On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ll celebrate the first of 3 birthdays for the Linux kernel. Mozilla announced a new release of Firefox with Firefox 80. Fedora 33 is switching to BTRFS and they are having a Testing Week for those wanting to help. openSUSE is also having some testing for their new Jump branch. Later in the show we will check out the new AMD Laptop from Tuxedo Computers, the Pulse 14. Then we will talk about the FUD surrounding Linux Security as well as what FUD means. We’ll round out the show with some gaming news related to SuperTuxKart and some awesome deals at the Humble Store and some Humble Bundles. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Downloads & Media
[tdpodcast mode=”subscribe” podcast=”thisweekinlinux”]
Segment Index
- 00:00 = Coming up on TWinL 115
- 00:53 = Welcome to TWinL
- 01:16 = Housekeeping: FrontPageLinux.com
- 01:50 = Housekeeping: Destination Linux & Hardware Addicts
- 02:54 = Housekeeping: Twitter & Mastodon
- 03:11 = Happy Birthday Linux Kernel!
- 06:03 = Firefox 80 Released with GPU Acceleration
- 08:00 = Fedora 33 Testing Week for BTRFS
- 10:35 = Digital Ocean – Cloud Hosting & VPS (https://do.co/dln)
- 12:20 = DLN Is Making A Quality Control Platform for Linux
- 17:06 = OpenSUSE Jump Now Available For Alpha Testing
- 20:55 = TUXEDO Pulse 14: AMD Ryzen 7 Linux Laptop
- 24:02 = Bitwarden – Open Source Password Manager (https://bitwarden.com/dln)
- 26:10 = Enough With The Linux Security FUD
- 31:30 = SuperTuxKart 1.2 Released
- 32:40 = Humble Store: End of Summer Sale
- 33:40 = Humble Bundle Bonanza (scroll down)
- 36:06 = Outro
Firefox 80: Enable GPU Acceleration:
- To enable:
- open a new tab
- type about:config
- search for vaapi
- Set these to “true”:
- media.ffmpeg.vaapi-drm-display.enabled
- media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled
- Restart browser
- Check if playback is improved in YouTube, Vimeo, ect
Humble Bundles
- Books: Programming & Productivity by Mercury [featured on TWinL115]
- Books: Advanced Computer Security & Privacy by Morgan & Claypool [featured on TWinL115]
- Learn a New Language for Kids and Adults [featured on TWinL115]
- Comics: Judge Dredd, 2000 AD, & more
- Games: Headup Games Band Boost
- Books: Become an Influencer by Wiley
- Games: Killing Floor Bundle
- Software: Your Sounds. Your Movies. Professional Video and Audio Creation Software
- Fantasy 3D Printable Models Bundle
- Comics: Hasbro Comics Crossovers by IDW
- Books: From Assassin’s Creed to Wolfenstein
Afternoon Michael, what was the FireFox about:config setting to change? Thanks.
I need to update the show notes, oops
here is the quick answer here
accessible via the about:config page as two options
Thanks. I appreciate that.
Thanks for this tip !
I also wanted to comment on Fedora switching to
BTRFS…Let me preface this by saying that,The approach by the Fedora team has left many people thinking that their current OS will be “updated” or that their Silverblue install will be migrated over to BTRFS from their current file system. This simple miscommunication has left over 100+ comments in the post/thread on the Fedora Magazine announcement thread.
I personally will not be switching to BTRFS from my current XFS builds, as I see it a bit impractical to test a file system in a week, that could potentially have ramifications months down the line that can’t feasibly come up in this small span of time. I know that games (Steam, Proton, WINE builds) have problems running on BTRFS, also expecting fairly new users to “test” a file system will yield poor results.
The file system is a tool that basic/new users have little interaction with. Expecting to test a File System should include dump and restores, backup utilities, shrinking and growing the file system, scrubbing, RAID configs and handling swap configurations.
I think BTRFS should continue to be an option for new users/installs. Anaconda (Fedora’s Installer) has an option for "Standard installations, LVM configuration and custom) This should just be a choice in custom and allow for users who know what they want to go for it.
Thanks, @MichaelTunnell very informative, as ever
I think Fedora are known for their bold moves as far as distros go, so I’ll be interested to read how people fare with Btrfs on release 33. I’ve only just restarted using Fedora in a VM and I like it. Same for CentOS Stream. Sadly the previous versions of both stopped updating correctly on my systems so I had to do fresh installs. That’s not something I’m used to as Debian’s been updating pretty well between versions… for must be about seven years now on most of my laptops.
It’s been a while since I saw browser speed-test comparisons, though I’m guessing if Firefox is starting to use GPU acceleration, maybe it will be outperforming the others? Not why I use it anyway; I much prefer Mozilla to Google and Microsoft.
I’m a bit behind with DL podcasts but the Quality Control Platform idea sounds fantastic. I’m going to hop over to that thread right away, though as I have just resumed an LFS build and have one other really important project on the go right now, not sure if I can contribute at this stage. Maybe some time soon though
Continue the discussion at forum.tuxdigital.com