Episode 275: Year of the Relevant Desktop

Christian F.K. Schaller from Red Hat joins us to discuss seamless Linux upgrades, replacing PulseAudio, some of the recent desktop Projects Red Hat’s been working on... And the value they get from them.

Plus a big batch of important community news, Wimpy’s Thunderbolt Dock experiments, and way to run pacman on any Linux distribution.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Christian F.K. Schaller, and Martin Wimpress.

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• Radio Garden
• PlayStation Classic relies on open source emulator for its 20 games - SlashGear — Kotaku got some early hands-on time with the PlayStation Classic and discovered that it uses the PCSX ReARMed emulator.
• snes9x — For those packaging the GTK+ port, note that building with GTK+ 3 is now highly recommended over GTK+ 2 and should have no regressions. Also note that Wayland compatibility is implemented, which, if enabled, also requires GTK+ to have been compiled with Wayland support.
• Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth says he has no plans to sell anytime soon — “I value my independence,” he told me during a brief chat on the outskirts of the OpenStack Summit in Berlin today. In part, that’s because he simply doesn’t personally need the money but also because he’d like to see through to the end his vision for Canonical and Ubuntu
• Open Invention Network Expands Linux Definition — The expansion includes 151 new packages, bringing the total number of protected packages to 2,873. “With this update to the Linux System definition, OIN continues with its well-established process of carefully maintaining a balance between stability and innovative core open source technology,” stated Mirko Boehm, OIN’s director for the Linux System definition. “While the majority of the new additions are widely used and found in most devices, the update includes a number of key open source innovations such as Kubernetes, Apache Cassandra and packages for Automotive Grade Linux.”
• Bitwarden Completes Third-party Security Audit — We are pleased to announce that Bitwarden has completed a thorough security audit and cryptographic analysis from the security experts at Cure53.
• Adding an optional install duration to LVFS firmware — We’ve just added an optional feature to fwupd and the LVFS that some people might find useful: The firmware update process can now tell the user how long in seconds the update is going to take.
• Help wanted - SuperTuxKart networking testers
• Supertuxkart
• PipeWire Hackfest — The event kicked off with Wim Taymans presenting on current state of PipeWire and outlining the remaining issues and current thoughts on how to resolve them. Most of the first day was spent on a roadtable discussion about what are and should be the goals of PipeWire and what potential tradeoffs there would be going forward.
• Thunderbolt 3 GPU Dock — Integrated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card.
• Automation System Name Poll — Vote on the Automation System name.
• Junest — The lightweight Arch Linux based distro that runs upon any Linux distros without root access.
• Wimpy’s xrandr Script