• Shiny new toys take backseat in Android Studio 3.5 for now as '600 bugs' squished

• Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus review: A powerhouse productivity machine

• Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus review: The most premium Android phone for your money

• How to Add Emergency Information to your Android smartphone

• It looks like Huawei is going to cling to Android for as long as possible after being blacklisted in the US

• Vision brings Android TV

• Chrome will be launching a new feature to search with Google Lens for Android users

• Android Studio 3.5 arrives with better performance and full Chrome OS support

• Android 10? Google is trying to grow up and it's really, really hard

• Android Gets Part of Focus Mode for Digital Wellbeing

Aug. 25, 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish student named Linus Torvalds announced to the internet that he was working on a project he said was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional.” Less than one month later, Torvalds released the Linux kernel to the public. The world hasn’t been the same since.

From how we interact with one another on a daily basis to preparing for the future of the human race, Linux is integral to our technological development. To commemorate the nearly 30 years that Linux has been available, we compiled a shortlist of ways Linux has fundamentally changed our lives.

We also provide some up to date information about the status of our IRC channels

Also: FreeBSD In Q2'2019 Saw Updated Graphics Drivers, Continued Linux Compatibility Layer

It was just last month that DragonFlyBSD pulled in Radeon's Linux 4.4 kernel driver code as an upgrade from the Linux 3.19 era code they had been using for their open-source AMD graphics support. This week that's now up to a Linux 4.7 era port.

François Tigeot who continues doing amazing work on pulling in updates to DragonFlyBSD's graphics driver now upgraded the Radeon DRM code to match that of what is found in the upstream Linux 4.7.10 kernel.

• Harmony OS 'will fail' if it is an Android alternative, says Huawei exec

• Nokia outlines its Android 10 upgrade roadmap

• Nokia will roll out Android 10 'starting Q4 2019'

• How to Play on Android | Game Rant

• Cafe Bazaar, the Largest Android Marketplace in the Middle East Seeks Cooperation with Chinese Game Developers

• Xiaomi to offer 'loans', new phones from Motorola, Realme, big 'change' for Android users and more

FPR16 got delayed because I really tried very hard to make some progress on our two biggest JavaScript deficiencies, the infamous issues 521 (async and await) and 533 (this is undefined). Unfortunately, not only did I make little progress on either, but the speculative fix I tried for issue 533 turned out to be the patch that unsettled the optimized build and had to be backed out. There is some partial work on issue 521, though, including a fully working parser patch. The problem is plumbing this into the browser runtime which is ripe for all kinds of regressions and is not currently implemented (instead, for compatibility, async functions get turned into a bytecode of null throw null return, essentially making any call to an async function throw an exception because it wouldn't have worked in the first place).

This wouldn't seem very useful except that effectively what the whole shebang does is convert a compile-time error into a runtime warning, such that other functions that previously might not have been able to load because of the error can now be parsed and hopefully run. With luck this should improve the functionality of sites using these functions even if everything still doesn't fully work, as a down payment hopefully on a future implementation. It may not be technically possible but it's a start.

Simon Steinbeiß of Xfce, Dalton Durst of UBports, KDE Applications, CutiePi Open Source Tablet, Huawei To Create Open Source Foundation, Rust Removes Linux Support, Stranded Deep Survival Game Fix

I’m not dead yet! KDE’s new goal proposals have been announced, and the voting has started. But in the meantime, the Usability & Productivity initiative continues, and we’re onto week 85!

• Kate - Document Preview Plugin - Maintainer Wanted!

  At the moment the Document Preview plugin that e.g. allows to preview Markdown or other documents layout-ed via embedding a matching KPart is no longer maintained.

  If you want to step up and keep that plugin alive and kicking, now is your chance!

• The Sprint

  Hi -)) haven’t posted for some time, because I was busy travelling and coding for the first half of the month. From Aug 5 to Aug 9, I went to the Krita Sprint in Deventer, Netherlands.

  According to Boud, I was the first person to arrive. My flight took a transit via Hong Kong where some flights were affected due to natural and social factors, but fortunately mine was not one of them. Upon arrival in Amsterdam I got a ticket for the Intercity to Deventer. Railway constructions made me take a transfer via Utrecht Centraal, but that was not a problem at all: the station has escalators going both up to the hall, and down to the platforms (in China you can only go to the hall by stairs or elevator (which is often crowded after you get off)). When I got out of Deventer Station, Boud immediately recognized me (how?!). It was early in the morning, and the street’s quietness was broken by the sound of me dragging my suitcase. Boud led me through Deventer’s crooked streets and alleys to his house.

  For the next two days people gradually arrived. I met my main mentor Dmitry (magician!) and his tiger, Sagoskatt, which I (and many others) have mistaken for a giraffe. He was even the voice actor for Sago. He had got quite a lot of insights into the code base (according to Boud, “80%”) and solved a number of bugs in Krita (but he said he introduced a lot of bugs, ha!). Also I met David Revoy (my favourite painter!), the author of Pepper and Carrot. And Tiar, our developer who started to work full-time on Krita this year; she had always been volunteering to support other Krita users and always on the IRC and Reddit. And two of other three GSoC students for the year: Blackbeard (just as his face) and Hellozee. Sh_zam could not come and lost communications due to political issues, which was really unfortunate (eh at least now he can be connected). It is feels so good to be able to see so many people in the community – they are so nice! And it is such an experience to hack in a basement church.

• How UCLA Library preserves rare objects with open source

  The University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) Library houses a collection of millions of rare and unique objects, including materials dating from 3000 BCE, that could be damaged, destroyed, or otherwise threatened if they were displayed.

  To make these special collections widely available while keeping them secure, the UCLA Library has been modernizing its digital repository, which was established 15 years ago on now-outdated software.

  [...]

  Watch Jen's Lightning Talk to learn more about the UCLA Library's rare collections digitization project.

• RcppExamples 0.1.9

  The RcppExamples package provides a handful of short examples detailing by concrete working examples how to set up basic R data structures in C++. It also provides a simple example for packaging with Rcpp.

• Get ready to blow everything up in Smith and Winston, releasing on August 27th

  Smith and Winston is a twin-stick shooter made entirely out of really small voxel blocks, it looks awesome and the destruction possible is also pretty amusing.

  Execution Unit have now announced that it's leaving Early Access next week on August 27th.

• 7 Billion Humans turns one year old, Tomorrow Corp put their games on sale to celebrate

  Tomorrow Corporation are celebrating their puzzle game 7 Billion Humans turning a year old with a big sale on their games and they support Linux too.

  Your chance to pick up a bargain while further supporting another Linux-friendly developer, perhaps something for you to play through for the rest of the weekend?

• Ampere Computing Is Keeping Close Track Of The Linux Performance For Their ARM Servers

  Hardware vendor Ampere Computing with their impressive ARM servers is doing a great job on closely following their hardware's Linux performance as part of a rigorous continuous testing regiment or ensuring quality, compatibility, and stability while being fully-automated.

  Ampere Computing's Travis Lazar talked at this week's Linux Foundation events in San Diego over the importance of continuous regression testing for software and hardware development by talking about their internal workflow and software in place. Their internal system is the "Totally Automated Regression System" or TARS for short. TARS makes use of various open-source components including the Phoronix Test Suite and its vast collection of benchmarks for providing comprehensive test coverage plus Ampere's own "extensions" to the Phoronix Test Suite. TARS also incorporates the provisioning/configuration responsibilities as well as analysis of the data.

• [SUSE] Learn how the Multimodal OS can benefit your organization.

• From ProdOps to DevOps: Surviving and thriving

  For many of us in Production Operations (ProdOps), change is the enemy. If something changes, there is now an opportunity for things that were working just fine to experience problems. It is like a game of Jenga. When will the tower fall because a seemingly minor change unbalances the whole stack of pieces? ProdOps teams hate change so much, that countless frameworks have been invented to "manage" changes; in reality, these frameworks make the procedure for effecting a change so onerous that most people give up and accept the status quo.

  Actually, that statement is a bit unfair. These frameworks are an attempt to wrap planning and consensus around production changes, thus minimizing potential downtime caused by random or rogue changes (see Why the lone wolf mentality is a sysadmin mistake).

• Meet Red Hat at VMworld

  As Red Hat’s Ashesh Badani said in his blog post about the reference architecture for OpenShift on VMware’s SDDC stack “… this is just the first step — Red Hat OpenShift 4 brings optimized installation capabilities to a variety of infrastructures and for this, the companies are working towards a VMware Validated Design. We are excited that VMware is working closely with Red Hat to deliver a simplified experience there in the coming months.”

• Microsoft Partners With Google, Intel, And Others To Form Data Protection Consortium

  The software maker joined Google Cloud, Intel, IBM, Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Red Hat, Swisscom, and Tencent to establish the Confidential Computing Consortium, a group committed to providing better private data protection, promoting the use of confidential computing, and advancing open source standards among members of the technology community.

• #OSSUMMIT: Confidential Computing Consortium Takes Shape to Enable Secure Collaboration

  At the Open Source Summit in San Diego, California on August 21, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Confidential Computing Consortium. Confidential computing is an approach using encrypted data that enables organizations to share and collaborate, while still maintaining privacy. Among the initial backers of the effort are Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent.

  “The context of confidential computing is that we can actually use the data encrypted while programs are working on it,” John Gossman, distinguished engineer at Microsoft, said during a keynote presentation announcing the new effort.

  Initially there are three projects that are part of the Confidential Computing Consortium, with an expectation that more will be added over time. Microsoft has contributed its Open Enclave SDK, Red Hat is contributing the Enarx project for Trusted Execution Environments and Intel is contributing its Software Guard Extensions (SGX) software development kit.

  Lorie Wigle, general manager, platform security product management at Intel, explained that Intel has had a capability built into some of its processors called software guard which essentially provides a hardware-based capability for protecting an area of memory.

• Mesa Radeon Vulkan Driver Sees ~30% Performance Boost For APUs

  Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver just saw a big performance optimization land to benefit APUs like Raven Ridge and Picasso, simply systems with no dedicated video memory.

  The change by Feral's Alex Smith puts the uncached GTT type at a higher index than the visible vRAM type for these configurations without dedicated vRAM, namely APUs.

• Intel Iris Gallium3D Is Close With SPIR-V Support For OpenGL 4.6

  This week saw OpenGL 4.6 support finally merged for Intel's i965 Mesa driver and will be part of the upcoming Mesa 19.2 release. Not landed yet but coming soon is the newer Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver also seeing OpenGL 4.6 support.

  Iris Gallium3D has been at OpenGL 4.5 support and is quite near as well with its OpenGL 4.6 support thanks to the shared NIR support and more with the rest of the Intel open-source graphics stack. Though it's looking less likely that OpenGL 4.6 support would be back-ported to Mesa 19.2 for Iris, but we'll see.

In it I tackle the GPD MicroPC with Ubuntu MATE 19.10. I touch on the same points made in my full text review, but with the added bonus of moving images to illustrate my points, rather than words.

Also: WiringPi - Deprecated

• Walkthrough Installation of WackoWiki v5.5.12

• How to install VirtualBox on MX Linux

• How to sync Firefox with the Gnome web browser

• How to set up the Glances system monitor on Linux

• How to Install Gogs on CentOS 7

• How to Add User to Sudoers in Ubuntu

• How to Install Plex Media Server on Debian 10 Buster Server or Desktop

• 7 Best Travel Planning Apps for iOS and Android

• 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week! – Android Apps Weekly!

• Note 10+ review, Android 10, and rebranding [#acpodcast]

• Goodbye, desserts: Android Q now officially called Android 10

• How to record calls on your Android phone

The Linux Foundation hosted the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, Deb Goodkin, at the Open Source Summit in San Diego. In this episode of Let’s Talk, we sat down with Goodkin to talk about the FreeBSD project and the foundation.

n full disclosure, Plasma is my Desktop Environment of choice, it is very easy to customize and to make my own with very little effort. As of late, there isn’t a whole lot of customizing I do, it’s all pretty minor. A couple tweaks to the the visuals, make it dark, change some sound effects to make it more Star Trek The Next Generation, add a couple Plasmoids and set up KDE Connect. Then I am ready to go.

Since KDE 3 and later Plasma, each release adds and refines existing features, all of which seems as though they are doing so in a sustainable fashion. New releases of Plasma are always met with excitement and anticipation. I can count on new features and refinements and an overall better experience. I didn’t look anywhere else but then, Xfce wondered into my world and although slow to change has become that desktop too. Historically, Xfce has been [for me] just there, nothing particularly exciting. It has held the spot of a necessary, minimal viable desktop… but not anymore.

I am extremely happy. I remember trying to play Red Alert about 10 years ago, and you had to patch files, and there was this and that, but now, it's smooth, seamless. This is true for many other games of this type, and it's easier to get them running on the latest operating systems than it was a few years after their demise. This is because people realized how valuable and dear they were.

Everything works well in this setup, but if you're not happy for some reason, you have cross-platform support, and there's also the fully open-source OpenRA clone. This one, alongside my DOSBox classics, many of which I still have the original save games for, plus OpenTTD, is the mainstay of excellence, from an era when computer gaming was pure and hard and utterly unforgiving. And it shows. I hope you find this little guide valuable. Next on the menu, Yuri's Revenge. See you soon.