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Links 20/2/2021: Mars Gets GNU/Linux and More Features Land in Linux 5.12

  • GNU/Linux

    • Linux has made it to Mars

      Yesterday, NASA landed a rover named Perseverance on Mars. I, along with 2 million other people, watched the landing happen live on YouTube. It was beautiful. I mean, here’s this little robot dude that’s traveled millions and millions of miles through the barrenness of space, and now it’s just hanging out on Mars taking pics and scientific samples! (Perseverance joins older sibling Curiosity on the surface of the Red Planet. Hope they have a nice time together!)

      In any case, Perseverance didn’t traverse the vastness of space alone. Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter, tagged along for the ride. As it’s primarily a technology demonstration, Ingenuity’s destiny is to attempt the first powered flight on any planet other than Earth and to hopefully be the blueprint for future Mars missions. It’s also running on Linux.

    • To infinity and beyond: Linux and open-source goes to Mars

      Perseverance hit Mars' atmosphere at almost 12,000 miles per hour (19,312 kilometers per hour) and a mere seven minutes later NASA landed its latest Mars rover softly and safely. Onboard the one-ton mobile science lab is its tiny flying companion, the drone helicopter Ingenuity. If all goes well, the four-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity will be the first vehicle to ever fly on another world. At 11-light minutes from Earth, no one will fly the dual-propped Ingenuity with a drone controller. Instead, it will fly itself using a combination of Linux and a NASA-built program based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) open-source F€´ (pronounced F prime) framework.

    • Linux Is Now on Mars, Thanks to NASA's Perseverance Rover

      When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars this week, it also brought the Linux operating system to the Red Planet.

      The tidbit was mentioned in an interview NASA software engineer Tim Canham gave to IEEE Spectrum. The helicopter-like drone on board the Perseverance rover uses a Linux-powered software framework the space agency open-sourced a few years ago. “This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars. We’re actually running on a Linux operating system,” Canham said.

      It also might be the first time NASA has brought a Linux-based device to Mars. “There isn’t a previous use of Linux that I’m aware of, definitely on the previous rovers,” Canham told PCMag in an email.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Olive 0.1: Kdenlive Has Been Dethroned - YouTube

        I've been trying out video editors and everything has been lacking compared to kdenlive but I think I've finally found something I want to use and that something is the Olive editor, while it's not perfect it's an amazing piece of software

      • Linux in the Ham Shack [LHS] Episode #394: The Weekender LXVI

        It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.

      • Season Fourteen

        Nearly thirteen years ago, on 11th March 2008, a few members of the Ubuntu UK Local Community Team released S01E01 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. Ciemon Dunville, Dave Walker, Tony Whitmore and I had recorded it on the previous Saturday in my cramped, messy home office. In the following seven years we recorded 187 episodes as “Ubuntu UK Podcast” - affectionately known as “uupc”. A re-brand in season eight to just “Ubuntu Podcast” led to another six years comprising another 251 episodes.

      • Bad Voltage 3×23: Multiple Otter Jacobs

        Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Facebook aren’t watching our webinars and this is not nuanced...

    • Kernel Space

      • VRR For Intel Xe Graphics, Radeon RX 6000 Series Overclocking With Linux 5.12 - Phoronix

        The DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window. Two of the biggest features are VRR/Adaptive-Sync now being supported for Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics while on the AMD side there is initial "OverDrive" overclocking support for their newest RDNA 2 GPUs.

      • Linux 5.12 Will Avoid Prematurely Shutting Down Intel Mobile Systems When Running Hot - Phoronix

        Linux 5.12 with queued thermal changes will avoid prematurely shutting down mobile Intel workstations when a "critical" thermal threshold is reached that isn't too critical.

        Sent in on Friday were the thermal patches for the Linux 5.12 merge window. Catching my attention within that assortment of patches were two patches by Canonical's Kai-Heng Feng who is part of the Linux kernel team for Ubuntu.

      • Graphics Stack

        • Mike Blumenkrantz: Notes

          I’ve been getting a lot of pings over the past week or two about ES 3.2 support.

          Here’s the deal.

          It’s not happening soon. Probably.

        • With OpenGL 4.6 Achieved, Zink Working CTS Fixes, Substantial Performance Gains - Phoronix

          Now that Mesa 21.1 has OpenGL 4.6 support for Zink, the attention is turning to fixes for the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite and juicing as much performance as possible out of this OpenGL on Vulkan driver layer within Mesa.

          Most active Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz, working under contract for Valve, has been working on the CTS fixes and performance improvements now that mainline Mesa has the Zink GL 4.6 support. Besides OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.1 is also now possible with Zink.

          Over the coming days and month or so, he is planning to land improved barrier support, removing explicit pre-fencing, descriptor caching, and various bug fixes. Even this morning a number of the Zink patches were merged.

        • Radeon "GFX90A" Added To LLVM As Next-Gen CDNA With Full-Rate FP64 - Phoronix

          It looks like the open-source driver support to the next-generation CDNA GPU / MI100 "Arcturus" successor is on the way. Hitting mainline AMDGPU LLVM is a new "GFX90A" target adding new interesting features for compute.

          The AMD GFX90A target is a big addition and was quickly and quietly merged this week... So much so that it generated some concerns and criticism in the review from other upstream LLVM developers that the merge request was just for a short time (a little more than one hour) before merging it, not allowing sufficient time for code review on such a large patch. To which one of the responses in return was over "we needed this upstreamed and no time was given to him to break it up into reasonably sized piece [across multiple patches that are easier for code review]." Code outside of the AMDGPU LLVM back-end isn't touched but understandably some of the upstream developers are put off by the rushed process not allowing for any open-source code review prior to landing such a massive addition.

    • Benchmarks

      • LLVM Clang 12 Performance Benchmarks On AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

        With LLVM 12 due for release next month and GCC 11 not being far behind, it's the season for fresh compiler benchmarks. In today's article is a look at the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) compiler performance between LLVM Clang 11.1 against the current LLVM Clang 12.0 Git development code in its feature-frozen state.

        LLVM/Clang 12 brings initial albeit basic support for AMD Zen 3 (Znver3) that adds in the newly-supported instructions but is not yet fully-tuned/optimized. Outside of the Zen 3 addition, LLVM Clang 12 brings more C++20 support, the machine function splitter was merged, -mtune for x86/x86_64 CPUs, and a lot of additions and improvements to the various LLVM sub-projects. There is also support for forthcoming Intel and ARM processors and other improvements there, which will be benchmarked in their own separate forthcoming articles on Phoronix.

    • Applications

      • Not Comfortable Using youtube-dl in Terminal? Use These GUI Apps

        Considering that it’s now restored and completely accessible, it is safe to say that it not an illegal tool out there.

        It is a very useful command-line tool that lets you download videos from YouTube and some other websites. Using youtube-dl is not that complicated but I understand that using commands for such tasks is not everyone’s favorite way.

        The good thing is that there are a few applications that provide GUI frontend for youtube-dl tool.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • How To Install Kodi 19 in Ubuntu 20.04 / LinuxMint

        This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install KODI 19 in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 18.04, and LinuxMint 20.1.

        KODI formerly known as XBMC Media center is a free and open-source cross-platform software media player. It is managed by a non-profit XBMC foundation and developed by volunteers around the world.

      • How to Find and Fix Broken Symlinks in Linux

        Want to know more about deleting broken symlinks on your system? Maybe someone told you how dead symbolic links take up space on your storage device and now you want to get rid of them for good.

        Luckily, there are several utilities available that you can download on your Linux computer in order to manage symbolic links. These tools will also help you in finding broken soft links and fixing them permanently.

      • How to dual boot Kali Linux and Windows 10

        If you want to run Kali Linux on your system but you already have Windows 10 installed, you have a couple of options. One thing you could do is install Kali Linux in a virtual machine, as we've shown in our tutorials for installing Kali in VMware and installing Kali in VirtualBox.

      • How To Install Google Chrome on Manjaro 20 - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Chrome on Manjaro 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Chrome is the official Google browser that is available for almost all platforms. The functionality of Google Chrome can easily be extended by installing different useful extensions and web applications. It is a secure and easy-to-use browser.

        This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Google Chrome web browser on a Manjaro 20 (Nibia).

      • How to Install GoAccess Web Log Analyzer on Ubuntu 20.04

        GoAccess is a free and open-source weblog analyzer tool used for the analysis of logs in real-time. You can analyze logs through a web browser or terminal. It is fast and light-weight that cannot consume a large amount of your CPU and Memory. It uses Common Log Format to parses and analyzes the web server logs. It supports HTTP/2 & IPv6 and has the ability to output JSON and CSV.

      • How to Install Kodi Media Center 19.0 in Ubuntu 20.04/18.04 | UbuntuHandbook

        The Kodi media center 19.0 now is available to install via its official Ubuntu PPA.

        Kodi 19.0 “Matrix” is a new major release for the open-source home theater software. Though it’s not officially announced at the moment of writing, the PPA packages has been updated, available for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, Linux Mint 20.x and derivatives.

      • How to Use GDB to Debug Programs in Ubuntu 20.04

        GNU Debugger (GDB) is an open-source debugger for GNU Systems. The debugger is portable and can be used for multiple languages as C/C++ and Fortran. It can be used for debugging programs by observing their states on specific breakpoints and even altering the flow or values for further execution. Usually, the GDB runs in command-line but several GUI has been developed for it as well.

        In this article, we explore how to debug C programs using GDB in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).

      • How to find details about user logins on Linux - TechRepublic

        Linux is an incredibly powerful platform that allows you to do just about anything you might want or need. As an admin, that's a double-edged sword--especially given Linux is a multi-user environment. In other words, more than one user can be logged in at once.

        That means admins might find themselves having to track down more information about those logins than they're accustomed to. For example, what users are logged in, what groups do they belong to, and what have they been doing? Where do you get such information? Have there been failed login attempts?

      • How to find string in a file on Linux | FOSS Linux

        Sometimes you might need to search a particular word or a string inside a file. To do this, almost every text editor has some GUI implementation to help you out. But for Linux users, it is much more productive and convenient to do these searches from the command-line.

        In fact, Linux has a powerful and convenient command-line utility – the grep command for this purpose. Using this, you can search for a particular string not just in one file but multiple files for a more comprehensive search.

        However, before you can use the grep command, you’ll first need to know how it works and its syntaxes. And so, to help you out, we have put together a detailed guide on using the grep command to help you find strings in a file on Linux. Not just that, but we will also show you how to search for strings in files through the command-line text editor and the GUI text editor.

      • How to install Mods in Friday Night Funkin on a Chromebook - CG5 Edition

        Today we are looking at how to install Mods in Friday Night Funkin on a Chromebook - CG5 Edition. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

      • How to send Linux command output to a file - TechRepublic

        If you're new to the world of the Linux command line, then you know how eye-openingly powerful it can be. In fact, the sky's the limit with what you can do from the Command Line interface. But, sometimes you'll run a command and the output flies by so fast you couldn't possibly catch everything necessary to get the task done.

        This is especially so when the command is of the informative nature. When you're working remotely, or on hardware that doesn't allow you the option to scroll back through the output, what do you do?

        You can always pipe the command through the likes of less, so you can page through the output. What if the output of the command is too long, or you need to save it for later or share it with someone to get a second set of eyes on an issue?

      • How to speed up apt downloads using apt-fast in ubuntu - Webleit.info

        Have you ever had to install a lot of updates? And does it take you a long time? Keeping our systems always up to date is important, but it’s also important to save time and optimize our work. Apt-fast is a script that allows each package to be pulled from multiple locations during its download. This in turn leads to faster download of all packages, and this leads to faster completion of our work on updating and installing packages.

    • Wine or Emulation

      • Collabora share big progress on the Wine compatibility layer with Wayland

        Collabora have shared a great progress update on getting Wine working directly with Wayland, which is going to eventually replace X11 on most Linux distributions.

        Notes for newbies: Wine is a translation layer that can run Windows games and applications on Linux, Wine is a huge part of what makes Steam Play Proton do anything. Wayland is the next-generation replacement for the ancient and now mostly unmaintained X server on Linux.

      • Experimental Wayland Support For Wine Now Sees More Functionality Working

        Back in December there was an experimental driver for native Wayland support within Wine published by Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis. A new version of the Wayland patches for Wine have now been published.

        With the new "request for comment" patches, there is now working support for copy/paste, drag-and-drop, and the ability to change the display mode. The patches remain out-of-tree for now and it's not clear if/when it will be ready for mainline. There also is a lack of clarity from upstream Wine developers / CodeWeavers on whether this code should first go through Wine-Staging or what ultimately the acceptance requirements will be for introducing Wayland support into Wine.

      • VKD3D-Proton 2.2 Released With Tier 1 Variable Rate Shading, Preps For DXR Ray-Tracing

        In addition to having DXVK 1.8 released for Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan, Valve's VKD3D-Proton project also is enjoying a new release in time for weekend gamers wanting to run the latest Direct3D 12 titles via Vulkan on Linux with Steam Play.

        VKD3D-Proton 2.2 is the new release today and is mostly on bug/regression fixes but also "unblocks significant future feature development" moving forward.

      • Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation lib VKD3D-Proton 2.2 is out, prepares DirectX Raytracing

        We just recently had the DXVK 1.8 release for Direct3D 9/10/11 to Vulkan and now we also have the VKD3D-Proton 2.2 release landing as well. As the name suggests, this is the project especially made for the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer to work with newer games that use Direct3D 12.

        According to the developer, the VKD3D-Proton 2.2 update is only a "maintenance release which fixes bugs and regressions" but as a big step it also "unblocks significant future feature development" so things shall continue to get exciting on it.

    • Games

      • How to play Farming Simulator 19 on Linux

        Farming Simulator 19 is a farming simulator video game developed by Giants Software and was published by Focus Home Interactive. In the game, players can realistically farm, breed livestock, plant and harvest crops, and sell assets created on the farm.

        Farming Simulator 19 has been released on dozens of platforms. However, it’s never made it to Linux. However, it is possible to play this game on Linux by using Steam’s Steam Play feature. Here’s how to set it up.

      • How to play Eternal Return: Black Survival on Linux

        Eternal Return: Black Survival is a MOBA/battle royal/survival game hybrid for PC developed and published by Nimble Neuron. The player chooses a character from the unique character roster and faces off with 17 other players in the game.

        Eternal Return: Black Survival never made its way to Linux as a native program. Instead, if you want to enjoy this game on Linux, you will need to use the Steam Play feature built into the Linux client. Here’s how to set the game up.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • LibFM + PCManFM 1.3.2 released!

        Two core parts of LXDE most of the time are releasing together, and that happened again. Not new major changes, just few more bugfixes. I would like to say something about translation updates but… unfortunately our Pootle server is still down and no other solution was introduced yet, so just few minor updates via Git. Fortunately, it is already in good shape so nothing too bad happened yet.

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • Emmanuele Bassi: Documentation changes

          Back in the late ‘90s, people working on GTK has the exact same problem we have today: how do we document the collection of function, types, macros, and assorted symbols that we call “an API”. It’s all well and good to strive for an API that can be immediately grasped by adhering to a set of well defined conventions and naming; but nothing is, or really can be, “self documenting”.

          When GTK 1.0 was released, the documentation was literally stored in handwritten Texinfo files; the API footprint of GTK was small enough to still make it possible, but not really maintainable in the longer term.

    • Distributions

      • New Releases

        • Koozali SME Server 10 Beta 1 Release Notes "Justine"

          The Koozali SME Server development team is pleased to announce the release of SME Server 10 Beta 1 which will be the next major release of SME Server. Code named "Justine"

          This release is based on CentOS 7. CentOS 7.# has an EOL of 30 June 2024.

          Koozali SME Server users should not upgrade production servers to this release but those who can are encouraged to load the alpha to a dedicated test machine and take part in the testing phase.

        • Release | Endless OS 3.9.3

          Endless OS 3.9.3 was released for existing users today, Thursday 18th, 2021.

          Downloadable images for new users will be available in the next few days.

          Improved multi-user support for Kolibri

          We heard your feedback! Previously, using Kolibri on Endless OS would store all content within one user on your system. This meant that, when a device is shared between multiple users in a family or classroom, users could not access the same offline content.

          In this version of Endless OS, Kolibri now runs system-wide, and downloaded content is accessible to all users on the system, instead of a separate data directory for each user. This is more convenient, and saves valuable disk space if multiple users want to use the same content!

          If you have already been using Kolibri, you can switch to the new behaviour and preserve your data. We added a migration script that will migrate the existing content and make it accessible system wide. If you create a new user on your system then the content will be available to this new user. Please run the eos-kolibri-migrate command in the Terminal App.

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • Linking a TI-86 Calculator with openSUSE – CubicleNate's Techpad

          Since there is a part of me still stuck in 1998, I do enjoy using my Texas Instruments TI-86 calculator for math things. When I have a complex equation that my middle-aged brain just can’t seem to work out, I reach for my trusty old TI-86. It has been a faithful companion that has been by my side, may math crunching crutch for over 22 years. I still have some of the same rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries from Rayovac that still seem to work.

          [...]

          The interface is dated and also of older GTK stock so there are some visual issues with the application but it is only a small annoyance. It would be nice to see this application updated with a newer Qt toolkit to make it from this decade.

          The documentation on Linux, as to what ports need to be opened for communication isn’t completely clear. I was only made aware of this because of my Arduino fun I have been having. Hopefully, in writing this, I am able to help someone out there find that answer.

        • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the weeks 2021/07

          Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

          This week might not have seen the highest count of snapshots being published (only 3, 0212, 0215, and 0217), but for sure we reached the highest count of packages to replace on your system and megabytes to transfer this year (so far). We have few reasons to trigger rebuilds of all packages, and most of the time I do that on a glibc update and when we switch the default compiler (in both cases to make use of new technologies). This week, glibc was the ‘guilty’ one.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • The Linux Foundation adds 7 projects to combat racial injustice [Ed: IBM desperate to distract the public from its dark and racist history]

          The Linux Foundation is adding seven open source projects aimed at pooling open source software expertise to promote racial justice to its Call for Code initiative.

          Call for Code was established in 2018 to bring together technical resources and expertise from partners like David Clark Cause, the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, IBM, and IBM subsidiary Red Hat to confront big social problems like climate change through a set of global challenges.

        • Linux Foundation backs 7 new open-source projects to promote racial justice

          The Linux Foundation said today that it has decided to house seven new open-source software projects aimed at promoting racial justice, in a move that’s designed to encourage more developers to participate in their development.

          The seven open-source projects are all entrants in the 2021 Call for Code, n annual contest held by IBM Corp. It invites developers to create and deploy applications based on open-source technology that can tackle some of the most pressing challenges in the world.

        • IBM, Linux Foundation Expand Call for Code for Racial Justice [Ed: This publication works for 'Linux' Foundation; IBM says it’s no longer racist because of a corporate PR campaign]

          The IBM Call for Code for Racial Justice team is expanding the program into new areas, and today said that the Linux Foundation will host seven projects in a bid to rally more coders to use open source technologies to address systemic racism.

          In addition to the five existing open source projects from Call for Code for Racial Justice, the Linux Foundation and IBM also unveiled two new project starters: Fair Change and TakeTwo.

        • DevConf2021.cz - Presentation and Demo

          There was a presentation entitled “Managing Standard Operating Envs with Ansible” given at DevConf2021.cz. Demo files and links to videos can be found at DevConf2021.cz

        • Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2021-07

          Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)! Fedora 34 Changes should be 100% code complete on Tuesday. The Beta freeze begins Tuesday.

          I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

      • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Ubuntu 21.04 Is Now Powered by Linux 5.10 LTS, Wayland Enabled by Default

          It’s official! Ubuntu 21.04 is now powered by Linux kernel 5.10 LTS as the packages landed earlier today in the main archives of the upcoming release. Until today, Ubuntu 21.04 was using the Linux 5.8 kernel used in Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) and more recently in Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (Focal Fossa).

          After several weeks of testing, it would appear that the Ubuntu Kernel Team decided to give a green light to the Linux kernel 5.10 LTS packages, which were kept in the proposed repositories for proper testing. This is good news for Ubuntu fans, as it looks like Linux kernel 5.10 LTS will be supported until December 2022.

        • Canonical & Ubuntu at Embedded World Virtual 2021

          Embedded World 2021 is just around the corner and we’re excited to be sponsoring and connecting with our fellow EW-ers once again. This time, the embedded community will be bigger than ever, as the event is (naturally) going digital.

          In fact, we’d like to extend a complimentary invite for you to join us there too! Just hit the button below and use the code b when prompted.

        • Supporting “I don’t care about cookies”

          It all started one day when my boss turned to me and said, the legal team have said we need to ask a person before our websites can start using non-essential cookies. So we started the cookie-policy project which is written in vanilla JavaScript with accompanying styling and the back-end implemented via Google Tag Manager.

          The cookie-policy project displays a modal to each first-time visitor to manage which cookies they would like to accept. We have rolled out successfully across over 30 of our sites.

          Recently we received an issue that there was no way to scroll on our site if you were using a popular browser extension named I don’t care about cookies. The cookie policy script added a class to the body of the site to lock scrolling as it was expecting the cookie management modal to be present. The plugin has a range of selectors targeting known cookie notification elements and hides the cookie modal making it impossible for users to remove the scroll lock.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • Cameron Kaiser: TenFourFox FPR30 SPR2 available

            TenFourFox Feature Parity Release "30.2" (SPR 2) is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). The reason this is another security-only release is because of my work schedule and also I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels on issue 621, which is the highest priority JavaScript concern because it is an outright crash. The hope was that I could recreate one of the Apple discussion pages locally and mess with it and maybe understand what is unsettling the parser, but even though I thought I had all the components, it still won't load or reproduce in a controlled environment. I've spent too much time on it and even if I could do more diagnostic analysis I still don't know if I can do anything better than "not crash" (and in SPR2 is a better "don't crash" fix, just one that doesn't restore any functionality). Still, if you are desperate to see this fixed, see if you can create a completely local Apple discussions page or clump of files that reliably crashes the browser. If you do this, either attach the archive to the Github issue or open a Tenderapp ticket and let's have a look. No promises, but if the community wants this fixed, the community will need to do some work on it.

          • Optional Comments

            I spend a lot of my time at Mozilla reviewing my peers' work. It's a joy, but it's hard to do well. Review can be a great opportunity for mentorship and growth, but it's also an opportunity to be overbearing. Striking the right tone is a struggle.

            Part of the problem is this implicit push for the author to incorporate every review comment into the document [1]. For example, comments must be marked as "resolved" which suggests the author took some action. I see this reflected in our culture too. Consider this HBR article that highlights the risk of jilting peers by ignoring their advice.

      • CMS

        • A quick guide to WordPress, the free-to-use website builder that powers some of the web's most popular sites

          WordPress is a free-to-use open-source content management system (CMS) that allows you to build a website with minimal technical knowledge.

        • Reflecting on Gutenberg’s 100th Release

          The past four years have not always been an easy journey. Shipping something this impactful is not easy, and there was precedent for keeping the editor as it was: WordPress had already tried to replace TinyMCE a couple of times already. What would be different this time around? The worry was “not much” and initially, very few people actively joined the project.

          Six months later came WordCamp Europe 2017 and the first release of the plugin. The editor was nowhere close to being usable, but it “clicked” for some. The reactions to the presentation were hopeful, but afterward, there was a lot of pushback.

          Gutenberg was (and is) an audacious project. With a project this big it attracted a lot of attention, and it became difficult to discern constructive debate from mere opposition. We each come with our context, and some people had a fixed idea about what they wanted for the project. Some wanted to reuse an existing page builder, others wanted to revive the Fields API project, some wanted it to be front-end-first, others wanted it just to replace the classic editor’s content area, some wanted it to be in Vue.JS, others wanted no change at all. With a product used by 40% of the web, you hope to find consensus, and when compromises have to be made, it can be difficult for those involved to avoid feeling that their voice is being ignored.

          We have also made quite a few mistakes: stability wasn’t great in some releases, performance suffered in others, and accessibility as well. But we kept pushing forward, using feedback to improve the editor and the project in all aspects until its first inclusion in WordPress 5.0, and we’re still working to improve it today.

          [...]

          Wednesday marked the 100th release of Gutenberg, and while that looks remarkable on the outside, the release itself holds what all the other releases did. It holds improvements to the existing features, it fixes bugs that users reported, adds new features, and it highlights experiments with new ideas.

          What is remarkable about the release is the people. The ones who were with us from the start, the ones who were with us but left, the ones who joined in our journey, everyone who helped along the way, everyone who provided feedback, everyone who got their hands dirty, and everyone who tried to use this editor, extend it and provide ideas.

      • Programming/Development

        • Why Flutter Has Become the Best Choice To Develop a Mobile Application

          Why Flutter Application Development is the right choice for startups? Flutter can make it more comfortable for startups to quickly ship features with a focus on native end-user experiences. Flutter is an open-source UI development kit created by Google. Flutter could be the ultimate solution for startups to build beautiful native applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Thus, flutter is an ideal choice for startups to develop mobile apps. Let’s go too deep in this post to understand everything related to Flutter and why Flutter has become the best choice to develop a mobile application.

        • Python

          • How to Setup PyDev for Eclipse IDE on Linux

            Eclipse is not a new term that programmers will hear. It is very popular in the developer community and has been in the market for a very long time. This article is all about showing how to set up Python in Eclipse using the PyDev package.

            Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used for Java development. Other than Java it also supports other languages like PHP, Rust, C, C++, etc. Though there are dedicated Linux IDE’s available in the market for python I have seen still people tweaking up their Eclipse environment to make it perfect for Python development.

        • Rust

          • March Sprint for rustc: Shrink Memory Usage

            I am very excited about the compiler team's upcoming sprint, and I want to share that excitement with all of you.

            The Rust Compiler Team decided over a series of recent meetings (4 dec 2020, 15 jan 2021, 29 jan 2021) that our focus for 2021 will be improving the compiler's performance from the perspective of the new contributor experience bootstrapping the compiler and developing code for the compiler.

            The team's first sprint for 2021 will be during the first week of March, and its focus will be on reducing the memory footprint of the compiler during bootstrap.

  • Leftovers

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Policy Brief: Cut the Campaign Finance Program from HR 1

        The Campaign Finance section is one of three divisions in HR 1, the proposed For the People Act.

        Division A deals with Voting, including many good reforms concerning internet and same-day voter registration, eliminating unjust voter roll purges, voter-verified permanent paper ballots, early voting, and no excuse absentee ballots.

        Division C deals with Ethics, again with many good reforms such as requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns.

        Division B deal with Campaign Finance. It creates a matching funds public campaign finance program for congressional and presidential candidates that simply adds public money on top of a campaign finance system that is dominated by private money. It also creates qualifying thresholds that are beyond the reach of third-party candidates. It has no restrictions on private campaign funding.

        In short, the HR 1 public campaign finance system is a scam to add public money to all the private money corporate major-party incumbents can raise, while making it hard for challengers, whether inside a major party or in a third party, to even qualify for public funding. The Republican politicians won’t vote for this, but if it passes, they will be happy to get in on the scam.

        The Campaign Finance section of HR 1 is a reform that doesn’t reform.



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