An Everyday Linux User Review Of Linux Mint 19

Well, there you have it. I have covered everything that I can think of in this review. Installation is as straight forward as downloading an ISO image, copying it to a USB and then navigating a few installation screens. The Cinnamon user interface is first class. It looks incredibly stylish and is very easy to use. The default software with Linux Mint is perfect for most purposes although I would always go with Chrome over Firefox and Evolution over Thunderbird but they are personal preferences. The software manager makes it easy to find new software and you can install either flatpak packages or debian format packages. Steam is available for playing games and you can now play Windows games without installing WINE but it isn’t yet 100% perfect. If you need Citrix then I have covered the fact that it works but there are a few pitfalls. These are not unique to Linux Mint and are generally the same on every distribution. I have shown that it is possible to run Windows 10 in a virtual machine meaning you can use Linux Mint for most tasks and swap into a virtual machine for everything else. No need to waste disk space dual booting. Timeshift is a great new tool for adding system restore points and there are various tools for keeping your system up to date, changing the look and feel of your system and for setting up hardware such as graphics cards and printers. It is easy to see why Linux Mint is so popular. It is straight forward, easy to use and consistent.

FSFE Resignation and Parabola GNU/Linux-libre Needs Hardware

• Daniel Pocock: Resigning as the FSFE Fellowship's representative

  I've recently sent the following email to fellows, I'm posting it here for the benefit of the wider community and also for any fellows who don't receive the email.

• Parabola GNU/Linux-libre: Server loss

  However, that sponsorship has come to an end. We are alright for now; the server that 1984 Hosting is sponsoring us with is capable of covering our immediate needs. We are looking for a replacement server and are favoring a proprietor that is a "friend of freedom," if anyone in the community has a suggestion.

Red Hat: News and Financial Results

• Observe what your Istio mesh is doing with Kiali

  The Istio service mesh is a powerful tool for building a service mesh. If you don’t know about Istio yet, have a look at the Introduction to Istio series of articles or download the ebook Introducing Istio Service Mesh for Microservices. The power of Istio comes with the cost of some complexity at configuration and runtime. To help this, the Kiali project provides observability of the mesh and the services in the mesh. Kiali visualizes the mesh with its services and workloads. It indicates the health of the mesh and shows hints about applied configuration options. You can then drill in on individual services or settings to view details.

• Why Red Hat and Microsoft are Bringing Managed OpenShift to Azure

  As the alliance between Red Hat and Microsoft has evolved over the last couple years, many people have wondered how one time competitors could be aligning on so many initiatives. Our collaboration spans open source projects, the adoption of Linux in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, to high performance databases and application development tools. The latest addition is managed Red Hat OpenShift on Azure.

• Submit a Fedora talk to DevConf.cz 2019

  DevConf.cz 2019 is the free, Red Hat sponsored community conference for open source contributors. Developers, admins, DevOps engineers, testers, documentation writers and other contributors to Linux, middleware, virtualization, storage, cloud, and mobile technologies will meet in Brno, Czechia January 25-27, 2019. Join Fedora and other FLOSS communities to sync, share, and hack on upstream projects together.

• Red Hat stock drops after miss on revenue targets and guidance

• Red Hat 2Q 2019 up 14% YoY, Buoyed By Subscription Revenue

• Red Hat Q2 Lower than Estimates As Client Moves to Legacy Provider

• Red Hat: Staying Hopeful

• Red Hat's CEO Tells TheStreet Why He Isn't Worried About His Firm's Sales Miss

• Stocks to Watch: Comcast, Tilray, Facebook, Amazon.com, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Red Hat, Darden Restaurants, Herman Miller

• Top Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades: AMD, Caterpillar, NRG, Nvidia, P&G, Square, Red Hat, Transocean, Viacom, Wisdom Tree and More

KDE and GNOME: Krita, Bionic and AppStream/AppData

• Let’s Tally Some Votes!

  We’re about a week into the campaign, and almost 9000 euros along the path to bug fixing. So we decided to do some preliminary vote tallying! And share the results with you all, of course! On top is Papercuts, with 84 votes. Is that because it’s the default choice? Or because you are telling us that Krita is fine, it just needs to be that little bit smoother that makes all the difference? If the latter, we won’t disagree, and yesterday Boudewijn fixed one of the things that must have annoyed everyone who wanted to create a custom image: now the channel depths are finally shown in a logical order!

• Almost Bionic

  Maybe it’s all the QA we added but issues kept cropping up with Bionic. All those people who had encrypted home folders in xenial soon found they had no files in bionic because support had been dropped so we had to add a quirk to keep access to the files. Even yesterday a badly applied patch to the installer broke installs on already partitioned disks which it turns out we didn’t do QA for so we had to rejig our tests as well as fix the problem. Things are turning pleasingly green now so we should be ready to launch our Bionic update early next week. Do give the ISO images one last test and help us out by upgrading any existing installs and reporting back. Hasta pronto.

• Speeding up AppStream: mmap’ing XML using libxmlb

  AppStream and the related AppData are XML formats that have been adopted by thousands of upstream projects and are being used in about a dozen different client programs. The AppStream metadata shipped in Fedora is currently a huge 13Mb XML file, which with gzip compresses down to a more reasonable 3.6Mb. AppStream is awesome; it provides translations of lots of useful data into basically all languages and includes screenshots for almost everything. GNOME Software is built around AppStream, and we even use a slightly extended version of the same XML format to ship firmware update metadata from the LVFS to fwupd.