Reviews
GhostBSD: A Solid Linux-Like Open Source Alternative
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 21st of February 2019 07:53:52 PM Filed under

Overall, aside from the system tools and the installation process, I did not see much not to like in running this BSD operating system. I experienced some annoyance when things failed to work just right, but I felt no frustrations that led me to give up on trying to use GhostBSD or find solutions to mishaps. I could provide a litany of Linux distros that did not measure up that well.
Some lingering problems for which I am still seeking workarounds are why my USB storage drives intermittently are not recognized and fail to mount. Another issue is why some of the preinstalled applications do not fully load. They either do not respond to launching at all, or crash before fully displaying anything beyond a white application window.
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A Linux Noob Reviews: The openSUSE Leap 15.0 Installer
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 19th of February 2019 04:47:04 PM Filed under


Welcome to a regular series here at Forbes that zeroes in on your very first experience with a desktop Linux operating system: the installer. This time around I'm escaping my comfort zone and leaving Ubuntu-based distributions behind with openSUSE Leap 15.0.
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Review: Slontoo 18.07.1 "LXDE"
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 18th of February 2019 02:34:16 AM Filed under
It is not often that I experiment with projects from the Gentoo family of distributions. This week I decided to enjoy a change of pace and experiment with a desktop oriented distribution from the Gentoo family called Slontoo. According to the project's website,
Slontoo is an operating system based on Funtoo Linux. It uses the Linux Mint live installer to simplify the installation procedure. Slontoo tries to provide most appropriate tools for home and office use.
Funtoo is, in turn, based on Gentoo and strives to improve the technologies presented in the Gentoo meta-distribution.
Slontoo is available in three editions: LXDE, MATE and Xfce. New users can download one unified ISO (1.7GB) that contains all three desktop environments, or select from one of three smaller ISO files that each include just one desktop. I decided to download the distribution's LXDE edition which is 1GB in size. Slontoo is available for 64-bit systems only.
Booting from the live media brings up a menu asking us to pick our preferred language. Then the system boots into a graphical mode and presents us with the LXDE desktop. A panel sits at the bottom of the screen, with the application menu in the bottom-left corner. Icons on the desktop open the file manager and launch the system installer. The live desktop was responsive and the distribution appeared to be working smoothly so I jumped immediately into the installer.
Also: Solus Plasma Testing V1 overview | A kde flavored Solus OS
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Microsoft VSCode – Finally a free, fast and cross-platform code editor
Submitted by Mohd Sohail on Monday 18th of February 2019 12:45:14 AM Filed under
If there is one thing a developer can ever ask for is a good code editor for the love of God. I have tried at the very least 30 or more code editors and felt incomplete somewhere or the other. Being very honest I pretty much had fallen in love with sublime but then I had to pay for it and I was just not up for it since we had atom from GitHub that was more or less similar.
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What’s New in Linux Mint 19.1 Xfce Edition
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 16th of February 2019 07:46:16 AM Filed under
Linux Mint 19.1 XFCE is the latest release of Linux Mint 19.1 that uses lightweight Xfce desktop environment 4.12. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.
The Update Manager is able to list mainline kernels and to show their support status. The Software Sources tool was given a new look. Similar to the welcome screen, it’s now using an Xapp sidebar and a headerbar. The Language Settings and the Input Methods are now two separate applications and the user interface for the Input Methods tool was revamped. It uses an icon sidebar and now shows a dedicated page for each supported language.
Based on Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS an powered by Linux Kernel 4.19, Linux Mint 19.1 Xfce edition also include pre-installed applications Thunar File Manager 1.6.15, Mozilla Firefox 65, Archive Manager 3.28, Gnome Disk 3.28, Hexchat 2.14, Thundebird 60, GIMP 2.8, Transmission Torrent Client 2.92, Rythmbox Music Manager 3.4.2, VLC Player 3.0.4, Xfce Dictionary 0.8, Libre Office Suite 6.0.6, Xfce Terminal 0.8, GNOME Fonts 3.28, Synaptic package Manager 0.84.
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elementary 5 "Juno"
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 15th of February 2019 06:21:41 PM Filed under


In the spring of 2014 (nearly five years ago), I was preparing a regular presentation I give most years—where I look at the bad side (and the good side) of the greater Linux world. As I had done in years prior, I was preparing a graph showing the market share of various Linux distributions changing over time.
But, this year, something was different.
In the span of less than two years, a tiny little Linux distro came out of nowhere to become one of the most watched and talked about systems available. In the blink of an eye, it went from nothing to passing several grand-daddies of Linux flavors that had been around for decades.
This was elementary. Needless to say, it caught my attention.
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Redcore Linux Gives Gentoo a Nice Facelift
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 15th of February 2019 06:12:03 PM Filed under


I like the overall look and feel of Redcore Linux. I generally do not use Gentoo-based Linux distros.
However, this distro does a good job of leveling the field of differences among competing Linux families. I especially like the way the LXQt and the KDE Plasma desktops have a noticeable common design that makes the Redcore distro stand out.
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An Everyday Linux User Review Of Debian 9
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 11th of February 2019 06:26:22 AM Filed under

Over the past few months I have been working my way through the top Linux distributions and writing a review for each one.
Thus far I have covered Manjaro, Linux Mint, Elementary, MX Linux and Ubuntu. These reviews are based on the top 5 distributions as listed at Distrowatch. Number 6 on that list is Debian which is the distribution I am reviewing here.
The list of distributions at Distrowatch include every distribution that you may or may or not have heard of and it is worth pointing out that not every distribution on the list is suitable for everybody’s needs. For example Kali is very popular with penetration testers and security experts because it comes with a whole range of tools for testing networks and for searching for vulnerabilities. Kali however is not suitable for the average Joe who primarily uses their system for web browsing and casual gaming.
The Everyday Linux User blog is about looking at Linux distributions from the point of view of an average computer user. What this means is that it isn’t specifically for developers, for hackers, for artists, musicians or video bloggers. The reviews are aimed at showing off a standard desktop operating system that by and large should be easy to install, easy to use and should either provide a good variety of applications or the ability to easily install those applications.
With this in mind whilst reviewing certain distributions I will state where that distribution is or isn’t necessarily suitable for the Everyday Linux User.
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Review: First impressions of Project Trident 18.12
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 11th of February 2019 02:08:00 AM Filed under

I have a lot of mixed feelings and impressions when it comes to Trident. On the one hand, the operating system has some great technology under the hook. It has cutting edge packages from the FreeBSD ecosystem, we have easy access to ZFS, boot environments, and lots of open source packages. Hardware support, at least on my physical workstation, was solid and the Lumina desktop is flexible.
However, there were a lot of problems I ran into during this trial. Some of them are matters of taste or style. The installer looks unusually crude, for example, and the mixed icon styles weren't appealing. Similarly, switching themes made some icons in toolbars disappear. These are not functional issues, just presentation ones. There were some functional problems too though. For example, needing to close and re-open AppCafe to see available packages, or the desktop not resizing when running Trident in a virtual machine, which required that I change the display settings at each login.
Lumina has come a long way and is highly flexible and I like the available alternative widgets for desktop elements. This is useful because Lumina's weakest link on Trident seems to be its defaults as I had some trouble with the "Start" application menu and I think some work to polish the initial impression would be helpful.
The biggest issues though were with security. Trident ships with some extra security features in place, but most of them can be easily bypassed by any user by simply opening the Control Panel to view or kill processes or even add or remove packages. Some systems intentionally give the user full access by running everything as root, but in those cases at least the administrator knows they have complete access. This situation seems worse since Trident gives the illusion of security and limited access, but any curious user can run administrator tools. I think the project needs time to mature before I would recommend using it.
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A Look at Xubuntu 18.04
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 11th of February 2019 01:59:38 AM Filed under



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Server: HTTP Clients, IIS DDoS and 'DevOps' Hype From Red Hat
| Purism's Privacy and Security-Focused Librem 5 Linux Phone to Arrive in Q3 2019
Initially planned to ship in early 2019, the revolutionary Librem 5 mobile phone was delayed for April 2019, but now it suffered just one more delay due to the CPU choices the development team had to make to deliver a stable and reliable device that won't heat up or discharge too quickly.
Purism had to choose between the i.MX8M Quad or the i.MX8M Mini processors for their Librem 5 Linux-powered smartphone, but after many trials and errors they decided to go with the i.MX8M Quad CPU as manufacturer NXP recently released a new software stack solving all previous power consumption and heating issues.
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Qt Creator 4.9 Beta released
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.9 Beta!
There are many improvements and fixes included in Qt Creator 4.9. I’ll just mention some highlights in this blog post. Please refer to our change log for a more thorough overview.
| Hack Week - Browsersync integration for Online
Recently my LibreOffice work is mostly focused on the Online. It's nice to see how it is growing with new features and has better UI. But when I was working on improving toolbars (eg. folding menubar or reorganization of items) I noticed one annoying thing from the developer perspective. After every small change, I had to restart the server to provide updated content for the browser. It takes few seconds for switching windows, killing old server then running new one which requires some tests to be passed.
Last week during the Hack Week funded by Collabora Productivity I was able to work on my own projects. It was a good opportunity for me to try to improve the process mentioned above.
I've heard previously about browsersync so I decided to try it out. It is a tool which can automatically reload used .css and .js files in all browser sessions after change detection. To make it work browsersync can start proxy server watching files on the original server and sending events to the browser clients if needed.
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