9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: April 11th, 2021

This week has been slow on news due to the Easter holidays, so we only saw the release of a new maintenance update for the latest KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment series, a new major update for the Getting Things GNOME to-do app, a new KDE Frameworks release, as well as a new major FFmpeg release. On top of that, Arch Linux adds the ArchInstall guided installer in the April 2021 ISO snapshot, KDE promises to keep their Qt 5 apps up to date until they finish the transition to Qt 6, KDE neon devs announce offline updates, Star Labs teases another Linux ultrabook, and GNOME 41 gets a final release date.

today's leftovers

• Charles Plessy: Debian Bullseye: more open

  Debian Bullseye will provide the command /usr/bin/open for your greatest comfort at the command line. On a system with a graphical desktop environment, the command should have a similar result as when opening a document from a mouse-and-click file browser.

• Dependencies for LibreOffice compiled in OE

  In the current release of EasyOS, LibreOffice (LO) was compiled in a running EasyOS, not in OE. During the build, LO automatically downloads any extra source packages that it needs, that are not available in the system. What I have done is compile many of those dependencies in OE, so they will be available as shared libraries for LO to link against, but other applications will also be able to use them. For example, LO uses 'libcdr', a CorelDraw import filter. By having this as a shared system library, Inkscape can optionally link against it, and also have CorelDraw import capability. Hmmm, does anyone still use CorelDraw?

• Jussi Pakkanen: Converting a project to Meson: the olc Pixel Game Engine

  Meson's development has always been fairly practical focusing on solving real world problems people have. One simple way of doing that is taking existing projects, converting their build systems to Meson and seeing how long it takes, what pain points there are and whether there are missing features. Let's look at one such conversion. We'll use the One Lone Coder Pixel Game Engine. It is a simple but fairly well featured game engine that is especially suitable for beginners. It also has very informative YouTube channel teaching people how to write their own computer games. The engine is implemented as a single C++ header and the idea is that you can just copy it in your own project, #include it and start coding your game.

• Create a Hello World App Using Flask Framework

  This article will cover a guide on writing a simple hello world application using Python based “Flask” framework. Flask can be used to create minimal, extensible and advanced web applications using a set of libraries included in its module. All code samples in this tutorial are tested on Ubuntu 20.10 having Python version 3.8.6 and Flask version 1.1.2.

Android Leftovers

• Google app shutdown - Popular Android download gets Play Store axe | Express.co.uk

• Google Android team embraces Rust for Android OS development - ARN

• LG rolls out the Android 11 update for Velvet 5G UW users | HT Tech

• Asus is updating the ZenFone 7 and 7 Pro to Android 11 around the world

• [Opinion] Why OnePlus 9 Pro probably isn't the best Android in the U.S.

• 10 new Android games from the last week: The best, worst, and everything in between (4/5/21 - 4/11/21)

• How many years of Android updates should be good enough?