More Raspberry Pi, Linux Pressure, Plasma 5.9
Jonathan Riddell announced the latest KDE Plasma today to "kick off 2017 in style." While announcing Plasma 5.9 Beta, Riddell assured users that 5.8 LTS would continue to receive bug fixes. Weird thing to say for a developmental release. Relatedly, neon 20170112 was uploaded but not announced. In other news, Mint 18.1 took another one on the chin today at The Reg mainly for it's old base and Update Manager. Jamie Watson tested other distributions on his Raspberry Pis, this time Fedora, Manjaro, and Ubuntu MATE and Robin "Roblimo" Miller said Windows users should be grateful to Linux. That followed a similar themed story from the other day where a developer claims Valve Linux choice forced Microsoft to beef up Windows gaming support. It was another interesting day in the land of The Penguin.
Plasma 5.9 is officially on its way. Jonathan Riddell today announced the release of Plasma 5.9 Beta, starting 2017 off with a bang. There are new features highlighted today by Riddell in the announcement, for example, a new notification image preview they say will be most helpful when taking a screenshot with Spectacle via keyboard shortcut. Global Menus are back and we can now customize our drop and drag desktop icons. Quick launch can now support jump list actions and Krunner actions will work from launcher searches. System Setting Network is now a new module using QML, but it still uses the old trusted backend. Wayland support has improved a lot as well and Plasma 5.9 sports a new wallpaper dubbed Canopee. New neon images hit the mirrors Thursday and the wee hours of Friday linked in the announcement.
It's time for round two in Jamie Watson's Great 2017 Pi Bake-off. The Geeko really didn't deliver for Watson the other day, so he was off to test Fedora, Manjaro, and Ubuntu MATE. Fedora's results were mixed, but Ubuntu MATE proved sufficent. However, most notable was Watson's enthusiasm for Manjaro. Everything worked and performed rather well. Another vote tallied for Manjaro.
Yikes! I'm really starting to feel bad for the Linux Mint guys. The Register's Gavin Clarke today said that the Mint 18.x release are feeling a bit stale with Ubuntu 16.04 as the base. He'd like a newer kernel, but can't tell from the Update Applet if it's officially supported. In fact, he has other issues with Update Manager saying the default update configuration is a little off-putting because the safest level is labeled "Don't break my computer" implying the others will. He added, "Out of the box Mint effectively blocks some updates to the system, which means Mint users may well be running software with known security vulnerabilities, which could theoretically be exploited."
In other news:
* Linux People Should Say, ‘You’re Welcome, Windows Users’
* Developer claims Linux forced Microsoft to up its Windows game support