Chris discovers he’s being snooped on by his ISP, we discuss some Linux friendly solutions solve the situation. Is Linux Mint 18 really the best Linux distro every? Or should Ubuntu 16.04 be getting more of the credit?

Plus our chat with a Matrix.org developer, Solus goes rolling, Unity on Windows & building a long-term financially sustainable open source product.

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Follow Up / Catch Up

​Linux Mint 18: The best desktop — period | ZDNet

I’ve been using Linux desktops since the leading desktop front-end was Bash. Things have changed in those 25 years. Today, the best Linux desktop is the latest version of Linux Mint: Linux Mint 18 Sarah with the Cinnamon 3.0 interface.

• Linux Mint 18 reviews roundup | InfoWorld

Latest Vivaldi Browser Snapshot Improves Tab Hibernation on GNU/Linux Distros

“Good news for Linux users! You can now hibernate tabs while the browser is running,” said Magnus Peter Langeland. “Choose Hibernate Tab to hibernate the selected tab or Hibernate Background Tabs to hibernate all other tabs in the window. Oh and remember, you cannot hibernate a tab while you are viewing its contents.”

ICSI Netalyzr — Command-line Client

Debug your Internet.

• Any good Linux friendly VPN providers?

• 3G and 4G LTE Cell Coverage Map – OpenSignal

DigitalOcean

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

You Can Now Run Ubuntu Linux with the Unity Desktop on Top of Windows 10 – Updated

After doing all sorts of tricks in the CompizConfig Settings Manager (CSSM) GUI configuration tool for Compiz, and using a combination of VcXsrv and XLaunch, two applications for configuring and setting up a Windows X server, he has managed to run Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS with the Unity desktop environment on top of Windows 10.

Linux’s AV Stack Adding Awesome Features

• Beamforming in PulseAudio | Arun Raghavan

Beamforming as a concept is used in various aspects of signal processing including radio waves, but I’m going to be talking about it only as applied to audio. The basic idea is that if you have a number of microphones (a mic array) in some known arrangement, it is possible to “point” or steer the array in a particular direction, so sounds coming from that direction are made louder, while sounds from other directions are rendered softer (attenuated).

Practically speaking, it should be easy to see the value of this on a laptop, for example, where you might want to focus a mic array to point in front of the laptop, where the user probably is, and suppress sounds that might be coming from other locations. You can see an example of this in the webcam below. Notice the grilles on either side of the camera — there is a microphone behind each of these.

• Introducing GStreamer VR Plug-ins and SPHVR – Lubosz’s Blog

Pronounced sphere, SPHVR is a python video player using gst-plugins-vr. Currently it is capable of opening a URL of an equirectangular mapped spherical video.

CopperheadOS – Secure Android

CopperheadOS currently supports the Nexus 5, Nexus 9, Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P.

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Nylas N1

• Nylas Pro

But right now, Nylas N1 is also free as in free beer, and that’s a problem. Due to its popularity, the API traffic for N1 users has dramatically eclipsed the combined volume of all other apps built on the Nylas Cloud APIs. We already sync several hundred terabytes of data for our users and are adding tens of thousands of new users each month. It’s costing us real dollars.

• Does anyone here use Nylas?

Dekko Is Shaping Up Nicely for Desktop Convergence

• Dekko developer Dan Chapman shared some images of a new, converged Dekko for the desktop on Google+, under the title “An all new Dekko is coming!”.

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

What’s Going on with Matrix.org?

• Ruma – A Matrix homeserver written in Rust.

Matrix is an open specification for an online communication protocol. It includes all the features you’d expect from a modern chat platform including instant messaging, group chats, audio and video calls, searchable message history, synchronization across all your devices, and end-to-end encryption. Matrix is federated, so no single company controls the system or your data. You can use an existing server you trust or run your own, and the servers synchronize messages seamlessly. Learn more in the Introduction to Matrix.

• Say Hello To Vector! — Medium

This week, we’re officially launching Vector, a forward-looking open source collaboration app, and the very first production-ready application built on top of the Matrix open standard. In fact Vector Web has been around for a bit, growing and being polished with the help of a passionate community of pioneers and they’ve done a great job of supporting us with useful feedback! And now the mobile apps are out! So today Vector is ready to be shared more widely as a proper beta.

• Interview with Matrix Dev

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The post One NAT to Rule Them | LINUX Unplugged 153 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Performance tips for keeping your Linux install running like new, some basic tricks & some advanced tips.

Why Microsoft’s new Surface Book might be able to run Linux & we reflect on the larger issues behind the recent public exits from the Linux Kernel development team & more!

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Pre-Show:

• Rover Electrical Upgrade | Rover Log 10

Feedback:

• A World Without Linux | The Linux Foundation

World Without Linux Episode #1: What’s the Name of That Song?

Remembering who sings your favorite song is a lot harder without Linux.

• N1 Is A Beautiful Open Source Email App for Linux – OMG! Ubuntu!

N1 is a new open source e-mail app from Created by Nylas Inc., built using React, Flux, and Electron.

Like a web-browser or modern text editor, N1 is designed to be built on and improved through extensions.

Rover Log

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Surface Book – The ultimate laptop

Ultra-thin, meticulously crafted, with incredible screen resolution. This is the ultimate laptop.

• Hands On: Microsoft Surface Book | PCMag.com

The latching mechanism has a wide electrical connector, no doubt PCIe-based to facilitate communication between the GPU and the rest of the system.

DigitalOcean

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

Keeping Linux Performing Well.

Tips and tricks for keeping your Linux box in top performance.

• If you gotta swap, swap on a sep disk

Creating your swap files on a separate disk can also help quite a bit, especially if your machine swaps frequently. It happens if you do not have enough RAM for your environment. Using KDE with all the features and applications that come along may require several GiB of memory, whereas a tiny window manager with console applications will perfectly fit in less than 512 MiB of memory.

• XFS – ArchWiki

Although the extent-based nature of XFS and the delayed allocation strategy it uses significantly improves the file system’s resistance to fragmentation problems, XFS provides a filesystem defragmentation utility (xfs_fsr, short for XFS filesystem reorganizer) that can defragment the files on a mounted and active XFS filesystem. It can be useful to view XFS fragmentation periodically.

• Is it REALLY worth Tuning your IO scheduler?

The kernel supports different schedulers for storage disk in-/output (IO). These are the CFQ scheduler (Completely Fair Queuing), the NOOP and Deadline. Another, the BFQ (Budget Fair Scheduler) is available in the linux-zen kernel.

A HDD has spinning disks and head that move physically to the required location. Such structure leads to following characteristics:

• random latency it quite high, for modern HDD it is ~10ms (ignoring a disk controller write buffer).
• sequential access provides much higher throughput. In this case head needs to move less distance.

In case if we have a lot of running processes that make IO requests to different parts of storage (i.e. random access) then we can expect that a disk handles ~100 IO requests per second. Because modern systems can easily generate load much higher than 100 requests per second we have a queue of requests that have to wait for access to the storage. One way to improve throughput is to linearize access, i.e. order waiting requests by its logical address and always choose the closest request. Historically this was the first Linux IO scheduler called elevator scheduler.

One of the problems with the elevator algorithm is that it makes suffer processes with sequential access. Such processes read a block of data then process it for several microseconds then read next block and so on. The elevator scheduler does not know that the process is going to read another block nearby and, thus, moves to another request at some other location. To overcome the problem anticipatory IO scheduler was added. For synchronous requests this algorithm waits for a short amount of time before moving to another request.

While these schedulers try to improve total throughput they also might leave some unlucky requests waiting for a very long time.

• Anything-sync-daemon – ArchWiki

• Linux Performance Tuning – Linux Foundation Training

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Going my own way

In the end it’s a mixture of just being tired of dealing with the crap associated with Linux development and realising that by continuing to put up with it I’m tacitly encouraging its continuation, but I can’t be bothered any more. And, thanks to the magic of free software, it turns out that I can avoid putting up with the bullshit in the kernel community and get to work on the things I’m interested in doing. So here’s a kernel tree with patches that implement a BSD-style securelevel interface. Over time it’ll pick up some of the power management code I’m still working on, and we’ll see where it goes from there. But, until there’s a significant shift in community norms on LKML, I’ll only be there when I’m being paid to be there. And that’s improved my mood immeasurably.

Closing a door | The Geekess

I am no longer a part of the Linux kernel community.

Runs Linux from the people:

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Post Show:

• Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles

The post Kernel of Truth | LINUX Unplugged 113 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.