Everyone’s Linux desktop is getting better this week, well… Almost everyone.

Plus why Linux users should be using Firefox, some Gnome and MATE news, communIty, why the Linux desktop isn’t seeing as many native apps these days & more!

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Show Notes:

Follow Up / Catch Up

Specs for our new voice assistant device | See Mark II – Mycroft

A screen; because a picture is worth a thousand words. Who really wants to hear 6 days of temperature forecasts, when you can simply glance at a screen?

Welcome To The (Ubuntu) Bionic Age: Nautilus, a LTS and desktop icons

If you are following closely the news of various tech websites, one of the latest hot topic in the community was about Nautilus removing desktop icons. Let’s try to clarify some points to ensure the various discussions around it have enough background information and not reacting on emotions only as it could be seen lately. You will have both downstream (mine) and upstream (Carlos) perspectives here.

• Why Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Will Use an Older Version of Nautilus

1. Stick with Nautilus 3.26 and keep desktop icon support
2. Ship Nautilus 3.28 and Nemo to support desktop icons
3. Ship Nautilus 3.28 and use an extension to draw desktop icons

GNOME Photos: Happenings

Enjoy the Shadows and highlights operations fresh from the oven of GEGL’s workshop. Implementation of shadows and highlights is a port of DarkTable‘s operation.

Firefox 59+ is GTK3 only

Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278282#c76

Firefox 58.0 release overview

• Firefox 58 user profiles are not compatible with older versions of Firefox.
• Firefox 58 features performance improvements, new WebExtensions API, and other improvements.

Firefox 58.0 download and update

TING

• **Ting – mobile that makes sense

Ulauncher — Application launcher for Linux 🐧

Application launcher for Linux

Docker console UI and Dashboard for quick managing and inspecting of Containers and Images

Docker console UI and Dashboard for quick managing and inspecting of Containers and Images

OBS Studio v21 Released: Lua/Python Scripting, New Audio Meters, Ducking, Multiview, and lots more

Full Changelog/Downloads: https://github.com/jp9000/obs-studio/releases/tag/21.0.1

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

All Aboard The Meson Future Hype Train – elementary OS

One big difference you should notice immediately is that installing files is just an argument instead of a whole new method and Meson is generally smart about knowing where certain files (like executables) should be installed to.

MATE is Lookin Good!

MATE is landing new and improved support for HiDPI.

20 Years of LWN

Over the following years we have borne witness to a long series of events
that none of us could really have predicted. Linux got caught up in the dotcom boom and, with the VA Linux Systems IPO, came to epitomize its excesses, but when that boom went boom, Linux was still there, stronger than ever.

The SCO Group tried to steal our community’s work and turn it into its own
rent-generating machine; in the process of fending them off it was made
clear that the Linux kernel had one of the cleanest code bases around.
Companies discovered our little hobbyist system and invested billions into
it, massively accelerating development at all levels of the system.
We learned how to scale development communities from dozens of developers
up to many thousands of developers.

The security environment, which was initially defending against script
kiddies playing their own form of Capture the Flag, became a fight against
spammers, organized criminals, and nation states with vast resources.
Google bought an obscure phone operating system called Android and used it
to dominate the phone market; as a result, we got mobile devices that are
far more open than they would otherwise have been.

Linux became the base software supporting the bulk of the Internet economy;
some of our biggest contributors do not distribute Linux at all, but they
use it internally and want to help make it work better.

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

  Is Native Linux App Development In Decline?

Once up on a time us writing about ___”yet another music player”___was a meme-like weekly occurrence.

Same goes for video players, download managers, instant messengers, torrent apps, image editors, Twitter apps, image viewers, text editors, photo uploaders, etc — you name it, we probably wrote about it! It seemed, for a long while, that app developers were out there en masse, crafting quality apps to satisfy the full gamut of end-user needs.

These days the availability of new native Linux apps which cater to users of the most popular Linux distributions seem few and far between.