The future of Linux package management is here & there’s a lot of ideas on how to solve it. We discuss some of the more popular ones & how they might be impacting your Linux desktop much sooner than you expect.

Plus that awkward moment when a traditional desktop environment adopts a controversial UI modern element, the new generation of “perfect” Linux laptops & more!

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Show Notes:

Follow Up / Catch Up

Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi

The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly without drastically increasing the footprint of the device.

Mozilla’s super speedy new browser will be available for testing in June

Servo is a browser engine that was built from the ground up in the Rust language to specialize in performance, security, modularity and parallelism.

Mycroft Announces The OpenSTT Project – YouTube

Mycroft is announcing that we are going after the Watson AI XPrize, and our first project aimed at achieving this goal is OpenSTT, an initiative to create an open source speech-to-text model that products and services, the world over, will be able to make use of.

• https://youtu.be/cDRDZng92Bs?t=41s

DigitalOcean

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

MATE in 16.04 to support Client Side Decoration (CSD) and Header Bars

The attached screenshot shows a number of applications that use Client Side Decoration and Header Bars. They are pictured here running on Ubuntu MATE 16.04 daily using the Marco window manager with software compositing enabled.

You may not be a fan of CSD applications, but there are a good number of them and undoubtedly there will be many more released over the coming years. It would be remiss of the Ubuntu MATE team to not provide first class CSD application support for the upcoming LTS release. With these changes, Ubuntu MATE can finally bridge the gap between traditional and contemporary applications.

• [What is Client Side Decoration?]](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28650646/what-is-client-side-decoration)

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Is the Future Snappy?

Snappy are repackaged .deb packages, which bring its own libraries and therefore might be a bit bigger than usual debs.

• Advantages
• Developers can choose which version of libraries they want you to use
• If an update failed you can reverse to the last working one without any problems
• Apps are sandboxed and cannot modify or read files that they aren’t supposed to
• Cons
• Bigger files
• Developers have to update snaps if there is a security hole in a library
• Snaps are Ubuntu exclusive, afaik

The questions we have:

Its approach is nothing new: just bundled libs, as Windows does. This is a security nightmare.

• Could this lead to a security nightmare? All those linked libs?
• Why not bundle dependencies – Gentoo Wiki

How to create local repository for Ubuntu Snappy – Ask Ubuntu

You can “snappy install” a snap directly on a machine, but there isn’t an equivalent to the idea of a local repository.

Other Solutions:

• GNU’s advanced distro and transactional package manager — GuixSD

Dependable. The GNU Guix package manager, in addition to standard package management features, supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and more.

• Nix:The Purely Functional Package Manage
• Limba Project – Home

Limba provides developers with a way to easily create software bundles for their applications which run
on multiple Linux distributions.
It provides atomic upgrades of software, simultaneous installation of multiple
software versions and a simple way to obtain and upgrade software.

• Projects/SandboxedApps – GNOME Wiki!

The sandboxing is done with a set of technologies, including:

• cgroups
• namespaces
• selinux (not currently used)
• kdbus (interesting for the future, currently uses userspace filtering)
• wayland (because X11 is inherently insecure)
• However, sandboxing requires a lot of changes to application and new APIs for sandboxed access to resources. So, in the short term we will focus on the first goal.
• AppImage | Linux apps that run anywhere

Download an application, make it executable, and run! No need to install. No system libraries or system preferences are altered.

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Skylake-based Dell XPS 13 with Linux arrives in the US

The fifth-generation XPS 13 developer edition ships with a Core i7 processor, up to 16 GB of memory, and Ubuntu Linux.

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