Best Linux distro for power users in 2021

The Linux power user is a celebrated breed, and one that does not simply burst fully-formed from the earth. All newbies must toil long and hard with their Linux installations before they can describe themselves as one. At the very least, the power user will have a great degree of skill concerning all things Linux, whether it's the kernel, Bash or package management systems – and they won’t be afraid to get their hands dirty in the name of configuring the system. It seems, in many ways, that power users are a dying breed. Almost all modern Linux distributions require little effort to get up and running, or to install new software or configure basic functionality. By definition, no power user will want to run any of these distros. This is why, despite their popularity, the likes of Ubuntu and Mint are not featured here. On the other hand, control and flexibility are the hallmark of any distro meant for power users. The ones in this feature are user-driven, not guided. This gives them much greater adaptability, as well as allowing them to perform a diverse range of tasks.

Devices: Simply NUC, Pine64, Arduino

• Ubuntu-ready Ryzen V2000 mini-PC starts at $639

  Simply NUC has launched a $639-and-up “Cypress” mini-PC with AMD’s Ryzen V2000 plus 2.5GbE, 2x HDMI, 2x DP-ready Type-C, 3x USB 3.2 Gen2, and a 128GB SSD for one of the 2x M.2 slots. Simply NUC (or SimplyNUC) has launched a Cypress Long Life Mini mini-PC, named for its 7-year supply guarantee. The system offers pre-installed Ubuntu or Win 10 running on AMD’s 7nm, octa- and hexa-core Ryzen Embedded V2000. Pricing starts at $639 for a Cypress LLM2v5Cy SKU with the hexa-core, 2.1GHz/3.95GHz V2516, $689 for the LLM2v6CY with the hexa-core, 3.0GHz/3.95GHz V2546, and $829 for the LLM2v8CY with the top-of-the-line, octa-core 2.9GHz/4.25GHz V2748. All these prices include 4GB RAM, a 128GB SSD, 1-year support, and either no OS or pre-installed Ubuntu.

• Build A Dog Ball Launcher That Kinda Looks Like A Dog | Hackaday

  The design is straightforward. The 3D printed housing features a large funnel into which a ball can be dropped. A servo then holds the ball while a pair of rollers are spun up by brushed DC motors. After two seconds, the servo releases the ball towards the rollers which launch the ball out of the machine. A Raspberry Pi Pico runs the show, controlling the timing of the ball launch and varying the motor speed to change the distance the ball is launched on each firing.

• Arm adds virtual testing platform for Corstone Cortex-A and -M ref designs

  Arm has launched an “Arm Total Solutions for IoT” initiative that combines its Cortex-A- and -M based Corstone SoC reference designs with a new “Arm Virtual Hardware Targets” platform for virtual, cloud-based testing. In 2018, Arm launched an Arm Corstone subsystem product line comprising prevalidated SoC reference designs that combine its core IP with security, debug, memory subsystems, and in some cases, NPUs. Now, Arm has expanded Arm Corstone with a cloud-based Arm Virtual Hardware Targets testing and development platform aimed at IoT. Together with a new Project Centauri ecosystem initiative for Cortex-M developers, the programs are wrapped up into an “Arm Total Solutions for IoT” umbrella platform.

• 248: PinePhone Pro: Exclusive Interview with Pine64

  This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re being joined by Lukasz Ericenski of Pine64 for an Exclusive Interview about the new PinePhone Pro! Then we’re going to talk about NTFS improvements coming to the Linux kernel. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

• Amazon offered me half of what I paid for my Galaxy S20 FE 5G. The phone is so awful that I’m considering it. – BaronHK's Rants

  I’m considering a Pine Phone Pro. My spouse laughed at me when I said it runs GNU/Linux and lets you do whatever you want. It sounds like the anti-iPhone to me. No crAPPs. No vendor lock-in. No freemium junk. But Samsung has been going downhill for years. Now, they don’t even want to talk to you unless you have thousands of dollars for a phone that will be obsolete or broken in a matter of 24-36 months (the Z series). The Pine Phone Pro is going to be $399 and Amazon is offering me a $200 gift card for this Galaxy phone. Which is half of what I paid for it last year, but I’m considering it. The stupid thing barely even works at all since T-Mobile bought Sprint and put the T-Mobile Network Experience SIM card in it. The stupid thing malfunctions the worst when I have 5G turned on, but it’s not great in LTE mode either. When it can get a network signal, the piece of trash is either beeping at me because it’s Samsung wanting me to agree to a new EULA or use Microsoft products that are also trash that I don’t want. (With NSA backdoors.) In the past 5 years, Samsung phones have gone from a couple of crapplets, just disable them, whatever, to an entire phone screaming at you that you MUST use Microsoft products.

• Arduino Brings USB Mouse to Homebrew computer

  When building your own homebrew computer, everything is a challenge. Ultimately, that’s kind of the point. If you didn’t want to really get your hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of the thing, you wouldn’t have built it in the first place. For example, take the lengths to which [rehsd] was willing to go in order to support standard USB mice on their 6502 machine.

Free Software and More

• The Apache News Round-up: week ending 15 October 2021

  Happy Friday, everyone. The Apache community has had another great week.

• The Intelligent Edge – Coming Soon to Arm DevSummit 2021 [Ed: What a ridiculous coredump of mindless buzzwords by SUSE]

  For those of us not keeping score, we’re at the cusp of a technology shockwave that will fundamentally change the way we live, work, and interact with each other. Some call it the fourth industrial revolution (I4). While the third industrial revolution was all about process and product automation, the fourth industrial revolution (from an IT perspective) will center on the fusion of IT and OT.

• Five of Monday's 'All Things Open' Presentations We Wouldn't Miss - FOSS Force

  If you couldn’t make it to Raleigh, North Carolina to attend this year’s All Things Open, you’re in luck. You can go to the conference’s web site and register for the free online version of the event, which will include live streaming of all presentations happening at the event (including all keynotes), as well as a large number of prerecorded presentations that were put together specifically for the online audience. That’s how we at FOSS Force are planning on attending this year, although downtown Raleigh is only a couple of hours away by car.

• Community Member Monday: Hlompho Mota

  I am a native of Lesotho, and a dreamer and a person who aspires to make changes. Currently I’m working in a business that serves other businesses in Lesotho to get recognition in the market, and generally grow to become more self-reliant. Other than my business, I do try and dabble in technology and try to understand how it works – and get a sense on how it can be relevant in the area of life that I live in at this moment. But besides that, I consider myself as lifelong learner and I hope that the learning will continue for the rest of my life. Currently, I’m a self-taught developer trying to participate in as many open-source projects as possible, with the hope of bringing much-needed development to my part of the world.

Programming Leftovers

• Use KPNG to Write Specialized kube-proxiers

  The post will show you how to create a specialized service kube-proxy style network proxier using Kubernetes Proxy NG kpng without interfering with the existing kube-proxy. The kpng project aims at renewing the the default Kubernetes Service implementation, the "kube-proxy". An important feature of kpng is that it can be used as a library to create proxiers outside K8s. While this is useful for CNI-plugins that replaces the kube-proxy it also opens the possibility for anyone to create a proxier for a special purpose.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: dang 0.0.14: Several Updates

  A new release of the dang package arrived at CRAN a couple of hours ago, exactly eight months after the previous release. The dang package regroups a few functions of mine that had no other home as for example lsos() from a StackOverflow question from 2009 (!!), the overbought/oversold price band plotter from an older blog post, the market monitor from the last release as well the checkCRANStatus() function recently tweeted about by Tim Taylor. This release regroups a few small edits to several functions, adds a sample function for character encoding reading and conversion using a library already used by R (hence “look Ma, no new depends”), adds a weekday helper, and a sample usage (computing rolling min/max values) of a new simple vector class added to tidyCpp (and the function and class need to get another blog post or study …), and an experimental git sha1sum and date marker (as I am not the fan of autogenerated binaries from repos as opposed to marked released meaning: we may see different binary release with the same version number).

• Rakudo Weekly News: 2021.42 Learning With

  Daniel Sockwell was inspired by a blog post a few weeks ago about a bouncing balls demo. The result is a new framework for learning Raku, but this time with some nice graphics: Learn Raku With: HTML Balls. Apart from the technical points, it’s also a great way (for people without much programming experience) to get involved with Raku while creating graphics and animations, rather than textual output. Check it out!

• Russ Allbery: rra-c-util 10.0

  It's been a while since I pushed out a release of my collection of utility libraries and test suite programs, so I've accumulated quite a lot of chanages. Here's a summary; for more, see the NEWS file.

• 1.56.0 pre-release testing | Inside Rust Blog

  The 1.56.0 pre-release is ready for testing. The release is scheduled for this Thursday, October 21th. Release notes can be found here.

• Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up

  Apple today announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max as their most powerful SoCs ever built by the company. The new chips feature up to a 10-core processor, 32-core GPU, and up to 64GB of unified memory. While the Apple M1 was already well regarded for its speed, the M1 Pro and M1 Max are said to deliver up to 70% faster CPU performance than last year's M1. Meanwhile the GPU within the M1 Pro is up to 2x faster than the M1 while the M1 Max's GPU is said to be 4x faster.