Solus Still Not Ready, NVIDIA on Wayland, Pimpin' Xfce
When Apache began the public discussion of what to do with OpenOffice, I knew someone would bring up the LibreOffice remerger. Today Jack Wallen did just that. Elsewhere, Neil Rickert said that Solus still needs more work to be a daily driver and more on NVIDIA with Wayland was discussed in the Land of Wobbly Windows. Sebastian Kuegler blogged Plasma 5.8 excludes Wayland from long term support and Bruce Byfield highlighted seven KDE applications sometimes forgotten and Dedoimedo pimped Xfce.
The possible demise of Apache OpenOffice entered the general public discussion a couple of weeks ago and I mentioned then that a remerger of The Document Foundation's LibreOffice and Apache's OpenOffice had been discussed in length before in various places. The general consensus was quite a bit of the code in OpenOffice was redundant or obsolete. LibreOffice developers spent the last five years removing and replacing a lot of the code derived from OpenOffice. As a result, LibreOffice is faster and more stable than any office we've experienced before. Remerging would be counter-productive. But today Jack Wallen posted that the two should remerge despite the "political differences." He listed some possible advantages such as uniting the MS filters, of which he said OpenOffice's were better. Regaining those OpenOffice developers and combining their usage numbers are others. He concluded, "Merging LibreOffice and OpenOffice would combine the strengths of the two constituent pieces and possibly jettison the weaknesses."
Neil Rickert reviewed Solus 1.2.0.5 today saying he rather likes the Budgie desktop featured by Solus. He noted Solus still doesn't support encryption but didn't say if it supports UEFI yet. Rickert noticed that Vi, sshd, rsync, and diff were missing from the default install and that IPv6 wasn't supported at all. He concluded that the OS still wasn't "ready for prime time."
When KDE neon went Wayland default, a lot of users asked what about those with NVIDIA cards. Martin Gräßlin said NVIDIA users would still get X, but he felt the need today to elaborate further. NVIDIA has officially gone back and forth in their decisions to support Wayland and the end result has been rather lacking according to Phoronix. However, Gräßlin said NVIDIA does support Wayland somewhat, but it's a mess that requires ugly hacks to work. It also requires a lot of man hours to support these proprietary drivers that they just don't have. He said, "We don't have the resources to develop and maintain an NVIDIA specific implementation on Wayland." He went into detail with examples as to why supporting NVIDIA drivers would be very difficult, but reminded users that X will still be available to them for some time.
In other news, Bruce Byfield listed some KDE applications "you should know about" and www.dedoimedo.com published a guide "to tame and pimp Xfce." Sebastian Kuegler discussed how Plasma 5.8 LTS lining up with several LTS distros is a plus since they're concentrating on stability this release. David Gewirtz ran down 10 extraordinary places Linux is used and Bryan Lunduke said the lack of Linux software is a big fat myth.