Some great phone news and some very bad, KDE goodness, Google creepiness, Ikey saves gaming on Linux, nonces compromise WiFi, and the biggest Ubuntu release for years.
News
Jesse always feels like there’s someone watching him
Ikey is singlehandedly saving gaming on Linux
Entroware
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Ubuntu 17.10
It’s the first Ubuntu release since Shuttleworth dropped the bombshell about the death of Unity and Convergence. The final release was a few days away when we recorded this so there might be a few slight changes and bug fixes.
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I am very interested to see where the Librem 5 goes, but I am skeptical of the user experience. Android is pretty aggressive about controlling battery life and memory usage. Customizing Debian to behave like that would take some work, I think. And desktop applications might not translate well to the phone — from what I can tell the SyncThing app is the same as the desktop program, just wrapped in an Android shell and it is pretty heavy on battery usage. So we will have to see how much of the pre-existing desktop software can actually work on the phone. If not much, then they are basically starting from scratch the same way Firefox, Ubuntu, etc did.
However, like you guys noted before, if the phone uses hardware with good free drivers, it could become the premier Replicant device and maybe Replicant could grow into a more vibrant project. From what I can tell, this MX6 processor they might use in the Librem 5 is the same one that was used in the Meizu MX6 that shipped with Ubuntu.
I’m curious about Jesse switching back to Ubuntu with stock GNOME. If Ubuntu had stayed with Unity, would you have switched to Ubuntu GNOME, or is there something different about Ubuntu 17.10 (given that you want to use the stock GNOME rather than the one with the Ubuntu modifications)?
I tinkered with Gnome when Fedora moved over following the very first Gnome 3 release and found it horrible.
I then hopped about a few distros over some years and stuck with Ubuntu for a year and a bit – not out of love for Unity but through inertia. This was in part because I was involved with LL at the time so was paranoid that I’d break something in my recording setup. When I finally pulled my thumb out I moved to easy-Arch (Antergos) with Gnome and loved it. So I don’t love Unity (however don’t hate it) but do like Gnome, and hence want to move over.
A particularly good episode with some great comments that had me laughing in the car on the way to work! Has Jesse spotted that you’ve spelled his name with an i yet?
What? Where!? Where’s this misspelling? I thought after Debian moved away from their Jessie release I’d have an easy ride!!
It’s been edited away. No need to get paranoid :o)
I also was confused by the double app search results for a single app in the ubuntu software center, one being a regular deb and the other a snap.
You can tell which is which in different ways though.
In the app details below the description where it says “source”, the snap would list the source as Snap and the deb will say something like the ubuntu repository it came from.
Another way is that the deb would have ratings and reviews while the snap version wouldn’t.
You can also tell by the size of the app. For example a deb version of an app may be 3MB while the snap of the same app can be 133MB.