot is at least an unethical tool that basically launderers 3 and open source code into proprietary projects but I'm not a lawyer and I know basically nothing about us copyright law so I can't say if it's illegal what I'm sure of is that it's unethical now speaking of AI it looks like Google is going all in as well they announced a huge project to develop one single AI model that supports the world's thousand most spoken languages which could be able to generate text and more importantly to translate anything into everything else they started this by training their AI on 400 languages and while they didn't exactly say where they wanted to make use of the results it's quite easy to imagine generating automatic captions on videos providing search suggestions on Google search in any language making Google Assistant better at conversational questions and answers generating text or translation comes to mind but there might be a lot of other applications of course Google's track record with AI hasn't always been great like when Google AI researchers wrote a paper outlining the societal bias of AI when trained on the data that's available as an AI will regurgitate basically anything and everything without any knowledge about veracity or harmfulness turns out Google didn't like that and fired these researchers afterwards now the applications of this AI could be incredible and could help move Society forwards but the fact that it's owned by Google is the stuff of nightmares I'm generally very enthusiastic about this kind of tech but I'm also torn between that and the fact that big companies that basically own these big AIS tend to misuse them a lot and don't use them to better Society but instead to worsen it the big Thunderbird UI overhaul is in full swing with new mock-ups being shared for what the calendar portion will look like and I must say it's a very cool new look that seems productive and beautiful at the same time it will support the usual month week and day view letting you tweak the days you want to see in your work week and the toolbar will populate with actions depending on what you've selected you will also be able to heavily customize the calendar by hiding calendar colors icons using category colors instead of the calendar colors collapsing weekends or removing the weekend days entirely from The View new shortcuts will also be available for keyboard users the event view that lets you fill in or see all the details for an appointment will also benefit from the redesign with the better and more legible layout and the ability to sort attendees depending on their current status as in whether they will attend or not or if they haven't answered yet it will stay fast with just one click to open that view and another one to edit with an option to get to the edit page as soon as you click on an event it all looks pretty good and sure it doesn't look like it's going to integrate with your GDK or cute theme with the Thunderbird app having its own design language but it still looks pretty beautiful and still very productive so I'll give it a shot when the official release is out and maybe I'll switch to it Microsoft is being targeted by Cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe or cispe which is a group of cloud service providers because they feel the Redmond giant is again putting in place some very anti-competitive practices Microsoft said they would partner with other Cloud providers to let their customers virtualize Microsoft Technologies on non-microsoft cloud providers they then put in place some licensing changes that exclude anyone who doesn't host their own cloud offerings on their own data centers so anyone who also uses AWS Google or even Microsoft's Cloud are excluded a lot of mid-sized Cloud providers have their own data centers that they then supplement with offerings from bigger providers to be able to answer the needs of their bigger clients this change means they're just not going to be able to offer their customers access to Microsoft's Cloud Technologies which obviously is bad for them and makes Microsoft a more appealing choice for customers the cispe group says Microsoft is irreparably damaging the European Cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice and they hope their complaint will start an investigation from the EU as always is with Microsoft it's one step forward two steps backwards some parts of this company just can't help but try and build monopolies instead of just trying to compete normally now there's an interesting blog post on Mastodon that I felt was appropriate seeing this platform grew to a million users last week in the midst of the Twitter acquisition the author points out a few ways in which Mastodon is a very interesting platform to use starting with data collection basically impossible at scale seeing as the network is decentralized and split into a multitude of small instances Each of which you would have to collect user data from and that same decentralization also makes it more resilient if an instance shuts down the rest of the network isn't affected much of course the open source nature of the thing is also a plus as anyone can start their own instance and connect to any other which also leads to specialized instances yet another Advantage letting you specialize and interact with specific communities exclusively all while retaining access to all other Federated instances in the same timeline and with the same account these very specialized instances being small can be very well moderated and require verification so they are not subject to spam Bots and trolls and since you can still connect to any other instance using the same account you're not locked into a bubble either and sure Mastodon still has some ux issues and needs some explaining especially on the instance and Federation Notions basically you can think about it as you would think of the internet itself while you use one internet access provider to connect to all the other servers you're not locked into the server hosted by your internet access provider same goes from astrodon if you create an account on one instance you can still use that same account to connect with people on any other instance that has been Federated and being Federated just means that the instance has agreed to be linked to the rest of the Mastodon Network I really like Mastodon it feels like a much friendlier Twitter and it has that old Grassroots 1990s 2000s internet feel of being actually helpful and actually not driven by huge companies and profits I love it all the links to access my Mastodon profile pixel fed or peer tube instances are in the description below now Firefox users on Ubuntu you can Rejoice the snap version will finally reach some amount of feature parody with the regular Firefox version thanks to Native Messaging support and no it's not support for messaging apps or notifications it's the protocol that lets the browser communicate with the operating system or other apps they started adding this in July but now it's in the stable snap builds and it should let you do stuff that you would expect like using third-party password managers installing genome extensions from the extensions website in one click or enabling the KD plasma browser integration add-on to have notifications volume control and more you won't have to do anything special to get that apart from applying your updates to Firefox apparently there are still issues with some third-party password managers but most things should work as they were intended and as they already do with all other Firefox versions with the performance improvements the snap team has added to the fire Fox nap this was the last piece to make Firefox not suck as a snap so if you're using Ubuntu or using the snap version do your updates and basically should work exactly as other versions do although if you hate snaps this won't change your mind okay let's finish this with the gaming news first the Wii U emulator CMU is now available as an app image they added Linux support recently but it wasn't readily available for everyone to use and that's now fixed it's still experimental but it should work in basically any distribution out there including Steam OS if you want to play the few Wii U exclusives on your steam deck there's also a new version of dxvk the awesome library that lets your Linux device run DirectX games by translating their calls from the Microsoft API into Vulcan instructions that Linux can understand this new release is a big one with a new version of dxvk native which can be used by developers to easily Port their games and the biggest change is that games will now compile shaders as they're loaded rather than when they are drawn this means that the weird stutters you experience when starting a new map in a game should disappear apart from that expect some bug fixes and performance improvements I just love all the effort that's being poured into that thing it's still unbelievable to me how far Linux gaming has come in the past three to five years I remember the days where I tried to run games just using wine because none of this existed and I have zero Nostalgia for these days and finally as valve brought the new deck UI to the desktop version of steam at least in beta there are quite a few improvements scaling should now work better windowed mode should yield better results you can force GPU rendering to get better performance something that will definitely come in handy when using steamer us on Nvidia gpus and a bunch of bugs have also been squashed if you want to try out that new UI all you have to do is move your steam client to the beta version from the settings and then add the dash Gamepad UI option to the steam launcher on your Linux desktop and I must say this new interface is much much better than Big Picture Mode you should absolutely give it a shot and you should absolutely give today's sponsor a shot as well tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they ship laptops and desktops running Linux out of the box worldwide buying one of their devices basically means that you remove all the guesswork from trying and knowing if something will run or not you don't have to research anything you can just buy the device slap your favorite distro on it and it's gonna run because the hardware is compatible with Linux and if there are a few tweaks needed here and there they have ppas and repos that you can add to the distro to make sure that everything is perfect they have a big range of devices from the biggest war workstations some gaming laptops Ultrabooks nux whatever you want they have it and all devices are extremely customizable with CPU options GPU options SSD Ram your own logo on the lid and much much more you can even have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys which is awesome so if you need a new computer and you want to make sure that it runs Linux and you want to support Linux development don't hesitate to click on the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo device they're really really good now thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to ring the bell to write a comment anything basically and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really want to help support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description or you can join my patreon members or YouTube members both links are in the description as well and both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday where I talk about Linux tag open source the channel my personal life and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so click those if you're interested and in the meantime thank you everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and if you manage to look away from the burning blue bird for a second welcome to this Linux and open source news video this week we have a lawsuit against GitHub and Microsoft to look into how copilot might be breaking licenses terms and conditions from GitHub and copyright law we have new insights into the new upcoming redesign of Thunderbird and we have Google working on a massive new AI project and also we have Microsoft doing some anti-competitive stuff in the cloud space we have the snap version of Firefox finally catching up in terms of features and some great gaming news so let's dive in right after I tell you everything about today's sponsor this video is sponsored by lenode lenode is the only solution I use to run my own nexcloud server and my only office server as well it's a super easy solution to deploy basically anything you want in one click they have a huge Marketplace place of applications you can host from next Cloud WordPress Drupal gitlab or grafana to gaming servers for Minecraft RX CS go rust valheim and more they take care of all the configuration for you all you have to do is click the thing you want to deploy fill in a few details and your server is up and running and once everything is live it's still super easy to manage your servers to upgrade or downgrade them add some storage back them up and get help if you're stuck I've been using linode for years now and I can only recommend them if you want to give them a shot click the link in the description below and you'll get a hundred dollars of free credits to get started GitHub is being sued especially for the use of GitHub co-pilot it's often been called the copyright laundering machine because it basically takes free and open source code to train a code generating algorithm and sometimes even copy and paste entire Snippets of set code into proprietary projects it's always been a Hot Topic and now there's a class action led by Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Savari law firm based in San Francisco they filed that suit against GitHub Microsoft and open AI on the grounds that training the AI on GitHub repos violates the attribution requirements of the various fast licenses used like the MIT GPL or Apache license they also claim that GitHub in doing so has violated its own terms of services and its own privacy policy as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by removing copyright management information and the copyright consumer privacy app and other laws they state that the class action could be joined by millions of GitHub users of course filing a lawsuit is just the first step and it will no doubt be a hard one as it not only impacts GitHub and copilot but how AI is trained and works in general I'm very excited to see where this thing goes because it could very well redefine how you can work with AI what you can feed your algorithm who the outputs belong to in relation to what you fed it it's going to be game changing depending on the ruling now I'm very much of the opinion that GitHub copilot is at least an unethical tool that basically launderers 3 and open source code into proprietary projects but I'm not a lawyer and I know basically nothing about us copyright law so I can't say if it's illegal what I'm sure of is that it's unethical now speaking of AI it looks like Google is going all in as well they announced a huge project to develop one single AI model that supports the world's thousand most spoken languages which could be able to generate text and more importantly to translate anything into everything else they started this by training their AI on 400 languages and while they didn't exactly say where they wanted to make use of the results it's quite easy to imagine generating automatic captions on videos providing search suggestions on Google search in any language making Google Assistant better at conversational questions and answers generating text or translation comes to mind but there might be a lot of other applications of course Google's track record with AI hasn't always been great like when Google AI researchers wrote a paper outlining the societal bias of AI when trained on the data that's available as an AI will regurgitate basically anything and everything without any knowledge about veracity or harmfulness turns out Google didn't like that and fired these researchers afterwards now the applications of this AI could be incredible and could help move Society forwards but the fact that it's owned by Google is the stuff of nightmares I'm generally very enthusiastic about this kind of tech but I'm also torn between that and the fact that big companies that basically own these big AIS tend to misuse them a lot and don't use them to better Society but instead to worsen it the big Thunderbird UI overhaul is in full swing with new mock-ups being shared for what the calendar portion will look like and I must say it's a very cool new look that seems productive and beautiful at the same time it will support the usual month week and day view letting you tweak the days you want to see in your work week and the toolbar will populate with actions depending on what you've selected you will also be able to heavily customize the calendar by hiding calendar colors icons using category colors instead of the calendar colors collapsing weekends or removing the weekend days entirely from The View new shortcuts will also be available for keyboard users the event view that lets you fill in or see all the details for an appointment will also benefit from the redesign with the better and more legible layout and the ability to sort attendees depending on their current status as in whether they will attend or not or if they haven't answered yet it will stay fast with just one click to open that view and another one to edit with an option to get to the edit page as soon as you click on an event it all looks pretty good and sure it doesn't look like it's going to integrate with your GDK or cute theme with the Thunderbird app having its own design language but it still looks pretty beautiful and still very productive so I'll give it a shot when the official release is out and maybe I'll switch to it Microsoft is being targeted by Cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe or cispe which is a group of cloud service providers because they feel the Redmond giant is again putting in place some very anti-competitive practices Microsoft said they would partner with other Cloud providers to let their customers virtualize Microsoft Technologies on non-microsoft cloud providers they then put in place some licensing changes that exclude anyone who doesn't host their own cloud offerings on their own data centers so anyone who also uses AWS Google or even Microsoft's Cloud are excluded a lot of mid-sized Cloud providers have their own data centers that they then supplement with offerings from bigger providers to be able to answer the needs of their bigger clients this change means they're just not going to be able to offer their customers access to Microsoft's Cloud Technologies which obviously is bad for them and makes Microsoft a more appealing choice for customers the cispe group says Microsoft is irreparably damaging the European Cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice and they hope their complaint will start an investigation from the EU as always is with Microsoft it's one step forward two steps backwards some parts of this company just can't help but try and build monopolies instead of just trying to compete normally now there's an interesting blog post on Mastodon that I felt was appropriate seeing this platform grew to a million users last week in the midst of the Twitter acquisition the author points out a few ways in which Mastodon is a very interesting platform to use starting with data collection basically impossible at scale seeing as the network is decentralized and split into a multitude of small instances Each of which you would have to collect user data from and that same decentralization also makes it more resilient if an instance shuts down the rest of the network isn't affected much of course the open source nature of the thing is also a plus as anyone can start their own instance and connect to any other which also leads to specialized instances yet another Advantage letting you specialize and interact with specific communities exclusively all while retaining access to all other Federated instances in the same timeline and with the same account these very specialized instances being small can be very well moderated and require verification so they are not subject to spam Bots and trolls and since you can still connect to any other instance using the same account you're not locked into a bubble either and sure Mastodon still has some ux issues and needs some explaining especially on the instance and Federation Notions basically you can think about it as you would think of the internet itself while you use one internet access provider to connect to all the other servers you're not locked into the server hosted by your internet access provider same goes from astrodon if you create an account on one instance you can still use that same account to connect with people on any other instance that has been Federated and being Federated just means that the instance has agreed to be linked to the rest of the Mastodon Network I really like Mastodon it feels like a much friendlier Twitter and it has that old Grassroots 1990s 2000s internet feel of being actually helpful and actually not driven by huge companies and profits I love it all the links to access my Mastodon profile pixel fed or peer tube instances are in the description below now Firefox users on Ubuntu you can Rejoice the snap version will finally reach some amount of feature parody with the regular Firefox version thanks to Native Messaging support and no it's not support for messaging apps or notifications it's the protocol that lets the browser communicate with the operating system or other apps they started adding this in July but now it's in the stable snap builds and it should let you do stuff that you would expect like using third-party password managers installing genome extensions from the extensions website in one click or enabling the KD plasma browser integration add-on to have notifications volume control and more you won't have to do anything special to get that apart from applying your updates to Firefox apparently there are still issues with some third-party password managers but most things should work as they were intended and as they already do with all other Firefox versions with the performance improvements the snap team has added to the fire Fox nap this was the last piece to make Firefox not suck as a snap so if you're using Ubuntu or using the snap version do your updates and basically should work exactly as other versions do although if you hate snaps this won't change your mind okay let's finish this with the gaming news first the Wii U emulator CMU is now available as an app image they added Linux support recently but it wasn't readily available for everyone to use and that's now fixed it's still experimental but it should work in basically any distribution out there including Steam OS if you want to play the few Wii U exclusives on your steam deck there's also a new version of dxvk the awesome library that lets your Linux device run DirectX games by translating their calls from the Microsoft API into Vulcan instructions that Linux can understand this new release is a big one with a new version of dxvk native which can be used by developers to easily Port their games and the biggest change is that games will now compile shaders as they're loaded rather than when they are drawn this means that the weird stutters you experience when starting a new map in a game should disappear apart from that expect some bug fixes and performance improvements I just love all the effort that's being poured into that thing it's still unbelievable to me how far Linux gaming has come in the past three to five years I remember the days where I tried to run games just using wine because none of this existed and I have zero Nostalgia for these days and finally as valve brought the new deck UI to the desktop version of steam at least in beta there are quite a few improvements scaling should now work better windowed mode should yield better results you can force GPU rendering to get better performance something that will definitely come in handy when using steamer us on Nvidia gpus and a bunch of bugs have also been squashed if you want to try out that new UI all you have to do is move your steam client to the beta version from the settings and then add the dash Gamepad UI option to the steam launcher on your Linux desktop and I must say this new interface is much much better than Big Picture Mode you should absolutely give it a shot and you should absolutely give today's sponsor a shot as well tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they ship laptops and desktops running Linux out of the box worldwide buying one of their devices basically means that you remove all the guesswork from trying and knowing if something will run or not you don't have to research anything you can just buy the device slap your favorite distro on it and it's gonna run because the hardware is compatible with Linux and if there are a few tweaks needed here and there they have ppas and repos that you can add to the distro to make sure that everything is perfect they have a big range of devices from the biggest war workstations some gaming laptops Ultrabooks nux whatever you want they have it and all devices are extremely customizable with CPU options GPU options SSD Ram your own logo on the lid and much much more you can even have your own custom keyboard layout laser etched on the keys which is awesome so if you need a new computer and you want to make sure that it runs Linux and you want to support Linux development don't hesitate to click on the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo device they're really really good now thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to ring the bell to write a comment anything basically and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really want to help support the channel there's a super thanks button underneath this video on YouTube there's a PayPal Link in the description or you can join my patreon members or YouTube members both links are in the description as well and both get access to a weekly podcast every Monday where I talk about Linux tag open source the channel my personal life and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so click those if you're interested and in the meantime thank you everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] |