[{"content":"First, why would I ever do this? My old laptop is many times better. I had some use for it, which I will explain in another article, but once I got the Acer Chromebook 311 11H, I decided to use it as a personal laptop for a short time just out of curiosity. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I will spoil anything if I say it was bad. But it surprisingly wasn\u0026rsquo;t bad at some things.\nThe specs All components were somewhere between the cheapest and even cheaper:\nMediatek MT8183 processor (a cheap ARM CPU for tablets, with 4 performance cores and 4 power efficient ones) 4 GB RAM 64 GB eMMC disk 11.6 inch HD LCD display ChromeOS WiFi 5 USB-C with charging and DisplayPort support (but its GPU can\u0026rsquo;t render QHD or more) USB 2.0 port 3.5 mm jack 36 Wh battery (advertised battery life of 15 hours, seems to be closer to 13) Its adverts seem to focus on battery life, good keyboard, ChromeOS\u0026rsquo; simplicity of use and good WiFi and Bluetooth. Turned out the battery life was really great, it seemed to last for around 13 hours under regular use, with no effort to save power (no wonder when it has a tablet CPU). The keyboard was okay, but that was mainly because the laptop\u0026rsquo;s designers weren\u0026rsquo;t even trying to make it thin, leaving enough space for the keyboard. WiFi seemed about as fast as the WiFi of my other, far more expensive laptop (but downloads were bottlenecked by the CPU at about 7 MB/s). So, no lies there, only a little embellishment.\nComparison with a Dell XPS 15\nThe overall power consumption was between 2 and 3 watts when idle, and could go up roughly to 7 watts when loaded.\nThe disk size seemed like the most limiting part. You have only 64 GB for everything, out of which around 51 GB is available to the user. Google Drive is seamlessly integrated into its file manager to compensate for it in some scenarios. I suppose it can be worked around by sticking a small USB flash drive into the USB 2.0 port and keeping it there permanently. Small ones that don\u0026rsquo;t reach much outside of the USB port and thus aren\u0026rsquo;t mechanically obstructive have capacities up to 256 GB. Of course, with the USB 2.0 port occupied, a Bluetooth mouse is necessary (or using only the touchpad, which is actually quite good).\nThe mechanical build When I first held it in my hand, it felt like a toy. Light (weighs 1 kg), small, made of weak plastic that bends easily. The whole laptop isn\u0026rsquo;t thin, it has similar thickness than a Dell XPS 15. Hinges were okay, opening reveals a small display with wide margins, a keyboard of regular laptop size covering all of its width and multitouch touchpad.\nThe overall size allows it to fit into the tablet room of small bags, but it\u0026rsquo;s thicker than a tablet.\nFits into a small backpack\u0026rsquo;s tablet section\nChromeOS ChromeOS is Google\u0026rsquo;s Linux distribution with its own desktop environment and its own application installer. Obviously, the Chrome browser is its integral part, but it has many other utility apps. It can also run Android apps from Play Store.\nI expected it to be a platform designed for casual users similar to MacOS, with more focus on the browser. This was somewhat true, but it turned out to be more about simplification than thinking different. Its control was similar to Windows or Ubuntu, shortcuts were fairly usual, window buttons were as one expected them, mouse worked as expected. I was delighted to learn that it used the programmer keyboard layout, at least for Czech and Slovak. A few things were different but configurable, I could disable mouse acceleration, set focus to follow mouse, set functional buttons to work as F1-F10 buttons. The only thing I could not change was that Start button was moved to the place of Caps Lock and there was no button in its place, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t miss Caps Lock. On the other hand, its command line, called crosh, was completely basic (seemed mostly for diagnostics), nothing like Mac\u0026rsquo;s terminal. Just like Mac, it missed a physical Delete button.\nI bought it with the idea of installing Ubuntu over the ChromeOS, but it turned out to be a problem. Booting from a USB stick requires patching BIOS, but it\u0026rsquo;s not an option on ARM Chromebooks. The method that gets the most search results is Crouton, but it\u0026rsquo;s unmaintained and doesn\u0026rsquo;t support newer versions of Linux distros. However, the team stopped maintaining it because Google has decided to add a setting to enable Linux, which installs a container named Crostini that runs Debian. It appears as a Terminal app, with fairly regular shortcuts and capabilities. Using apt allows installing Debian packages. Installed GUI apps are searchable as regular ChromeOS apps, with proper window decoration and a normal interaction. Any folders, including external devices, can be made available in /mnt/ by clicking on a share option in ChromeOS\u0026rsquo; file manager (which felt similar to Windows Explorer overall). There are some drawbacks, the mounted folders are unchangeably owned by the main user with access rights 744 and the container doesn\u0026rsquo;t not start on startup and has to be manually launched.\nAfter installing a lot of Linux apps in Crostini and using mostly just these apps, it felt like a normal Linux distro. The fact that I was mostly inside a container wasn\u0026rsquo;t very apparent, some might even argue that it\u0026rsquo;s good to containerise development away from documents. I also missed the few Ubuntu-specific goodies that weren\u0026rsquo;t on Debian, like the context menu in Nautilus to open a folder in Terminal. On the other hand, it suspended flawlessly, had a good multitouch touchpad with good support of gestures and a functioning palm rejection and swapped with a good strategy, which are things I am not used to seeing when using Linux.\nBenchmarks I was expecting the chromebook to be slow, but the question was, how slow. ChromeOS did a good job of loading stuff asynchronously to avoid UI freezes, though some mild frame drops did occur. The system compensated for its low RAM with swapping, but it manifested as stuttering rather than visible freezes.\nIts slowness fully manifested when I started using Linux and saw how long were the usual operations taking. Installing apps and compilation were around 5 times slower than I was used to.\nNaturally, my expectations are based on the performance of my main laptop, Dell XPS 15. It has a i7-9750H 6-core/12-thread processor with turboboost disabled (it could not sustain turboboost, ended up throttling and had less performance in the long run). So if don\u0026rsquo;t explicitly mention what am I comparing the Chromebook to, I am comparing it to this laptop.\nSo when I set up the usual development tools, I started running my own benchmarks (I didn\u0026rsquo;t bother running generic benchmarks that can be looked up, Geekbench says it\u0026rsquo;s 5 times slower both in singlethreaded and multithreaded mode, similar to Raspberry Pi 4). The benchmarks I was running have found that the results greatly depended on the application, with the Chromebook usually in the range between twice and ten times slower.\nBecause I like optimising code, I usually design code to have good memory locality (that is, group data in a way that allows it to stay in the processor cache together, reducing the number of high latency RAM roundtrips). In C++, this also greatly reduces the chance of making memory corruption errors. Code written this way was usually roughly twice slower on the Chromebook than on the laptop, sometimes even less.\nIt got worse for tasks including a lot of non-local accesses. Adding a few syscalls into the process (I think it spent most of the time in the syscalls) increased the difference a lot, it became 5 times or even 7 times slower.\nOne benchmark where I was positively surprised as that it could parse an HTTP request and write a response to it in 3 microseconds. Of course, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t process a million realistic requests per second on all threads combined because there was no encryption, the requests came in unrealistic 32 kB TCP packets and were simply asking for a small resource that was in memory.\nI also run a stock browser-based benchmark with a multithreaded raytracing algorithm, mainly because I expected it to have bad memory locality (raytracing algorithms don\u0026rsquo;t have good memory locality). And it\u0026rsquo;s also easy to set up. The Chromebook achieved score 2107 (amount of computation done per time, in arbitrary units), my main laptop scored 20835. Because of the ease of setting it up, I benchmarked a lot of other devices as well. For whatever reasons, running the test in Firefox instead of WebKit-based browsers made the results far worse, the better the CPU, the greater the difference.\nCPU WebKit Firefox MediaTek MT8183 2107 450 Apple A-15 13331 ? Intel i7-9750H 20835 1298 Ryzen 7 2700X 24240 1381 Apple M1 (Ubuntu) 19625 1801 Apple M1 (MacOS) 23218 2577 Intel i7-1370P 49089 1144 Ryzen 7 7800X3D 98173 2509 I will be speculating a little now. I interpret the results as the Chromebook\u0026rsquo;s CPU computing power per core is about a half of the laptop\u0026rsquo;s one. The clock frequencies are similar, so the improved vectorisation, out of order execution and speculative parallelism are already doing wonders. Much of the difference lies in CPU cache, both have 64 kB of L1 cache for each core, 256 kB of L2 cache for each core, but MT8183 has 2 MB of L3 cache shared between cores while i7-9750H has 12 MB of L3 cache shared between cores. The desktop CPU I tried to use for the raytracing has 64 kB of L1 cache, 1 MB of L2 cache and 96 MB of L3 cache, which is massively better. The iPhone approached the laptop\u0026rsquo;s performance at the raytracing task despite having only 2 performance cores because Apple\u0026rsquo;s CPUs have large caches and also contain the RAM as part of the chip. Running the raytracing in Firefox seemed to be bound on instructions rather than cache and followed similar ratios to tasks with good memory locality (maybe it was interpreting some code that WebKit could JIT).\nI tried running SIMD operations on the Chromebook too. With 128 bit SIMD operations, it was about half as fast as the laptop. I was surprised that it supports also 256 bit SIMD operations, but they took twice as much time as the 128 bit ones (the laptop did 256 bit ones equally fast as the 128 bit ones). They didn\u0026rsquo;t really allow optimising anything, it seems like they are supported for compatibility with future binaries. For reference, Apple\u0026rsquo;s M3 processor supports only 128 bit SIMD.\nSummary There\u0026rsquo;s no way a laptop for 200€ could be good, but it\u0026rsquo;s surprisingly usable with the low specs it has. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t obstruct any activities as long they are not demanding on hardware. And its battery life is great. So if you need a laptop for some purpose that doesn\u0026rsquo;t require any hardware capacities or running any Windows-only software, you have an option that won\u0026rsquo;t cost you much.\nIt can be used for software development, as long as you don\u0026rsquo;t need any heavy libraries or frameworks. It\u0026rsquo;s possible to squeeze decent performance from it, but it requires writing the code and optimising it for memory locality, which often isn\u0026rsquo;t an option. Compilation will be slow, about five times slower than on a good laptop, and that is a factor that can\u0026rsquo;t be handwaved.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/tech/so-i-bought-a-new-laptop-for-200e/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s amazing that ChromeOS can provide a desktop environment that doesn\u0026rsquo;t freeze on such low specs\u0026hellip; and also delivers an almost complete Debian experience.","title":"So I bought a new laptop for 200€"},{"content":"Let\u0026rsquo;s start from the beginning - what Is Linux Application Summit? Like the name suggests, it\u0026rsquo;s a conference, or rather a meet-up of a variety of Linux software groups, teams and individual creators. Most important of all, it\u0026rsquo;s a joint effort by two large projects - KDE and GNOME. It represents a truth, not many Linux blogs and media properly represent - that we are part of a large family that shares values, customs and love. A lot of people seem to assume, that there is this great rivalry and fragmentation in the Linux community. That for one to prevail, the others must fall into oblivion. That there can only be one packaging format, one distro to rule them all. Linux App Summit is the proof that our differences are not our weakness, but actually our strength. Events such as this, where people from Canonical, Red Hat and various other projects and communities meet, eat, drink and bond together show that the open source world is a gorgeous tapestry, rather than a vicious battlefield. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to join us in person, let me at least show you a glimpse of what I\u0026rsquo;ve seen and experienced in one of my favorite cities in the Central Europe, the city of Brno in Czech Republic.\nDay (-1) Arriving on Thursday by train, I was welcomed by the familiar sight of the slightly unusual city clock. It may not be as fancy as the astronomical clock in Prague, but it sure leaves you with an impression.\nClocks strike noon at eleven in Brno, commemorating a trick played on the Swedish army by the besieged townsfolk.\nBrno is a relatively small city and everything of note is within walking distance, however for those in hurry, there is a well-organized public transportation system. Just be sure to call the local trams by their proper name \u0026ldquo;šalina\u0026rdquo; and not \u0026ldquo;tramvaj\u0026rdquo; as do the inhabitants of Prague call them. Otherwise you are bound to catch a few annoyed looks pointed your way.\nDay 0 Friday was quite uneventful - it was the day many of the attendees were traveling to Brno. It was an opportunity to speak with a few folks before the main event began and everything became a bit more hectic. The welcome party at the Harry\u0026rsquo;s brewery was quite pleasant. Beer was flowing, cheers and stories were shared. Also finally got to connect the names to the faces of folks I\u0026rsquo;ve only seen online until this event.\nDay 1 The first proper day of the LAS 2023 was a bit rough. Waking up early to go get the TV for the booth, setting everything up to and overcoming technical difficulties the whole morning. It was worth it though, as the talks were engaging, people were brimming with collaborative energy and passer-byes could see Fedora and Ubuntu folks sitting side by side chatting instead of fighting on the forums.\nThe timetable for the day was offering a lot to choose from for people from a variety of camps and interests. My only regret was not seeing any of them in person, although most of the day was recorded and is available here (Room 1) and here (Room 2). I was most captivated by the talk on Snap performance optimization by Igor Ljubuncic, although the other talks were very interesting as well. You can watch the talk here.\nAfter the talks, there was a joint release party of Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 23.04. Although alcohol was off limits at the venue (Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University), the mood was cheerful and the cake definitely wasn\u0026rsquo;t a lie.\nDay 2 The final day of the LAS 2023 was filled to brim with talks both technical and community-oriented. The recordings of the two rooms are available here (Room 1) and here (Room 2). We\u0026rsquo;ve had a peek at the GNOME Mobile - a very cool proof of concept for a GTK environment on a smart device. It may not have the daily-driver readiness of Ubuntu Touch, but it was definitely cool to see making progress. Next, there was a talk on an often skipped but still very important step in software development - writing tests. In this case, writing tests for Flutter desktop applications. You can follow along the workshop here. In case some bugs slip by you testing, a user having seen this talk (available to watch here) may report it to you and help you get that extra bit of polish for you Linux app.\nAs a devoted follower of calorie counting religion, I rely heavily on my fruity devices and a proprietary app called Lose It! It is a nice enough app that I am happy to pay my yearly fee for, however I always felt a bit uneasy giving up information on every bit of food that I consume to a black box that I hold no power over. Although there doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to be an alternative just yet, I was quite happy to see, that at the very least the fitness and exercise aspect of weight control has finally reached the open source community. Local developer, Miroslav Mazel presented his work on an OSS exercise Wiki and client apps. (Stream here). I just wish, that somebody will create an open source database of food and drinks as well.\nThis eventful day was closed as always, by a group photo of (most of the) speakers, volunteers and attendees.\nAs you can probably tell from my ramblings in this post, I\u0026rsquo;ve had a great time at the LAS 2023. Of course, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t without problems - sound issues, lack of breaks in between the talks that would allow the hallway track to flourish did put a blemish on it all, but these are easily fixable in the future. What it represents, though, is more important than a perfect organization. It shows Linux users that the people behind the software they use is made by teams that are engaged in a friendly competition and cooperation. It shows that despite our differences, we have much more in common with each other and we can all bring value to the shared space we all occupy.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/events/linux-application-summit-2023-a-view-from-the-sidelines/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLet\u0026rsquo;s start from the beginning - what Is Linux Application Summit? Like the name suggests, it\u0026rsquo;s a conference, or rather a meet-up of a variety of Linux software groups, teams and individual creators. Most important of all, it\u0026rsquo;s a joint effort by two large projects - KDE and GNOME. It represents a truth, not many Linux blogs and media properly represent - that we are part of a large family that shares values, customs and love. A lot of people seem to assume, that there is this great rivalry and fragmentation in the Linux community. That for one to prevail, the others must fall into oblivion. That there can only be one packaging format, one distro to rule them all. Linux App Summit is the proof that our differences are not our weakness, but actually our strength. Events such as this, where people from Canonical, Red Hat and various other projects and communities meet, eat, drink and bond together show that the open source world is a gorgeous tapestry, rather than a vicious battlefield. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t been able to join us in person, let me at least show you a glimpse of what I\u0026rsquo;ve seen and experienced in one of my favorite cities in the Central Europe, the city of Brno in Czech Republic.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Linux Application Summit 2023 - A view from the sidelines..."},{"content":"If you\u0026rsquo;ve visited this blog in the past, you may have noticed that we are two guys writing about very different topics. Dugi usually writes about his C++ expertise, while I used to do more general-oriented posts, distro reviews mostly. I also haven\u0026rsquo;t been feeling like writing much in the past two years, as I was getting burned out both by trying to start a career as a freelancer, while finishing up my PhD and starting the process of building a house. Fortunately, since then I was able to finish my degree, get the house construction on the way (now in the final finishing touches phase) and since the beginning of this year, get a nice and cozy job as a Java backend developer. As I obviously do not like the feeling of boredom, I decided to try and resurrect this dreaming blog of ours by both starting my distro-hopping once again, writing longer, more involved reviews of both hardware and software that I daily drive and also write a few words here and there about Java and quite possibly some other languages that I started learning in the mean time.\nSo other than becoming a Pretty Huge Dick and a landowner, what else is new? I\u0026rsquo;ve bitten the bullet and bought an M1 MacBook Air (long-term review incoming), switching my wings of freedom for a nice gilded cage. I still use Ubuntu for most of my work and leisure, but now I also have the window into the consumer-oriented world of Apple ecosystem and access to a select few proprietary applications that I grew to rely on (Adobe suite, mostly). I also, like almost everybody I know, started to use LLMs in my daily life, using Github Copilot as a more powerful, but sometimes very stupid Intellisense. I think Copilot is a bit of a misnomer, as the code generation features are undercooked at best at the moment. I also play around the incredibly hyped ChatGPT 4, which I must admit does save me a lot of headaches and time. This I would describe as having a very eager intern, who can perform incredible feats, but needs to be guided and offered precise feedback. Due to this growing interest in ML technologies, I plan on working on some models I have in mind, once I am fully moved into my new house. Of course, it might also be a topic of a new series on this blog.\nSo let\u0026rsquo;s summarise - I\u0026rsquo;m restarting my engagement in this blog. We have some articles in mind that I would like to work on in a near future and a lot of plans for further topics that might be quite interesting for our current and future readers. What are some topics you can expect in the future?\nOld-school Linux distributions reviews Long-term hardware reviews Java software development (mostly Spring) posts My thoughts on Swift, Flutter/Dart, and other sexy languages that I might pick up Summaries and stories from various Linux-related events \u0026ldquo;AI\u0026rdquo;-related posts Geeky home-improvement Stay tuned\u0026hellip; My next post will hopefully go online this week. In the meantime, here are some outputs for the prompt I used to generate the featured image of this post.\n30 year old man with dark brown hair and thin red beard typing on a laptop with Ubuntu, Java, Swift and other tech-related stickers. Patrick Nagel style.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/life-and-updates/lords-of-tech-resurrections/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIf you\u0026rsquo;ve visited this blog in the past, you may have noticed that we are two guys writing about very different topics. Dugi usually writes about his C++ expertise, while I used to do more general-oriented posts, distro reviews mostly. I also haven\u0026rsquo;t been feeling like writing much in the past two years, as I was getting burned out both by trying to start a career as a freelancer, while finishing up my PhD and starting the process of building a house. Fortunately, since then I was able to finish my degree, get the house construction on the way (now in the final finishing touches phase) and since the beginning of this year, get a nice and cozy job as a Java backend developer. As I obviously do not like the feeling of boredom, I decided to try and resurrect this dreaming blog of ours by both starting my distro-hopping once again, writing longer, more involved reviews of both hardware and software that I daily drive and also write a few words here and there about Java and quite possibly some other languages that I started learning in the mean time.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Lords of Tech 4: Resurrections"},{"content":"A small side-effect of my community and blogging work is, that I occassionaly (a few times per month) have people reach out to me asking for advice on a variety of topics, or for help if they are in a pickle. The lastest case was a guy from Czechia (Let\u0026rsquo;s call him Mr. D), asking for help with his pwnd web/mail server. It had a multiple glaring issues and even after my intervention is probably a minefield of vulnerabilities and backdoor. Since I am in the last year (hopefully) of my PhD studies and am currently swamped by my regular job as well, I didn\u0026rsquo;t have time to spend properly investigating and fixing all the issues in a manner that I would feel comfortable getting paid for, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to perform the bare minimum to get the site up and running \u0026ldquo;pro bono\u0026rdquo;.\nNot this Bono\u0026hellip; (photo source: Daniel Hazard, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)\nInformation gathering Mr. D first reached out to me a few months ago with an issue that surfaced after upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. I however wasn\u0026rsquo;t available to help at that time and not really confident dealing with LAMP (instead of my preferred LEMP) server on such short notice, so I\u0026rsquo;ve recommended that he tried looking for help from somebody else in our local Ubuntu community Telegram group. Somebody probably helped him as he next messaged me in late August for an advice and lastly in a couple of weeks ago after his long suffering server has finally keeled over and started serving the dark lords of the Internet script kiddies hunting for low hanging fruit. His mail server was up and running, but wasn\u0026rsquo;t able to deliver any email. He\u0026rsquo;s sent me a screenshot of his mail.err log file.\nmail.err shows a multitude of issues, but most , if not all of them are red herrings\nThe first kind of error that hits your eyes is the repeated line:\nmail dovecot: lmtp .... Error: SSL context initialization failed, disabling SSL: Can\u0026#39;t load DH parameters: error 1408518:SSL routines:ssl3_ctx_ctrl:dh key too small Even without engaging my google-fu (or rathe duckduckgo-fu, since I prefer the fruity overlord that at least pretends to care about my privacy), we can dissect the error message and gain valuable intel. First of all, we know the issue is with dovecot, our usually reliable IMAP server, and specifically in lmtp. LMTP is a transfer protocol often used to bridge postfix and dovecot, otherwise known as the peanut butter and jelly of email services. The error message itself informs us that we won\u0026rsquo;t be able to use SSL, because the DH key is too small. We can still access IMAP without encryption, but that really isn\u0026rsquo;t optimal. It\u0026rsquo;s better to fix it, even though it\u0026rsquo;s not the cause of the unusable mail server. Copy-pasting the error message into our favourite avian-themed search engine leads us to find out, that this error is pretty common occurence when upgrading Ubuntu to the latest LTS (as of writing, Ubuntu 20.04), especially when also running some \u0026ldquo;user-friendly\u0026rdquo; server managment tools such as ISPConfig. The solution is to generate a new 4096 bit SSL.\nIf you think counting sheep can\u0026rsquo;t make you sleep, try running \u0026quot;sudo openssl dhparam -out dh.pem 4096\u0026quot; and counting the dots\u0026hellip;\nAfter some time (an hour or two on a powerful machine, a night on the VPS), I\u0026rsquo;ve copied the resulting file to /etc/dovecot/private, edited the config file at /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf and added this line:\nssl_dh = \u0026lt;/etc/dovecot/private/dh.pem After that I\u0026rsquo;ve restarted the dovecot service and waited a few minutes to see if I get any more SSL errors. Since the error log has been clean since than, I can assume it worked. The rest of the issues I decided to resolve later, since I needed to get the mail running first. Interestingly, the rest of the issues eventually disappeared on their own, probably as a side effect of my other actions. If they resurface, I\u0026rsquo;ll deal with them and update the post accordingly.\nAfter dealing with this lower hanging fruit, I went and checked on the running services. Nothing really seemed that strange, apart from the holy trinity of PHP versions, specifically 5.6, 7.2 and 7.4. From chat with D, it seems the 5.6 is necessary for some legacy intranet website, 7.4 runs both of his Wordpress instances and ISPConfig and 7.2 runs\u0026hellip; Cthulhu knows what, I don\u0026rsquo;t.\nRestoring mail capability\u0026hellip; There have been a multiple indicators that D\u0026rsquo;s server has been pwned. His mail queue was constantly being filled so that proper email couldn\u0026rsquo;t get through and mail logs showed spam being sent to a multitude of emails. Whenever I dropped the entire queue with\nsudo postsuper -d ALL it was filled up again immediately. I\u0026rsquo;ve shut down all three versions of PHP and confirming my suspicion, the after once again deleting the whole queue, it remained empty allowing the test emails to pass freely. Unfortunately, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t able to locate the spam script, since it didn\u0026rsquo;t run again after launching all three PHP versions and the sheer number of php files modified in September alone is in thousands.\n\u0026hellip; just to have it fail again along with database, web and everything. A few days passes and D has reached out to me once again, this time with more panic in his words. Unfortunately what I feared to be true ( that is, the attacker had unrestricted root access to the OS) proved to be very likely. His mariadb woudn\u0026rsquo;t run, because of errors in InnoDB and his database root user was deleted. In order to fix what was left of his database, I was forced to delete ib_logfiles risking corrupting some data and try to save what was possible to fix. Then, I stopped the mysql service and logged in while skipping grant tables:\nsudo rm /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile* sudo mysqlcheck --repair --all-databases sudo systemctl stop mysql sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables \u0026amp; Then I was able to finally login to mysql and create a new root user. Annoyingly, when running mysql in this regime, you are unable to use some of the more userfriendly features of the database (no CREATE user command, no GRANT privileges, etc.). Instead, you have to do what you\u0026rsquo;re almost never supposed to do and edit the inner mysql tables manually.\nINSERT INTO mysql.user SET user = \u0026#39;root\u0026#39;, host = \u0026#39;localhost\u0026#39;, password = Password(\u0026#39;password\u0026#39;), Select_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Insert_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Update_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Delete_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Create_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Drop_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Reload_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Shutdown_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Process_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, File_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Grant_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, References_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Index_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Alter_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Show_db_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Super_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Create_tmp_table_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Lock_tables_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Execute_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Repl_slave_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Repl_client_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Create_view_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Show_view_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Create_routine_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Alter_routine_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Create_user_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Event_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Trigger_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, Create_tablespace_priv = \u0026#39;y\u0026#39;, ssl_cipher = \u0026#39;\u0026#39;, x509_issuer = \u0026#39;\u0026#39;, x509_subject = \u0026#39;\u0026#39;, authentication_string = \u0026#39;\u0026#39;; The monstrosity above has done the trick and I was finally able to kill this unholy mysql session, restore the regular one and login as root. Then I changed the password, and altered the configs of Wordpress and Phpmyadmin accordingly. Lastly, I\u0026rsquo;ve sent a message to D, explaining that this is just a temporary solution and that he should migrate to a new clean machine and my further assistance would come with my regular friendly fee.\nTenor GIF\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/emergency-recovery-of-a-shared-web-and-mail-hosting-vps-case-study/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA small side-effect of my community and blogging work is, that I occassionaly (a few times per month) have people reach out to me asking for advice on a variety of topics, or for help if they are in a pickle. The lastest case was a guy from Czechia (Let\u0026rsquo;s call him \u003cstrong\u003eMr. D\u003c/strong\u003e), asking for help with his pwnd web/mail server. It had a multiple glaring issues and even after my intervention is probably a minefield of vulnerabilities and backdoor. Since I am in the last year (hopefully) of my PhD studies and am currently swamped by my regular job as well, I didn\u0026rsquo;t have time to spend properly investigating and fixing all the issues in a manner that I would feel comfortable getting paid for, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to perform the bare minimum to get the site up and running \u0026ldquo;pro bono\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Emergency recovery of a shared web and mail hosting VPS [Case Study]"},{"content":"Choosing the hosting Despite the popularity of services such as AWS, Azure and even Github Pages, I prefer more granular control of my web presence. For this purpose, I often pick between two VPS providers - DigitalOcean and Contabo. DigitalOcean is often a popular choice due to its powerful tooling, great website and last but not least it sponsoring a bunch of tech/linux media in the past. That has recently been supplanted by Linode, but the influence still holds.\nDigitalOcean In my experience, DO is invaluable whenever you need to spin out something quick and easy, where time is of the essence and you don\u0026rsquo;t plan on holding on to it indefinitely - a perfect prototyping environment. Under a minute you can have a distro of your choosing up and ready in a vanilla state, preconfigured based on your needs, clone your backup/snapshot or import your very own image. Better SSH management, fast backups/snapshots and many more creature comforts are, however, paid for by low basic storage and understandably higher pricing.\nThanks to the great tutorials, reliability and a plethora of settings and optimisations you can do directly in their web dashboard I recommend DigitalOcean for anyone who can afford premium pricing. If you choose this option, you can pretty much skip this article and go straight for a LEMP server, preset your ssh public keys and just follow their amazing documentation for setting up pretty much everything you wish to do. If you\u0026rsquo;re a cheapskate who wants to maximise their investments (like me), read on.\nContabo Let me put is straight. Contabo doesn\u0026rsquo;t have a stellar reputations. It is incredibly cheap. I don\u0026rsquo;t know of any VPS hosting that comes anywhere near with its price/(performance+storage+location) ratio, but you sacrifice the ultra-quick deployment (VPS can take up to 3 hours for them to set up, real hardware even longer), lose some of the tools you may enjoy in DigitalOcean and if you want to save on the setup fee, you need to pay the whole year in advance. With their ruthless German efficiency, they also don\u0026rsquo;t shy away from cutting your server off at any sign of abuse (such as a hacked Wordpress instance) requiring you to clean up your act and pay up an approx €30 fee before they reconnect your VPS. On the other hand, it takes many emails and begging to make them reach out the various IP blacklist services in order to get a mail server within their IP region to deliver emails to Gmail, Hotmail and other popular mail (or rather personal information mining) services.\nWhen you finally get an email from Contabo that your VPS is setup and ready to be used, you will also get a login and password for SSH access. You need to use it and change it ASAP. It was delivered to you via unencrypted email and provides an unrestricted access to your server. If you get \u0026ldquo;hacked\u0026rdquo; because of this, I feel no pity towards you.\nInitial setup Now that you have your VPS up and running, open up your favourite terminal emulator and ssh into it.\nssh root@vps-ip-address Once you\u0026rsquo;re in, create a new user, grant him sudo privileges, exit the root user session, log in with your user and disable root password.\nadduser your-username usermod -aG sudo your-username exit ssh your-username@vps-ip-address sudo passwd -l root I also like to set up ssh so that it only accepts connections from clients with my private ssh keys. You can learn about ssh keys in this great article at freecodecamp.org. First you need to create a hidden .ssh folder in your home folder, create a file called authorized_users, change it to be readable and writeable only by the owner and paste in the public part of your key.\nmkdir ~/.ssh touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys Your file should look kinda like this:\nMy file has four lines, because I have four clients (my Linux workstation, my Macbook Air, my iPad and my iPhone) that I\u0026rsquo;ll use to manage this server\nThen, open up the config file for your ssh daemon and disable password login (Warning, you will be unable to login from any machine that doesn\u0026rsquo;t have its public ssh key in the aforementioned authorized_keys file).\nsudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config Look for a line that says:\n#PasswordAuthentication yes and change it to:\nPasswordAuthentication no Save your changes, close the file and restart your ssh daemon with this systemd command:\nsudo systemctl restart ssh Last but not least, we\u0026rsquo;ll enable the firewall manager - ufw. I like ufw, because it has a very simple syntax and isn\u0026rsquo;t as scary as configuring iptables. In the next three lines, we\u0026rsquo;ll allow OpenSSH to go through the firewall, raise the shields and check on their status.\nsudo ufw allow OpenSSH sudo ufw enable sudo ufw status Right now your server only accepts SSH traffic (and it\u0026rsquo;s hypervisor accepts VNC, unless you wisely disabled it), which is good, because you should only allow access to services that you\u0026rsquo;ve set up and know what they are doing.\nLEMP LEMP is an acronym that means Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP. It is an alternative to the very popular LAMP, which switches Nginx for Apache. People prefer one or the other, but I like the simple syntax and great performance of Nginx. Our setup will also switch Oracle-infested MySQL for compatible MariaDB and we will install PHP 8.0 from a third-party PPA instead of the default 7.4 which is in the official Canonical repository. These are my opinionated pics - the first one is mostly political, the second performance and future-proofing related. Two of my often used web applications - Wordpress and Nextcloud prefer and soon will require PHP 8.0. I usually refrain and warn against third-party PPA, however I will make an exception in this case since it is the only \u0026ldquo;easy\u0026rdquo; way to install it and because this PPA is maintained by a renowned Debian contributor, Ondřej Surý. If your server starts making you money, please consider sending a few bucks his way via his Patreon. First of all, you will need to install a package in order to add third-party repositories. Then add the repository itself.\nsudo apt install software-properties-common -y sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php -y When you have the repository added, you can install Nginx and php 8.0 with all the extensions you\u0026rsquo;ll need. I\u0026rsquo;ll install what is needed for a basic LEMP installation and probably install more as needed in later parts of this series. This command should install everything you\u0026rsquo;ll need at this point\nsudo apt install nginx mariadb-server php8.0 php8.0-fpm php8.0-mysql certbot python3-certbot-nginx -y After the short time installing all the packages, open up the ports for Nginx:\nsudo ufw allow \u0026#39;Nginx Full\u0026#39; Create a new folder in /var/www/ to hold your website, change it\u0026rsquo;s owner to www-data and then copy over the default nginx config file and make the necessary changes:\nsudo mkdir /var/www/your-site sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/your-site sudo cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/your-site sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/your-site server { listen 80; listen [::]:80; root /var/www/your_server_dir; index index.html index.htm index.php; server_name yourserverdns.com www.yourserverdomain.com; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ =404; } # pass PHP scripts to FastCGI server location ~ \\.php$ { include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf; # With php-fpm (or other unix sockets): fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock; # With php-cgi (or other tcp sockets): # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; } } Save and close the config. You can now create a symbolic link to the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ so that it is activated, and test your configuration:\nsudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/your-site /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ sudo nginx -t If your nginx config is a-OK, you can now request your SSL certificate from LetsEncrypt.\nsudo certbot --nginx --agree-tos -m your@email.com -d yourserverdomain.com -d www.yourserverdomain.com Lastly, we can create the directory for our webserver and test our nginx and php installation in one go.\nsudo mkdir /var/www/your_server_dir echo -e \u0026#39;\u0026lt;?php \\n phpinfo();\u0026#39; | sudo tee /var/www/your_server_dir/index.php sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/your_server_dir sudo systemctl restart nginx Now simply navigate to your domain in a browser of your choosing and you should see something like this:\nDon\u0026rsquo;t forget to delete this file:\nsudo rm /var/www/your_server_dir/index.php You can repeat the creation of the creation of the nginx config, requesting the ssl etc. and host multiple websites under multiple domains. In the future parts of this tutorial series, I\u0026rsquo;ll be covering the installation of Wordpress, Mail server and Nextcloud and possibly more.\nFeatured image by Lydia Simons (https://freepngimg.com/author/lydiasimm-7560)\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/setting-up-a-vps-for-several-small-e-commerce-businesses-part-1/","summary":"Over the years, I\u0026rsquo;ve had the opportunity to set up a few websites, both static and dynamically generated. A few years ago, I\u0026rsquo;ve settled on Wordpress as my default choice, initially simply building up sites from themes and plugins, until I bit the bullet and started adding my own snippets of PHP and later building a full, albeit simple, custom theme. This series will hopefully prove to you that setting up a web server, mail server and other neat services is not as hard as you might assume and you can even serve several small businesses using a reasonably priced VPS. In this initial article, we\u0026rsquo;ll deal with initial setup of our Ubuntu 20.04 server and turning it into a nice little LEMP server. I am expecting you to know at least the bare minimum about terminal, ssh and how to install packages in Debian-based distributions. You should also already own a domain and know how to set up A-records.","title":"Setting up a VPS for several small e-commerce businesses (part 1)"},{"content":"Since I haven\u0026rsquo;t written anything in a while, much less a comprehensive distribution review, a little updated background info is in order. In past years, I\u0026rsquo;ve toned down my \u0026ldquo;Linux on everything\u0026rdquo; push and went slightly more practical in my day-to-day life. I probably will write a short story on my transformation from an obsessed FOSS-only zealot to a privacy-minded, practicality-inclined user of whatever tool fits the best. I still use Ubuntu 20.04 on my workstation at the office, various Ubuntu LTS releases on my servers and a few months ago, I installed Fedora 34 on my home-office workstation (long-term review coming), but I\u0026rsquo;ve switched from a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 3 with a distro-du-jour to an M1 Macbook Air running unsurprisingly macOS Big Sur. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had the unfortune to support a bunch of Windows 10 desktop, so I think I can at least compare various desktop operating systems and measure their merit. That being said, I must admit, I haven\u0026rsquo;t felt the need to write anything about new releases for the past year or so, since apart from Gnome 40 in Fedora 34, nothing really tickled my interest, and I\u0026rsquo;m holding on my review of that huge upgrade until I can try it out in a reasonably stable beta of Ubuntu 21.10. Anyways, back to the distro at hand.\nElementaryOS 6 Odin Wallpaper\nImprovements and changes If you\u0026rsquo;ve read my previous Elementary OS reviews (here and here), you probably know my feelings on it. If you haven\u0026rsquo;t read them, here\u0026rsquo;s a TL;DR: I like ElementaryOS, I\u0026rsquo;ve installed and recommended it to users in the past, but I \u0026rsquo;ve found the last release, the 5.1 Hera not measuring up to the likes of Ubuntu 20.04. Today, as a part time macOS user, part time Gnome 3.38/40 user I can say, that Pantheon (the desktop environment of ElementaryOS) is both quite intriguing in its features and, unfortunately also sluggishness on my machine. True, it\u0026rsquo;s not nearly as powerful as my Ryzen 7 2700X workstation nor my M1 Macbook Air, but it\u0026rsquo;s far from the lowest of the low-ends and should run any desktop just fine. Can\u0026rsquo;t even blame the display drivers, as Intel iGPU are usually well supported in Linux.\nElementary showing brief description of the review laptop\nI won\u0026rsquo;t bore you with the details of installation process. It\u0026rsquo;s updated and fancier looking than the old-school Ubiquity installer, but if you\u0026rsquo;ve ever set up an Android or an iOS device, you won\u0026rsquo;t be very surprised. What is rather surprising is the fact, that Elementary OS still doesn\u0026rsquo;t offer an upgrade option. You could try to replace the sources and perform a manual upgrade, but you may as well go for Linux From Scratch if you\u0026rsquo;re that into self-abuse. For saner folks, the clean install is the only way to go.\nAt first launch, I was honestly quite surprised how little has changed since Loki, Hera and Juno. There are some welcome visual tweaks here and there, but nothing extremely noticeable unless you know where to look. The small touches, like showing the keyboard shortcuts next to the context menu items (like in macOS),\nability to easily change theme and customize accent color,\nand most importantly the changes under the hood of the window manager. The workspaces managment looks suspiciously like that of macOS, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think that\u0026rsquo;s a bad thing. The basic design is a good one and even though many distributions have tried to imitate the looks, most fail at the feel of it. One of the biggest pitfalls has been the responsiveness of trackpad gestures. In the past, users (myself included) have tried to implement them using utilities like touchegg, but these fell short of the real deal, because the requested action would happen only after you\u0026rsquo;ve completed the gesture. This is a limitation of most XServer based window managers, with the only exception I know of being the one in Odin itself. Other distributions, such as Fedora 34, has solved this by moving to Wayland and Gnome 40, so it\u0026rsquo;s just a matter of time until desktop Linux manages to scratch off one of the largest complaints of users spoiled by Windows Precision drivers and Apple\u0026rsquo;s fantastic touchpads.\nAny similarity to fruity operating systems is only accidental\nFortunately, the gestures are not only for show and are being propagated to the ElementaryOS-specific apps as well. It translates well into the default browser, which emulates Safari quite nicely. I just wish, the same back-forward gesture would work in more apps, but that will hopefully come in the future.\nSpeaking of distro-specific apps, I still find most of them well-designed and pleasant to use. I like the Files app more than I like Finder, especially since it has the only good feature that failure of a file manager has got - the column view.\nI especially like the \u0026ldquo;Connect Server\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; option, which is nice to use and better than the others found in Nautilus, etc.\nThe only issue I\u0026rsquo;ve found was connecting to AFP file share, however that protocol is such a dumpster fire, that I find it dubious the issue is on the distro side.\nThe rest of the desktop Notifications are hidden in a nice panel item,\nsound device can be picked directly from the sound applet,\nand Calendar applet shows the calendar and agenda in a two column layout. I just wish it also allowed for a quick creation of new events.\nI also like what the devs has done with not-so-common features like screen-time limiters, dyslexia-friendly text and permissions menu.\nSoftware distribution Ironically, the main reason why anybody should consider ElementaryOS is also the reason why I currently find this to be somewhat of a downgrade. AppCenter, the only preinstalled software store is extremely barren, when compared to alternatives such as Snap Store or even itself in the past. It only shows a few apps, which also often fit into multiple categories, making it even emptier than it first seems.\nIt is obviously caused by Elementary OS\u0026rsquo; move from their own software distribution to flatpak, but the first impression is not amazing. It forces you to look for apps on flathub.org, which while being a perfectly ok place to host an app, it also feels like a step back into the past. Even Windows is pushing it\u0026rsquo;s users forwards towards Windows Store and WinGet, which is IMO the way to go.\nAfter you install your first application from flathub.org, or any other source, it will automatically add the website as a source to the AppCenter and fill up the software store with applications. This however is rather unintuitive and could do with an onboarding pop-up when you open the AppCenter for the first time.\nCompare this to the experience you can get in Snap Store and even though it itself also has problems (a lot of badly packaged or unusable apps), it at least doesn\u0026rsquo;t force you to go through the web browser in order to download installation packages like an animal.\nConclusion I must admit, Odin has gained my interest. I intend to keep it on my old laptop to see if the AppCenter fills up with the third party apps ElementaryOS is famous for. I also would like to see performance improvements, but I\u0026rsquo;m not that hopeful on this front. The desktop is as polished as on any commercial OS. I just hope that their pivot towards Flatpak and the constant struggle to make app developers create native-looking premium applications for the platform eventually pan out. Until now, the older releases were chock-full of beautiful but shallow single-use utilities. Hopefully, with flatpak being one of the three universal app packaging formats, the devs community can reach more users, even if the ElementaryOS-native apps may look a bit jarring on other desktops. ","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/elementaryos-6-odin/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSince I haven\u0026rsquo;t written anything in a while, much less a comprehensive distribution review, a little updated background info is in order. In past years, I\u0026rsquo;ve toned down my \u0026ldquo;Linux on everything\u0026rdquo; push and went slightly more practical in my day-to-day life. I probably will write a short story on my transformation from an obsessed FOSS-only zealot to a privacy-minded, practicality-inclined user of whatever tool fits the best. I still use Ubuntu 20.04 on my workstation at the office, various Ubuntu LTS releases on my servers and a few months ago, I installed Fedora 34 on my home-office workstation (long-term review coming), but I\u0026rsquo;ve switched from a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 3 with a distro-du-jour to an M1 Macbook Air running unsurprisingly macOS Big Sur. I\u0026rsquo;ve also had the unfortune to support a bunch of Windows 10 desktop, so I think I can at least compare various desktop operating systems and measure their merit. That being said, I must admit, I haven\u0026rsquo;t felt the need to write anything about new releases for the past year or so, since apart from Gnome 40 in Fedora 34, nothing really tickled my interest, and I\u0026rsquo;m holding on my review of that huge upgrade until I can try it out in a reasonably stable beta of Ubuntu 21.10. Anyways, back to the distro at hand.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"ElementaryOS 6 Odin"},{"content":"Prologue and motivation A part of my PhD. research deals with computer science as a source of innovative ways to improve education in Slovakia. My approach is mostly throwing eye-tracking at every problem and see where it sticks. The trouble with eye-tracking as a research method is, you often find yourself spending much more time changing the form of the content, rather than conducting actual experiments and getting some data out of it. While researching the readability of the study materials at our university I had to move around the paragraphs, trim out excess stuff, play with the image size and, in case of using headset-based eye-tracker apparatus, also surround the pages with chessboard markers to \u0026ldquo;ground\u0026rdquo; the generated heatmaps around the text itself. These changes made the eye-tracking possible, however they were time consuming and also may have tampered with the data to some degree.\nThen the global pandemic hit and I suddenly was left without my usual guinea pigs\u0026hellip; erm\u0026hellip; students\u0026hellip;, who I could abuse, forcing them to wear uncomfortable eye-tracking headgear while also having them spend much more time at school than any of them wished. I had a new task at hand - finding a way to conduct my experiments in some other manner. I started looking into webcam-based eye-trackers and found out that there are multiple interesting projects, some of them browser-based as well. Having a webcam-based solution decreases the accuracy of individual measurements, but I figured, seeing as I have much more students that have a PC with a webcam attached to it as opposed to the number of my expensive eye-tracking gear (1), I could compensate the lack of accuracy with a much greater amount of data. It\u0026rsquo;s much easier to have a hundred students read some text at home using their own devices than to have them come one at a time to school, spend 10 minutes calibrating, 10 minutes recording (the headset loses calibration after 5-10 mins) and afterwards 5 minutes disinfecting before calling in another subject. Thinking about it some more, I\u0026rsquo;ve found some additional value that could be gained by creating my own eye-tracking browser:\nby inserting javascript in each page, I can make necessary changes in text that will make eye-tracking easier - increase font size, disable scrolling, paginate longer text, I can insert eye-tracking code directly into the browser, I can control what web-pages students can visit, or even make a sort of \u0026ldquo;playlist\u0026rdquo; of pages that will be shown to them, I can enable Adobe Flash Player to display some legacy educational animations that we didn\u0026rsquo;t rewrite in a modern way yet\u0026hellip;. This last point is the one I finally successfully solved and I write this post still riding on the high of this feat of overcoming frustration\nThe heroic struggle of an idiot with a search engine\u0026hellip; At first, I thought this would be the easiest task (scarily enough, it may yet prove to be). I would just check the documentation and it should be easy-peasy, right?\nObviously not\u0026hellip;\nThe problem doesn\u0026rsquo;t lie in the fact, that flash is deprecated, won\u0026rsquo;t be shipped starting January 2021 and most browser need to be forced at a gunpoint to run it (and even than will complain and try to make you disable it asap). The problem lies in that the otherwise good Qt documentation lies to you.\nThis is what qtwebengine page in the docs say:\nalso\nWhat it fucking doesn\u0026rsquo;t tell you (and neither does any of the numerous forum posts) is, that this isn\u0026rsquo;t enough. What happens when you only do this is:\nFortunately, some other sucker has been trying to do something similarly stupid as I am, and I\u0026rsquo;ve found this StackOverflow post, that pointed me towards this forum post. Unfortunately it\u0026rsquo;s been written in the old pre-QML era, but I was able, after a brief \u0026ldquo;try and error\u0026rdquo; figure out, that I need to add this to my QML WebEngineView, in order to enable plugins in my homemade browser.\nI was done, right?\nNope\u0026hellip;\nThen I tried downloading Adobe Flash Player and placing it directly in my home folder and explicitly give my app the path. Done?\nNope\u0026hellip;\nI tried many more stupid things - compiling qtwebengine from source, switch between 32bit and 64bit versions, even trying it in Windows to no avail. At long last, I tried running my app from bash, instead of QtCreator and I got a nice little error message:\noperation not permitted? WTF?!\nOperation not permitted? I didn\u0026rsquo;t just copy the system version of flash, I downloaded an archive from Adobe site and extracted it. It should have proper permissions\u0026hellip; just to be sure, I\u0026rsquo;ve \u0026lsquo;chmod 777\u0026rsquo; it and the permissions checked again:\nShould work now, right?\nNope\u0026hellip; same thing. I got really frustrated. Enough to do something really silly - running it with sudo:\nHEUREKA!\nFinally an useful piece of information! I truly never heard of QWebEngine being inside any sandbox. It does make sense, seeing as it\u0026rsquo;s really just Chromium, but one would think that this silly little detail might be mentioned in any example or documentation, right? NOOOOO! Anyways, I\u0026rsquo;ve added \u0026ndash;no-sandbox to my parameters and now it WORKS!\nSo what is the magic formula after all?\n./EyeBrowser --enable-pepper-testing --ppapi-flash-path=~/libpepflashplayer.so --no-sandbox Conclusion Afterwards, when I finally found out what was the issue, I decided to search the documentation for the \u0026ndash;no-sandbox option, just to make sure I\u0026rsquo;m not a total idiot. Of course, there has been a mention of the sandbox feature in the docs, however it was never mentioned that it would interfere with the plugins. In my endless stupidity, I thought it would only limit the reach plugins and the websites had on my system and not preventing me from even launching the plugin itself.\nThis is only mentioned in platform notes here.\nI\u0026rsquo;m tired and going to sleep\u0026hellip; Screw this shit.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/the-sisyphean-task-of-enabling-adobe-flash-player-in-a-modern-qt-chromium-based-web-browser/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"prologue-and-motivation\"\u003ePrologue and motivation\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA part of my PhD. research deals with computer science as a source of innovative ways to improve education in Slovakia. My approach is mostly throwing eye-tracking at every problem and see where it sticks. The trouble with eye-tracking as a research method is, you often find yourself spending much more time changing the form of the content, rather than conducting actual experiments and getting some data out of it. While researching the readability of the study materials at our university I had to move around the paragraphs, trim out excess stuff, play with the image size and, in case of using headset-based eye-tracker apparatus, also surround the pages with chessboard markers to \u0026ldquo;ground\u0026rdquo; the generated heatmaps around the text itself. These changes made the eye-tracking possible, however they were time consuming and also may have tampered with the data to some degree.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Sisyphean task of enabling Adobe Flash Player in a modern QT/Chromium based web browser"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve recently gained interest in OpenCV. The problem with this is, that in most modern tutorials and walkthroughs it seems like the go-to language for working with this C-library is Python. I have an unreasonable antipathy towards this snake of a language and although I intend to fight through it some day in the future, at the moment I have more important stuff to deal with, so I intend to experiment with OpenCV in my own way - with a blend of noobie C++ and QT. In this quick note I\u0026rsquo;ll document for my (and whomever happens to land on this blog\u0026hellip;) benefit the process of building a recent version of OpenCV on Ubuntu 20.04 and what arcane line to insert into the dark lord of K-prefixed apps - QtCreator.\nBuilding the OpenCV Install dependencies (I\u0026rsquo;m including python, because I really want to overcome my irrational feelings)\nsudo apt-get install build-essential cmake git libgtk2.0-dev pkg-config libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev python-dev python-numpy libtbb2 libtbb-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libtiff-dev libdc1394-22-dev Clone the repositories containing latest release, create a build folder\ngit clone https://github.com/opencv/opencv.git \u0026amp;\u0026amp; git clone https://github.com/opencv/opencv_contrib.git \u0026amp;\u0026amp; cd ./opencv \u0026amp;\u0026amp; mkdir build \u0026amp;\u0026amp; cd ./build Set all the flags you expect to need\ncmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DBUILD_DOCS=ON -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=ON -DOPENCV_EXTRA_MODULES_PATH=\u0026#34;~/opencv_contrib/modules\u0026#34; -DPYTHON3_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3.8 -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python3.8 -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR2=/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/python3.8 -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpython3.8.so -DPYTHON3_NUMPY_INCLUDE_DIRS=/usr/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/numpy/core/include/ -DOPENCV_GENERATE_PKGCONFIG=ON -DBUILD_opencv_apps=ON .. Let it compile for a few minutes - opencv is pretty large beast, so it may take a while\nmake -j$((`nproc`-1)) After it\u0026rsquo;s done (took a few minutes on a desktop with an 8C/16T Ryzen 7 2700X, closer to an hour on an ultrabook with a 2C/4T i5), install it.\nsudo make install Including it into a QtCreator .pro file Just add these two lines and you\u0026rsquo;re good to go.\nINCLUDEPATH += /usr/local/include/opencv4 LIBS += -L/usr/local/lib -lopencv_core -lopencv_highgui -lopencv_imgproc -lopencv_objdetect -lopencv_imgcodecs -lopencv_videoio Now you\u0026rsquo;re all ready to go play with some nice OpenCV in your QtCreator.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/adding-opencv-libraries-to-a-qt5-project-in-ubuntu-20-04/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve recently gained interest in OpenCV. The problem with this is, that in most modern tutorials and walkthroughs it seems like the go-to language for working with this C-library is Python. I have an unreasonable antipathy towards this snake of a language and although I intend to fight through it some day in the future, at the moment I have more important stuff to deal with, so I intend to experiment with OpenCV in my own way - with a blend of noobie C++ and QT. In this \u003cem\u003equick note\u003c/em\u003e I\u0026rsquo;ll document for my (and whomever happens to land on this blog\u0026hellip;) benefit the process of building a recent version of OpenCV on Ubuntu 20.04 and what arcane line to insert into the dark lord of K-prefixed apps - QtCreator.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Adding OpenCV libraries to a QT5 project in Ubuntu 20.04"},{"content":"As somebody who\u0026rsquo;s always had Ubuntu in his daily life for the past 13 years, I sometimes find it hard to differentiate between all the versions. I do appreciate the progress though, albeit I\u0026rsquo;ve felt like the direction Ubuntu was taking was going to force me to abandon it eventually. Lately, though, I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed the increased polish and speed improvements of Gnome 3.36 dabbled with snap packaging, understood its \u0026ldquo;raison d\u0026rsquo;etre\u0026rdquo; and had the opportunity of participating in an Canonical hosted webinar for press to pose some questions.\nEven so, I don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s that much to say about Ubuntu proper as it is nowadays, without resorting to boring lists of change and a bit of insight here and there. For this reason, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to forgo my usual formula of distro reviews and I decided to use this opportunity to take a look at all the official flavors of Ubuntu, compare their strengths and weaknesses and probably make an enemy of many of them.\nLubuntu 20.04 Lubuntu 20.04 desktop\nI\u0026rsquo;ve wanted to do a proper look at Lubuntu for quite a while, but because of its transition from LXDE to LXQt, I waited until now to really try is out. I must say, I don\u0026rsquo;t really get its purpose. I know it\u0026rsquo;s supposed to be THE Ubuntu flavor for underpowered or old computers, but who exactly has a 64bit machine that\u0026rsquo;s not powerful enough to run something like Ubuntu MATE? Even single board computers such as Raspberry Pi are sporting couple of gigabytes of RAM and CPUs that would put some of my older PCs to shame.\nIncorect units are not the only thing wrong in this picture\nI find it curious, that the system monitor app it using incorrect units. I, in fact, don\u0026rsquo;t use a rare version of Lenovo X1 Carbon that comes with 1GB of RAM (8Mb = 1MB). Even so, this memory usage is only ~150MB less than that of Ubuntu MATE, an arguably much more featureful distribution.\nApplication Menu filled with various light Qt-based applications\nUsers of older versions may be quite shocked by the amount of changes in the application selection and also their inability to upgrade from older LTS - this is due to the change from GTK-based LXDE to QT-based LXQt. In a way, now Lubuntu has more in common with Kubuntu than it has with Xubuntu or Ubuntu MATE. One such surefire sign is the inclusion of Discover - KDE software center application. Discover used to have a reputation of being a slow and buggy mess, but it\u0026rsquo;s been given some work lately and today it\u0026rsquo;s much more usable.\nDiscover - no longer the c#*p it used to be.\nApart from Discover, Lubuntu also contains a Synaptic lookalike called Muon. I don\u0026rsquo;t really see the purpose of this kind of package manager. I feel if you\u0026rsquo;re too advanced to bother using Discover or Gnome Software, you\u0026rsquo;re probably skilled enough with terminal to do you package installations there.\nMuon - the illegitimate half-sibling of Synaptic Package manager\nThe main issue I have with Lubuntu (and Xubuntu to some degree as well) is that the desktop feels and behaves like a collection of individual programs and not a cohesive experience. Imagine a migrant from macOS trying to change the desktop wallpaper and finding this abomination of desktop settings\nYes, they are really serious.\nWhen I tried to take these screenshots, I found out another annoyance - no keyboard shortcuts were assigned for printscreen app. I had to add them manually in Global Action Manager.\nThis should be default in all OS.\nI could go on and on with my gripes with lack attention to details, but I must say I found one redeeming quality - included 2048 game. I won\u0026rsquo;t say it\u0026rsquo;s a clone, as even 2048 is a lackluster cashgrab clone of charming game Threes, but it\u0026rsquo;s much better than most other boring default games.\nA thing that kinda grabbed my attention is the inclusion of Trojitá, an email client by a Czech programmer Jan Kundrát. I haven\u0026rsquo;t tried it yet since, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty locked in my Thunderbird workflow and wasn\u0026rsquo;t up to migrating 8 email accounts to a new email client.\nXubuntu 20.04 Xubuntu 20.04 desktop\nI won\u0026rsquo;t spend much time talking about Xubuntu, as I\u0026rsquo;ve done a review quite recently and at the timescales of XFCE development, even the standard length of LTS support cycle is just a barely noticable blink of an eye. Pretty much all my points about Lubuntu still stand. The RAM usage fresh after boot is ~ 50-100 MB higher, which sounds about right, considering the slightly friendlier user experience.\nXubuntu RAM usage\nThe only new addition worth speaking of is the new dark theme, and even though I am happy users that enjoy a little bit of sleek darkness have this option by default, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t really work for me with the greyish gradient in the top bar of the decoration.\nUbuntu MATE 20.04 Ubuntu MATE 20.04 desktop\nAs I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned in my previous Ubuntu MATE review, I have a soft spot for this tea-themed flavour. It may very well be nostalgia factor, but whenever I see Ubuntu MATE, it brings up warm feeling in my heart. In the past, however, these feelings have been spoiled by frequent crashes of brisk menu and other annoying bugs. Fortunately, it seems like these have been fixed and Ubuntu MATE is getting to a level that I can easily recommend it to an user, who either wants to run a full desktop on a Raspberry Pi level of hardware, or is voluntarily stuck in a Gnome 2 past. Not to say that\u0026rsquo;s not a valid reason, though, as that desktop paradigm does have its merits even to this day and MATE desktop builds and extends that metaphor, while keeping the memory consumption in check.\nI\u0026rsquo;d rather sacrifice ~200MB of RAM than use LXQT on a daily basis.\nApart from a plethora of bugfixes, there are a bunch of new tweaks and features included in this release. These, however, add to a somewhat schizofrenic feeling of the desktop. On one hand, there\u0026rsquo;s a friendly selector of color themes in the Ubuntu Mate Welcome, on the other hand I would rather see this in the appearance menu. If you miss the Mate Welcome, as I have on my first run, you might not realize you can now change the default mate green to a bunch of other colors with just a few clicks. After the installation of the new themes, they even show up in the appearance menu, where they should have been in the first place!\nOther than this disparity, Ubuntu Mate Welcome remains one of the best ideas in Linux desktop and with each release it gets more and more polished. You can now change the layout of the panels AND see what you\u0026rsquo;re doing without having to try it first!\nThe thing is, with such great experience with Welcome, it\u0026rsquo;s much more jarring to go back to MATE Tweak and use the spartan combobox there.\nI really need to give Ubuntu MATE 20.04 a longer and more detailed look to see, whether all the kinks and crashes are truly gone, but if it\u0026rsquo;s actually true, the green flavor is the first distro in this review that is of similar quality as vanilla Ubuntu.\nUbuntu Budgie 20.04 Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 desktop\nBefore Gnome got actually good, my choice of modern-feeling GTK desktop was a tossup between Pantheon and Budgie. I appreciate the consistent feeling and intention behind Elementary OS and it\u0026rsquo;s special-made apps, but I liked Budgie enough to use it as my daily driver for half a year. It\u0026rsquo;s a bit on the heavy side of RAM consumption, eating up a respectable 1.2-1.5 GB on launch, but gems like its awesome tiling feature, great looks and good default apps selection made it a great alternative to Gnome.\nIn the ye old days of Gutsy Gibbon, I remember fitting OpenOffice, Firefox and some other stuff in measly 512MB of RAM.\nUnfortunately for Budgie, Gnome improved drastically and although Budgie was my choice for the beginning of 2019, this year the competition got much tougher.\nUbuntu Budgie Welcome is still pretty good, although a bit lagging behind its MATE inspiration. It allows easy installation of drivers, web browser ballot, teaches new users it\u0026rsquo;s keyboard shortcut magic, shows info about your hardware, etc.\nIn my several days of usage, I haven\u0026rsquo;t noticed any huge changes from the last release I\u0026rsquo;ve tried and while I really liked Budgie in 19.04, I don\u0026rsquo;t feel the excitement anymore. Now it feels like a Dr. Pepper to Gnome\u0026rsquo;s Coca-Cola - great for some people, but not the real deal.\nKubuntu 20.04 Kubuntu 20.04 desktop\nBack in 2007, when I first started using Ubuntu, I\u0026rsquo;ve seen Kubuntu as an equal member of the Ubuntu family. KDE 3 wasn\u0026rsquo;t exactly my kup of tea, possibly due to the superficial similarities to Windows, an OS I\u0026rsquo;ve been trying to escape from. As years came by and disagreements between Jonathan Riddell and Canonical escalated in his leaving of the community and project, the future of Kubuntu became rather questionable. This became even more apparent, when a few new contenders came onto the scene. Distributions such as Manjaro and KDE Neon brought top-notch KDE setups to masses (well\u0026hellip; dozens of users) and Kubuntu became the boring option. In its core, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty much the opposite of KDE Neon. While Neon is bleeding-edge KDE on top of LTS Ubuntu, Kubuntu is stable KDE on top of current Ubuntu.\nThat being said, there isn\u0026rsquo;t a very noticeable difference between the KDE user experience in Neon and Kubuntu. One very nice thing that I may have missed in my KDE Neon and Manjaro reviews is that KRunner launches whenever you start typing while the focus is on the desktop. KRunner itself is pretty much the best launcher/search utility there is, including Windows Start menu and macOS spotlight.\nKRunner is awesome!\nKonsidering (ho-ho-ho) that KDE used to be thought of as the bloated desktop environment, one that has higher than usual system requirements, you can imagine my surprise, when I saw its RAM usage placed right next to XFCE and MATE, two arguably very light desktops, while providing the most complete and polished experience of the three.\nCompared to Budgie, KDE is downright feather-light\nJust look at the KDE screnshot utility, Spectacle - it\u0026rsquo;s amazing how many features can be stuck inside an app this simple.\nIt is pretty hard to review KDE distributions though. It seems like all the distros only differ under the hood, which is ironic, as KDE is THE KING of customizations. However, whenever you see Manjaro, KDE Neon or Kubuntu, the only immediately visible difference is the color scheme and wallpaper. They all share the same Windows-like panel layout and clean desktop look. I guess it could be argued that it\u0026rsquo;s the way so the user can go wild with customization, but compare it to Fedora and Ubuntu - Both distributions use Gnome, both look very different.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, though, Kubuntu is a great interpretation of KDE, but I feel like it lacks certain visual differentiation from the de facto standard KDE Neon look. Even the default Kubuntu theme is very reminiscent of Breeze theme, which isn\u0026rsquo;t a bad choice, but I would rather see something wild, ideally a version of Ubuntu\u0026rsquo;s Yaru theme in KDE, maybe even go really crazy and implement an Unity-like interface in Kubuntu, so that it really looks like Ubuntu with KDE, not a generic k-named distribution. I believe the kommunity has enough people with decent visual imagination so they can come up with something great\u0026hellip;\n\u0026hellip;hopefully not ending up with a widget hell like this\u0026hellip;\nUbuntu Kylin 20.04 Ubuntu Kylin 20.04 Desktop\nSpeaking of cluster-fucks\u0026hellip; Let\u0026rsquo;s look at Ubuntu Kylin. I\u0026rsquo;ve heard about Kylin from various Linux-related podcasts and I\u0026rsquo;ve never really paid attention to it myself. From what I\u0026rsquo;ve heard, it seemed like an awesome option for Chinese users of Linux, that doesn\u0026rsquo;t get much attention in the western world. I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that as it is an official flavor of Ubuntu, I should take a look at it. Oh boy\u0026hellip;. it\u0026rsquo;s not good, it\u0026rsquo;s not good at all. Many of the things can be explained by mistranslations, difficulties of providing the same UI to latin-based fonts and Chinese signs, but a lot of the problems can only be attributed to sloppy copying of other OS or just plain choosing the wrong paths in the design of the user experience.\nAt first glance, the user interface looks clean, professional and nice. The feeling lasts only until you hover your mouse cursor over some UI element. There are obvious issues, probably stemming from the fact that information is a bit less densely represented by Latin letters, than Chinese symbols.\nThe more insidious issue, that can\u0026rsquo;t be solved by taking in consideration the variable string length is the inexplicably schizophrenic interface. As far as I know, Kylin DE is a heavily modified fork of MATE, however a bunch of Kylin-specific apps seem to be completely alien, even ignoring the scaling setting of the desktop. The most aggravating perpetrator is a miserable copy of Microsoft\u0026rsquo;s Control Panel.\nMore of this weirdness can be witnessed in other Kylin apps, such as the Weather widget\u0026hellip;\n\u0026hellip; the pre-installed extensions and website in Firefox\u0026hellip;\n\u0026hellip;or strange copycats of famous denizens of Windows app ecosystem.\nUnderneath all this quirkiness and mess there are still some relics of its MATE parent. There are applications such as Pluma text editor and it\u0026rsquo;s relatively low RAM usage.\nThat being said, I don\u0026rsquo;t think anybody would identify it as a MATE fork if they didn\u0026rsquo;t explicitly look for similarities, since the light MATE base is covered up by this spoiled mayonnaise dressing of rubbish apps on top of it.\nThe only addition that many Westerners may know off is Kingsoft WPS Office. It\u0026rsquo;s an office suite that is pretty well known in Android app ecosystem, and although I\u0026rsquo;ve never found it to be very good it\u0026rsquo;s got a lot of users that swear by it. I\u0026rsquo;m wondering though, how the licensing works, as WPS Office is completely proprietary piece of software.\nUbuntu Studio 20.04 Ubuntu Studio 20.04 desktop\nUbuntu Studio is a strange beast. It is often said that the success of early Ubuntu versions stemmed from sane defaults and moderation in including applications within its base installation. Well, Ubuntu Studio is a complete antithesis of this concept. It packs in everything including the sink into a crazy wide collection of tools for media creators of all kind. I honestly don\u0026rsquo;t think there is a person on this planet that can use all of the tools proficiently.\nAt first, I wrote this part of the review quite scathingly. I though it was just an exercise in excess, while not provide any more value than a regular Xubuntu install and some meta-packages in the repositories. I\u0026rsquo;ve since then talked with some of my friends in European Ubuntu community and they\u0026rsquo;ve made some interesting points that changed my view.\nThe main contribution of Ubuntu Studio is providing great visibility and discoverability to a variety of open source content creation tools that may have been overlooked in the past by creators switching to Linux.\nIt also comes with JACK already set up, which I\u0026rsquo;ve heard is no trivial task. Apart from the app selection and JACK, it\u0026rsquo;s pretty much standard Xubuntu install with a simple theme and surprisingly lower idle RAM usage\nUbuntu Studio 20.04 RAM usage\nAll in all, I\u0026rsquo;d say this little weird flavor changed my opinion and since next release is gonna switch XFCE for subjectively much superior KDE, I think it\u0026rsquo;s great to see it continue cater to its uber-niche.\nUbuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa desktop\nThis release isn\u0026rsquo;t some revolutionary jump forward, that won\u0026rsquo;t leave no stone unturned. Certainly, there are some changes underneath, such as backporting of Wireguard VPN in the kernel, inclusion of device specific enhancements in the base iso, etc. These improvements aren\u0026rsquo;t, however really visible to a basic user. What is great about this release is the culmination of a series of incremental improvements that started back in 2017 with Artful Aardvark and its move from Unity 7 to Gnome Shell. I\u0026rsquo;m not ashamed of saying I was very much against this switch. I love Unity and would be using it to this day, if it wasn\u0026rsquo;t borked by later versions of GTK applications. HUD doesn\u0026rsquo;t work in every application anymore, scaling is unreliable and honestly, Unity looks are so 2012\u0026hellip; I was pretty hard on Gnome in my previous reviews, harping on the extra clicks it requires to do basic tasks like connecting to a new Wi-Fi network and a lot of frame drops I\u0026rsquo;d experience even on beefy machines. Fortunately, the latter issue is gone and the Gnome design sensibilities are starting to grow on me. I don\u0026rsquo;t think GTK will replace Qt as my favorite GUI toolkit any time soon, but I don\u0026rsquo;t hold Gnome as an anti-feature of Linux distros anymore. So let\u0026rsquo;s take a look at what\u0026rsquo;s so great about this purple beauty.\nFirst launch welcomes new users with an easy utility to set up your online accounts, Ubuntu\u0026rsquo;s Live Patch feature, opt-out of sending Canonical useful telemetry or turn on location detection. The last slide shows you some of the awesome apps that are available via Snap Store.\nAbout that Snap Store, I\u0026rsquo;d say its an unfortunate misnomer. I know it means that it\u0026rsquo;s a version of Gnome Software that\u0026rsquo;s installed as a snap package, but it evokes the feeling that it only allows users to install applications packaged as snaps and not the usual .deb format. I myself had spent a lot of mine time explaining away this confusion to members of Czech and Slovak Ubuntu communities. If it was only me, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t care that much either way, since I usually install software using terminal commands, but I can see how it would make new users a bit uncomfortable. The thing is, though, that snaps do have a lot of bad rep, which I think is mostly blown out of proportion. I think it suffers from the same curse as Unity does - it wasn\u0026rsquo;t all that polished in it\u0026rsquo;s first couple of versions, but now it\u0026rsquo;s awesome and the few disadvantages it carries with it are greatly overshadowed by advantages.\nAt first start of the Snap Store, it takes a while to download the Software catalogue. Unfortunately, it will still take a while to populate all categories, if you\u0026rsquo;re on slow connection or the servers are being hammered at the moment. The strength of the Snap store and snaps themselves is in the fact, that software publishers are in control of releasing their software to the public and thus users can be certain they always have the latest and greatest versions of their favourite apps. That\u0026rsquo;s why even large proprietary vendors and services are jumping on the bandwagon and you can get Slack, Spotify, and many more right from the store.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s not just about proprietary applications. Even open source ones, such as Inkscape can benefit from the ease of packaging and publishing apps in this way. Here we have the very latest stable version of Inkscape packaged as snap almost immediately after releasing the new version, while the .deb packages are lagging several months behind it. Snap apps even ask for permissions like you\u0026rsquo;re probably used to from Android and iOS. In the last screenshot of the bunch, you can see the snap version on the left, while the .deb version is on the right half of the screen. I didn\u0026rsquo;t measure it, but since I couldn\u0026rsquo;t tell the difference in launch speed, I\u0026rsquo;d say they are reasonably close.\nPackaging apps as snaps is really easy, easy enough that even I could do it for my simple audio switching bash script. Even though it is a bit wasteful to package 14MB of PulseAudio and notify-osd with a ~50 lines of bash, it allows the script to run without major issues on a majority of mainstream Linux distributions.\nOther than the new Snap Store, Ubuntu 20.04 brings Gnome 3.36.1. Like I\u0026rsquo;ve already said, this is the peak Gnome experience - smooth looking and smooth running. Even the notoriously frame-droppy Application reveal animation is buttery-smooth and provides the wow-factor the distro deserves. What\u0026rsquo;s even more impressive is, that the frames don\u0026rsquo;t drop even when running with experimental fractional scaling option set to \u0026ldquo;on\u0026rdquo;.\nEven stuff like fingerprint scanner and LTE modem work out of the box. There are some parts, such as the OCD triggering misaligned search bar. Fortunately, it does not bother me that much, same as the higher than I would like RAM consumption.\n1.4GB is pretty steep, but in 2020 with 8GB of RAM in phones, I guess it is manageable\nYou can call me superficial, but one of my favourite features of this release is the updated Yaru theme. I love it, I love how original, fitting and Ubuntu-like it is. Warm purple and orange accents are both classy and comforting.\nConclusion This has been such a ride for me. Moving between all of these flavors for the past few weeks has radically shaken up my view of Ubuntu, not only of the default Gnome flavor, but of all that is built around the core project. I find myself a bit worried, that the brand and reputation is somewhat diluted by the plethora of flavors, most of which are superfluous. I don\u0026rsquo;t really see why flavors such as Lubuntu, Xubuntu or Ubuntu Budgie should carry on being called \u0026ldquo;official\u0026rdquo;. They are great OS on their own, but I feel like any lack of attention or polish they may suffer from reflects badly on Ubuntu as a whole and they don\u0026rsquo;t really bring all that much to it on the best of days. If it is deemed necessary to keep some flavors around to keep the options out there, then I would prefer the selection to be a bit condensed, maybe to Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu MATE with Ubuntu Studio meta-packages. That way, we could see more polish and hopefully stuff like a QT variant of Yaru theme for Kubuntu.\nOn the other hand, there is much promise and potential in Ubuntu\u0026rsquo;s future. There is visible progress in the development of relations with OEMs, the experimental support of ZFS on root partition and now even flicker-free boot sequence. All of these are signs of the future Ubuntu is moving towards. I\u0026rsquo;ve been lucky enough to be present at the press webinar hosted by Mark Shuttleworth, where we were able to peek behind the curtain.\nThe questions and answers we\u0026rsquo;ve got did fill me with sober enthusiasm. I was glad to hear that Ubuntu is already self-sufficient and no longer reliant on funding by it\u0026rsquo;s benevolent dictator for life. Snaps are improving rapidly and there are even talks of getting them to run on Windows, via it\u0026rsquo;s Windows Subsystem for Linux (v2).\nWhat may be less exciting for a common home user, but can prove very important in business sphere is the increase in extended security maintenance - it now covers every single package in Ubuntu repositories.\nI myself am mostly excited about snaps. The potential future, where I would be able to create one package for an application and run it on all important Linux distribution AND Microsoft Windows is a dream come true and if the tooling around it keeps on improving with the same speed as it did so far, I see a bright future for Ubuntu as both the developer-centric and the de facto default Linux desktop for any user. Let\u0026rsquo;s hope that FUD and misunderstandings won\u0026rsquo;t slow the progress down too much.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/ubuntu-20-04-focal-fossa-a-complex-look-at-the-state-of-ubuntu/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAs somebody who\u0026rsquo;s always had Ubuntu in his daily life for the past 13 years, I sometimes find it hard to differentiate between all the versions. I do appreciate the progress though, albeit I\u0026rsquo;ve felt like the direction Ubuntu was taking was going to force me to abandon it eventually. Lately, though, I\u0026rsquo;ve enjoyed the increased polish and speed improvements of Gnome 3.36 dabbled with snap packaging, understood its \u0026ldquo;raison d\u0026rsquo;etre\u0026rdquo; and had the opportunity of participating in an Canonical hosted webinar for press to pose some questions.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Mega Review - A complex look at the state of Ubuntu"},{"content":"When I received the newsletter letting me know that in just a few days, there would be a new point release of elementary OS, I\u0026rsquo;ve had mixed feelings. I was happy that the project I find very endearing is chugging along nicely, but I knew it would be a tough review to write. The problem with elementary OS is, that in this last release, the team behind it has been trickling down bug fixes and new features (such as the new login greeter). For this reason, it is very hard for me, as a daily user of this Linux distro, to make a clear distinction between the previous version, Juno, and this new version - codenamed Hera. I guess I\u0026rsquo;ll have to try to approach this review as if I was a completely new user, seeing the OS for the very first time.\nLike a virgin!\nClean slate After the installation, I\u0026rsquo;ve created a new user to see what the out of the box experience is like. I was greeted with a nice onboarding slideshow, similar to the one Fedora, Ubuntu MATE and many others has been shipping recently.\nIt is a nice touch and sure helps the first impression slightly slighted by the suboptimal default setup on my 1440p 14\u0026quot; screen. Fortunately, decreasing the overall scaling to 100% and increasing the font and icon size to \u0026ldquo;large\u0026rdquo; seems to make the UI usable. Once that was done, I could go on to explore the famously gorgeous elementary OS desktop.\nThe application drawer is situated as usually in the top-left corner of the screen and can be summoned by the super+space keyboard shortcut. It is rather basic, only allowing you to search through apps and settings, not documents and files, but at least you can pick between a grid and a list view.\nThe thing I at first despised, but grown to like is the virtual workspace management. They are dynamically created like in Gnome, but arranged horizontally and can be managed in a pleasant multitasking view\nMultitasking View\nBut eye-candy interface does not make a great OS, right? Fortunately, the default elementary OS apps are also things of beauty. They may not have all the bells and whistles of other software suites (ehm, KDE apps), but they balance it up with thoughtful design. Quick disclaimer, as I\u0026rsquo;ve had to used the laptop for work over the weekend, I\u0026rsquo;ve had to install LibreOffice and Firefox, which are not installed by default. With this in mind, let\u0026rsquo;s take a look at some of the default applications.\nBrowser Arguably the most important application in any OS. It is hard to imagine someone nowadays making do without a web browser. The default browser in elementary OS is Epiphany, which is a very competent browser, but which can\u0026rsquo;t really compete with the likes of Firefox or Chrome. Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, it is perfectly usable for regular users, who might even fall in love with it\u0026rsquo;s simplistic look, but if you\u0026rsquo;re addicted to collecting extensions, you should look somewhere else. I usually use Epiphany as my secondary browser in order to easily separate my multitude of online accounts from each other.\nCode One of my all-time favourite text editor. I can\u0026rsquo;t really point my finger to any single feature that makes this app stand above the rest of the category, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s the typical elementary OS blend of utility and design that gets out of your way. In just a few clicks I\u0026rsquo;m able to switch the highlighting profile, the color theme of the app or the number of spaces each tab inserts. It has precisely the features I want in an editor (and in quickly reachable spots) and nothing more. However, if you think you are missing something, you can extend the functionality by installing some of the many available plug-ins.\nFile manager Another vital tool in the toolbox, the elementary OS\u0026rsquo;s file manager feels, for better or worse, like the Finder in macOS. It\u0026rsquo;s not overly bloated with buttons and menus, but supports tabbing, splitting the window, showing the directories as trees and so on. It\u0026rsquo;s a decent enough file manager, with one preset that may get on people\u0026rsquo;s nerves - it opens files and directories with one click, requiring you to either carefully the mouse cursor at top-left corner, or hold the Ctrl-key if you want to just select a file. Fortunately, it\u0026rsquo;s not hard to disable this behavior in unsupported elementary Tweaks app, or using terminal command:\ngsettings set io.elementary.files.preferences single-click false I, myself, got quite used to the behaviour, but I can imagine most people not willing to give it a chance.\nMusic I don\u0026rsquo;t listen to much local music anymore. I may lose some of my open source street cred, but I\u0026rsquo;ve failed to resist to lure of the green demon Spotify. It\u0026rsquo;s just such a convenient way to have a plethora of genres at a fingertip without resorting to piracy. I also don\u0026rsquo;t usually seek out artists, I\u0026rsquo;m more interested in specific genres to match the mood and it allows me to match music to the mood. That being said, if I still kept hold of my local mp3/flac library, elementary OS music app would be as good as any other. It visually fits in with the rest of the system, imports your music from the ~/Music folder automagically and it even plays music. What more can you wish for?\nVideo In terms of use, local video playback is much more in my alley. I often use youtube-dl to pull down videos from my favorite Youtube channels, Udemy courses, etc. The default app is competent enough, but I\u0026rsquo;m so used to the VLC/mpv, that I install them almost by muscle memory nowadays.\nPhotos The photos app is, like all the rest of default elementary OS apps, streamlined to only have the bare minimum of necessary features. It serves well to view both singular images and slideshows, can perform basic picture-tuning (crop, tilt, color correction) and export the file as a different image format, but I would like to see simpler renaming of the images in the future releases. Currently you have to go through a clunky menu, which feels kinda un-elementary. Otherwise it\u0026rsquo;s a nice-looking picture viewer, which will serve most users well.\nCalendar I\u0026rsquo;ve never been great at organizing my time. Don\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, I love setting up calendars and creating complex timetables for everything from important meetings to going to the loo, but it only holds my attention for a few days at a time. After that my calendar-filling habits fall of at the first opportunity and all I\u0026rsquo;m left with is a depressing reminder of my lack of planning. If I ever start keeping a calendar again, elementary OS\u0026rsquo;s calendar app is as good as any other in helping me with that. You can easily add appointments - with location, participants, reminders, etc.\nMail I must admit, due to the time constraints I haven\u0026rsquo;t given Geary, the default mail client a fair chance. I was glad to see that my complaint about the text encoding issues are out of date and I think I\u0026rsquo;ll try to migrate my accounts from Thunderbird in the next couple of days. If I find something interesting to say about it, I\u0026rsquo;ll add an update to this section here.\nGeary mail client\nMiscellaneous Apart from the aforementioned apps, you can also find here a basic calculator, selfie camera or a screenshot utility.\nAppCenter and Sideloading Apps in elementary OS are usually installed using the AppCenter. It is a nice-looking repository browser, with the added feature of monetizing curated apps by the pay what you want model. I myself have pitched in a dollar or two to some of the devs, as the elementary-specific apps are usually really pretty and I enjoy using them. The issue here is, that as there is no elementaryOS online account, you don\u0026rsquo;t get to keep your purchases if you wipe clean your machine or move to a new one. It\u0026rsquo;s not a huge issue, since you can opt out of paying for the applications, but if you do that, you\u0026rsquo;ll have to install the updates manually. This is one case in which I don\u0026rsquo;t mind having to sing up for an online account and elementary OS devs should think about implementing an online account system here. Other than this medium-sized issue, the AppCenter works ok.\nThere is another point here, that I take slight issue with. Installing Flatpaks is called \u0026ldquo;Sideloading\u0026rdquo;, which evokes the feeling of doing something \u0026ldquo;advanced\u0026rdquo; and developery, which isn\u0026rsquo;t the case. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of apps missing in the AppCenter repository, for example Spotify, and calling the action of clicking \u0026ldquo;Install\u0026rdquo; on its Flathub\u0026rsquo;s page is doing disservice to the process, which in itself is simple to do and in my experience works more reliably than on Fedora.\nFlatpak \u0026quot;sideloading\u0026quot;\nDue to the size of the repository, I would prefer if elementary opted for the Snaps, but I can see the reasons why they chose Flatpaks. The ability to install snaps is just a single\nsudo apt install snapd away, so I don\u0026rsquo;t mind it that much.\nIssues In my limited time to review the changes and running it on my laptop, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed one reasonably serious issue. I\u0026rsquo;m almost constantly wearing my Jabra Elite Active 65t wireless earbuds, and today, while writing this review they\u0026rsquo;ve switched from the default A2DP mode (high-quality stereo output) to HSP (low-quality mono output). I\u0026rsquo;ve had this happen with other distributions, but this was the first time, that I couldn\u0026rsquo;t find the mode switch anywhere in the settings. The only workaround I can do is to unpair the headset, pair it again and hope for the best.\nNo mode switcher in Bluetooth audio devices?\nConclusion Elementary OS 5.1 Hera is not a major release by any criteria. It is a nice iteration on a polished experience, encompassing features that has been slowly added to the 5.0 Juno release. Out of the box, it is a great experience and solves one of the gripes users could have with the previous versions - Clunky installation of third-party apps. With Flatpaks working nicely, this issue is no longer distracting you from enjoying the thoughtful work of Daniel, Cassidy and the rest of the team.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/elementary-os-5-1-hera/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen I received the newsletter letting me know that in just a few days, there would be a new point release of elementary OS, I\u0026rsquo;ve had mixed feelings. I was happy that the project I find very endearing is chugging along nicely, but I knew it would be a tough review to write. The problem with elementary OS is, that in this last release, the team behind it has been trickling down bug fixes and new features (such as the new login greeter). For this reason, it is very hard for me, as a daily user of this Linux distro, to make a clear distinction between the \u003ca href=\"/open-source/elementaryos-juno-review/\"\u003eprevious version, Juno\u003c/a\u003e, and this new version - codenamed Hera. I guess I\u0026rsquo;ll have to try to approach this review as if I was a completely new user, seeing the OS for the very first time.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"elementary OS 5.1 Hera"},{"content":"Most people know me as a long-time Gnome hater. I admit, I\u0026rsquo;ve been hard on it, but once in a while, I do try to challenge my own views by diving into stuff I didn\u0026rsquo;t appreciate at first. For this reason, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to give Fedora 31 some time to shine on my primary laptop. Of course, as a long-time Linux (usually Ubuntu) user, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t unfamiliar with Gnome, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never tried to use it without pulling down dozens of extensions, themes and performing a plethora of modifications and fine-tuning. This time, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to try and see things as Gnome devs want us to. After more than a month of use, I admit I\u0026rsquo;ve warmed up to it, but I still see some glaring issues with their choices.\nThe good\u0026hellip; The life of a GNU/Linux user is that of compromises. Drivers are often worse than on competing platforms, we\u0026rsquo;re usually considered second-class citizens and many features of modern laptops either require some effort to make work, behave erratically, or don\u0026rsquo;t work at all. When I first booted a clean install of Fedora 31 on my Lenovo X1 Carbon (Gen 3), I was positively shocked to see both my touchscreen, multitouch touchpad and fingerprint scanner working out of the box. Especially considering Fedora\u0026rsquo;s reputation of not being the most noob-friendly, I expected to be forced to perform my usual dance to set up touchscreen gestures, basic two-finger scrolling and giving up on biometric login.\nAfter the first login, there was a nice onboarding slideshow, showing new users the peculiarities of using Gnome and finishing up initial setup. It reminds me of setting up an Android smartphone and it is a nice touch (heh) for new users.\nApart from surprisingly great support of this hardware, I really grown to love the default Adwaita theme. At first, I thought it looked a bit boring and I pined after the bright orange accents found in Ubuntu, but after a couple of days, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed how pleasant to look at and polished it looks. I still prefer my OS to have a bit more color to it, but I must admit current Gnome is gorgeous to look at. Recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve borrowed my brothers old MacBook Pro, and although beauty is in the eye of beholder, I can honestly say that in my view, Fedora is on par or better looking than macOS.\nThe default Gnome apps both look great and seem to be ready for the dream of convergence to become reality. Almost all of them scale correctly, are easy to use with keyboard shortcuts, mouse cursor or touchscreen, and even though I grow wary of repeating myself, they do look gorgeous.\n\u0026hellip; the bad \u0026hellip; The reason behind touchscreen and touchpad work perfectly is that Fedora ships with Wayland out of the box. Wayland is a protocol meant to replace the aging X Server with Wayland compositors, however, in my experience it breaks more stuff than it solves. For every touchscreen gesture, you get some weird limitations, that is caused by Wayland\u0026rsquo;s design and isn\u0026rsquo;t going to get fixed anytime soon. In recent years, I\u0026rsquo;ve grown very used to having a pull-down terminal available just a single keystroke away. Unfortunately, Wayland breaks not only pull-down terminals (such as Tilda, Guake, Yakuake,\u0026hellip;), but also screen recording and doesn\u0026rsquo;t bring that much to the table. To my knowledge, libinput gestures are possible to set up with Xorg, touchscreen works in other Gnome on Xorg distributions (ehm, Ubuntu), and to this date, Wayland in Fedora doesn\u0026rsquo;t allow fractional scaling. Sorry, Wayland, you\u0026rsquo;re not ready to play the first fiddle yet.\nGnome Settings - Where\u0026rsquo;s the promised fractional scaling?\nApart from Wayland issues, I\u0026rsquo;ve also had some issues with software availability. Default Fedora repositories are lacking some very popular applications and for almost all users, RPM fusion is a must. Having to add unofficial repositories to install VLC is a bit of a no-no in my opinion.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve tried to mitigate this issue with trying out flatpaks, the main competitor of Canonical\u0026rsquo;s Snap packages, but I had some questionable experience with them as well. Weirdly enough, you need to first enable flatpak repository, just to have the installation progress get stuck on 0% forever if you try to install some Flatpak applications. Fortunately, snapd is just a single yum install away, and snaps do work great in Fedora.\nGnome Software - Installing Flatpak isn\u0026rsquo;t really user-friendly\nFrom the point of a developer, it was an even greater mess. I\u0026rsquo;ve had great trouble trying to set up my work environment, ultimately being unable to properly configure QtCreator, as for some reason, while trying to build an application that without issues builds everywhere, meta-object compiler suddenly has a meltdown trying to deal with std. Investigating the issue has brought me to the deepest levels of internet and bore no fruit, so I resorted to do my dev work in an Ubuntu 16.04 VM. Not ideal.\nLast but not least, for some reason, Gnome seems more sluggish in its purest form than it is in Ubuntu 19.10. The stuttering and frame drops of old Gnome are pretty much gone, but I have often have to wait on strange freezes and I\u0026rsquo;ve had the whole Gnome crash twice, killing all my open windows and costing me about an hour of work in both cases. This caught me by surprise, because I haven\u0026rsquo;t encountered crashes like that since Canonical switched its focus from creating their own Unity environment, over to improving Gnome. I would expect the home field advantage to have some effect in making Fedora the best experience there is.\n\u0026hellip; the strange. There are some choices made in Fedora, that are neither wrong or right, but seem a bit strange. One such shocker for me was when I found out that \u0026ldquo;nano\u0026rdquo;, my favourite command-line text editor is not installed. There also is no preset keyboard shortcut to launch Gnome Terminal and then there are the famous Gnome \u0026ldquo;features\u0026rdquo;, like taking 5-7 clicks to connect to a WiFi network, not having a suspend button in the top-right menu, unless you hold Alt-key, etc. On a clean install, I\u0026rsquo;ve also received fun, but harmless errors popping up after each boot.\nGnome Shell - Notification widget showing various errors\nConclusion Using Fedora 31 has been an interesting experience. If you allow yourself to see it, it opens a window into the mind of a Gnome dev team. I must admit, that in a vacuum, their vision of future is appealing, mostly in terms of streamlined and clean design. If it was possible to use exclusively GTK applications across various screen sizes, pointing devices and use-cases, it would be an amazing ecosystem. Thanks to Purism and its Librem 5, we may be closing in on this in 2020. Unfortunately, the whole world doesn\u0026rsquo;t bend to the will of the team, different people have different views and the DE itself still struggles with some pretty basic (although not technically trivial) growing pains. It\u0026rsquo;s just a shame that it has taken Gnome Shell 8 years to finally start pairing its gorgeous aesthetics with features it lost in the transition.\nFedora 31 is a good distro living in a time of great ones. In my view, both ElementaryOS and Ubuntu provide a much more polished experience, without the hassle of enabling unofficial repositories just to install widely used apps. They also have the advantage of being built on a rock-solid Debian base, allowing the teams to focus on presenting the users the best experience possible. Fedora is valuable as a testing ground for base Gnome, but I don\u0026rsquo;t really see it competing as a daily driver for anyone not being paid to sport a red headwear.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/fedora-31-review/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMost people know me as a long-time Gnome hater. I admit, I\u0026rsquo;ve been hard on it, but once in a while, I do try to challenge my own views by diving into stuff I didn\u0026rsquo;t appreciate at first. For this reason, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to give Fedora 31 some time to shine on my primary laptop. Of course, as a long-time Linux (usually Ubuntu) user, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t unfamiliar with Gnome, but I\u0026rsquo;ve never tried to use it without pulling down dozens of extensions, themes and performing a plethora of modifications and fine-tuning. This time, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided to try and see things as Gnome devs want us to. After more than a month of use, I admit I\u0026rsquo;ve warmed up to it, but I still see some glaring issues with their choices.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Fedora 31 Review"},{"content":"We are just (currently) two guys from Slovakia who occasionally have some random experiences (we believe are) worth sharing. We are not offering any services except picking items dropped by clumsy people and giving it back to them.\nThe intended goal of this blog is to be a small repository of more or less useful knowledge so that we can trace back our steps in case of eventual screw-ups, share interesting technical tidbits, review distributions and interesting projects, etc.\nMichal Kohútek I\u0026rsquo;m a CompSci student from Trencin, Slovakia, that is currently working towards a doctorate degree at my Alma Mater in Nitra, Slovakia. I speak English quite well, French somewhat and I can order a beer in several other languages. As a passionate user of Ubuntu and converter of many source infidels, I attend conferences, give talks and try to do my part in the good fight. Apart from my studies, this and several other websites, my friend and I are starting an audiocast about audiocasts called PodCrawl. You can check it out here.\nAs for my contribution to this blog, eventually, I would like to extend it to contain my experiences from various GNU/Linux-related tech conferences, meetups, etc. I am quite opinionated on many topics, so there\u0026rsquo;s a decent chance I will post a view, that does not correspond to your world-view. If you want to have a constructive talk, feel free to contact me via social media, email or carrier pidgeon. If you want to post hurtful, mean and otherwise stupid comments, please write them down on a piece of parchment, sign and stick them up your arse.\nJán Dugáček ","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/about/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe are just (currently) two guys from Slovakia who occasionally have some random experiences (we believe are) worth sharing. We are not offering any services except picking items dropped by clumsy people and giving it back to them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe intended goal of this blog is to be a small repository of more or less useful knowledge so that we can trace back our steps in case of eventual screw-ups, share interesting technical tidbits, review distributions and interesting projects, etc.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"About us"},{"content":"The best way to contact us is by attaching messages to sushi or hamburger packages sent to our addresses. We may occasionally respond to comments under blog posts, but it has to be related to the topic. Otherwise, send treats first.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/contact/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe best way to contact us is by attaching messages to sushi or hamburger packages sent to our addresses. We may occasionally respond to comments under blog posts, but it has to be related to the topic. Otherwise, send treats first.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Contact"},{"content":"If you’ve read any of my previous reviews, you know that I have a difficult relationship with Gnome. I love the aesthetics, but I despise the number of desktop crashing bugs, dropped frames and the number of extra clicks you need to make to get anything done. That being said, Gnome 3.34 in Ubuntu 19.10 is a giant leap forward and if the core Gnome team supported by Canonical’s renewed efforts keep tweaking the performance and stability in subsequent releases, I may be tempted to stop distrohopping and stay with vanilla Ubuntu until something exciting happens in the Linux distributions land.\nUsing Gnome 3.34 in Ubuntu 19.10 feels like getting used to living with a new girlfriend after you’ve been trying to recover from a bad breakup by falling into a string of random hook-ups. That is, I still miss Unity and I remember fondly its kinks and unique features (I \u0026lt;3 HUD), but I’m finding various exciting things that I can appreciate about this new relationship.\nThings i didn’t even know I wanted, such as proper touch support. I’ve got my first touchscreen laptop (Lenovo X1 Carbon) and fingering my screen (tee-hee) to scroll through long academic papers is a godsend. Proper responsive scaling of a few selected Gnome applications (I smell Librem 5’s influence here) is also a nice touch that make the DE look more polished than ever before.\nWhat really sells it though, and I have almost lost hope to ever see it happen, is the great increase in performance. Stutters and frame drops do occasionally happen, especially when you have a bunch of windows opened across multiple virtual desktops, but they are no longer omnipresent and are much less disturbing.\nThis used to be my gripe for as long as there was Gnome Shell. It’s still not perfect, but it’s freaking huge improvement.\nIn addition, although this may be more of a testament to how bad Gnome used to be, I only encountered two Gnome crashes, that brought down all the open apps as well. First one happened within a few days of usage a couple of weeks ago, while I was trying to log in after waking the laptop from sleep; the second happened while writing this review, mere hours before the 19.10 is released.\nThe stuff under the hood has undergone the standard version increment. The kernel is version 5.3.0, Gnome Shell is version 3.34.1, you can now experimentally install / on a ZFS partition and Nvidia drivers will be shipped with the .iso image. October releases used to be quite exciting and filled with new features, but this one was more about the polish and tweaking the user experience, than anything radically new.\nNeofetch – Showing system info\nWhat can make some users happy is the continued improvement of the snap integration, which now supports themes and some visual updates to the Yaru theme itself. Subjectively, I find Ubuntu 19.10 to be the best looking distro I’ve used in a while. Everything, from the Gnome itself to the color palette in dialog windows are wonderful to look at.\nActivities - Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine\nCalendar Widget - Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine\nCalendar - Theme Example\nKeyboard Layout Dropdown menu\nCombined menu - Cool to look at, needlessly click-heavy to use\nFile Rename - Nautilus\nClose File without saving - Gedit\nVirtual Desktop switching\nI just wish the functionality and features would some day catch up to the eye-candy of recent Ubuntu versions, as whenever I use my girlfriends laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 with Unity, I feel as if the version numbers got mixed up. Unity in 16.04 still runs circles around Gnome in terms of raw performance, screen scaling, multiple display support and number of killer features. The only categories, where 19.10 gets points are the theme, touch support and responsive app scaling, which matters more on a phone or a tablet, than on laptops and desktops.\nIt takes too much time and effort to do simple tasks such as connecting Bluetooth headphones, switching audio output…Or even connect to wifi networks. There is no reason whatsoever why it should take 5-7 clicks!\nOne of my long time dream is having a calendar widget that would allow me to add to-do tasks and events without having to launch a second application. You’d think the big, beautiful calendar and notifications widget up top would allow me to do just that, right? WRONG!!! Stuff like this is really infuriating, especially considering some great usability innovations that are unique to Gnome. It’s app switching via activities menu, especially using keyboard is blazing fast and cool as heck.\nWhy the hell can’t the whole desktop be as efficient?\nUnfortunately the flow of time waits on nobody and 16.04 has only 2 years of support to go. With the steady improvements rate, there is a slight possibility, that I’ll be able to use vanilla Ubuntu full-time once again, without pining for the past. I wish Canonical and Gnome team the best in their effort to get there.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/ubuntu-19-10-eoan-ermine-review/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIf you’ve read any of my previous reviews, you know that I have a difficult relationship with Gnome. I love the aesthetics, but I despise the number of desktop crashing bugs, dropped frames and the number of extra clicks you need to make to get anything done. That being said, Gnome 3.34 in Ubuntu 19.10 is a giant leap forward and if the core Gnome team supported by Canonical’s renewed efforts keep tweaking the performance and stability in subsequent releases, I may be tempted to stop distrohopping and stay with vanilla Ubuntu until something exciting happens in the Linux distributions land.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine Review"},{"content":"Manjaro is a strange beast. It’s a distribution based upon the memetic Arch Linux. That doesn’t mean it’s BFU-hostile, though, or that you have to set it all up from scratch. In fact, Manjaro is an easy to setup distro you could install for your grandparents and sleep soundly knowing they will always have the (almost) bleeding edge software, with a eye-catching minty theme on top. Of course, you’d have to first instruct them to install the upgrades whenever the Octopi Pamac software manager pops up with a notification, otherwise it could fall victim to the classic rolling-release death trap of updating after too much time has passed. So what’s the difference between Manjaro and other user-friendly distros?\nManjaro is similar to Ubuntu in that it’s got various DE flavors. What separates it from the rest of the bunch is that it comes, apart from the usual Gnome, KDE and XFCE, with a fork of an option called Architect. This allows you to pick and choose from the buffet of packages precisely those, that you want in your installation. Given my love for the KDE, I’ve opted for that one, though, so I’ll have to return to the Architect on a later date. One thing that keeps bugging me is the breadth of options provided by such a tiny team of talented individuals. I find it a bit crazy that Manjaro provides 3+1 main flavors of their distro, along with specific ARM versions for Raspberry Pi 4, Odroid and a plethora of other widely-used SBCs. To be honest, one of my concern in the long term is that the team’s gonna burn out or spread themselves too thin in their efforts. Fortunately, they’ve recently got funding by a company called Blue Systems (patrons of other respectable projects such as Calamares, AppImageLauncher and the freakin’ KDE itself) and seem to be growing their list of commercial partners.\nCore team – there’s a small bunch of other people, dealing mostly with ARM and such.\nOnce I install any distro I usually go to the specific app launcher and take a look at the preinstalled applications. Usually you see the same things across almost all the distributions – Your DE-specific defaults (file managers, pdf viewers, image viewers, music apps, etc.), Gimp and LibreOffice. Ubuntu has dropped Gimp from its defaults a few years back and some distributions do omit LibreOffice for some obscure reasons, but I’ve never seen the combination of Calligra office suite and web shortcuts to Microsoft Office Online. It’s a strange choice that may cause some pause to most die-hard Linux users and truth to be told, didn’t really resonate well with me. MS Office Online is usable (although requires you to be online and lacks less used features), but Calligra has crashed repeatedly while opening some of my documents (both free and proprietary formats) and it is strange to offer two non-standard options like this. Surprisingly, in spite of this, I found Calligra to be fascinating and will return to take a look at it on later date.\nAs a testament to the everchanging nature of rolling distributions, previous paragraph is already out of date. Manjaro currently offers the choice between LibreOffice and FreeOffice.\nMichal Kohutek (October 2019)\nOther than that, I was surprised that the workspace switching keybindings weren’t set at all, but that shouldn’t bother anybody – Those who can’t figure out how to set up keybindings probably don’t use virtual workspaces either.\nManjaro Hello That’s not to say Manjaro is hostile to new users. It took the chapter out of Ubuntu Mate’s book and created it’s own welcome application – Manjaro Hello. It may not look as nice as Ubuntu Mate Welcome or be as feature rich, but it provides the basic information, links to support forums and so on. For users searching for more information, there is a bundled user guide in PDF format.\nManjaro Hello welcomes new users and provides relevant information.\nI must say, I do enjoy the look of Manjaro. It’s a pretty standard KDE Plasma 5 installation, but the theme is very clean and makes the desktop look very professional. The snappiness is also on a completely different level compared to Gnome distros and almost rivals that of XFCE. All in all, Manjaro is pretty sexy.\nManjaro desktop – Desktop image provided by Variety\nA great strength of Arch-based distributions is the availability of bleeding edge software. Canonical may be trying to provide LTS releases with reasonably recent versions using their Snap store (not it’s singular purpose), but no distro can even touch the glory of the AUR, aka Arch User Repository. It’s a repository of automated build instructions compiled and curated by the community, which allows you to install pretty much everything under the sun in it’s most recent version directly from source. I was even able to build the newest version of the Pupil Labs eye tracking software I’m using at my university. I did have to create a new udev rule to make it work correctly, but I was still surprised to even find it in the repository. If you like to live a bit dangerously and can do basic problem-solving, AUR is a hoot. Manjaro makes it a bit easier to do, as its GUI package installer, Octopi, supports both the regular repository and the AUR.\nAnother recent change – Octopi has been replaced by Pamac.\nMichal Kohutek (October 2019)\nOne of the main features of both KDE and Arch Linux is their configurability. Given this edition of Manjaro is based on both, it goes without saying that its got a great amount of different dials, sliders and buttons to play with in the Settings app.\nManjaro Settings Manjaro Settings – One place to go if you want to tweak everything to your liking\nManjaro also comes with KInfoCenter, a KDE application that provides you with detailed (and I mean DETAILED) information dump about your system – down to the graphs on energy consumption, health of your battery, etc.\nIn conclusion, Manjaro KDE is a great rolling distribution with unrivaled software availability and almost Ubuntu-level user friendliness. It’s got a couple of great features, a weird choice here and there and neat default look to top it all off. I’d say that if you’re getting bored with all the Debian-based distros and you’re not fond of funny hats, Manjaro is a respectable candidate.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/manjaro-18-10-kde-edition-non-review-2019/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eManjaro is a strange beast. It’s a distribution based upon the memetic Arch Linux. That doesn’t mean it’s BFU-hostile, though, or that you have to set it all up from scratch. In fact, Manjaro is an easy to setup distro you could install for your grandparents and sleep soundly knowing they will always have the (almost) bleeding edge software, with a eye-catching minty theme on top. Of course, you’d have to first instruct them to install the upgrades whenever the Octopi Pamac software manager pops up with a notification, otherwise it could fall victim to the classic rolling-release death trap of updating after too much time has passed. So what’s the difference between Manjaro and other user-friendly distros?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Manjaro 18.10 (KDE Edition) Non-Review (2019)"},{"content":"This review is one of the longest in the making ever since starting this blog. I’ve been using Ubuntu Budgie on my desktop workstation even before I’ve installed Xubuntu 19.04 on my main laptop for it’s review. From day one, I kinda liked it, making in my eyes a ton more sense than Gnome Shell and thus entering the ranks of superior GTK3 desktop implementations. Pantheon. please make room for your new roommate!\nUbuntu Budgie is visually remarkably neat and polished. In fact, it is more polished than it has any reason to be, being it is a community supported flavor of my old flame – Ubuntu. If my memory of Ubuntu flavors got wiped clean and you’d ask me, which flavor is the official, Canonical-backed one, five times out of ten, I’d say Budgie. It’s got charming little touches, such as the clock and weather overlays displayed over the desktop wallpaper, a selection of curated GTK themes and a rich offering of installable applets. The eye-candy however brings along slightly lower performance and higher memory consumption. I don’t like grading GNU/Linux distros based upon megabytes of RAM gobbled up on boot, as a single Facebook tab in a modern browser will dwarf any reasonable DE in it’s RAM hogginess, but after installing it on my Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 3 with a dual-core i5 and 8GBs of RAM, I often notice stuttering, temporary freezes and general slowness.\nRAM consumption upon boot on Lenovo X1 Carbon\nOn my desktop workstation with double the ram and quadruple the CPU cores I notice no such thing, but I would be enraged if any distro wouldn’t scream on this AMD beast. Enough with my performance experience, as your mileage may vary depending on many factors including your GPU, installed software, birth star or any recent witch-doctor curses\nLet’s look at other aspects of using this OS. Like I said, Budgie is very visually impressive to me, although as they say, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. The default general layout is very similar to Elementary OS or the system formerly known as OS X. You’ve got your dock on the bottom, panel on the top and a pretty wallpaper in between. The dock in this instance is Plank, which is one of my favorites, as it’s stable (much more than Cairo Dock or Docky in my experience), pretty and doesn’t get in your way. The top panel can be filled up with various applets, such as weather applet, countdown, or workspace switcher. The top right corner is occupied by the raven button, which allows you to access other applets, quick settings and notifications. This here is one of my favorite features that I loved in Budgie’s parental distro – Solus, although you are still unable to act on the notifications shown there.\nThe default apps are mostly identical with vanilla Ubuntu, as they are mostly Gnome apps with the exception of the occasional Budgie variant. One of those apps is Budgie Welcome, which has taken it’s idea from Ubuntu Mate and added it’s own DE-specific spin on it. Very user-friendly for newbies, who can start playing and tweaking their new OS immediately after first boot-up. There’s an option to select a browser from a ballot (ehm.. Windows… ehm… European Union…), buy some swag, learn keyboard shortcuts, install applets and themes, set up firewall, snap/flatpack support and much more.\nAs the app selection is roughly identical to vanilla Ubuntu, I won’t spend too much time describing them all again. There are a couple welcome changes, such as the Nemo file manager, which is in my opinion far superior to Nautilus (Gnome Files), and Tilix, a great terminal emulator which can also be summoned with “Alt+Q” as a quake-style dropdown terminal. Apart from that, there is also a nice Gnome Maps application, which missed my location by about 100 Km, although it surprisingly supports routes.\nAs the app selection is roughly identical to vanilla Ubuntu, I won’t spend too much time describing them all again. There are a couple welcome changes, such as the Nemo file manager, which is in my opinion far superior to Nautilus (Gnome Files), and Tilix, a great terminal emulator which can also be summoned with “Alt+Q” as a quake-style dropdown terminal. Apart from that, there is also a nice Gnome Maps application, which missed my location by about 100 Km, although it surprisingly supports routes.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/ubuntu-budgie-19-04-review/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis review is one of the longest in the making ever since starting this blog. I’ve been using Ubuntu Budgie on my desktop workstation even before I’ve installed Xubuntu 19.04 on my main laptop for it’s review. From day one, I kinda liked it, making in my eyes a ton more sense than Gnome Shell and thus entering the ranks of superior GTK3 desktop implementations. Pantheon. please make room for your new roommate!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Ubuntu Budgie 19.04 Review"},{"content":"If there is a desktop environment that I always somehow evaded, it’s XFCE. I’ve always thought that I had my DEs well categorized – Unity was awesome, but misunderstood and limited to Ubuntu, Gnome 2 / MATE was/is featureful, but it’s widgets and applets crash constantly, LXDE brought new life for computers with less than 512MB RAM, KDE was bloated and Gnome 3 was meant for the weird unfulfilled future, where all laptops sport a touchscreen and GNU/Linux has great drivers. In the last couple of years, these categories got mixed up and often switched entirely and we’ve got a bunch of new and exciting DEs waiting just a few keystrokes away from our computers.\nXFCE is not exciting. It’s not full of modern features, sensibilities and most importantly compromises. It’s a Windows 2000 of a GNU/Linux world. Stable, reliable, It may not look like much (although /r/unixporn might disagree), but if you spend some time and configure it to your liking, it’s worth it.I haven’t spent much time tweaking and enjoying XFCE in Xubuntu 19.04, as I’ve encountered a strange problem with it on my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (3rd Gen). I get random freezes of the whole system, forcing me to shut down the laptop by long-pressing the on/off button. I’ve looked into the logs and found nothing obvious, tried the magic sysrq button combinations to no avail, even wrote down all the activities, during which I experienced the freezing. Nothing. My question in askubuntu forum remained unanswered and I gave up. I don’t blame Xubuntu, nor XFCE though. It seems like I’m the only person in the world with this issue, and most other users seem very please with the experience. I will try not to have my review clouded by this strange curse and focus on other aspects of this distro flavor.\nThe out-of-the-box experience The default look of the distro is quite spartan. You get a thin bar at the top, couple of icons on the desktop and inoffensive background image. The whole desktop is quite lightweight.\nHtop running on freshly booted system\nWhat’s not so spartan is the apps selection – you’ve got the full LibreOffice suite, Gimp, bunch of GTK apps shared with Ubuntu Mate, such as Engrampa archive manager, MATE Calculator and Atril Document viewer. I can safely recommend most of them as a good variants of common tasks, except for Atril, as it doesn’t have proper annotation support. Annotations, that show up perfectly in viewers such as Evince show only the color highlighting, without the note itself.\nThe only other annoyance that the default behavior brings is the lack of super-key launcher shortcut. Most people I know, including myself are used to just pressing the super (“Windows”) key and tapping away in the search bar to launch applications. In Xubuntu, the default shortcut for Whisker launcher is Ctrl + Esc. Fortunately, the change to the Super key is pretty trivial.\nWhisker Launcher\nApart from that, there is the usual – an image viewer, which lacks the ability to save edits of the images, but can play animated gifs; a terminal emulator, Simple scan, Parole media player (with GStreamer backend) and an optical media burning app.\nCustomization and features XFCE is eerily similar to the good old Gnome 2 both in it’s 2000s look and feel, and it’s panel management. You can create panels and add various widgets to them. What is different, though, is that I haven’t experienced any crashes or moving applets in XFCE, while they plagued me in both Gnome 2 and it’s contemporary MATE offspring. Even though the whole XFCE is built up from various pieces, they all seem to fit together pretty well.\nXFCE Panel items\nOf course, you can also use GTK themes to further customize the appearance, but what I’ve tried didn’t look quite right and due to frequent freezes, I gave up on tuning up the looks.\nAppearance - Themes\nOne thing, that really captured my attention in Thunar (XFCE’s file manager) was the ability to set up custom actions, depending on the selected file types. As I often use gimp with many layers created from various pictures, using the example action, I’ve promptly put together a simple, but useful new custom action – Open in Gimp as layers.\nConclusion Xubuntu 19.04 is a good distro that might not appeal to many new users, but it’s got a stable userbase, which finds in it precisely what they look for. It’s stable to the point of dullness, reliable and once you get accustomed to it’s retro look and feel, it’s crazy fast. The lack of animation and advanced compositing makes all the controls and buttons feel much more immediate. Often, I caught myself believing, that the window I just killed closed a couple ms before I even hit the button. It feels faster and lighter than MATE, while being more consistent than LXDE. It succeeded in convincing me, that there is a place for it in the GNU/Linux ecosystem and I wish it will keep on slowly chugging along like the steam locomotive it is.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/xubuntu-19-04/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIf there is a desktop environment that I always somehow evaded, it’s XFCE. I’ve always thought that I had my DEs well categorized – Unity was awesome, but misunderstood and limited to Ubuntu, Gnome 2 / MATE was/is featureful, but it’s widgets and applets crash constantly, LXDE brought new life for computers with less than 512MB RAM, KDE was bloated and Gnome 3 was meant for the weird unfulfilled future, where all laptops sport a touchscreen and GNU/Linux has great drivers. In the last couple of years, these categories got mixed up and often switched entirely and we’ve got a bunch of new and exciting DEs waiting just a few keystrokes away from our computers.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Xubuntu 19.04"},{"content":"Reviewing Ubuntu MATE is really hard for me. My first ever desktop environment has been Gnome 2 and my nostalgia-fueled rose colored glasses are tough to put down. I’ve been using Ubuntu Mate on various low-powered devices, ranging from old, dumpster-truck variety PCs, to single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi. Ever since Canonical stopped the official support for Unity 7, there’s been another reason to switch from vanilla Ubuntu to this flavor of tea-themed distribution – its Mutiny layout and useful (and rare) features like HUD.\nGiven its mostly traditional desktop paradigm seeking user demographic, there aren’t many changes in this release, apart from the under-the-hood updates brought by it’s Ubuntu base, and some version increments of MATE-specific packages. After first boot-up of Ubuntu MATE, you are greeted by a very user-friendly Ubuntu MATE Welcome. It’s a nice way to ease new (especially BFU) users into discovering all the features it’s got, allows for easy customization and installing a variety of hand-picked apps via Software Boutique. Curiously, there aren’t any GUI software repository browsers preinstalled, but you can either use apt in the terminal, or install Gnome Software from the Software Boutique and gain access to the whole offering of Ubuntu packages.\nUbuntu MATE Welcome is a great way for new users to familiarize themselves with their new OS\nLayout presets and customization A strong suit of Ubuntu MATE is its variety of presets. Using preinstalled MATE Tweak, you can change number and layout of panels, docks and widgets. As I am a fan of Unity 7, my favorite preset is the one closest in look and features to it, called Mutiny.\nDefault look of Mutiny preset\nThis preset uses an application dock on the left side of the screen, top panel with global menu and indicators and a full-screen application launcher with quick search. It has some appearance quirks, and it’s a bit too easy to remove the whole dock, or parts of it, requiring the reset of the panel or the layout itself.\nMutiny App Launcher\nThe launcher itself is not an exact copy of Unity Dash, but it is close enough to be usable in similar fashion.\nThe default layout, called Familiar, shares a lot of similarities with its siblings, Contemporary and Traditional. They’ve got a panel on the bottom, housing “Show Desktop”, “Window list”, “Workspace switcher” and “Trashcan” widgets. At the top of the screen, there is a panel with indicators to the right and either brisk-menu with search functionality, or in case of Traditional layout, the old Gnome 2 style Application|Places|System menu. When I’m installing Ubuntu Mate for my older relatives, I often use the Traditional layout, as it provides greater software discoverability and less clutter. Otherwise, Brisk menu is very speedy and a more modern alternative.\nApart from Gnome 2 inspired layouts, there are also ones inspired by other OS, appropriately named by their places of origin – Redmont and Cupertino.\nI’d like for the Redmont layout have an option to switch between the classic Windows 2000 style layout and a slightly more modern Windows 7 style, but currently only the former is available. Other than that it is a nice option for those users, that are migrating away from the Windows platform.\nEven Microsoft Windows 2000 inspired look can be refreshing in today’s world.\nThe Cupertino layout also has a very close relative in Pantheon (inspired by ElementaryOS) . Both of them have an application dock on the bottom and a panel on top. The most obvious difference between them is the Global menu on the top panel in Cupertino.\nLast, but not least, there is a minimalist netbook layout, sporting just a single panel on top with everything cramped into the smallest footprint possible, leaving most of the screen available for contents. I can’t really see a use case for this layout on modern HiDPI screens, but if you’ve got an old netbook gathering dust, you can try breathing some life into it with this layout.\nNetbook layout\nOther than different layouts, you can also select (and/or download) various themes, giving your desktop the look reminding you of your favorite decade in computing history.\nPreinstalled themes in Ubuntu MATE\nMy favorites are the two Ambiant themes, copies of the old Ubuntu theme Ambiance with soothing green accents.\nAmbiant Light/Dark\nA slightly more technical is the ability to change your compositors. In most cases, I recommend switching to the Compiz compositor, as it’s the one with the nicest animations and the only one with working window previews. Both Marco and Compton are competent little things, but Compiz is still the best compositor available for Ubuntu Mate, even without diving into the ocean of options and plugins available for it.\nCompositors available in Ubuntu MATE\nThese customization options can be accessed via MATE Tweak.\nPre-installed apps and features Although as with any modern and popular GNU/Linux distribution, you can download and install pretty much any (kind of) application you’d ever want or need, there is a case to be made on importance of “sane” defaults. Ubuntu Mate is one of the distributions, after installing which I don’t have to spend much time setting up the necessities. Apart from the essential utilities like Calculator, there is also a full LibreOffice install, which I recently found out is not a given in every distribution (looking at you ElementaryOS). Let’s have a look at a few of these apps and utilities.\nYou know the saying, that the best backup solution is the automated one? In my opinion an automated and user-friendly backup software should be included in every modern OS. I myself don’t use these included backup apps, as I distro-hop quite a lot and there is none as universal as a rsync command in a cron job. For most other users, the software bundled in Ubuntu MATE is easier and more feature-full than most. You can easily set up which folders you want backed-up, those to ignore, where to backup (including online services like Google Drive or Nextcloud) and scheduling\nThe MATE Calculator has a pretty standard set of features, but the inability to resize the windows irks me quite a lot.\nOther than that, there is Rhythmbox, a music player that I used back in the ’07 and which surprised me with its podcast support; VLC, one of the best video players on any platform; Brasero, an optical media burning software for those, that live in the early 2000s; Shotwell – my favorite photo manager; and Caja – a file manager similar to how Nautilus was before Gnome team dumbed it down to negative infinity. There’s also Firefox (although you can change the default web browser in Ubuntu MATE Welcome, just like in European versions of Windows 7), Thunderbird mail client and Transmission for downloading and seeding the torrents of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions. Interestingly, there are no games pre-installed, although you can get a good selection in the Software Boutique. I wholeheartedly recommend SuperTuxKart, a fun arcade racer with weapons and 0 A.D., a great historical real-time strategy similar to Age of Empires II.\nA key feature of Ubuntu MATE that is very hard to find elsewhere is called HUD. It allows you to search the menu items of the currently highlighted window. It is extremely useful feature, especially when occasionally working with complex software like GIMP, LibreOffice or Inkscape. It works like this – suppose you want to blur the layer of an image in GIMP. You don’t remember where to look for this feature, nor the precise string in the menu item. You hit the alt-key, which brings up the HUD menu. You type in “blur” and it offers you Gaussian blur and some other features. This awesome killer-feature used to be one of my favorite additions to Unity back in 2012, but after the axing of that awesome DE, none other than MATE has picked it up. There have been some attempts to provide this kind of functionality in KDE, but I haven’t seen any as polished as this implementation.\nIssues If you’ve read this far, you might think Ubuntu MATE is a perfect distribution without any relevant flaws. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect, not even this green beauty. Maybe partially because it allows for such degree of easy customization, various parts of MATE desktop are prone to crash… often. Most often, a widget or a panel crashes, prompting you to reset the layout, loosing all the customization you’ve done so far. This happens after every other wake from suspend, unlocking the lock screen, etc.\nAnother pain point is the lack of fractional scaling. What that means is, that if you try to use MATE on a 14″ 1440p screen, you are going to have to endure a few visual papercuts. Fonts too small or too large, having to zoom in your websites, etc. It’s not a deal-breaker, but Unity had fractional scaling many years ago, Gnome just got it and it really should be such an issue in 2019. If you’ve got a more standard screen (think 24″ 1080p), this won’t be an issue, and even you share my struggle, it isn’t that big of a deal.\nConclusion Like I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this review, I have a hard time keeping my distance and objectivity when dealing with Ubuntu MATE. I love this flavor of Ubuntu, but it’s not just because it reminds me of Gnome2, or Unity. It combines the customization of early distributions, with user-friendliness of hand-picked boutique of apps. The result may not be the most polished desktop on the market, but it is a charming one, and damn, if it isn’t light-weight and speedy.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/ubuntu-mate-19-04-review/","summary":"A biased review of the light-weight, yet incredibly easy to customize flavor of Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo.","title":"Ubuntu MATE 19.04 Review"},{"content":"My very first experience with KDE was back in the day of Ubuntu 7.10, with KDE 3. I quickly got overwhelmed by the breadth of settings, it’s modularity and default look similar to Windows platform, from which I had just escaped.\nSource: By Rbuj – Own work, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7014393\nIt only took me a few days, before I switched back to Gnome 2 and haven’t looked back until a couple years ago, when Canonical, much to my dismay, announced they were dropping Unity for Gnome 3. That was when I first installed KDE Neon based upon Ubuntu 16.04 and used it for several months. A few months ago, I have decided to give KDE another go and I kept using it to this day on my main laptop computer. What is KDE anyways? It is a Linux desktop environment, based on Qt Framework, as opposed to GTK Framework, used in most other DEs – Gnome, Pantheon, Cinnamon, Mate, etc. In it’s current incarnation, the KDE Plasma 5, it is very lightweight, snappy and clean-looking. It is inherently very modular and can be reshaped to pretty much any look and feel you’d like. However, because of this customizability, it is often looked at as hard to set up and is less widespread than it’s younger cousin.\nInstallation Not much to say. Typical Ubuntu-based distro, no issues installing on my Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 3. Since it is an Ubuntu distro, my usual several-lines long ‘sudo apt install’ command to get all the IDEs, LaTeX packages, etc. ran without any issues. Other popular apps, such as Spotify, Telegram and Discord, which are not to be found in neither Canonical’s nor KDE’s repositories can be found in the Snap store. Like with any other Ubuntu-based distro, getting yourself up and ready to do some proper work is as easy as it gets. That is, unless you are afraid of the terminal, as Discover, the default repository browser app is slow, ugly and buggy mess.\nDiscover is a buggy mess\nKDE Peculiarities / User Experience KDE Neon is, according to it’s own creators, not a proper GNU/Linux distro, however, for all intents and purposes, it is precisely that. It has an Ubuntu LTS core, currently the 18.04 Bionic Beaver, with KDE-specific packages coming from it’s own repository. This is the main difference between Kubuntu and KDE Neon. While Kubuntu is an officially recognized flavour of Ubuntu, with reasonable expectations of reliability, KDE Neon is an interesting mix of Ubuntu LTS stability with cutting edge Plasma 5 releases. Of course, there are three different editions – the recommended User Edition, and two Developer Editions – Git-Stable and Git-Unstable.\nSource: https://neon.kde.org/download\nThe gist is, unless you are a KDE developer, you should stay away from those. So what kind of user is the User edition meant for? I’d say, it will best suite the kind of people who frequently browse /r/unixporn subreddit and want to tweak their installation to the greatest degree possible, while still having all the bells and whistles that come with full desktop environments. In short, it is what KDE developers want the stock KDE experience to look like.\nKDE in itself is indeed full of features. It is, in my opinion, the most complete package with immense amount of settings available via GUI or config files. When I first started using KDE Neon, it reminded me of the good ol’ days, back when I first started using Linux more than a decade ago. It offers all kinds of desktop paradigms. You can set your workspace to resemble Unity,\nUnity-style Plasma 5\ntry to piss of Apple fans with your imitation of their holy system,\nmacOS lookalike\nor find something, that will fully suit you and you alone. I found myself being kinda conservative, and staying with stock settings, apart from adding a few extra virtual desktops, Yakuake Quake-like console and a few buttons here and there.\nThere are also a bunch of applets, often reminding me of my favourite Windows version – The OS formerly known as Longhorn. You might think Vista was a shit OS, but it made Windows much more modern, secure and it ruining my Windows installation sent me on my way to first discover Ubuntu. But I digress. These plasmoids, or widgets are very handy little applets, that can either be docked on a panel, or on the desktop. There is a great number of them pre-installed, but you also have the option of downloading more. A problem might arise, if you have poor self-control and you can find yourself cluttering your desktop with a plethora of widgets “just in case”.\nPlasmoid selection is quite wide by default\nIt can result in a desktop full of widgets\nAnother often overlooked features are Activities. They are an awesome feature that nobody I know, including me, uses. I want to explore and write about them in subsequent post, but here’s the gist. They are something like virtual desktops on steroids. You can better separate your various “activities”, group your windows and programs according to various tasks you need to complete and suspend activities, when you need to work on something else. For example, I can create an activity for writing scientific papers, with a note taking widget pinned to the desktop, Zotero and LibreOffice/Kile running and no other distractions. After I am done working for the day, I can switch back to another activity, that houses my IDEs, or another, that is gaming-oriented. You can even suspend the inactive activities, thus saving system resources.\nActivities\nThe most well-known feature of KDE is it’s customizability. Boy, oh boy, you can really tweak anything. I could go on and on about all the different settings that are surfaced in GUI menus, but it will be easier to just show you the systems settings app. Keep in mind, that every KDE native application has a bunch of app-specific settings as well.\nSystem setting is a few hour journey of playing around\nApplications Speaking of applications, they are built according to a completely different design and function philosophy, than GTK ones. They have incredible amount of customizability, they are modular, work together and feel like proper workstation software from early 2000s. No silly hamburger buttons hiding the poor selection of options, instead you have proper toolbars, with dropdown menues and more features than you can explore in a lifetime. Let’s pick apart a few apps that I use on a daily basis.\nFirst of all, KWrite. I am currently writing this review in it, and I use it for my daily note-taking, because of it’s syntax highlighting and other nifty features. It provides autocomplete, different color schemes, repeated words highlighting, etc.\nKWrite syntax highlighting options\nThe second very often used application is Dolphin. It is a file manager, that has all the features that Gnome’s Nautilus has lost over the years and more. It supports split view, dropdown terminal, fully customizable user interface, and plethora of settings.\nDolphin features and options\nGwenview is a default image viewer, although the name is kinda misleading. It does so much more, than just image viewing, that it honestly gets in the way of it. It is the only KDE app, that I wish was more simple by default, ideally hiding all the extra options and information behind a menu. However, after using it for a few days, I can say that I enjoy the power, behind it. I don’t have to open GIMP to do some basic edits, such as cropping, mirroring, etc.\nGwenview – Image viewer\nFor videos, I use Qt-based VLC, and for music Spotify. Not much to say here.\nVLC\nOffice workload can be easily handled by LibreOffice and for the ones, that actually enjoy producing great looking papers, Kile. It is a very usable and full-featured LaTeX editor, that I used to write multiple essays.\nKile – LaTeX editor\nSystem utilities include KSysGuard, which is very similar to Windows Task Manager, Konsole, a terminal emulator, and aforementioned Discover, which is the only KDE application, that is downright unusable. One other badly-designed application is KCalc, a calculator, which doesn’t allow you to resize it’s window and by default has buttons too tiny to reliably hit on my touchscreen.\nA very useful and well-known utility is KDE Connect. It is an application, that pairs your computer with your Android phone via a companion app, allowing you to read/write messages, share files, clipboard, ping your device and even use your phone as an input device for your PC.\nKDE Connect\nConclusion To say it simply, I love KDE. I love what it stands for and what it allows me to do with my machine. I rarely feel as much in control as when I tweak my DE to my liking, making it truly mine. Thanks to KDE, I finally understand the kind of people, who spend every Sunday under the hood of their car tightening bolts and other stuff I don’t know about. Being me, I will keep on distro-hopping to experience more of the Linux ecosystem, but I think, it won’t be long until I’ll come back home to KDE, even though it might be on a different Linux distributions.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/kde-neon-18-04-review/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy very first experience with KDE was back in the day of Ubuntu 7.10, with KDE 3. I quickly got overwhelmed by the breadth of settings, it’s modularity and default look similar to Windows platform, from which I had just escaped.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cfigure\u003e\n    \u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Kubuntu.7.10.KDE_.png\"\n         alt=\"Source: By Rbuj – Own work, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7014393\"/\u003e \u003cfigcaption\u003e\n            \u003cp\u003eSource: By Rbuj – Own work, GPL, \u003ca href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7014393\"\u003ehttps://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7014393\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n        \u003c/figcaption\u003e\n\u003c/figure\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt only took me a few days, before I switched back to Gnome 2 and haven’t looked back until a couple years ago, when Canonical, much to my dismay, announced they were dropping Unity for Gnome 3. That was when I first installed KDE Neon based upon Ubuntu 16.04 and used it for several months. A few months ago, I have decided to give KDE another go and I kept using it to this day on my main laptop computer. What is KDE anyways? It is a Linux desktop environment, based on Qt Framework, as opposed to GTK Framework, used in most other DEs – Gnome, Pantheon, Cinnamon, Mate, etc. In it’s current incarnation, the KDE Plasma 5, it is very lightweight, snappy and clean-looking. It is inherently very modular and can be reshaped to pretty much any look and feel you’d like. However, because of this customizability, it is often looked at as hard to set up and is less widespread than it’s younger cousin.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"KDE Neon (18.04) Review"},{"content":"I am a guy who doesn\u0026rsquo;t use smartphones much. I prefer cheap Android phones because I occasionally need to use some apps that are available only for Android and iOS. I never cared for large screen sizes because it only made the phone harder to fit into a pocket. Then I saw the opportunity. A phone fitted into a watch, with Android and everything. Such products by large companies currently use cellular network only for emergency calls or through LTE, but some shady Chinese companies offer fully featured ones. Because I have always worn a watch, it meant one less electronic device to care about. So I decided to try them out.\nFirst fail So I looked what was available. The biggest choice was on AliExpress. One that picked my attention was a smartwatch called Z01, with a decent battery life and a rather rare possibility to insert microSD cards. I picked a seller and bought one. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t expensive, so it was worth a try. When it came, my curiosity was quickly doused by disappointment. It was running on vanilla Android, with a collection of 5 watch faces replacing lock screen. None of them looked very good. Navigating through the app menu was annoying, because I was grabbing icons and moving them to other places too often, changing their order to make it harder to find what I looked for. The manual was written in terrible English, bordering on incomprehensibility. More disasters came soon, the microSD card became permanently read-only after saving one photo on it and it stopped noticing the SIM card forever one second after inserting one for the first time. Many apps failed to install with a cryptic error message. On the other side, its battery life was actually quite good, its display was sensitive enough for typing at such small buttons and browsing the Internet worked quite well.\ninsertEditorsNote(\u0026ldquo;Here I was supposed to add in pictures of the fake Z01 smartphone, but since pictures were eyescratchingly bad, I\u0026rsquo;ll leave it to you, dear reader, to imagine an awesome collage of low-quality Android crap\u0026hellip; You know what? I think you can take it! Here you go:\u0026rdquo;); Since it wasn\u0026rsquo;t doing one of its two primary purposes and sucked at the other, I returned it and got a refund (but I had to pay for mailing it back to China), as the seller was afraid of getting a bad rating. Later, I figured out it was a fake. There was a real Z01 watch that was probably much better (according to videos I found), this one just had the same name and the same appearance. Its brand wasn\u0026rsquo;t mentioned anywhere because it wasn\u0026rsquo;t the brand it was pretending to be and they could not write plain lies. Everything written there was true, but only literally. Lesson learned, China also makes fakes of Chinese products. Screw you and I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll bankrupt soon, RoYvShg Electroni c Store.\nSecond, more successful attempt After reading guides about shopping on AliExpress and learning from my error, I decided to try again. I viewed only the shops whose products had enough reviews and the reviews made it clear they were really selling the product they seemed to sell. I viewed youtube videos how their UIs were supposed to behave. I checked if their reviews on Amazon both in English and German, sometimes even in French. Then I chose a smartwatch called KingWear KW88 Pro. Yes, its name is ridiculous. And surprisingly, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t bad.\ninsertEditorsNote(\u0026ldquo;Again with the potato quality. I promise, further pictures will be of much better quality\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;); Parametres The watch comes with a MediaTek processor with four cores, 1 GiB of RAM and 16 GiB of internal memory, 2 GiB of which is taken by OS. It runs Android 7.0 (not AndroidWear). Screen diameter is 400 pixels, which makes the picture look sharp enough due to its small size. Battery capacity is 350 mAh. It has all the usual connectivity modules, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS and can connect to 2G or 3G cellular networks using a nano SIM. It has its own kind of connector that connects to USB ports for charging and copying files. It can install regular Android Apps. Its camera has a 2 MPix resolution. It also has some kind of pedometer and a heart rate monitor. Its parametres except battery capacity and screen size are comparable to low-end Android smartphones.\nUsage The watch\u0026rsquo;s size is comparable to many other large smartwatches. Or large watches. The current fashion of large watches make its size quite acceptable. Its strap is oriented backwards, towards the arm, so it fits quite well even on my thin hand. Its appearance is quite good, but its quality isn\u0026rsquo;t superb - a piece of protective glass on its edge got unstuck and let a small bubble of air in shortly after unpacking. It\u0026rsquo;s not waterproof, but it can survive a bit of snowfall (and I wasn\u0026rsquo;t willing to make more experiments in this direction).\nThe version of Android running in the watch has a heavily modified UI so that it is usable when the screen is so small. Surprisingly, it looks quite good and it\u0026rsquo;s not choppy. Some things need more swipes to access, but it\u0026rsquo;s better than trying to hit diminutive icons. Internet browsing is a bit limited due to the small screen size, but it can be used in case of emergency.\nPhone calls are done through a loudspeaker, but a Bluetooth headset can be connected to overcome this issue. It pairs surprisingly well with it, unlike my Android 5.0 phone. It also has a rather minimalistic mp3 player, but I found it sufficient (it\u0026rsquo;s somewhat comparable to cmus on Linux or Groove Music from Microsoft).\nTyping is surprisingly quite possible with my thin fingers. After a bit of practice, I don\u0026rsquo;t make many typos. Of course, I can\u0026rsquo;t type fast when I need to aim and can use only one hand.\nThe main limitation is the battery. While Amazfit Bip has a smaller battery and a month of battery life, running Android on a generic processor rather than a specialised OS on a low frequency microprocessor can\u0026rsquo;t allow a 350 mAh battery last long. If I use it only to check time and to be connected to cellular network, it might can last for 4 days. If I go outside with a Bluetooth headset connected for a few hours and occasionally check something, the duration is 3 days. Having the Bluetooth headset connected for 10 hours per day but not doing much else shortens its battery life to barely 2 days. It can last only 1 regular working day with headset connected most of the day, listening to music for about an hour and a bit of other usage and the battery is nearly empty when the day is over. Listening to music will discharge the battery in as little as 3 hours. Actively browsing the Internet might discharge it even faster, but it\u0026rsquo;s not what it\u0026rsquo;s made for.\nAnother battery-related problem is that the feature to light the screen when the hand is raised is implemented using software and it drains the battery quite significantly (if it\u0026rsquo;s doing nothing else, it doubles battery consumption) and so it\u0026rsquo;s not really worth using. Time has to be checked by pressing the button, which is somewhat annoying.\nCharging the battery from a laptop USB port from dead to fully charged takes about 2 hours. The charging connector is some kind of group of four contacts attached using a magnet, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t hold particularly strongly.\nWhile it has all the hardware features of Amazfit Bip, there is a lot of wasted potential in its built-in fitness app. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t even have an option to measure heart rate periodically. Maybe some other fitness app could be used instead of it, but it would probably drain the battery and would not be integrated into its UI so well.\nIt can also be connected to a smartphone using an app installed on the smartphone through Bluetooth, but I have not tried it. It\u0026rsquo;s reputed to drain the battery quite fast if not done properly.\nSoftware bugs The software bugs present in this watch are worth having its own chapter. I don\u0026rsquo;t think even Bethesda can leave a higher density of bugs than the team who programmed this watch\u0026rsquo;s UI.\nThe most annoying bug I discovered is that the step count on the pedometer sometimes changes randomly to absurd values. My step count is 3421, I walk into the kitchen to make some fruit tea, I look at the watch and\u0026hellip; suddenly, I have 63741 steps. It looks like undefined behaviour. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem to manifest shortly after factory reset, but that hardly helps.\nThe USB connection is forbidden from transferring files by default, it can be changed in settings, but, annoyingly, this setting is always set back to default when the watch is disconnected. Silent mode has vibration disabled, making phone calls impossible to notice. The list of recent calls lists only phone numbers, not the names of the contacts. The option to synchronise contacts with google is inaccessible in the contacts menu and it has to be done through an unclear option in settings. There is no way to change the SIM\u0026rsquo;s PIN code.\nThere might be more bugs I have not discovered yet.\nRating Its price was below 70€ (or 150€ at Amazon), so there\u0026rsquo;s no point in comparing it with high end smartphones. Its parametres are comparable with cheap smartphones, but the small screen size makes it less usable (which is, of course, physically impossible to avoid). The short battery life is a problem that plagues all Android wristphones, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t appear to me that much effort was put into optimising it.\nIn one way, it\u0026rsquo;s awesome to have all the electronic devices fitted into a small watch as in those spy films and sci-fi, which was the dream I had when I was a kid. On the other hand, it has its downsides, not only related to the limitations of a small screen. Because of the poor battery life and bugs, my rating is 3/5.\nConclusion Wristphones have been part of sci-fi for long and although they can do more than computers could do two decades ago, the technology still isn\u0026rsquo;t polished enough. It\u0026rsquo;s probably the reason why large companies are not interested in producing them. If it\u0026rsquo;s done, it has debilitating downsides, like short battery life. Some problems are unavoidable because of its physical shape and size, like small screen or impossibility to make calls without a loudspeaker or headset.\nIf you aren\u0026rsquo;t very fond of spending hours touching a smartphone\u0026rsquo;s screen, don\u0026rsquo;t mind recharging every 1-2 days and wear a headset when outside home, they can come handy at reducing the amount of stuff in pockets. Plus, making calls and checking out stuff online using just a watch is very cool. But I don\u0026rsquo;t recommend them to average smartphone users.\ninsertEditorsNote(\u0026ldquo;You can play spy with this amazing feat of camera technology\u0026rdquo;); insertEditorsNote(\u0026ldquo;The app launcher is very similar to Android Wear, which is good\u0026rdquo;); insertEditorsNote(\u0026ldquo;And you can still get your 80s music fix even on the go!\u0026rdquo;); ","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/tech/chinese-wristphones/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI am a guy who doesn\u0026rsquo;t use smartphones much. I prefer cheap Android phones because I occasionally need to use some apps that are available only for Android and iOS. I never cared for large screen sizes because it only made the phone harder to fit into a pocket. Then I saw the opportunity. A phone fitted into a watch, with Android and everything. Such products by large companies currently use cellular network only for emergency calls or through LTE, but some shady Chinese companies offer fully featured ones. Because I have always worn a watch, it meant one less electronic device to care about. So I decided to try them out.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Chinese wristphones"},{"content":"If you are new to my blog and to knowing me in general, you might wonder, why would anyone write a blog post about buying such a pedestrian piece of electronic machinery. You might ask yourself \u0026ldquo;Is Michal such a fridge afficionado, that he has something of value to add to the thriving fridge-reviewing scene?\u0026rdquo; If so, then I will dissapoint you. I know next to nothing about fridges and I don\u0026rsquo;t care either way. For all I care my fridge runs on liquified unicorn farts and increases the size of the tachyon hole in the aurasphere of the Multi-Earth. I do care about picking the best value for money, though, and I like to learn more about anything and everything, so that I may some day blow someone\u0026rsquo;s mind by my expertize in fridge-picking. So how I went around picking the fridge for my family and how shitty well, did it go?\nChoosing \u0026ldquo;The One\u0026rdquo; As a proper open source freak enthusiast, I foregone any thoughs of using pen and paper, or even paper ads for the local electronics stores and went straight for my laptop powered by a Linux distro and LibreOffice Calc. I searched the web for fridge-selling e-commerce websites and opened a bazillion tabs with price range of 300-500 galactic credits (contemporary currency exchange is 1 galactic credit ~ 1 euro).\nIn order to weed out the selection, I\u0026rsquo;ve set a filter of features I required and features I banned. For example, since I don\u0026rsquo;t agree with the notion, that my fridge should partake in some DDoS party, nor do I want an appliance, that will shame me for my choice of junk food and cheap liquor, I chose to discard any fridge with internet connectivity. Empirically, I found the anti-freeze feature such a big time and hassle saver, that units without it didn\u0026rsquo;t even make the cut into the spreadsheet. Also, being the forgetful idiot I am, loud open fridge alarm was a big plus. One funny (banned) feature, that I noticed in some pricier models was ozone generation. The marketing bs claims that it makes food and especially veggies and fruits last longer fresh, but I assume it\u0026rsquo;s just relative to your shortened lifespan of inhaling unsafe quantities of O_3 each and every day. There is a reason why copiers come with a warning to use in a well ventilated room.\nOther important parts of spec that I looked at were the power efficiency, volume (total and ratio fridge/freezer) and noise.\nHere I noticed an interesting correlation. Three of my biggest inefficiency outliers had at the same time lower than average noise rating, while having more total volume. It seems like that with constant volume, there can be a bit of a tradeoff between power efficiency and quietness of the fridge. In my case, power efficiency and thus the total cost of operation is a more important quality and I disregarded the loudness of the fridge in my final choice. This wasn\u0026rsquo;t so much of a concern on paper, as the fridge is located in the kitchen, separated by doors from every other room, but if I had to buy a new one today, I would assign some weight to this property. Concerning volume, I\u0026rsquo;ve set a hard lower limit at 90l for the freezer and 200l for the fridge.\nAbove all else, I took into account the power efficiency of the appliance, measured in KWh per annum. This number then got multiplied by the average cost of KWh in Western Slovakia and added to the price of the fridge, creating the \u0026ldquo;Price in 5 years variable\u0026rdquo;. As you can see in the spreadsheet, if you buy the cheapest fridge in the bunch, you can still lose money in the medium-long time range. This effect will grow even more in the coming years, with the price per KWh rising fast.\nDrumroll\u0026hellip; And the winner is\u0026hellip;.. After taking everything in account and having a top 2 contestants withdraw from the races (gone out of stock by the time I went for the kill), I picked the Sharp SJ-BA10IMXI2. Meeting all my requirements and only being slightly louder than I\u0026rsquo;d wish, it has a nice space grey color and an oleophoebic coating. It is quite efficient, roomy and above all else, it makes the stuff I put in cold.\n","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/tech/buying-a-fridge-the-geeky-way/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIf you are new to my blog and to knowing me in general, you might wonder, why would anyone write a blog post about buying such a pedestrian piece of electronic machinery. You might ask yourself \u0026ldquo;Is Michal such a fridge afficionado, that he has something of value to add to the thriving fridge-reviewing scene?\u0026rdquo; If so, then I will dissapoint you. I know next to nothing about fridges and I don\u0026rsquo;t care either way. For all I care my fridge runs on liquified unicorn farts and increases the size of the tachyon hole in the aurasphere of the Multi-Earth. I do care about picking the best value for money, though, and I like to learn more about anything and everything, so that I may some day blow someone\u0026rsquo;s mind by my expertize in fridge-picking. So how I went around picking the fridge for my family and how shitty well, did it go?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Buying a fridge the geeky way!"},{"content":" Desktop\nI\u0026rsquo;ve spent a long while thinking about the right words to start off this review. It has been long time coming and you might say, it\u0026rsquo;s been coming since the first time I\u0026rsquo;ve heard about this distro. Considering all that, I decided that the best way to start would be with the eyecatching first look of this flawed beauty. It is a strange thing though, because even though I really dislike MacOS look and feel, I find ElementaryOS UX very appealing. Even so, that it made me forgive the OS some shortcomings I may have harder time biting through otherwise.\nInstallation I wish I could say the installation was standard painless affair, but for some reason ElementaryOS still doesn\u0026rsquo;t support upgrading between major releases. I have been impatient and have installed the previous version, Loki, a few weeks before Juno\u0026rsquo;s release. After that, I was forced to do a full reinstall to get all the new goodies out of the distro. This may not trouble most users, as the release schedule is slower than I\u0026rsquo;m used to and every version is basically an LTS. Still, this has to be considered a flaw, when even Microsoft has figured a way to somewhat reliably upgrade it\u0026rsquo;s major OS versions. After the installation, I got welcomed by a beautiful desktop and lackluster offering of pre-installed applications. I like that it\u0026rsquo;s not pulled down by heaps of bloatware, but I come to expect at least some office suite preinstalled with my distributions. It might have had not hurt as much, but my first running of ElementaryOS was on my morning train commute to University. When I decided to polish up my presentation, I found out I\u0026rsquo;d have to sacrifice pricy megabytes of my cellular carrier\u0026rsquo;s data plan to install the required LibreOffice packages. Otherwise app installation was pretty straightforward, as ElementaryOS shares the package manager and repositories with Canonical\u0026rsquo;s Ubuntu\u0026hellip; That is if you don\u0026rsquo;t need something that isn\u0026rsquo;t in there. There is no snaps nor ppa support by default and you need to set it up. I can understand not wanting users to install whatever crappy ppa they find online, but I really feel like a distro based upon Ubuntu 18.04 should come with snapd preinstalled. If you decide to stay withing the confines as defined by ElementaryOS team, you can get your software needs fulfilled by the offerings in their own AppCenter. Beside the usuals, it offers a variety of applications built specifically for ElementaryOS. I must say, that apart from some lazy copies of well-know applications, most I tried are rather nice and fitting very well with the rest of the user experience.\nAppCenter\nDefault apps. One of the more interesting aspects of ElementaryOS is it\u0026rsquo;s own set of apps. These are very well polished and even though may be lacking a feature or two, their overall well though out design makes them joy to be used. That is if they work. I\u0026rsquo;ve had bad time with the default mail client with constant crashes and trouble opening my messages.\nEpiphany, the default web browser is capable, but can\u0026rsquo;t fully replace Firefox in my workflow without hurting my productivity. Others were a lot better though, and I will miss them when I move on to another distro from my bucket list. One simple feature, that really impressed even non-linuxy onlookers was the quick-settings of color palette in two of my most used applications, Code and Terminal.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t used Music at all, as I don\u0026rsquo;t carry around my music library on my laptop and instead rely on Spotify.\nUser Experience There is one main reason why you may choose to use ElementaryOS over any other distro. Pantheon desktop environment, which many consider an MacOS look-alike hides more thought put into proper design than any other DE I know off. Pretty much every window and every notification looks like it\u0026rsquo;s been handcrafted to look professional and beautiful. It is, however, kinda limited in it\u0026rsquo;s customizability. In some respects, it is even more locked down than the often mentioned source of inspiration. For one, the launcher panel is locked to the bottom of the screen. You can\u0026rsquo;t disable the infuriating default behaviour of Files app, that opens all folders and files with a single click. Setting the default terminal shell is also impossible in the default terminal emulator, as Apart from choosing dark variant of the default theme, there isn\u0026rsquo;t much you can do about the looks of the OS, and even that requires you to jump through hoops and install the Tweaks app.\nI accept all those limitations though, as I don\u0026rsquo;t see ElementaryOS as a distro aimed at tinkerers and control-freaks. It is a distro I would be comfortable recommending to complete newbies and I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t worry too much about them shooting themselves in the foot.\nOne thing, that I find sorely missing in the settings menu are drivers. I don\u0026rsquo;t think making new users install GPU drivers in terminal is the most user-friendly approach.\nOther oddities I found: no system monitor, password length showing in terminal, warnings then pasting text into terminal, non-standard keyboard shortcuts.\nTechnical issues Apart from the trouble with default mail client and my constant struggle with NVidia and WiFi drivers, I\u0026rsquo;ve only noticed one glaring technical fault with this release. That issue is the inability to use a secondary screen on top of the primary. Due to the top panel stopping the windows being pulled up, my usual desk setup was useless to me.\nConclusion on using it. I did not expect to like Elementary nearly as much as I did. It is the closest thing to professional polished desktop I experienced in the Linux world. However this polish carries with itself some limitations and makes the whole feel less linux-y. That may not be a drawback to some, but I prefer more freedom even if it means having to deal with some rough edges. All in all, ElementaryOS Juno is a great release and I can\u0026rsquo;t wait to see what else the team can accomplish in the future.\nPro: Pantheon is polished beyond belief and looks amazing, ElementaryOS apps look terrific and hide a lot of great ideas, AppCentre supports Linux developpers by providing an interesting way of monetizing the platform, It is very close to being completely fool-proof. Con: Some useful third party apps require a bit more effort to install, Lacks customizability and some basic settings, No upgrade to the next major version. ","permalink":"https://lordsoftech.com/open-source/elementaryos-juno-review/","summary":"\u003cfigure\u003e\n    \u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/BiOlhy2ROoBswsAFkDOdTmBvd7zFdDHTOiiC_b-FDOgFHmahOVZw1xVIq_7Nb40UfU6EEj0YoganOu1BBLRc4CyHkdNPOT6FWHZ0UEMmvVbN9V8q5nk6tj-lPireinh2tf6hN_Ah\"\n         alt=\"Desktop\"/\u003e \u003cfigcaption\u003e\n            \u003cp\u003eDesktop\u003c/p\u003e\n        \u003c/figcaption\u003e\n\u003c/figure\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve spent a long while thinking about the right words to start off this review. It has been long time coming and you might say, it\u0026rsquo;s been coming since the first time I\u0026rsquo;ve heard about this distro. Considering all that, I decided that the best way to start would be with the eyecatching first look of this flawed beauty. It is a strange thing though, because even though I really dislike MacOS look and feel, I find ElementaryOS UX very appealing. Even so, that it made me forgive the OS some shortcomings I may have harder time biting through otherwise.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"ElementaryOS Juno Review"}]