Ever since Ubuntu abandoned the Unity project, UBports continued the maintenance and development of Unity. On February 27th 2020, UBports announced that they are giving Unity8 a new branding in the form of Lomiri.
Unity8 is now Lomiri
Unity8 in action | Image Credit: UBports
UBports announced that the Unity8 desktop environment would be renamed as Lomiri. They gave three reasons for this fairly drastic announcement.
First, they want to avoid confusion with the Unity game engine. Quite a few people confused the two. UBports noted that they are frequently receiving questions regarding “how to import 3D models and meshes into our shell”. When you search “Unity” in your favorite search engine, most of the top links are for the game engine.
The second reason for the name change has to do with the new effort to package Unity8 for Debian. Unfortunately, many of the Unity8’s dependencies have Ubuntu in the name, for example, ubuntu-ui-toolkit. Debian packagers warned that packages that have Ubuntu in the name may not be accepted into Debian.
Finally, UBports said the name change would improve verbal communications. Saying Unity8 repeatedly can be a mouthful. People would not have to worry about confusing “users of Ubuntu Unity and Unity (the game engine)”.
UBports went on to stress that the name change was not “triggered by any action from Canonical or the Ubuntu community, legal or otherwise”.
They noted that this name change was the perfect time for them to switch to GitHub alternative GitLab for their development.
Interestingly, the announcement did not explain how they picked Lomiri as the new name. All they said is that “We went through many different names before settling on Lomiri. All of them had problems with pronunciation, availability, or other related issues.”
UBports noted that most Ubuntu Touch users would be unaffected by the name change. Developers and power users might notice some changes, but UBports “will strive to maintain backwards compatibility within Ubuntu Touch for the foreseeable future”.
What Exactly is Being Renamed?
According to the announcement, packages that have either Ubuntu or Unity in the title will be affected. For example,
unity8, containing the shell, will become lomiri
ubuntu-ui-toolkit will become lomiri-ui-toolkit
ubuntu-download-manager will become lomiri-download-manager
On top of this, interfaces call will change, as well. “For example, the Ubuntu.Components QML import will change to Lomiri.Components.” For the sake of backwards compatibility, Ubuntu Touch images will not change too much. “Developers will only need to update to the new API when they’d like to package their apps for other distributions.”
What Will Stay the Same?
Since renaming packages can cause quite a few cascading problems, UBports wants to limit the number of packages they change. They don’t expect the following things to change.
Packages that don’t use the “Ubuntu” or “Unity” names
Ubuntu Touch will remain the same
Any components which are already used by other projects and accepted into other distributions
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think this change will be good for Ubuntu Touch in the long run. I understand why Canonical picked the Unity name for their convergence desktop, but I think the desktop environment was overshadowed by the game engine from the beginning. This will give them room to breathe and also free up valuable coding time. The less time spent replying to questions about 3D models the more time that can be spent creating a convergent desktop.
If you have any further questions or concerns about the name change, you visit the UBports forms. They have set up a thread specifically for this topic.
Don’t hesitate to share our views on it in the comment section.
Ikey Doherty, the creator and former lead dev of Solus, is back with a new project. His new company, Lispy Snake, Ltd, uses open source technology to create games, with a focus on Linux support.
I asked Ikey some questions about his new project. Here are his answers.
It’s FOSS: What made you decide to get into game development?
Ikey: Honestly I would have to say a respect for older games. The creativity that came from so much limitation is frankly amazing. If you think of how limited the NES or C64 were, (or indeed my Amstrad CPC) – yet how much joy people experienced from those platforms. It’s a buzz I can’t avoid. Even though we’re a long way now from that world, I still look to model that technical excellence and creativity as best I can. I’m a sucker for good stories.
It’s FOSS: There are already several open-source game engines. Why did you decide to make your own? What is Serpent’s killer feature?
Ikey: There are a good number of open and closed source ones, each with a great set of features. However, I’m a pretty old school developer and there is nothing I hate more than an IDE or ‘drag n drop’ codeless environment. I simply wanted to create indie games with the least fuss possible and using a framework where I didn’t have to compromise. Once you get to ‘must work nicely on Linux and be open source’ you’re kinda short on choice.
I collected a set of projects that I’d use as the foundation for Lispy Snake’s first games, but needed something of a framework to tie them all together, as a reusable codebase across all games and updates.
I wouldn’t say killer features are present yet – just a set of sensible decisions. Serpent is written in D so it’s highly performant with a lower barrier of entry than say C or C++. It’s allowing me to flesh out a framework that suits my development ideals and pays attention to industry requirements, such as a performant multithreading Entity Component System or the sprite batching system.
When you rope together all the features and decisions, you get a portable codebase, that thanks to its choice of libraries like SDL and bgfx, will eventually run on all major platforms with minimal effort on our part. That basically means we’re getting OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan and Metal “for free”.
Being able to target the latest APIs and create indie games easily, with industry standard features emerging constantly, from a framework that doesn’t impose itself on your workflow…that’s a pretty good combination.
It’s FOSS: Why did you name your company LispySnake? Did you have a pet snake with a speech impediment when you were a kid?
Ikey: Honestly? Naughty Dog was taken. Gotta love some Bandicoot. Plus, originally we were taking on some Python contracting work and I found the name amusing. It’s pretty much a nonsensical name like many of my previous projects (Like Dave. Or Dave2.)
It’s FOSS: After being an operating system developer for many years, how does it feel to be working on something smaller? Would you say that your time as an OS developer gives you an edge as a game dev?
Ikey: OS dev needs a very high level view constantly, with the ability to context switch from macro to micro and back again. Many, many moving parts in a large ecosystem.
Serpent is much more task orientated – though similarities in the workflow exist in terms of defining macro systems and interleaving micro features to build a cohesive whole. My background in OS dev is obviously a huge help here.
Where it especially shines is dealing with the ‘guts’. I think a lot of indie devs (forgive me for being sweeping) are generally happy to just build from an existing kit and either embrace it or workaround the issues. There are some true gems out there like Factorio that go above and beyond and I have to hold my hat to them.
In terms of building a new kit we get to think, properly, about cache coherency, parallel performance, memory fragmentation, context switching and such.
Consumers of Serpent (when released in a more stable form) will know that the framework has been designed to leverage Linux features, not just spitting out builds for it.
It’s FOSS: Recently you ported your Serpent game engine from C to the D language. Why did you make this move? What features does D have over C?
Ikey: Yeah honestly that was an interesting move. We were originally working on a project called lispysnake2d which was to be a trivial wrapper around SDL to give us a micro-game library. This simply used SDL_Renderer APIs to blit 2D sprites and initially seemed sufficient. Unfortunately as development progressed it was clear we needed a 3D pipeline for 2D, so we could utilize shaders and special effects. At that point SDL_Renderer is no good to you anymore and you need to go with Vulkan or OpenGL. We began abstracting the pipelines and saw the madness ensue.
After taking a step back, I analyzed all the shortcomings in the approach, and tired of the portability issues that would definitely arise. I’m not talking in terms of libraries, I’m talking about dealing with various filepaths, encodings, Win32 APIs, DirectX vs OpenGL vs Vulkan…etc. Then whack in boilerplate time, C string shortcomings, and the amount of reinventing required to avoid linking to bloated “cross-platform” standard library style libraries. It was a bad picture.
Having done a lot of Go development, I started researching alternatives to C that were concurrency-aware, string-sane, and packed with a powerful cross-platform standard library. This is the part where everyone will automatically tell you to use Rust.
Unfortunately, I’m too stupid to use Rust because the syntax literally offends my eyes. I don’t get it, and I never will. Rust is a fantastic language and as academic endeavours go, highly successful. Unfortunately, I’m too practically minded and seek comfort in C-style languages, having lived in that world too long. So, D was the best candidate to tick all the boxes, whilst having C & C++ interoptability.
It took us a while to restore feature parity but now we have a concurrency-friendly framework which is tested with both OpenGL and Vulkan, supports sprite batching and has nice APIs. Plus, much of the reinvention is gone as we’re leveraging all the features of SDL, bgfx and the DLang standard library. Win win.
The first game from LispySnake
It’s FOSS: How are you planning to distribute your games?
Ikey: Demo wise we’ll initially only focus on Linux, and it’s looking like we’ll use Flatpak for that. As time goes on, when we’ve introduced support and testing for macOS + Windows, we’ll likely look to the Steam Store. Despite the closed source nature, Valve have been far more friendly and supportive of Linux over the years, whilst the likes of Epic Games have a long history of being highly anti-Linux. So that’s a no go.
It’s FOSS: How can people support and contribute to the development of the Serpent game engine?
Ikey: We have a few different methods, for what it’s worth. The easiest is to buy a Lifetime License – which is $20. This grants you lifetime access to all of our 2D games and helps fund development of our game titles and Serpent.
Alternatively, you can sponsor me directly on GitHub to work on Serpent and upstream where needed. Bit of FOSS love.
In a move to improve the cyber-security, EU has recommended its staff to use open source secure messaging app Signal instead of the popular apps like WhatsApp.
Signal is in news for good reasons. The European Union Commissions have instructed its staff to use Signal for public instant messaging.
This is part of EU”s new cybersecurity strategy. There has been cases of data leaks and hacking against EU diplomats and thus policy is being put in place to encourage better security practices.
Governments recommending open source technology is a good sign
No matter what the reason is, Government bodies recommending open-source services for better security is definitely a good thing for the open-source community in general.
Politico originally reported this by mentioning that the EU instructed its staff to use Signal as the recommended public instant messaging app:
The instruction appeared on internal messaging boards in early February, notifying employees that “Signal has been selected as the recommended application for public instant messaging.”
The report also mentioned the potential advantage of Signal (which is why the EU is considering using it):
“It’s like Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage but it’s based on an encryption protocol that’s very innovative,” said Bart Preneel, cryptography expert at the University of Leuven. “Because it’s open-source, you can check what’s happening under the hood,” he added.
Even though they just want to secure their communication or want to prevent high-profile leaks, switching to an open-source solution instead of WhatsApp sounds good to me.
Signal gets a deserving promotion
Even though Signal is a centralized solution that requires a phone number as of now, it is still a no-nonsense open-source messaging app that you may trust.
Privacy enthusiasts already know a lot of services (or alternatives) to keep up with the latest security and privacy threats. However, with the EU Commission recommending it to its staff, Signal will get an indirect promotion for common mobile and desktop users.
Wrapping Up
It is still an irony that some Government bodies hate encrypted solutions while opting to use them for their own requirement.
Nevertheless, it is good progress for open-source services and tech, in general, is recommended as a secure alternative.
What do you think about the EU’s decision on switching to the Signal app for its internal communication? Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Brief: Here, we shall take a look at the best open source slack alternatives that you can choose to communicate with your team at work.
Slack is one of the most popular team communication services for work. Some may call it a glorified IRC but that doesn’t impact its popularity.
It is available for free with additional features offered in its paid plans. Though Slack can be installed on Linux thanks to an Electron app but it is not open source, neither the client nor the server.
In this article, I’ll list a few open source Slack alternatives that you can try.
Slack Alternatives Software That Are Open Source
The software mentioned here are open source which means you could install them on your own server (self-hosting) and thus control the data.
You may also opt to pay for the managed hosting for some of these Slack alternatives. A few of them provide both free and paid options.
That’s how some open source projects make money. You can take the trouble of hosting it on your own or pay for a hosted service offered by the project itself.
Let’s take a look at what options do you have to replace Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Note:The list is in no particular order of ranking.
Free and paid options available for managed hosting
While Riot has been a decent Slack alternative since its first stable release, it offers a lot of essential features that most of the Slack users can utilize. You can choose to use the public Matrix servers for free or the premium hosted servers.
To start with, you get cross-platform support, so once you’ve set up your own server (or by using the free public server), all you have to do is create rooms/communities. Rooms are like the channels and the communities act as a new group/server.
Everything should work flawlessly ranging from sending messages to attaching files. However, you might find it tricky to enable the end-to-end encryption for the room you’re joined in. You may refer to the official FAQ docs available.
Third-party integrations that include GitHub as well
Cross-platform
Free and paid options available
Zulip Chat is a good open-source team chat software.
Not just limited to the open-source enthusiasts, but Zulip Chat offers some really useful features when compared to Slack in general. The threaded conversations with the ability to filter by topics is a plus. So, you can just join back to a conversation that was hours ago before scrolling down hours of gibberish messages that weren’t probably meant for you in a channel.
The UI may not be as good as Slack but it is good enough for most of the users. You can either choose to install Zulip on your server or use Zulip’s hosted solution for free with limitations (or upgrade it to unlock features). You can also take a look at their GitHub page to learn more.
Rocket.Chat is also an impressive Slack alternative that you can choose for your work or organization. In fact, we are considering to use it for our internal team communication at It’s FOSS.
The user interface is quite good and you can choose to customize the look of it by creating your own theme packages. In addition to all the essential features that Slack offers, it also supports video/audio conferencing, which is very important to some. You can host it yourself with limited features for free or opt for premium cloud hosting options.
Using end-to-end encryption with Rocket.Chat is a one-click task as well. Personally, I like the user experience better when compared to the others in the list – but that’s just me. You can also follow their active GitHub page to know more about it.
Unlike others, Mattermost is an enterprise-focused Slack alternative. You wouldn’t be too surprised that you may not like to use it for personal use.
You can opt to deploy the open-source edition for free but you will be limited to the free features. So, it is highly likely that you have to request a trial key before purchasing the license for Mattermost.
For obvious reasons, you won’t be able to try anything on your desktop unless you have a trial key because the demo is limited to their online website as a temporary session. Unless you’re an enterprise who needs something very similar to Slack but open-source, I don’t think you’d need this. If you’d like, you can also take a look at their GitHub page.
We’ve already covered Wire as an alternative to Slack in one of our previous articles. It is indeed a useful open-source solution that focuses on privacy while giving a premium UX for users looking to switch from Slack.
You would need to opt for the Enterprise-focused premium plan if you want a custom deployment for Wire. You can try the hosted pro version (Desktop/Mobile) for free up to 30 days but for a private hosting deployment, you need to contact them.
You can learn more about it on their GitHub page or simply visit the official website through the button below.
Slack is unquestionably a good team chat app, but if you want to stick with open source solution, you can try one of these recommendation.
I’d recommend you to re-read the key highlights mentioned for each of the apps mentioned to help decide for yourself.
Feel free to try them and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Also, if I missed something that’s potentially an open source Slack alternative, let me know!
Brief: Vokoscreen, open source screencasting tool, has been reborn as vokoscreenNG. It is created from scratch using Qt and GStreamer. In this week’s open source software highlight, let’s take a look at vokoscreenNG.
For some time, vokoscreen didn’t see updates and eventually it was discontinued.
The good news is that vokoscreen is not entirely dead. It’s reborn as vokoscreenNG.
The NG in vokoscreenNG stands for New Generation and rightly so because it’s been created from scratch using Qt and Gstreamer.
Features of VokoscreenNG
VokoscreenNG has all the standard features you would expect in an standard screen recording tool.
You can record the entire desktop, a specific area or a specific application window. You can zoom in, add a delay before starting the recording.
You can choose the output video format, codec (like x264), frame rates and other such parameters.
Set time duration for the recording
You can also limit the disk space usage or set a fixed time duration for the recordings.
Record the webcam
You can also record the webcam (if you were having a video-conference).
There are more features that you can explore while using VokoscreenNG.
Installing VokoscreenNG on Linux
VokoscreenNG is under active development and doesn’t have DEB packages at the time of writing this article. AppImage and other packages are in pipeline.
At present, you can install it on Fedora using the following command:
For other distributions, you’ll have to install it from source code which I don’t recommend specially when you are a regular user. Wait for some time and you should have ‘easy to install’ packages available. Till then use Kazam or SimpleScreenRecorder for this purpose.
Vokoscreen was a popular tool 6-7 years back. I am glad to see that it is reincarnated into vokoscreenNG and is being actively developed now.
Have you used vokoscreenNG already? If yes, how’s your experience with it? If not, will you be giving it a try? Do share your views in the comment section.
Arduino is an open-source electronics platform that combines both open source software and hardware to let people make interactive projects with ease. You can get Arduino-compatible single board computers and use them to make something useful.
In addition to the hardware, you will also need to know the Arduino language to use the Arduino IDE to successfully create something.
You can code using the web editor or use the Arduino IDE offline. Nevertheless, you can always refer to the official resources available to learn about Arduino.
Considering that you know the essentials, I will be mentioning some of the best (or interesting) Arduino projects. You can try to make them for yourself or modify them to come up with something of your own.
Interesting Arduino project ideas for beginners, experts, everyone
The following projects need a variety of additional hardware – so make sure to check out the official link to the projects (originally featured on the official Arduino Project Hub) to learn more about them.
Also, it is worth noting that they aren’t particularly in any ranking order – so feel free to try what sounds best to you.
1. LED Controller
Looking for simple Arduino projects? Here’s one for you.
One of the easiest projects that let you control LED lights. Yes, you do not have to opt for expensive LED products just to decorate your room (or for any other use-case), you can simply make an LED controller and customize it to use it however you want.
It requires using the Arduino UNO board and a couple more things (which also includes an Android phone). You can learn more about it in the link to the project below.
Another Arduino LED project for you. Since we are talking about using LEDs to decorate, you can also make an LED lamp that looks beautiful.
For this, you might want to make sure that you have a 3D printer. Next, you need an LED strip and Arduino Nano R3 as the primary materials.
Once you’ve printed the case and assembled the lamp section, all you need to do is to add the glue sticks and figure out the wiring. It does sound very simple to mention – you can learn more about it on the official Arduino project feature site.
Want to have a personal digital chessboard? Why not?
You’ll need a TFT LCD touch screen display and an Arduino Mega 2560 board as the primary materials. If you have a 3D printer, you can create a pretty case for it and make changes accordingly.
Take a look at the original project for inspiration.
A very interesting project. I wouldn’t argue the usefulness of it – but if you’re annoyed by certain celebrities (or personalities) on TV, you can simply mute their voice whenever they’re about to speak something on TV.
Technically, it was tested with the old tech back then (when you didn’t really stream anything). You can watch the video above to get an idea and try to recreate it or simply head to the link to read more about it.
If you want to do something with the help of your robot and still have manual control over it, the robot arm with a controller is one of the most useful Arduino projects. It uses the Arduino UNO board if you’re wondering.
You will have a robot arm -for which you can make a case using the 3D printer to enhance its usage and you can use it for a variety of use-cases. For instance, to clean the carbage using the robot arm or anything similar where you don’t want to directly intervene.
I’ve seen a variety of musical instruments made using Arduino. You can explore the Internet if you want something different than this.
You would need a Pi supply flick charge and an Arduino UNO to make it happen. It is indeed a cool Arduino project where you get to simply tap and your hand waves will be converted to music. Also, it isn’t tough to make this – so you should have a lot of fun making this.
An Arduino-based device that assists you to help train your pet – sounds exciting!
For this, they’re using the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense while utilizing TensorFlow to train a small neural network for all the common actions that your pet does. Accordingly, the buzzer will offer a reinforcing notification when your pet obeys your command.
This can have wide applications when tweaked as per your requirements. Check out the details below.
Normally, you depend on the government officials to announce/inform about the earthquake stats (or the warning for it).
But with Arduino boards, you can simply build a basic earthquake detector and have transparent results for yourself without depending on the authorities. Click on the button below to know about the relevant details to help make it.
As the project describes – “RFID tagging is an ID system that uses small radio frequency identification “.
So, in this project, you will be making an RFID reader using Arduino while pairing it with an Adafruit NFC card for security access. Check out the full details using the button below and let me know how it works for you.
This could be potentially one of the best Arduino projects out there. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to equip smoke detectors for your home, you can manage with a DIY solution to some extent.
Of course, unless you want a complex failsafe set up along with your smoke detector, a basic inexpensive solution should do the trick. In either case, you can also find other applications for the smoke detector.
In case you didn’t know 1Sheeld basically replaces the need for an add-on Arduino board. You just need a smartphone and add Arduino shields to it so that you can do a lot of things with it.
Using 5 such shields, the original creator of this project made himself a DIY Amazon Echo. You can find all the relevant details, schematics, and code to make it happen.
Just want to make something cool? Well, here’s an idea for an audio spectrum visualizer.
For this, you will need an Arduino Nano R3 and an LED display as primary materials to get started with. You can tweak the display as required. You can connect it with your headphone output or simply a line-out amplifier.
Easily one of the cheapest Arduino projects that you can try for fun.
Up for a challenge? If you are – this will be one of the coolest Arduino Projects in our list.
Basically, this is meant to replace your home security camera which is limited to an angle of video recording. You can turn the same camera into a motorized camera that follows the motion.
So, whenever it detects a movement, it will change its angle to try to follow the object. You can read more about it to find out how to make it.
If you’re concerned about your health in connection to the water you drink, you can try making this.
It requires an Arduino UNO and the water quality sensors as the primary materials. To be honest, a useful Arduino project to go for. You can find everything you need to make this in the link below.
I would be very cautious about this – but seriously, one of the best (and coolest) Arduino projects I’ve ever come across.
Of course, this counts as a fun project to try out to see what bigger projects you can pull off using Arduino and here it is. In the project, he originally used the SparkFun Arduino Pro Mini 328 along with an accelerometer as the primary materials.
This isn’t any ordinary plotter machine that you might’ve seen people creating using Arduino boards.
With this, you can draw some cool vector graphics images or bitmap. It might sound like bit of overkill but then it could also be fun to do something like this.
This could be a tricky project, so you can refer to the details on the link to go through it thoroughly.
Technically, this is just a broad project idea because you can utilize the Arduino board to automate almost anything you want at your home.
Just like I mentioned, you can go for a security access device, maybe create something that automatically waters the plants or simply make an alarm system.
Countless possibilities of what you can do to automate things at your home. For reference, I’ve linked to an interesting home automation project below.
A programmable robotic cat for AI-enhanced services and STEM education. In this project, both Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards have been utilized.
You can also look at the Raspberry Pi alternatives if you want. This project needs a lot of work, so you would want to invest a good amount of time to make it work.
With the help of Arduino boards (coupled with other sensors and materials), you can do a lot of projects with ease. Some of the projects that I’ve listed above are suitable for beginners and some are not. Feel free to take your time to analyze what you need and the cost of the project before proceeding.
Did I miss listing an interesting Arduino project that deserves the mention here? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
FreeBSD is one of the most popular BSD distributions. It is used on desktop, servers and embedded devices for more than two decades.
We talked to Deb Goodkin, executive director, FreeBSD Foundation and discussed the past, present and future of FreeBSD project.
It’s FOSS: FreeBSD has been in the scene for more than 25 years. How do you see the journey of FreeBSD?
Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of innovation happening on and with FreeBSD. When the Foundation came into play 20 years ago, we were able to step in and help accelerate changes in the operating system. Over the years, we’ve increased our marketing support, to provide more advocacy and educational material, and to increase the awareness and use of FreeBSD.
In addition, we’ve increased our staff of software developers to allow us to quickly step in to fix bugs, review patches, implement workarounds to hardware issues, and implement new features and functionality. We have also increased the number of development projects we are funding to improve various areas of FreeBSD.
The history of stability and reliability, along with all the improvements and growth with FreeBSD, is making it a compelling choice for companies, universities, and individuals.
It’s FOSS: We know that Netflix uses FreeBSD extensively. What other companies or groups rely on FreeBSD? How do they contribute to BSD/FreeBSD (if they do at all)?
Sony’s Playstation 4 uses a modified version of FreeBSD as their operating system, Apple with their MacOS and iOS, NetApp in their ONTAP product, Juniper Networks in JunOS, Trivago in their backend infrastructure, University of Cambridge in security research including the Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instruction (CHERI) project, University of Notre Dame in their Engineering Department, Groupon in their datacenter, LA Times in their data center, as well as, other notable companies like Panasonic, and Nintendo.
I listed a variety of organizations to highlight the different FreeBSD use cases. Companies like Netflix support FreeBSD by supporting the Project financially, as well as, by upstreaming their code. Some of the companies, like Sony, take advantage of the BSD license and don’t give back at all.
Deb Goodkin And Friend Promoting FreeBSD At Oscon
It’s FOSS: Linux is ruling the servers and cloud computing. It seems that BSD is lagging in that field?
I wouldn’t characterize it as lagging, per se. Linux distributions do have a much higher market share than FreeBSD, but our strength falls in those two markets. FreeBSD does extremely well in these markets, because it provides a consistent and reliable foundation, and tends to just work. Known for having long term API stability, the user will integrate once and upgrade on their terms as both FreeBSD and their product evolves.
It’s FOSS: Do you see the emergence of Linux as a threat to BSD?
Sure, there are so many Linux distributions already, and most of them are supported by for profit companies. In fact, companies like Intel have many Linux developers on staff, so Linux is easily supported on their hardware.
However, thanks to the continuing education efforts and as our market share continues to grow, more developers will be available to support companies’ various FreeBSD use cases.
It’s FOSS: Let’s talk about desktop. Recently, the devs of Project Trident announced that they were moving away from FreeBSD as a base. They said that they made this decision because FreeBSD is slow to review updates and support for new hardware. For example, the most recent version of Telegram on FreeBSD is 9 releases behind the version available on Linux. How would you respond to their comments?
There are quite a few FreeBSD distros for the desktop, with various focuses. The latest, is FuryBSD, which coincidentally was started by iXsystems employees, but is independent of iXsystems, just like Project Trident is. In addition to FuryBSD, you may want to check out NomadBSD and MidnightBSD.
Regarding supporting new hardware, we’ve stepped up our efforts to get FreeBSD working on more popular newer laptops. For example, the Foundation recently purchased a couple of the latest generation Lenovo X1 Carbon laptops and sponsored work to make sure that peripherals are supported out-of-the-box.
It’s FOSS: Why should a desktop user consider choosing FreeBSD?
There are many reasons people should consider using FreeBSD on their desktop! Just to highlight a few, it has rock solid stability; high performance; supports ZFS to protect your data; a community that is friendly, helpful, and approachable; excellent documentation to easily find answers; over 30,000 open source software packages that are easy to install, allowing you to easily set up your environment without a lot of extras, and that includes many choices of popular GUIs, and it follows the POLA philosophy (Principle of Least Astonishment) which means, don’t break things that work and upgrades are generally painless (even across major releases).
It’s FOSS: Are there any plans to make it easier to install FreeBSD as a desktop system? The current focus seems to be on servers.
The Foundation is supporting efforts to make sure FreeBSD works on the latest hardware and peripherals that appear in desktop systems, and will continue to support making FreeBSD easy to deploy, monitor, and configure to provide a great toolbox for building a desktop on top of it. That allows others to take as much or as little of FreeBSD to build a desktop version to produce a specific user experience they desire.
Like I mentioned above, there are other FreeBSD distributions that have taken these FreeBSD components and created their own desktop versions.
It’s FOSS: What are your plans/roadmap for FreeBSD in the coming years?
The FreeBSD Foundation’s purpose is to support the FreeBSD Project. While we’re an entirely separate entity, we work closely with the Core Team and the community to help move the Project forward. The Foundation identifies key areas we should support in the coming years, based on input from users and what we are seeing in the industry.
In 2019, we embarked on an even broader spectrum advocacy project to recruit new members throughout the world, while raising awareness about the benefits of learning FreeBSD. We are funding development projects including WiFi improvements, supporting OpenJDK, ZFS RAID-Z expansion, security, toolchain, performance improvements, and other features to keep FreeBSD innovative.
The FreeBSD Foundation will continue to host workshops and expand the amount of training opportunities and materials we provide. Finally, the BSD Certification program recently launched through Linux Professional Institute with greater availability.
It’s FOSS: How can we bring more people to the BSD hold?
We need more PR for FreeBSD and get more tech journalists like yourself to write about FreeBSD. We also need more trainings and classes that include FreeBSD in universities, trainings/workshops at technical conferences, more FreeBSD contributors giving talks at those conferences, more technical journalists, as well as, users writing about FreeBSD, and finally we need case studies from companies and organizations successfully using FreeBSD. It all takes having more resources! We’re working on all of the above.
It’s FOSS: Any message you would like to convey to our readers?
Readers should consider getting involved with the largest and oldest democratically run open source project!
Whether you want to learn systems programming or how an operating system works, the small size of the operating system makes it a great platform to learn from. The size of the Project makes it easier for anyone to make a notable contribution, and there is a strong mentorship culture to support new contributors.
Being a democratically run project, allows your voice to be heard and work in the areas you are interested in. I hope your readers will go to freebsd.org and try it out themselves.
Brief: In this week’s open source software highlight, we take a look at a Firefox-based browser that supports legacy extensions that Firefox no longer supports while potentially providing fast user experience.
Firefox has improved a lot lately and one of the side-effects of the improvements is removal of add-ons. If your favorite add-on disappeared in last few months/years, you have a good new in the form of Witerfox.
Waterfox: A Firefox-based Browser
Waterfox Classic
Waterfox is a useful open-source browser built on top of Firefox that focuses on privacy and supports legacy extensions. It doesn’t pitch itself as a privacy-paranoid browser but it does respect the basics.
You get two separate Waterfox browser versions. The current edition aims to provide a modern experience and the classic version focuses to support NPAPI plugins and bootstrap extensions.
Waterfox Classic
If you do not need to utilize bootstrap extensions but rely on WebExtensions, Waterfox Current is the one you should go for.
And, if you need to set up a browser that needs NPAPI plugins or bootstrap extensions extensively, Waterfox Classic version will be suitable for you.
So, if you like Firefox, but want to try something different on the same line, this is a Firefox alternative for the job.
Features of Waterfox
Waterfox Current
Of course, technically, you should be able to do a lot of things that Mozilla Firefox supports.
So, I’ll just highlight all the important features of Waterfox in a list here.
Supports NPAPI Plugins
Supports Bootstrap Extensions
Offers separate editions for legacy extension support and modern WebExtension support.
Cross-platform support (Windows, Linux, and macOS)
Theme customization
Archived Add-ons supported
Installing Waterfox on Ubuntu/Linux
Unlike other popular browsers, you don’t get a package to install. So, you will have to download the archived package from its official download page.
Depending on what edition (Current/Classic) you want – just download the file, which will be .tar.bz2 extension file.
Once downloaded, simply extract the file.
Next, head on to the extracted folder and look for the “Waterfox” file. You can simply double-click on it to run start up the browser.
If that doesn’t work, you can utilize the terminal and navigate to the extracted Waterfox folder. Once there, you can simply run it with a single command. Here’s how it looks like:
cd waterfox-classic
./waterfox
In either case, you can also head to its GitHub page and explore more options to get it installed on your system.
I fired it up on my Pop!_OS 19.10 installation and it worked really well for me. Though I don’t think I could switch from Firefox to Waterfox because I am not using any legacy add-on. It could still be an impressive option for certain users.
You could give it a try and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Brief: Open source painting application MyPaint 2.0 has been released with new features and improvements. Check out what’s new and how to get the latest MyPaint on Linux.
Maximum input mapping curve points increased to 64
The new release also features plenty of bug fixes.
Installing MyPaint 2.0 on Linux
It will take some time before your distribution provides MyPaint 2.0 (if it provides at all). An easier and more convenient way of using MyPaint 2 right now on Linux is via AppImage.
MyPaint 2 is available in an AppImage format that you can download from its GitHub repository, give it execute permission and run it.
The source code and other installation options are available on the release page.
Conclude the article by a quick summary of the XYZ app and its usefulness. Ask readers if they have a better alternative to XYZ or if they prefer something else.
