Has Ubuntu fallen behind, or setting a new bar of refinement? We load up our hardware with Ubuntu 16.10, walk away with some big surprises & two totally different experiences.

Plus KDE celebrates 20 years in a way only open source can, real VR gets demoed on Linux, the big BSD news & more!

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— Show Notes: —


System76

Brought to you by: Linux Academy

Ubuntu 16.10 Review

  • Ubuntu 16.10

  • Super fast boot into Unity (set your login to auto and give it a shot, tell me that’s not crazy fast)

  • For me personally I never expected to be this surprised by Ubuntu 16.10. I was expecting just another simpler interaction. And that’s exactly what I got, and I didn’t even know I wanted it.

  • Unity 7 is fast, simple, and now runs are lower end hardware and VM’s a lot better.

  • This is the simple, clean, modern looking desktop I’m comfortable recommending to friends and loved ones.

  • But my biggest surprises came when I found myself reloading studio production machines to Ubuntu MATE 16.10.

  • From a desktop environment perspective, we need our desktops to be light on the GPU, simple in their function, and steady. MATE has played that role for a while now on top of Arch in the JB studio.

  • But Ubuntu 16.10’s based on Kernel 4.8 (which brings Skylake improvements, and USB capture/camera device improvements). 16.10’s MATE flavor also ships with MATE Desktop 1.16. The first major distribution to ship a full GTK3+ implementation of the MATE Desktop.

  • The roll out of the Unity 8 Preview is very humble. Very clear on what state this is in, and how end users can play and improve it.

Kernel 4.8 Features

The biggest new feature being a fix for an Intel Skylake power management bug

NFS client updates for Linux 4.8, the next major kernel release, include several performance-related features, more aggressive caching, optimized several code paths, SUNRPC updates, pNFS improvements, and various bug fixes. The performance changes for the NFS client in Linux 4.8 include removing a “performance killer.”

  • Support for overclocking AMD graphic cards
  • Initial NVIDIA Pascal support in Nouveau driver
  • Raspberry Pi 3 SoC support
  • ACPI Low-Power Idle support
  • Support for the Microsoft Surface 3 touch screen
  • Wider range of audio device, USB and webcam drivers

Unity 8 preview session in Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak | Ubuntu Insights

The current experience comes with a minimal set of applications; a browser, terminal and systems settings. Here are a few things you might like to try to flesh out your Unity 8 session and get the most from it.

The main driver for getting Unity 8 in to 16.10 was the chance to get it in the hands of users so we can get feedback and bug reports. If you find something doesn’t work, please, log a bug. We don’t monitor every forum or comments section on the web so the absolute best way to provide your feedback to people who can act on it is a bug report with clear steps on how to reproduce the issue (in the case of crashes) or an explanation of why you think a particular behaviour is wrong. This is how you get things changed or fixed.

Ubuntu MATE 16.10 | Ubuntu MATE

The work to port MATE Desktop to GTK3+ has been ongoing for a couple
of years and Ubuntu MATE is the first major distribution to ship a
full GTK3+ implementation of the MATE Desktop. And the absolute latest
release too, MATE Desktop 1.16! Firefox and LibreOffice are also GTK3+
only in Yakkety.

This has been no small undertaking, we’ve changed toolkits twice this
cycle. First from GTK 2.24.x to GTK 3.18, and then again to GTK 3.20. The
themes required two significant upgrades during this process.
We’ve also upgraded through three MATE Desktop versions this cycle,
starting from 1.12 to 1.14, to 1.15 and finally to 1.16.

We originally planned to complete the migration to GTK3+ for the
Ubuntu MATE 17.04 release, but thanks to those of you who have generously
supported the Ubuntu MATE crowd-funding we’ve achieved that
objective well ahead of schedule!

newest _MATE 1.16 desktop environment_based on the latest GTK+ 3.20 technologies, Ubuntu MATE 16.10 is probably the most important milestone of the official Ubuntu flavor built around the MATE Desktop

Being re-worked from scratch, more or less, Ubuntu MATE 16.10 ships with the ability for users to uninstall default applications without issues.

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

Dutch Train Station, Runs Linux

Desktop App Pick

Internet DJ Console

Ability to broadcast LIVE audio through icecast. Internet DJ Console is a project started in March 2005 to provide a powerful yet easy to use source-client for individuals interested in streaming live radio shows over the Internet using Shoutcast or Icecast servers.
Because of the large number of streaming applications that already existed but did little more than stream a pair of audio channels or a fixed playlist, it was decided that IDJC would be the opposite and simulate audio hardware to cut down the expense of creating a home studio.

Unlike Mixxx is designed to stream live audio not just pre-recorded MP3s

Spotlight [Ben F Switched to Linux for Good] (Video in Dropbox)

Ben gives us a little show and tell.

— NEWS —

Devs Mark KDE’s 20th Birthday By Re-Releasing KDE 1!

Yup, it’s the KDE project’s 20th birthday. And to help mark the mammoth milestone the KDE Restoration Project is re-releasing KDE 1!

HTC Vive VR demo on Linux used Kubuntu at SteamDevDays

As mentioned before, SteamVR on Linux will use Vulkan and not OpenGL. This is probably one of the main things that held up SteamVR/HTC Vive support on Linux.

While we found out today Valve is finally expected to show a VR Linux demo likely using the HTC Vive, it turns out Collabora has been working on their own Linux VR effort with a focus on a fully open-source driver for the HTC Vive for the OSVR platform.

FreeBSD Takes Open Source to 11 with Latest Release

New architecture support, performance improvements, toolchain enhancements and support for contemporary wireless chipsets.

Mad Max to release on 20th of October for Linux & SteamOS, being ported by Feral Interactive

Intel i5 or AMD FX8350 3.4 GHz CPU
8GB RAM
SteamOS 2.0 or Ubuntu 16.04 or better.

The game also requires an NVIDIA 660ti series graphics card or better, running driver version 367.35 or later. AMD and Intel GPUs are not supported at release.

Come say hi at MeetBSD

Nov. 11-12. #MeetBSDCA

Feedback:

Mail Bag

Name: Sam S

Subject: Barebones Linux Follow Up

Message: Hi guys, I’m writing in about the LAS438 question regarding a “barebones” distro. I’d like to give a shameless plug to my set of “GeckoLinux” spins based on openSUSE. Among the 8 spins, I actually have one called “BareBones”, which is basically an openbox desktop with Firefox, rxvt, and the YaST configuration tools, nothing else. There’s a BareBones based on openSUSE Leap (long-term fixed-release cycle) and another for Tumbleweed (super-stable rolling release). You can download it at geckolinux.github.io or clone it on SuseStudio.

Name: Ghislain A.

Subject: Ghislain is looking for a distro to do the following three things

  1. Full Disk Encryption
  2. Installation on RAID 1
  3. Support multi screen three by default

Full Message: Hi Noah !

I still have my windows machine but i go rid of the last windows software necessary to run my business bu going webbased for my billing. For my workstation as my main working PC at my company i wanted to run a linux KDE desktop ( i love the layout of the plasma 5 desktop) but gnome would do also, i do not like at all the ubuntu unity one so i prefer to avoid it but i can live with it if i have raid and encryption.

On my research i had quite a lot of issue as most distro i tried to install do not support the basic i need “out of the box”. Those “basics” are:

  • full disk encryption ( i use truecrypt on windows)
  • installation on a raid 1
  • support multi screen (3) by default

For now i do not find any distro that support the raid 1 thing in the installer.

I have to manually do some magic mojo to have a simple install in raid1 in the installer.

The second challenge is that allmost all the non KDE 5+ distro i tried did not support the 3 screen i have with my 2 low power AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series cards. The others would see 2 screen and not the third or see it but do not allow to move the mouse to it.

So right now i have kubuntu and antegros that is working , the last one was installed but i had to do some mojo to install it with raid and i do not have encryption so i must restart my install.

This is where you can help Do you know of a distro you think can support those simple business need (raid1, encryption, multi screen) without the need to manually tweak many thing by hand and pray no error was made ? Hope you do

Ghislain.

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