Allan Day: GNOME Shell user research goings on

It’s been a while since we last blogged about the GNOME Shell design work that’s been happening. While we might not have blogged in a bit, there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes, particularly on the research side, and it’s about time that we told everyone about what we’ve been up to. As a side note: a great team has developed around this initiative. The existing design team of Jakub, Tobias and myself has been joined by Maria Komarova from System76. Maria has a particularly strong research background and was immensely helpful in running interviews. The development side has also been fully engaged with the process, particularly through Georges and Florian.

Android Leftovers

• Android 11 on Android TV Launches for the Big Screen

• Realme UI 2.0 Based on Android 11 Announced in India: Here’s When Your Realme Smartphone will Get the Update

• Android 11 for Android TV begins to roll out, but on a very limited basis

• Vivo Funtouch OS 11 beta based on Android 11 available for the Nex 3S 5G and iQOO 3 4G/5G

• Motorola Moto G8 Plus Starts Receiving Android 10 Update in Italy

• Verizon's Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 finally receives Android 10 update

• Android users beware: downloading these popular apps will leave you with a nasty shock

• Android Smartphone Manufacturers Are Putting Logos On Pictures That Users Capture, And That's Annoying

• Mozilla fixes flaw that let attackers hijack Firefox for Android via Wi‑Fi

• 5 Best Android Apps To Keep You Focused

• Zoom for Android now supports virtual backgrounds and a bunch of new features

Apostrophe – distraction free Markdown editor

Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It’s designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write. Readability is at the very heart of Markdown. It offers the advantages of plain text, provides a convenient format for writing for the web, but it’s not intended to be a replacement for HTML. Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters included, such as # or *. Apostrophe is a distraction free Markdown editor. It uses pandoc as backend for Markdown parsing and offers a very clean and sleek user interface.

Audiocasts/Shows: DevNation Tech Talks, LINUX Unplugged and mintCast

• Kubernetes: The evolution of distributed systems

  DevNation Tech Talks are hosted by the Red Hat technologists who create our products. These sessions include real solutions plus code and sample projects to help you get started. In this talk, you’ll learn about Kubernetes and distributed systems from Bilgin Ibryam and Burr Sutter. Cloud-native applications of the future will consist of hybrid workloads: stateful applications, batch jobs, stateless microservices, and functions (plus maybe something else) wrapped as Linux containers and deployed via Kubernetes on any cloud. Functions and the so-called serverless computing model are the latest evolution of what started as service-oriented architecture years ago. But is this the last step of the application architecture evolution and is it here to stay? During this talk, we will take you on a journey exploring distributed application needs, and how they evolved with Kubernetes, Istio, Knative, Dapr, and other projects. By the end of the session, you will know what is coming after microservices.

• Distro Triforce | LINUX Unplugged 372

  What would it really take to get you to switch Linux distributions? We debate the practical reasons more and more people are sticking with the big three. Plus Carl from System76 stops by to surprise us with some firmware news.

• mintCast 344 – Getting Jacked

  First up, in our Wanderings, I fiddle with the Focusrite, Tony Hughes paints it pink, Joe puts a ring on it, Bo gets jacked, Tony Watts reduces, reuses and recycles