Review: BunsenLabs Helium

I have got a bit of soft spot for Openbox. I like how minimalist it is and how it hardly uses any system resources - according to my Conky panel BunsenLabs was using just over 200MB of RAM when idle. BunsenLabs provides a system that is usable out of the box but which can be tweaked any way you want. For this review I made the system cleaner and leaner but I could have gone in the opposite direction and create a desktop with conkies, panels and docks all over the place. DistroWatch's slogan, "put the fun back into computing", very much applies to BunsenLabs. In short, this is a distro I could easily use as my daily driver. My only concern would be the project's long term future. BunsenLabs Helium was released almost a year after Debian Stretch was released and then there is the worrying fact that Openbox doesn't work under Wayland, which is getting ever closer to replacing Xorg. BunsenLabs has got a sound community though, so I very much hope this distro will be around for many years to come.

KaOS 2018.06

Just days after Plasma 5.13.1 was announced can you already see it on this new release. Highlights of Plasma 5.13 include optimising startup and minimising memory usage, yielding faster time-to-desktop, better runtime performance, and less memory consumption. System Settings with KDE’s Kirigami framework gives the pages a slick new look. KWin gained much-improved effects for blur and desktop switching. Wayland work continued, with the return of window rules, the use of high priority EGL Contexts, and initial support for screencasts and desktop sharing. And a tech preview of GTK global menu integration.

8 reasons to use the Xfce Linux desktop environment

The Xfce desktop is thin and fast with an overall elegance that makes it easy to figure out how to do things. Its lightweight construction conserves both memory and CPU cycles. This makes it ideal for older hosts with few resources to spare for a desktop. However, Xfce is flexible and powerful enough to satisfy my needs as a power user. I've learned that changing to a new Linux desktop can take some work to configure it as I want—with all of my favorite application launchers on the panel, my preferred wallpaper, and much more. I have changed to new desktops or updates of old ones many times over the years. It takes some time and a bit of patience. I think of it like when I've moved cubicles or offices at work. Someone carries my stuff from the old office to the new one, and I connect my computer, unpack the boxes, and place their contents in appropriate locations in my new office. Moving into the Xfce desktop was the easiest move I have ever made.

Programming: Go, Bugs and LLVM

• 3 ways to copy files in Go

  This article will show you how to copy a file in the Go programming language. Although there are more than three ways to copy a file in Go, this article will present the three most common ways: using the io.Copy() function call from the Go library; reading the input file all at once and writing it to another file; and copying the file in small chunks using a buffer.

• The life cycle of a software bug

  During the process of testing, bugs are reported to the development team. Quality assurance testers describe the bug in as much detail as possible, reporting on their system state, the processes they were undertaking, and how the bug manifested itself. Despite this, some bugs are never confirmed; they may be reported in testing but can never be reproduced in a controlled environment. In such cases they may not be resolved but are instead closed. It can be difficult to confirm a computer bug due to the wide array of platforms in use and the many different types of user behavior. Some bugs only occur intermittently or under very specific situations, and others may occur seemingly at random. Many people use and interact with open source software, and many bugs and issues may be non-repeatable or may not be adequately described. Still, because every user and developer also plays the role of quality assurance tester, at least in part, there is a good chance that bugs will be revealed.

• LLVM's OpenMP Offloads Liboffload Into Oblivion

  The liboffload library has been dropped from LLVM's OpenMP repository. Liboffload is/was the Intel runtime library for offloading and geared for supporting the Xeon Phi co-processors. But liboffload within LLVM hasn't been receiving updates, it wasn't properly integrated within the LLVM build system, and unfortunately Xeon Phi co-processors appear to be discontinued. The liboffload library has also confused some with LLVM's libomptarget library for OpenMP support that is in much better shape.