GNOME: Theming, Mutter and Sprint 1

• App Devs Ask Linux Distros to “Stop Theming Our Apps”

  A group of independent Linux app developers have written an open letter to ask wider GNOME community to ask: “stop theming our apps”. The letter is addressed to the maintainers of Linux distributions who elect to ship custom GTK and icons themes by default in lieu of upstream defaults. By publicising the issues they feel stem from the practice of “theming” it’s hoped that distros and developers might work together to create a “healthier GNOME third party app ecosystem”.

• A Group of Independent Linux App Developers Has Asked Wider GNOME Community To 'Stop Theming' Its Apps

• GNOME's Mutter Makes Another Step Towards X11-Less, Starting XWayland On-Demand

  GNOME 3.34 feature development continues at full-speed with a lot of interesting activity this cycle particularly on the Mutter front. On top of the performance/lag/stuttering improvements, today Mutter saw the merging of the "X11 excision" preparation patches. The Mutter patches by longtime GNOME developer Carlos Garnacho around preparing for X11 excision were merged minutes ago.

• Georges Basile Stavracas Neto: New Background panel, Calendar search engine, GTK4 shortcut engine (Sprint 1)

  GNOME To Do is full GTK4 these days. Which means it’s both a testbed for new GTK4 features, and also a way to give feedback as an app developer for the GTK team. Unfortunately, it also means To Do is blocked on various areas where GTK4 is lacking. One of these areas is keyboard shortcut. Last year, Benjamin wrote a major revamp for keyboard shortcuts. As part of this cycle, I decided to rebase and finish it; and also make To Do use the new API. Unfortunately, I failed to achieve what I set myself to. Turns out, adding a shortcuts engine to GTK4 is more involving and requires way more context than I had when trying to get it up to speed. I failed to predict that one week would have not been enough to finish it all. However, that does not mean all the efforts were wasted! The rebasing of the shortcuts engine was a non-trivial task successfully completed (see gtk!842), and I also fixed a few bugs while working on it. I also got a working prototype of GNOME To Do with the new APIs, and confirmed that it’s well suited — at least for a simpler application such as To Do. In retrospect, I believe I should have been more realistic (and perhaps slightly pessimistic) about the length and requirements of this task.

Programming: SVE2, Graphical Interface, Guile, Python and More

• Arm SVE2 Support Aligning For GCC 10, LLVM Clang 9.0

  Given the significant performance benefits to Arm's Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2), they are working on ensuring the open-source Linux compiler toolchains support these new CPU instructions ahead of SoCs shipping that support this big addition. Arm announced Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) recently as their latest advancement around SIMD programming and increasing data-level parallelism in programs. SVE2 is designed to ultimately deliver better SIMD performance than their long-available Neon extensions and to scale the performance with vector length increases as well as enabling auto-vectorization techniques. More details in this post on SVE2.

• Intake: Discovering and Exploring Data in a Graphical Interface

  Do you have data that you’d like people to be able to explore on their own? Are you always passing around snippets of code to load specific data files? These are problems that people encounter all the time when working in groups and using the same datasources or when trying to distribute data to the public. Some users are comfortable interacting with data entirely programatically, but often it is helpful to use a GUI (Graphical User Interface) instead. With that in mind we have reimplemented the Intake GUI so that in addition to working in a jupyter notebook, it can be served as a web application next to your data, or at any endpoint.

• lightening run-time code generation

  The upcoming Guile 3 release will have just-in-time native code generation. Finally, amirite? There's lots that I'd like to share about that and I need to start somewhere, so this article is about one piece of it: Lightening, a library to generate machine code.

• Python Language Creator: “Male Attitude” Is Hurting The Programming Space

  Guido van Rossum is a famous name in the programming world. He is the creator of the Python programming language which was developed back in 1989. It is only since the last few years when this general-purpose programming language started gaining popularity. The number of Python users has increased significantly and it was not only named as the best programming language by IEEE but also the most asked-about language on Stack Overflow, overthrowing JavaScript — the all-time winner for decades.

• Avant-IDLE: an experiment

Dear Ubuntu: Please Stop Packaging Epiphany If You Won’t Do It Properly

When users try Epiphany on Ubuntu, they receive a sub-par, broken browser. If you’re not willing to do this right, please just remove Epiphany from your repositories. We’d all be happier this way. You are the most popular distributor of Epiphany by far, and your poor packaging is making the browser look bad.

Security Leftovers

• Security updates for Friday

• Episode 19: Democratizing Cybersecurity

  Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Alex Gounares of Polyverse Linux about Cybersecurity for everyone.

• Introducing the Librem Tunnel

  You probably know by now that the Librem Tunnel is part of Librem One, a suite of privacy-protecting, no-tracking apps and services created by our team at Purism, which also includes Librem Mail, Librem Chat and Librem Social. Librem Tunnel offers an encrypted, no-logging, virtual private network tunnel, making sure all your network traffic is secure and your privacy fully protected. This means you can safely and conveniently use any public hotspot and not have to worry about how private your connection really is, using standards-based OpenVPN with any compatible client. You are not the product in Librem Tunnel: you will not be tracked, we do not sell your data, and we don’t advertise.

• Trump Explains Why He Banned Huawei, And It’s Not Convincing

  The world’s two biggest economies are indulged in a trade war and the toll is being paid by the Chinese company Huawei, which is being erased from existence in the US. The US government has already blacklisted Huawei, causing a big blow to its growing smartphone business across the globe. After the temporary license ends in August, it won’t be able to do any business with US-based companies unless the ban is lifted.

• Snort Alerts

  It was previously explained on LinuxHint how to install Snort Intrusion Detection System and how to create Snort rules. Snort is an Intrusion Detection System designed to detect and alert on irregular activities within a network. Snort is integrated by sensors delivering information to the server according to rules instructions. In this tutorial Snort alert modes will be explained to instruct Snort to report over incidents in 5 different ways (ignoring the “no alert” mode), fast, full, console, cmg and unsock. If you didn’t read the articles mentioned above and you don’t have previous experience with snort please get started with the tutorial on Snort installation and usage and continue with the article on rules before continuing this lecture. This tutorial assumes you have Snort already running.