Unbelievable! Linux Mint Ditches Ubuntu, Will Now Be Based on Arch Linux

Mark this day. This is the day when Linux Mint has decided to leave Ubuntu for Arch Linux. Read this shocking announcement to know more about it.

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Become an Arch Power User with Pacli and PacUI

Get a greater control on package management in Arch Linux with the advanced tools like Pacli and PacUI.

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LOL! Google Thinks Arch Linux is Based on Ubuntu

Search 'Ubuntu based distros' on Google and laugh at the recommendations as Google shows Arch, Debian etc in the search result.

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Automatically Disable Touchpad When Mouse is Used in Ubuntu Linux [Quick Tip]

Brief: Use this tiny utility to automatically disable touchpad when mouse is plugged in. A must-have for Ubuntu laptop users who prefer mouse over the touchpad.

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Install Linux Inside Windows Using VirtualBox

Using Linux in a virtual machine gives you the option to try Linux within Windows. This step-by-step guide shows you how to install Linux inside Windows using VirtualBox.

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Krita Version 4.0 Released With Improved Vector Tools

Popular open source digital painting application Krita has a new release with improvement on the vector tools. Have a look at the new features and installation procedure of Krita 4.0. 

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Which Linux Distribution to Use After Ubuntu?

If you have gained some Linux skills after using Ubuntu for some time, you may try switching to these distributions to explore the world of Linux distributions further.

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Easily Fund Open Source Projects With These Platforms

Brief: We list out some funding platforms you can use to financially support open source projects. 

Financial support is one of the many ways to help Linux and Open Source community. This is why you see “Donate” option on the websites of most open source projects.

While the big corporations have the necessary funding and resources, most open source projects are developed by individuals in their spare time. However, it does require one’s efforts, time and probably includes some overhead costs too. Monetary supports surely help drive the project development.

If you would like to support open source projects financially, let me show you some platforms dedicated to open source and/or Linux.

Funding platforms for Open Source projects

Just to clarify, we are not associated with any of the funding platforms mentioned here.

1. Liberapay

Gratipay was probably the biggest platform for funding open source projects and people associated with the project, which got shut down at the end of the year 2017. However, there’s a fork – Liberapay that works as a recurrent donation platform for the open source projects and the contributors.

Liberapay is a non-profit, open source organization that helps in a periodic donation to a project. You can create an account as a contributor and ask the people who would really like to help (usually the consumer of your products) to donate.

To receive a donation, you will have to create an account on Liberapay, brief what you do and about your project, reasons for asking for the donation and what will be done with the money you receive.

For someone who would like to donate, they would have to add money to their accounts and set up a period for payment that can be weekly, monthly or yearly to someone. There’s a mail triggered when there is not much left to donate.

The currency supported are dollars and Euro as of now and you can always put up a badge on Github, your Twitter profile or website for a donation.

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2. Bountysource

Bountysource is a funding platform for open source software that has a unique way of paying a developer for his time and work int he name of Bounties.

There are basically two campaigns, bounties and salt campaign.

Under the Bounties, users declare bounties aka cash prizes on open issues that they believe should be fixed or any new features which they want to see in the software they are using. A developer can then go and fix it to receive the cash prize.

Salt Campaign is like any other funding, anyone can pay a recurring amount to a project or an individual working for an open source project for as long as they want.

Bountysource accepts any software that is approved by Free Software Foundation or Open Source Initiatives. The bounties can be placed using PayPal, Bitcoin or the bounty itself if owned previously.  Bountysource supports a no. of issue tracker currently like GitHub, Bugzilla, Google Code, Jira, Launchpad etc.

3. Open Collective

Open Collective is another popular funding initiative where a person who is willing to receive the donation for the work he is doing in Open Source world can create a page. He can submit the expense reports for the project he is working on. A contributor can add money to his account and pay him for his expenses.

The complete process is transparent and everyone can track whoever is associated with Open Collective. The contributions are visible along with the unpaid expenses. There is also the option to contribute on a recurring basis.

Open Collective currently has more than 500 collectives being backed up by more than 5000 users.

The fact that it is transparent and you know what you are contributing to, drives more accountability. Some common example of collective include hosting costs, community maintenance, travel expenses etc.

Though Open Collective keeps 10% of all the transactions, it is still a nice way to get your expenses covered in the process of contributing towards an open source project.

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4. Open Source Grants

Open Source Grants is still in its beta stage and has not matured yet. They are looking for projects that do not have any stable funding and adds value to open source community. Most open source projects are run by a small community in a free time and they are trying to fund them so that the developers can work full time on the projects.

They are equally searching for companies that want to help open source enthusiasts. The process of submitting a project is still being worked upon, and hopefully, in coming days we will see a working way of funding.

Final Words

In the end, I would also like to mention Patreon. This funding platform is not exclusive to open source but is focused on creators of all kinds. Some projects like elementary OS have created their accounts on Patreon so that you can support the project on a recurring basis.

Think Free Speech, not Free Beer. Your small contribution to a project can help it sustain in the long run. For the developers, the above platform can provide a good way to cover up their expenses.

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Fedora 28 Release Date and New Features

Brief: This is a continually updated article to inform you about Fedora 28 release date, features and everything important associated with it.

Development on Fedora 28 began right after the release of Fedora 27 release. The new release will bring battery improvement on laptops, slightly different initial setup and a possible secure Thunderbolt 3 support among other things.

Fedora 28 Release Date

Fedora has a six monthly release cycle. Which means there are two Fedora releases each year. These releases are usually timed around May Day (1st of May) and Halloween (31st October). However, Fedora has a history of not keeping up the release dates. So the release schedule is only tentative and the dates may change for all the phases.

Below is the proposed release schedule for Fedora 28:

• 6th Feb 2018 – Software String Freeze
• 6th March 2018 – Beta freeze
• 27th March 2018 – Beta release
• 17th April 2018 – Final freeze
• 1st May 2018 – Fedora 28 final release

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New Features in Fedora 28

Here are some of the noticeable new features in Fedora 28 release:

1. Improved battery life on laptops

No more manual tweaks! Fedora 28 will deploy several tweaks on its own to provide improved battery life. As explained in a talk at FOSDEM 2018, Fedora 28 will have the following power management tweaks:

• Enabling auto-suspend for Intel HDA codecs saves around 0.4 W
• Enabling SATA ALPM by default saves up to 1.5 W
• Enabling i915 Panel Self Refresh by default saves around 0.5 W

With these tweaks in place, some laptop models will see up to 30% of battery life improvements.

While ‘power users’ can do these tweaks manually and achieve the same result, the idea is to provide an out of the box experience to every Fedora user. Indeed a good thinking there.

2. Reduced Initial Setup Redundancy

To make Fedora more beginner friendly, Fedora 28 Workstation will have fewer ‘questions’ to answer at the install time. There will be no root password anymore and the user password itself will be sufficient for the root actions, same as Ubuntu.

There will be some more code changes to reduce the redundancy between Anaconda installer and gnome-initial-setup.

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3. Improved VirtualBox support

Fedora 28 will see the addition of guest-drivers to the Fedora kernel package, packaging the userspace-tools (VirtualBox Guest Additions) and adding the VirtualBox Guest Additions package to the default package list for the Workstation product.

This means using Fedora in VirtualBox will have a better experience.

4. New supplemental wallpapers

This is only for hardcore Fedora fans. As usual Fedora 28 will also have a new set of wallpapers.

You can download these wallpapers from the link below:

Download Fedora 28 Wallpapers

5. Other notable changes in Fedora 28

• Secure Thunderbolt 3 support
• Users can type either emoji annotation or Unicode names on the same dialog
• Ruby 2.5
• GCC 8
• Django 2.0
• Erlang 20
• GHC 8.2
• Golang 1.10

You can have a look at other proposed features in Fedora 28 here.

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Download Fedora 28 Beta

If you want to test Fedora 28 before its release, you can download Fedora 28 beta version from the link below. But before you do that, let me warn you that beta means bugs. You’ll have an unstable operating system with possible issues. I advise not using it as your main OS yet.

Download Fedora 28 Beta

What else?

I’ll keep on updating on all the major happenings around Fedora 28. If you have something to add to this list, feel free to inform me in the comment section.

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Kali Linux and Debian Are Now Available on Microsoft Store

Brief: Kali Linux and Debian join Ubuntu and SUSE Linux on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). This means that now you can install these Linux distributions in command line mode inside Windows 10 like any other Windows application.

Last week Microsoft announced the availability of Debian and Debian based hacking distribution Kali Linux on Windows Subsystem for Linux. You can download these two distributions from Microsoft Store and install them like any other Windows 10 application. This way, you get the command line version of these Linux distributions.

These announcements should not come as surprise because Kali had already announced on their site in January that they are “always on the prowl for novel environments to run Kali on, and with the introduction of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in Windows 10, new and exciting possibilities have surfaced.”

They also hinted at the inclusion of other Debian based distributions on WSL in the same announcement, “it shouldn’t be too hard to incorporate another Debian-like distribution, right?”

This indicates that Microsoft has kept its promise at its Build 2017 conference to make available more Linux distributions in the Microsoft Store to be used on Windows 10 subsystem for Linux.

To download and install Linux app on Windows 10 subsystem using WSL, you need to, first of all, enable the Optional Windows feature. You should also check out our screenshot guide of installing Linux over WSL. The installation procedure is same for all Linux distributions available on Windows Store.

Kali Linux also has an official video showing quick installation process.

According to Kali Linux, they have also done a successful test run of XFCE on WSL even though it is not yet officially supported. You can check out this video on how to install xfce4 on Kali Linux over WSL, Windows 10.

Considering that so many wannabe hackers try to use Kali Linux, perhaps now they will have an easier way to install it. Though I am not sure whether using Kali Linux is a good idea altogether. Debian is a much better choice for all-purpose computing. What do you think?

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Open Source Disk Cleaner App BleachBit Gets First Update After 19 Months

Brief: Open Source system cleaner application BleachBit version 2.0 has been released. The new version brings some improvements and new features to the most used system cleaning application on Linux.

The open source system cleaning software, BleachBit has announced its first major release, BleachBit 2.0, after one and a half year. According to the release statement, this latest update “brings major improvements to infrastructure, security, stability, and the framework.”

The open source software that has been designed for both Linux and Windows operating system helps to free disk space by cleaning many applications and various web browsers as well as putting guard on users privacy. You can call it Ccleaner alternative for Linux.

BleachBit can completely delete files leaving no traces and prevent them from being recovered. It can also hide traces of files deleted using other applications. This was one of the main reasons why it shot to fame when US politician Hillary Clinton used it to delete some controversial emails from her servers.

BleachBit 2.0 deletes cookies, clears cache and Internet history, deletes logs, shreds temporary files and discard junk files that users may not be aware of.

New features in BleachBit 2.0

BleachBit 2.0 comes along with some major changes since version 1.2 was released in 2016. Below are some of the improvements:

• Drag-and-drop Support: It is now possible to drag and drop files into the program window for shredding using its disk-cleaning tools

• Web Browsers: Preservation of thumbnails, error Favicons have seen improvements in Chrome and Chromium browsers. You can now also clean site engagement history on these two browsers. DatabaseError on Firefox Firefox profiles has been fixed

• Packages for Fedora 25 & 26, OpenSUSE Leap 42.x and Debian 16.10 have been added

• For Windows OS, to improve on accuracy, some APIs have been improved to help users wipe specific files

• Mac OS X (Darwin) has seen some improvements in its basic functions though an installer or GUI is still not available

• Fixes specific only to Linux: There are some fixes that are only specific to Linux. These include the journald cleaner, use of PolicyKit, apt clean fixes, XDG base directrix specification in cleaners and an improvement in Liferea cleaner

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Download BleachBit 2.0

BleachBit 2.0 has installation packages available for Linux-based distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Debian and OpenSUSE as well as for Microsoft Windows. You can download BleachBit 2.0 for Linux from the page below:

Download BleachBit 2.0 for Linux

Don’t hesitate to share your experience with the rest of us if you have used the latest version or old version of BleachBit.

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