Operating Systems: Debian, Clear Linux, OpenSUSE and Vista 10

• John Goerzen: Tips for Upgrading to, And Securing, Debian Buster

  Wow.  Once again, a Debian release impresses me — a guy that’s been using Debian for more than 20 years.  For the first time I can ever recall, buster not only supported suspend-to-disk out of the box on my laptop, but it did so on an encrypted volume atop LVM.  Very impressive! For those upgrading from previous releases, I have a few tips to enhance the experience with buster.

• Clear Linux Could Soon Be Faster Within Containers On AVX2 Systems

  While Clear Linux as part of its standard bare metal installations has long defaulted to having an AVX2-optimized GNU C Library installed by default, it turns out that it wasn't part of the default os-core bundle as used by containers. That though is changing and should yield even better out-of-the-box performance when running Clear Linux within containers. Intel's William Douglas sent out the proposal for adding the AVX2 version of the Glibc libraries into the os-core bundle in order to get picked up by containers and other bare/lightweight Clear configurations.

• OpenSUSE Enables LTO By Default For Tumbleweed - Smaller & Faster Binaries

  The past few months openSUSE developers have been working on enabling LTO by default for its packages while now finally with the newest release of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed this goal has been accomplished.  As of today, the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed release is using Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) by default. For end-users this should mean faster -- and smaller -- binaries thanks to the additional optimizations performed at link-time. Link-time optimizations allow for different optimizations to be performed at link-time for the different bits comprising a single module/binary for the entire program. Sadly not many Linux distributions are yet LTO'ing their entire package set besides the aggressive ones like Clear Linux. 

• Investigating why my 7-year old Windows 10 laptop became unbearably slow

  The laptop had also begun to run into blue screens of death (BSoD) whenever I used the built-in camera and when I opened Spotify or Netflix in a web browser. The slowdown and crashes were actually related, but I didn’t realize this at first. The camera-induced BSoD error message blamed the camera vendor’s driver without any further details. This sounds believable enough for a 7-year old laptop so I didn’t think any more of it.

Audiocasts/Shows: Linux in the Ham Shack, FLOSS Weekly, Test and Code

• LHS Episode #292: Digital Operation Deep Dive

  Welcome to Episode 292 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts are joined by Rob, KA2PBT, in a deep disucussion of digital mode operation on the amateur radio bands including what modes are available, the technology behind the creation and operation of those modes and even dive into current controversy behind FCC rules regarding encryption, PACTOR-4 and much more. Thank you for tuning in and we hope you have a wonderful week.

• FLOSS Weekly 538: Leo Laporte

  Randal Schwartz and Jonathan Bennett talk to Leo Laporte about FLOSS's history and the TWiT Network.

• Test and Code: 81: TDD with flit

  In the last episode, we talked about going from script to supported package. I worked on a project called subark and did the packaging with flit. Today's episode is a continuation where we add new features to a supported package and how to develop and test a flit based package.

Windows vs Ubuntu

Kubuntu is my favorite derivative of all the Ubuntu-based operating systems. I can not point out any features as favorite because I like all of them. Everything mentioned above is part of my daily workflow. Now when you know all of this it is worth trying them out. I was skeptical at first but later when I built my flow and learned how to utilize these features I can do everything faster, with fewer keystrokes and the most important thing is that I have a nicely organized desktop that helps me to minimize brain fatigue while doing my job. Kubuntu is a great distro to switch to if you’re coming from Windows. They have a quite similar UI, and Kubuntu has all the features Windows has, plus more.