mintCast 230 – Linux Mint 17.2 KDE & Xfce
230]
Introduction:
- Rob’s Xfce woes…XFCE window borders missing! (keheliya.blogspot.com)
News:
- Putting Lipstick on a Penguin – Ken Starks (fossforce.com)
- More Surprises for Windows 10 Users – Christine Hall (fossforce.com)
- Privacy Badger 1.0 – New Ways to Stop Sneaky Trackers (lwn.net) (eff.org)
- LibreOffice 5.0 stands out from the office suite crowd
(documentfoundation.org)
Main Topic: Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela – KDE & Xfce
- Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” Xfce – (Released!) (What’s New) (Release Notes)
- Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” KDE – (Released!) (What’s New) (Release Notes)
Website:
- Linux Mint – Home page with download links (linuxmint.com)
Tip:
- A Quick and Easy Guide to KDE KIO slaves (maketecheasier.com)
Pre-Show Music:
- Beautiful Way by Keffy Kay (jamendo.com)
- Should Have Shut My Mouth by Jazz Street Trio (jamendo.com)
Podcast Announcements:
- LinuxCon North America – August 17-19 (Seattle, WA, USA)
- Texas Linux Fest – August 21-22 (San Marcos, TX, USA) (Call for Papers)
- Ohio LinuxFest – October 2-3, 2015 (Columbus, OH, USA) (Call for Presentations)
- LinuxCon Europe – October 5-7 (Dublin, Ireland)
- OggCamp – October 30-Nov 1 (Liverpool, UK)
More Information:
Hosts: Rob, Scott, and Joe
Live Stream every other Sunday 2:00 p.m.(Central): mintcast.org/livestream
Contact Us:
- Forum: forums.linuxmint.com (rarely)
- Email: [email protected]
- Twitter: @mintCast @Linux_Mint @3dbeef @txhawkins @JoeRessington
- IRC: irc.spotchat.org – #mintcast, or irc.freenode.net – #mintcast
- Google+: mintCast
More Linux Mint info: website, blog, forums, community
Credits:
Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). Podcast bumpers provided by Oscar.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Hi Guys
Half way through listening to your latest podcast and felt I ought to send this before I forgot (same problem as you Rob).
I was interested in your comments about Windows 10. I fear it is worse that it seems in that has iceberg tendencies:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/
I have been using Privacy Badger for a while now. It seems to block most ads without breaking many websites. It was working well enough for me that I put it on my wife’s computer as well, and I have only had to disable it once or twice to unbreak something for her. I have sympathy for websites trying to make money to pay their bills, so I feel bad using something designed purely to block ads. I like that Privacy Badger uses an agnostic algorithm rather than a blacklist of ad servers. If a website is going to load itself down with trackers, I don’t feel so bad about blocking its ads.
Both Rob and Joe like to harp on memory usage, but measuring RAM use is fairly meaningless on modern operating systems. Numbers reported by tools like top don’t tell the real story. For example, the VSS memory statistic for a process includes everything mapped into a process’s address space including open files, dynamic libraries, shared memory segments, and so forth. And the kernel actively tries to keep as much cached in RAM as possible (some of which is going to be files, not virtual memory), and as much of the process’s virtual memory in real RAM as it can, according to the kernel’s tracking of the working set.
Sure not booting into a desktop GUI will show much less RAM in use. But showing a lot of RAM in use does not mean a desktop is necessarily heavy. So I’m not surprised nor horrified that Rob’s KDE desktop is happily sitting on 1 GB of his 8 GB of RAM, doing nothing and running no other programs. Cut your total RAM to 1 GB and see what happens. Try 512. Probably no modern environment will run below 512 these days, but try it for fun. That’s the real way to determine how heavy or light a system is, and how much RAM is actually required. A virtual machine is a decent way to play with this. Looking forward to hearing your results of this type of testing methodology.
In my opinion Mint with cinnamon is a great version to for windows users. A couple months ago I had installed cinnamon mint 17.2 on a friends old laptop. It works close enough to windows that he had zero issues getting used to it, I did some minor tweaks to mint and libre before he got it. The next day he easily found the option to extend the time before it went to sleep. It’s been almost 2 months without any issues, he knows it’s linux and not windows and everything just works for his uses.
I think this kind of user knowing it’s linux, and it just working is the best kind of passive advocate for linux on the desktop. If it was dressed up like windows instead of just having things in the general place he expects them I think it would be even more confusing, it would look like windows but it wouldn’t act like windows when it matters. The lack of knowledge that it’s linux, and to expect small differences would cause more frustration than anything else in my opinion.
Rob, memory is the second thing to go. I… don’t… remember… the first…