A big week of community updates, events & news, including great news for Plasma Desktop users, MATE users & Wayland fans.

Then Barton George from Dell joins us to discuss the new XPS 13’s shipping Ubuntu, where Linux could see its next big success & more!

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Pre-Show

Follow Up / Catch Up

Plasma 5.12 LTS Beta Makes Your Desktop Smoother and Speedier

Plasma 5.12 LTS Beta is the second long term support release from the Plasma 5 team. We have been working hard focusing on speed and stability for this release. Boot time to desktop has been improved by reviewing the code for anything which blocks execution. The team has been triaging and fixing bugs in every aspect of the codebase, tidying up artwork, removing corner cases and ensuring cross desktop integration. For the first time we offer our Wayland integration on long term support so you can be sure we will continue to fix bugs over the coming releases.

KDE’s KWin Now Considers Its X11 Code To Be Under An “Eternal Feature Freeze”

With KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS, the KWin window manager / compositor’s X11/X.Org code will now be under an “eternal feature freeze” as development will focus more on Wayland.
KWin maintainer Martin Flöser has confirmed the KWin/X11 code is now considered feature frozen as for Plasma 5.13 and the future they will be focused on Wayland. Features may get added for the KWin on X11, but only when it’s in common code-paths and not writing any new X11-specific feature code.
+ KDE’s KWin Now Considers Its X11 Code To Be Under An “Eternal Feature Freeze” – Phoronix

City of Barcelona Kicks Out Microsoft in Favor of Linux and Open Source

Brief: Barcelona city administration has prepared the roadmap to migrate its existing system from Microsoft and proprietary software to Linux and Open Source software.
A Spanish newspaper, El País, has reported that the City of Barcelona is in the process of migrating its computer system to Open Source technologies.
Barcelona will go open source by Spring 2019 The City has plans for 70% of its software budget to be invested in open source software in the coming year.

Upcoming Community Events

DevConf.cz | January 26-28, 2018 – Brno, Czechia

DevConf.cz 2018 is the 10th annual, free, Red Hat sponsored community conference for developers, admins, DevOps engineers, testers, documentation writers and other contibutors to open source technologies such as Linux, Middleware, Virtualization, Storage, Cloud and mobile where FLOSS communities sync, share, and hack on upstream projects together in the beautiful city of Brno, Czech Republic.
When: Friday, January 26 to Sunday, January 28, 2018
Venue: Faculty of Information Technology (VUT FIT – Božetěchova 2, Brno)

LinuxFest Northwest 2018

LFNWDates

LinuxFest is celebrating 19 years of service to the Free and Open Source community and we want you to be a part of it! Please join us by being a presenter at one of the largest, technically diverse, educational, and fun open source conferences here in the Pacific Northwest.
We are encouraging (but not requiring) that presenters touch on our theme “Message in a Bottle”: Security, Containerization, and Personal Data. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us at present@linuxfestnorthwest.org.

FOSS Talk
SCALE 16x

SCaLE 16X – the 16th annual Southern California Linux Expo – will take place on March. 8-11, 2018, at the Pasadena Convention Center. SCaLE 16X expects to host 150 exhibitors this year, along with nearly 130 sessions, tutorials and special events.
+ Libre Graphicas track at SCaLE 16x!

TING

New XPS 13 Developer/Ubuntu Laptops from Dell

8th Generation Intel® Quad Core™, i5 (US and Canada only) and i7 versions
Guest: Barton George
+ Barton’s Blog
+ Systems Developed by and for Developers | Dell

Linus prefers the XPS 13

Right now the XPS13 stands out due to the thin bezel, which really does maximize the screen size for the size of machine. That was really what made me pick it for Daniela in the first place. It just ends up hitting my two primary goals very well: small and portable, but with the biggest screen you can cram into that size.
+ Linus bought two. One for him, and one for his daughter.
XPS 13 7th Gen Config Options

9370 Specifications
  • 8th Generation Intel® Quad Core™, i5 (US and Canada only) and i7 versions
  • Memory options: 4GB, 8GB or 16GB Dual Channel SDRAM
  • Storage options: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB or 1TB
  • 2x Thunderbolt™ 3
  • Headset jack
  • DC-In & DisplayPort 1x USB-C 3.1
  • MicroSD card reader
  • UltraSharp 4K Ultra HD (3840×2160) InfinityEdge touch display
    • FHD (1920 x 1080) InfinityEdge display
  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS preloaded
  • 1 year ProSupport
  • XPS 13 Coil Whine through headphones – Dell Community

DigitalOcean

Ubuntu MATE is creating a retrospective desktop operating system, for everyone

Plex vs Emby

Using Kodi Directly vs Plex/Emby

  • Plex and Emby are not as fast as just basic Kodi pointing at some files on a local disk.
  • Requires fairly reliable networking.
  • Much better media identification.
  • Real, easy to use for you and family streaming.
  • Plex sharing.

Plex and Emby Licensing

Plex
Emby
Emby with the premium Emby Premiere features unlocked.

At some point, the developers of Emby added a nasty nag screen before playback. Worse, you need to wait a few seconds before being able to dismiss it. They refuse to address removing it as seen here.
This is bullshit for a GPLv2 licensed product. Of course someone is going to fork Emby to remove it.
So while my main motivation was to remove the nag screen, unlocking all the premium features proved the simplest way.

Linux Academy

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