Austrian schools are switching, Wes is trying & Chris is reviewing the Plasma desktop this week. Why the heck we keep talking about it & what’s really bugging us about it.

Plus the 7-Inch Ubuntu Laptop that might be legit & Linus reflects on what he really hates after 25 years of Linux.

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Show Notes:

Follow Up / Catch Up

NVIDIA Makes Huge Code Contribution To Qt, New Qt 3D Studio

NVIDIA open-sourced and contributed to Qt the NVIDIA DRIVE Design Studio, which is a “designer friendly 3D UI authoring system” and Qt is now releasing it with the name Qt 3D Studio.

Interview: Thomas Weissel Installing Plasma in Austrian Schools

About 34 classrooms, 2 consulting rooms, the room for teachers and one computer lab just got upgraded to a custom “distribution” based on Kubuntu and KDE neon. At least 75 teachers are going to work with the system. Most of the 700+ students are not going to touch these computers (because they are locked away) but in their 5th grade every one of them gets a live USB flash-drive in order to work with the very same system in the computer lab.

The State of Plasma

Since 2014, Plasma has kept me entertained and disappointed in equal measures. At some point, I had it crowned my favorite desktop, and then it went downhill steeply, fast, struggling to recover. Not helping was the slew of bugs and regressions across the distro space, which exacerbated the quality of Plasma and what it could show the world.

TING

Linux 4.10 – Linux Kernel Newbies

This release adds support for Intel GVT-g for KVM (a.k.a. KVMGT), a full GPU virtualization solution with mediated pass-through, starting from 4th generation Intel Core (Haswell) processors with Intel Graphics. This feature is based on a new VFIO Mediated Device framework. Unlike direct pass-through alternatives, the mediated device framework allows KVMGT to offer a complete virtualized GPU with full GPU features to each one of the virtualized guests, with part of performance critical resources directly assigned, while still having performance close to native. The capability of running native graphics driver inside a VM, without hypervisor intervention in performance critical paths, achieves a good balance among performance, feature, and sharing capability.

GNOME 3.24 Desktop Environment Enters Beta, Final Release Is Coming March 22

GNOME 3.23.90 is now available. This is the beta release for the upcoming stable GNOME 3.24 release. At this point, we have entered feature freeze, UI freeze, and API freeze, so developers should be focused on bugfixes and stability improvements for the next month as we approach GNOME 3.24,” said Michael Catanzaro in a mailing list announcement.

The upcoming beta of Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 — regular Ubuntu only takes part in the second beta — will feature GNOME 3.24 Beta 1 (v3.23.90) and defaults to the latest GNOME Shell desktop.

Plasma in a Snap?

Shortly before FOSDEM, Aleix Pol asked if I had ever put Plasma in a Snap. While I was a bit perplexed by the notion itself, I also found this a rather interesting idea.

GUADEC 2017 – The GNOME Conference

GUADEC brings together Free Software Enthusiasts and professionals from all over the world. Join us for six days of talks, demos, discussion, parties, games and more.

Linux Academy

GPD Pocket, The 7-Inch Ubuntu Laptop is Now Live on IndieGoGo

It took the little 7-inch laptop less than 7 hours to leap over its $200,000 fixed funding goal. This means the device will (barring any hiccups) be produced.

The device is super small, measuring a teeny 7.1-inch by 4.2-inch (and standing a mere 0.7-inch tall). The GPD Pocket offers a 7-inch 1920×1200 IPS screen, pushing a pixel-popping 323 PPI. Corning Gorilla Glass 3.

Despite the diminutive proportions the unibody magnesium alloy case contains some powerful internals.

Core specs:
  • 7-inch full-HD (1920×1200) IPS touch display
  • Intel Atom x7-Z8750 CPU (Quad Core) @ 1.6GHz
  • 8GB RAM
  • 128GB eMMC

The device does have a fan. GPD says this ‘active cooling’ means its** performance is better than the Microsoft Surface 3**, which is passively cooled.

Also:
  • 7,000 mAh battery (12 hours battery life estimated)
  • 802.11ac WiFi
  • Bluetooth 4.1
  • 1x USB 3.0 Type-C
  • 1x USB 3.0 Type-A
  • micro HDMI
  • 3.5mm headphone jack

An option USB Type-C dock can be attached to provide an additional 2x USB 3.0 ports and an SD and microSD card reader.

The included QWERTY keyboard takes up as much room as possible, with a small pointer nub in-between a split space bar (yup, no trackpad, no palm rest).

More than just thin but also small, small to fit in your pocket!

DigitalOcean

Linus Reflects on 25 Years of Releasing Linux

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