Linux Gaming Futures, LibreOffice 4.4.7, Cloud v Local
Today in Linux news, Martin Gräßlin examined the next step in Linux gaming. Italo Vignoli today announced The Document Foundation's LibreOffice 4.4.7 and tech blogger Locutus said it might be time to discuss "code bloat" again. Bruce Byfield took another stab at outlining the choices one really makes when choosing cloud services and the Electron Frontier Foundation launched a new cell phone privacy information site.
Linux gaming still seems the oxymoron to some and KDE's Martin Gräßlin has been giving some thought as to how it might be improved. He said today that the main problems are the windowing systems in general and compositing in particular. Workarounds represent compromise and while Wayland should eliminate some of the middlemen, it still works through OpenGL. Full-screen games should receive most of a system's resources, but current rendering process demand much of it. In addition, window managers and compositors sometimes clash with the full-screen game when it thinks it needs to redraw a window or something behind the game causing crashes, freezing, or loss of full-screen. Gräßlin suggested "removing the windowing system" from the loop. In the olden days I started most games from the runlevel 3 with xinit /path/game_exe, but Gräßlin said full-screen games of the future could be started as 'a "sub-session" on a new virtual terminal and become the logind- session controller for that session.' A lively discussion ensued.
Italo Vignoli today announced LibreOffice 4.4.7, the final minor update to the conservative "Still" branch of development. This is a bug and security fix release and users are urged to upgrade. Only 14 fixes this time that include the loss of bullets when saving in Powerpoint format, misaligned paragraphs in documentation, and a regression that caused Open Document formats to take a "looong time" to open. Download at www.libreoffice.org.
Bruce Byfield today shared more thoughts on cloud computing. He said individual and businesses seem to choose the cloud because of convenience or perceived convenience and may forget security. Again, Byfield explained how impossible it is to know where your data is stored, how secure their facility is, and just who exactly has access to it "on the cloud." Ah, but there are drawbacks to local storage for the enterprise in terms of cost. He said the choice "comes down to convenience without control, or accepting both responsibility and its efforts and expenses."
In other news:
* I'm not bloated, I'm big code.
* Top 10 Linux Gifts for the 2015 Holidays
* Mint 17.3 (Rosa) on the Dell XPS 13
* Government, Can You Hear Me Now? Cell-site Simulators Aren’t Secret Anymore