Episode 425 Show Notes

Welcome to mintCast

the Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux

This is Episode 425!

This is Episode 425.5!

Recorded on Sunday, November 12, 2023

Trying out something new im Joe; I’m just Moss; I am have been then Bill; banging my head I’m Majid; and I’m Eric and I’ve got the touch

— Play Standard Intro —

  • First up in the news: Ubuntu 24.04 gets a name, Mozilla Doubles Down on Firefox DEB Package, Discord is now official on Flathub, scrcpy gets an update, LXQt 1.4.0 is released, Firefox Accounts gets a Mozilla rename, Brave launches an AI, there is a new Audacity, OpenELA forms to preserve RHEL access, Element gets a new license, Proton has a new app, Fedora 39 is released, and OBS Studio 30 is out;
  • In security and privacy: we got nothing;
  • Then in our Wanderings: Bill gets things linked up, Joe plays with Nextcloud, Moss shuffles his files around, Majid plays musical chairs, and Eric finally buys a tablet.
  • In our Innards section: we have a wonderful interview with YouTuber, infinitelyGalactic
  • And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

— Play News Transition Bumper —

The News

20 minutes

  • Ubuntu 24.04 gets a name joe
    • The next LTS version of Ubuntu is 24.04, due for release April 25 next year. It has been given the code name Noble Numbat, a small, marsupial anteater native to Australia. Daily builds are now available if you want an early peek at what’s coming up. It is expected to come with a new Linux kernel (either 6.7 or 6.8, based on timing), and GNOME 46 (due out in March).
      • Mozilla Doubles Down on Firefox DEB Package
    • From the Mozilla blog and also 9to5 Linux (via londoner)
  • At present, Mint users can get Firefox from the Mint repos which are updated within a day or two after the latest version is released by Mozilla. If you are using Ubuntu, or one of its flavours, then you are stuck with the Snap version. If, however, you want to get Firefox directly from Mozilla currently your only option is to download and install from a tar.bz2 file.
  • This is about to change. The nightly builds are now available as a .deb package by switching to Mozilla’s own APT repository. Adopting Mozilla’s Firefox Nightly .deb package offers multiple benefits:
    • you will get better performance thanks to our advanced compiler-based optimizations,
    • you will get hardened binaries with all security flags enabled during compilation,
    • you will get the latest updates as fast as possible because the package is incorporated into the Firefox release process,
    • you will not have to create your own .desktop file.
  • Following a period of testing, these packages will become available on the beta, esr, and release branches of Firefox.
  • Information on how to use the Mozilla APT repository are given in the Mozilla blog post linked above.
  • Discord is now Verified on Flathub Bill
    • from OMGUbuntu
    • Discord, the phenomenally popular proprietary chat platform, is now verified on Flathub.
    • For years, a Discord Flatpak app has been available on Flathub albeit without any official association, approval, or contribution from Discord itself. However, that’s finally changed.
    • Being verified on Flathub means an app is published “by its original developer or a third party approved by the developer”, according to Flathub documentation. Verified apps show a checkmark on the Flathub store page to let users know the software in question is legit.
    • This means users who install Discord from Flathub on Linux can be certain that the Discord app they are installing is legitimate and safe.
    • Linux users can also get Discord from Canonical’s snap store. However, it’s important to note that the Discord application in the snap store is “maintained by the Snapcrafters community” and is not officially endorsed or maintained by Discord.”
  • scrcpy v2.2 joe
    • from scrcpy GitHub
    • A new version of one of Joe’s favorite utilities, scrcpy, is out.
    • Changes since v2.1.1:
      • Add option to mirror camera (#241, #4213)
      • Add –pause-on-exit (#4130)
      • Rename –display (deprecated) to –display-id
      • Fix device disconnection detection with –no-video (#4207)
      • Accept –turn-screen-off without video playback (#4175)
      • Upgrade SDL to 2.28.4 in Windows releases
      • Upgrade platform-tools to 34.0.5 (adb) in Windows releases
      • Various technical fixes
  • LXQt 1.4.0 Released Bill
    • from lxqt blog
    • The LXQt team announces the release of LXQt 1.4.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.
      • LXQt 1.4.0 is based on Qt 5.15, the last LTS version of Qt5. If everything goes as planned, this is the last Qt5-based release – we’ll do our best to port the next release to Qt6, even if we’ll have to delay it.
      • lxqt-menu-data is released to replace lxmenu-data anywhere needed.
      • In LXQt’s file manager and its library, the user can now add the command for the default terminal, the state of split view is considered on restoring tabs of the last window, an SVG icon is added for PCManFM-Qt, password and anonymity settings of the mount dialog are remembered, and several fixes and enhancements are made to the codes.
      • QTerminal supports audible bell as an option. Also, Putty-style mouse button swap is supported, and Falcon color scheme is added.
      • LXQt’s image viewer has a minimal support for color spaces now.
    • NOTE: There are no new releases of lxqt-build-tools and lxqt-themes because they haven’t changed since their last releases. Of course, the former is essential to building LXQt 1.4.0.
    • New versions of other LXQt products are also released, such as PCManFM.
  • Why ‘Firefox accounts’ are becoming ‘Mozilla accounts’ Eric
    • from Mozilla blog
    • Over the past few years, a Firefox account has grown its support beyond the web browser. It’s now the authentication and account management tool for millions of users across Mozilla’s family of products. So, to reflect this expanding world of Mozilla services, we’ve made the decision to rename “Firefox accounts” to “Mozilla accounts.”
    • With this name change, we hope people who love Firefox will continue to support the open-source browser that kickstarted Mozilla’s journey. We also welcome them to explore our growing slate of Mozilla’s people-first products.
    • Want a more transparent online shopping experience? Try Fakespot. Looking to secure your internet connection? Check out Mozilla VPN. Relay will help protect your phone number and email addresses from spammers, while Monitor can help keep your sensitive data private. And if you hope to find and save the best content online, give Pocket a try.
  • Brave launches Leo AI joe
    • from Brave blog
    • Three months ago, Brave previewed Leo—the browser-native AI assistant—on its Nightly channel for developers and testers. Since then we’ve seen great adoption, with tens of thousands of users globally. With user feedback, we’ve been able to improve much faster than we’d hoped—on response-times, the quality of responses, even the product UI. Today, we’re excited to announce that Brave Leo is ready for all Brave users, available in desktop release 1.60.
    • With that testing, we also received requests for new features. The most common one has been to add different AI language models in Leo. To that end, we’re bringing our users advanced conversational AI experiences through Brave Leo Premium—our new paid option featuring Claude Instant, Anthropic’s state-of-the-art AI assistant.
    • Leo, Brave’s browser AI assistant, can help with all sorts of tasks. It can create real-time summaries of webpages or videos. It can answer questions about content, or generate new content. It can even translate pages, analyze them, rewrite them, and more. Whether you’re looking for information, trying to solve a problem, or creating content, Leo can help.
    • Leo combines this easy, free access to AI with the privacy focus of Brave. Chats with Leo are private, anonymous, and secure. Leo doesn’t record chats, or use them for model training, and no account or login is required to use Leo. With cutting-edge technology and privacy, Brave Leo pushes the boundaries of typical AI chatbot services.
  • Audacity 3.4 Released with New Music Workflows, Time Stretch Tool Bill
    • from OMGUbuntu
    • A brand new version of Audacity, the open-source audio workstation, has been released.
    • Audacity 3.4 includes a number of new features and improvements, include new music workflows that will greatly enhance the editor’s appeal with musicians.
    • One of the biggest new features in Audacity 3.4 is a new Beat and Measures grid. This new view makes it easier to align clips to a project’s tempo and rhythm, with options to show subdivisions, and snap clips to the nearest beat.
    • Also included is a new Time Stretch tool. This makes it a breeze to change the duration of an audio clip without affecting the pitch (which most traditional time stretch tools do). It does this using a new algorithm ‘specifically made for music’ which, the project says, outperforms commercial options.
    • Finally, there’s a new exporter view that groups together all options into a single window, no need to pop up different dialogs to adjust things first. Audacity say “the exporter now features the native file browser, giving you access to all your bookmarked folders”.
  • CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE unite behind OpenELA to take on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Majid
    • from ZDNet
    • When Mike McGrath, Red Hat Core Platforms vice president, announced that Red Hat was putting new restrictions on who could access Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)’s code, other Linux companies that depended on RHEL’s code for their own distro releases were, in a word, unhappy.
    • Three of them, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE, came together to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). Their united goal was to foster “the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free enterprise Linux source code.” Now, the first OpenELA code release is available.
    • As Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE’s chief technology and product officer, said in a statement, “We’re pleased to deliver on our promise of making source code available and to continue our work together to provide choice to our customers while we ensure that Enterprise Linux source code remains freely accessible to the public.”
    • Why are they doing this? Gregory Kurtzer, CIQ’s CEO, and Rocky Linux’s founder, explained:
      • “Organizations worldwide standardized on CentOS because it was freely available, followed the Enterprise Linux standard, and was well supported. After CentOS was discontinued, it left not only a gaping hole in the ecosystem but also clearly showed how the community needs to come together and do better. OpenELA is exactly that—the community’s answer to ensuring a collaborative and stable future for all professional IT departments and enterprise use cases.”
  • A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends – Majid
    • from Element blog
    • After considerable thought, and taking particular inspiration from Grafana, the folks at Element have chosen to pursue future development of Synapse (the main Matrix server), Dendrite (our second generation Matrix server) and associated server-side projects (e.g. sydent, sygnal) under the terms of the Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3 – maintaining the code in new repositories in the Element GitHub org, forked from the Apache-licensed repositories in the Matrix.org GitHub org (originally donated by Element). This is still the same team of developers who have been working on Matrix since it began in 2014, still developing and releasing Synapse as open source – and in fact, arguably even more Free and Libre than before thanks to the AGPL. Client-side code developed by Element, including projects donated to the Foundation, is not affected.
    • The benefit of switching to AGPLv3 is that it obliges downstream developers to contribute back to the core project – either by releasing their modifications as open source for the benefit of the whole Matrix ecosystem, or by contacting Element for an alternative license. Future code contributors to Synapse will need to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) based on the Apache Software Foundation’s CLA, giving Element the right to license the contribution commercially to third party proprietary forks so we can use it to help fund Matrix core development in future. (EDIT: to be clear, the sole reason for a CLA is to allow Element to dual-license the software as per https://gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html – not to give Element the ability to relicense to a non-OSI license in future. After all, Element already had that ability with the Apache license, and has not used it.)
    • This preserves the Free and Open Source nature of these Matrix implementations under an OSI-approved open source license (AGPLv3), while encouraging proprietary forks to contribute to the development costs of the underlying project.
  • Proton releases a brand-new Linux app with many new features for its Proton VPN service – Majid
    • from AlternativeTo
    • Proton has unveiled a completely redesigned Linux application for its Proton VPN service. The new Proton VPN Linux app, which has been rebuilt from scratch, is efficient, elegant, and modular, allowing for seamless integration of new features as they are developed.
    • The new Linux app introduces a host of new features. Among them is the NetShield Ad-blocker, a DNS filtering feature designed to block ads, trackers, and malware. It also includes a kill switch that prevents your real IP from being exposed if your VPN connection drops, a VPN Accelerator designed to enhance speed, and a Moderate NAT which can solve connection issues during multiplayer online gaming or WebRTC video conversations.
    • The new Linux app also boosts P2P performance and can auto-connect at startup. It includes OpenVPN DCO, which provides speed performance equivalent to WireGuard. Another noteworthy feature is Secure Core, a double VPN security solution where the initial server is located only in countries with robust privacy laws.
    • The new Proton VPN Linux app is officially supported on the latest versions of Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.
  • Fedora Linux 39 is officially here! Eric
    • from Fedora Magazine
    • On November 6, 2003, the Fedora Project released the Fedora Core 1. One day and twenty years later, we’re pleased to bring you Fedora Linux 39, our complete, community-built operating system for desktops, laptops, servers, the cloud, edge devices — and just about anything else you can think of.
    • As always, you should make sure your system is fully up-to-date before upgrading from a previous release. Can’t wait to get started? Download while you read!
    • Fedora Workstation now features GNOME 45, which brings better performance and many usability enhancements, including a new workspace switcher and a much-improved image viewer.
    • If you’re looking for a different desktop experience, our Budgie Special Interest Group has created Fedora Onyx, a Budgie-based “Atomic” desktop in the spirit of Fedora Silverblue.
    • Of course, that’s not all — we also have updated desktop flavors featuring KDE Plasma Desktop, Xfce, Cinnamon, and more.
    • Fedora Cloud images will be officially available in Microsoft Azure (in addition to Google Cloud and AWS). Also, our cloud images now are configured so that cloud-init can (at your option) install updates and reboot when first provisioned, so you know you’re running with our latest security updates.
    • As always, we’ve updated many, many other packages as we work to bring you the best of everything the free and open source software world has to offer. Fedora Linux 39 includes gcc 13.2, binutils 2.40, glibc 2.38, gdb 13.2, and rpm 4.19. It also has updates to popular programming language stacks, including Python 3.12 and Rust 1.73.
    • Of particular note, we include the latest version of Inkscape, the popular vector graphics illustration and drawing tool. Inkscape also turned 20 yesterday — we’re digital twins! Congratulations to everyone in that awesome project as well.
  • OBS Studio 30 Released with Support for Intel QSV H264, HEVC, and AV1 on Linux
    • from 9to5 Linux
    • Highlights of OBS Studio 30 include support for Intel QSV (Quick Sync Video) H264, HEVC, and AV1 on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, HDR playback support for DeckLink output, 10-bit capture support for DeckLink devices, as well as YouTube Live Control Panel when streaming to YouTube.
    • This release also introduces a new “Safe Mode” that will let you run the app without third-party plugins, scripting, and websockets. The “Safe Mode” will be prompted to the user when an improper shutdown is detected, for troubleshooting purposes, but it can also be manually activated from the “Help” menu.
    • Other new features in OBS Studio 30 include an updated graphical user interface with a redesigned status bar that provides users with more organized and structured information with more representative and recognizable icons, and a new option in the “Docks” menu for full-height docks so that the dock can take up the entire height of the OBS window.
    • Among other noteworthy changes, the OBS Studio 30 defaults to sorting audio/video encoder dropdowns by name, adds the ability to arrange filters using drag and drop, enables GPU scaling for “Rescale Output” when possible, and adds logging for scene changes in Studio Mode.
    • Moreover, it adds support for grayscale MJPEG in V4L / DirectShow sources, improves the settings interface of the “Text (FreeType 2)” source, adds IPv6 support for RTMP streaming output with IPv4 fallback for dual-stack streaming services, and adds the ability to set FFmpeg options for VA-API.
    • Last but not least, OBS Studio 30 improves various functionality, such as the FFmpeg VA-API AMD encoder video quality, lossless recording with fragmented MP4/MOV, the VLC media source, and logging of high frame rate video capture devices on Linux. For more details, check out the release notes.
    • Meanwhile, you can download OBS Studio 30 right now from the release notes page linked above as binaries for Ubuntu systems, as well as a source tarball if you fancy compiling it from sources. OBS Studio is also available for installation as a Flatpak app on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution from Flathub.

— Play Security Transition Bumper —

Security and Privacy

10 minutes

— Play Wanderings Transition Bumper —

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

30 minutes (~5-8 mins each)

  • Bill
    • Well I don’t have much to report this time around in terms of things I’ve done except to announce rather gleefully that I’ve begun adding proper chapters and clickable timestamps to the show notes and RSS Feed. Listeners of the audio only version of the show will now have two ways to navigate around in the show to get to the sections they want to focus on. The first episode to feature the new addition was 424. If you use a podcast catcher like Antennapod, you will now notice the “chapters” button. From there you can choose from all the sections of the show. In the show notes, the timestamps are also linked to the corresponding sections of the show that way you have a way to navigate the show even if you’re simply listening from the website. Much of the motivation behind the effort was the need to provide a way to skip to the next section if perhaps we ramble on in our wanderings about inflammatory topics, or we are simply discussing something listeners have little or not interest in. I was really excited to get it up and running, and I hope it is useful.
    • Last week’s Linux OTC was a lot of fun. We got into Majid’s Feren OS installation. Which I found interesting. The show just seems run off the rails almost instantly. I’m really happy with the success of the show. When I decided to make OTC I imagined a show with no real structure, and no pre-decided topic. The show would have to live and die by the quality of the personalities of the hosts. It’s been really fun just relaxing and talking about Linux with friends and just allowing the show to flow in whatever direction the topics organically take us.
    • On a previous episode I mentioned replacing my AMD FirePro W5100 with the Radeon Pro WX7100. I also described installing and using the proprietary AMDGPU PRO driver. At first I thought I was doing the right thing because I was getting some amazing FPS readings from GLX Gears. In the tens of thousands, in fact. Then while trying to record an episode of mintCast, OBS studio was unable to do simple window capturing. After some research I found it was entirely because of the proprietary driver. I then returned to the opensource driver and all is well with the universe. From what I can gather it has something to do with the new video encoding framework used by the proprietary driver which is not supported by OBS. I’m sure there are ways to get things working, but for now I’m happy with the performance I’m getting from the opensource driver, and I don’t have to struggle with the ethics of the choice.
  • Joe
    • I set up Nextcloud so that I could actually use it. I have had the flatpak of Nextcloud desktop setup for a while but I have not slogged trough the settings so that I could use anything other than the mintCast storage space. I wanted to test some things out on my own so I had to figure it out.
    • The problem that I had was getting the trusted_domains set up. Me and a friend spent hours looking through and trying to get it figured out
    • Most of the documentation said to change the config file but because this was the flatpak I could not find it. I finally found the commands for nextcloud.occ which let me add trusted hosts which allows me to access my Nextcloud storage from anywhere.
      • sudo nextcloud.occ config:system:set trusted_domains # –value=URL
      • I also want to mention thanks Mordancy and yes I do realize occ was one of the suggestions that you made and we could not figure out at first
    • I was then able to also add this address to my phone and started syncing all of my photos and videos so that I was once again backing up locally.
    • But that was not the main reason that I did this. I set this up so that I could use Joplin for a couple of weeks and see how I liked it compared to standard notes.
    • It took a bit more research and some command line tools to get first get the decrypted backup of all my standard notes notes and convert them to something that Joplin could read. I also then needed to parse those notes in a different way because Joplin does things a little bit different. The file/sections is pretty cool. But while I was syncing to next cloud the first time there was a problem and I had to restart which wiped out half my notes and I had to re-import them and parse them again.
    • With that all done I was also able to setup on my phone and also link to the Nextcloud instance. It syncs but maybe not as fast as I would like. It does autosync every 5 minutes but sometimes I still need to force both machines to sync even after a sync.
    • I also setup on a couple of my other computers. I don’t need to setup Nextcloud on all of them just have the webdav link ready to use and the passwords that I use for Joplin
    • I am starting to get used to Joplin and think it is ok even if the syncing is not real time and I have had some small issues with conflicting copies. I am going to keep using it for now.
    • it seems like a decent tool so far but with the setup of Nextcloud as well it is a bit more work to get things up and running over something like standard notes and I cannot put an extra password protection on the notes that I want to.
    • I also decided to avoid watching YouTube videos for a while and see how that went. I was surprised with how much more I was able to get done and the amount of audio that I was able to listen to.
    • But I still enjoy some of the things on youtube so I have gone back through and started getting rid of some of the subscriptions that I don’t enjoy as much. Some of the political ones and some of the ones that are not as good as they used to be like LTT
    • I was able to put together another set of those home made earbuds with some of the drivers that I had sitting around. I did have some issues finding drivers that worked in my collection of parts and was a little frustrated the first time I came across one that did not work at all in the trouble shooting process. Turned out to be 3 of them I had the issue with but after the first two I made sure to have a test set so that I could make sure that the connection on the MMCX side was not the issue. it took a while but I got it done. Now I have a grey set and an orange set and I am going to make a black set next. Which is already printed and ready to go just need to pull the parts together and do the work.
    • I do have to wonder how a really cheap set of earbuds would sound with a new casing and some different padding.
  • Moss
    • I took it upon myself to reorganize my external storage on my Studio computer. I have two 512 Gb Silicon Power SSDs in my Wavlink ST-336A “toaster”. My saved ISOs were taking up too much space in the Downloads directory of sdb “SPDYGNZLZ” and there wasn’t that much on sdc “SLOPOKRMRZ”, but too much to just move the ISO directory over. By the end, SLOPOKRMRZ holds only the ISOs and the Timeshift directory, everything else (documents, pictures, music files, etc.) is on SPDYGNZLZ. That took a few hours.
    • I’m running LMDE 6 “Faye” on my test laptop and also on my Studio machine. On the Studio computer I have replaced Cinnamon with MATE, using information given me by Londoner. I really like it, and am having trouble deciding whether I should just use it in place of Mint 21.2.
    • I’ve had to take a couple days off work. As I’m only working 2 days per week max, that hurts, but we can get by. It’s getting close to Suzanne’s knee surgery and there will be more days I will need to take off. Hopefully she will be recovered by the time we go to our annual music convention in Atlanta the first weekend of January.
    • Dale, Dylan and I have been trying and failing to attract new writers or other contributors to It’s Moss website. At this time, it looks to be fading into obscurity, if indeed it ever arose from that level. We have had some excellent articles, especially Dale’s foray into the computer desktop (which also was picked up by Full Circle Magazine).
  • Majid
    • Apologies for missing the last episode. It was the kids school holidays, and me and the wife used it to get a few days away! Went to Bristol which has some very nice food!
    • I seem to be playing distro-hopping musical chairs. When I was last one, I was running Manjaro, Feren and Ubuntu Gnome. I am still running the same distros but on different devices. I find that Feren is a good KDE based on Mint (esp since Mint dont do an official KDE Spin anywore). I’ve put Manjaro on my main (touchscreen) laptop. Gnome makes a lot of sense on a touchscreen. The Arch way is something I’m going have to get used to. Apparently Bill uses Arch (who knew?) Thanks to Bill for helping out. Putting Ubuntu GNOME on my work machine. This is a dual-booter, and I wanted a distro that works well with that. I dual boot because the stylus input on windows 11 is good, and also cos I used Samsung Dex. Also it keeps secure boot working. Still get bitlocker prompts when booting into that windows partition though.
    • I am looking for a good linux email client that works with Exchange. I’ve been trying for a few years now (so as to completely move away from windows). Evolution has a plug-in but seems to be problematic in workig. Thunderbird has a paid plugin, which i decided against. So using the web app at present. I had tried BlueMail which is available for linux. Not FOSS and quite buggy. Might look back into this.
    • Enjoyed the last episode of Linux OTC. Some good conversations.
    • Cheap Android tablets have got good, like really good. Bought an Honor Pad X9 for my daughter. For about 150 quid, its basically all the computer she needs, whether its for school, play (i hate roblox) or messaging via skype (im surprised the kids are even using it, but hey ho)
    • I think I’m the only guy liking the new Frasier. Its very 90s, which is agood thing for me!
    • Bought a Nissan Micra for my son.
    • Been listening to the new albums by Wargasm (which has a nice Fred Durst cameo), and the Bullet for my Valentine deluxe reissue. Rock on!
    • Winter has started in the UK. This is relevant for me as we get a lot of sick kids coming through the hospital doors. Got my 24hr shift tomorrow, not looking forward to it!.
  • Eric
    • I haven’t had much time in the past few weeks to do much other than trying out a new (to me) tablet PC. I finally did enough research to feel comfortable buying something and what I ended up with is a Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 which has an 8th Gen Intel® CoreTM i5-8350U (6M Cache, Quad Core, up to 3.6GHz, 15W TDP), vPro, Intel® Integrated UHD Graphics 620, 16GB of RAM at 2400 MHz, a 512GB NVME SSD, 12.3″ 1920×1280 3:2 WVA display at 340 nits. For being five years old, it is an impressively capable machine, particularly given the tiny form factor. The battery is only has about 60% capacity which isn’t unexpected for an older device. I get about three hours which, even if the battery were perfect, would mean that I’d only get about five which is pretty terrible. There have to be some optimizations I can use to improve this. I haven’t had a chance to test TLP or anything of the sort yet.

      It came with Windows 10 installed, which I updated to Windows 11. I configured it to dual boot with, at the time, Fedora Workstation 39 Beta, which has since been released. I could never make much sense of vanilla Gnome, that is until I used it on a touchscreen device. Now it all makes sense, although I still feel like it’s lacking a few things. In particular, and I don’t feel like arguing the point, it needs a system tray for apps running in the background. Yes, there are other, more cumbersome, ways to deal with background apps but they expect tray icons and so do I. Luckily, there are extensions available to fix this and other shortcomings. But that example aside, Gnome getting out of the way, supporting gestures, and otherwise just being easy to use from a touch perspective is impressive. I do wish the on screen keyboard was more full featured but apparently there are alternatives out there.

      Using this device hasn’t been perfect but it is letting me achieve what I set out to which is to use Linux on a tablet device. I have also been able to test Wayland since it’s the only non-Nvidia machine I own. I can happily say that I haven’t missed X11, at least not yet. I look forward to testing different distros and desktops over time to find the best option for me.

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Linux Innards

30 minutes (~5-8 minutes each)

An Interview with infinitelyGalactic (iG)

  • How did you end up on Linux?
  • What have been your favorite Linux distros (besides Mint)?
  • Have you settled on a daily driver? Which one? Why?
  • Do you use any other OS’s? Why?
  • How long have you had your channel on YouTube?
  • How long does it take you to edit and produce a video?
  • Do you do all your own editing and recording or do you have a team?
  • Have you had any takedown notices from YT?
  • Do you use other systems, i.e., PeerTube, Odyssee, etc.?
  • What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in your time in tech/linux?
  • How was it different when you launched initially to your relaunch after a hiatus?
  • What is your opinion on linux on tablets?
  • To what do you credit your ongoing interest and motivation to not only using Linux but also making content?
  • Did you ever feel pressure to grow your channel because people expect it or were you content to just do your thing?
  • Do you feel like creating content is something you’ll always be interested in?

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Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

  • 🙁

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Check This Out

10 minutes

Housekeeping & Announcements

  • Thank you for listening to this episode of mintCast!
  • If you see something that you’d like to hear about, tell us!

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Wrap-up

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

  • Someone for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

— Play Closing Music and Standard Outro —

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