Review: Linux Mint 20

Linux Mint is a desktop distribution which is available in two branches, one based on Debian and the other which uses Ubuntu as its base. The project recently published Linux Mint 20 which is based on Ubuntu 20.04 and promises five years of security updates. The distribution is available in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. These editions are available for 64-bit (x86_64) computers exclusively and the download for each edition is approximately 2GB in size. There are a few key new features in Linux Mint 20. One is Warpinator, a simple desktop tool which makes it easy to share files in a peer-to-peer fashion with other computers running Mint on the same local network. Warpinator replaces a past Mint utility called Giver and works much the same way, making sharing files across the network a point and click experience. This release also features the NVIDIA Prime applet that can be used to switch between using one video card and another. This is helpful when running laptops that have an Intel video card and another from NVIDIA. The Cinnamon desktop now allows each monitor attached to the computer to have different fractional scaling and this should improve the visual experience on HiDPI screens. Unlike its parent, Mint does not ship with support for Snap packages. In fact, Deb packages which would normally install Snap bundles (the way Ubuntu's Chromium package does) have been replaced with empty packages. Mint instead supplies Flatpak support for people wishing to run portable package formats. The project's release notes include a few warnings and workarounds. For instance, we are told that encrypted home directories are available, but may not unmount properly when logging out of the system due to a regression between the ecryptfs software and systemd. Guest sessions are available, though disabled by default, and can be activated through the Login Window settings module. We are also warned that Chromium web browser packages are not available in the default repositories, but can be found in an add-on repository if the browser is needed.

German Translation in the Brave Desktop Browser: A moan about localisation

In Linux, smaller distributions in particular have an issue with well done localisation, the bigger ones have this sorted as far as I can tell. It also seems to depend on the desktop environment but this alone is not an axcuse. For instance, the Cinnamon desktop in a standard Linux Mint Debian install is well translated and fully localised from the start. Trying the same in Artix though with their Cinnamon edition offering yields a half-baked, half-localised desktop where parts of the menu, the submenus and application entries themselves, and interestingly all Gnome and other applications that are not part of the Cinnamon desktop tools have fully translated menus and options but the Cinnamon desktop, including its control panel/ system settings and file manager are not. This can hardly be due to missing support because it works in LMDE, so the use of English is certainly not hard-coded. Perhaps it's missing a language pack somewhere, but the real reason is down to QA and probably, in the case of smaller projects like Artix, lack of manpower. And that's understandable. What I am trying to say here is that localisation in Linux is still an issue in 2020, but one would only notice if actually trying to use something other than American English, or any form of English. That reminds me, I've never tried the South African English locale. Brave is a browser I've been enjoying quite a bit lately as a well supported Chrome and Chromium alternative where you do actually get updates, in contrast to the Debian world where even using the latest stable release means outdated libraries are keeping us on Chromium 73. That or install the privacy invading Google-Chrome. Brave has got a few good features incl. effective built-in ad-blocking and stripping out a lot of Google's tracking and API's so that I'm now using it in all my installs.

Programming Leftovers

• Pocket Lisp Computer

  I recently built three Lisp Badge computers with some help from my kids. I bought a hot air soldering station and learned TQFP soldering. The kids did some through-hole and SMT soldering and really enjoyed it! The hardware assembly and debugging process was really fun, other than worrying several times that I had put too much heat into a component, or set the wrong programmable fuse. During that phase I received some advice from the board’s designer, which really helped. I’ve learned from the hardware people at work to always order extra parts, and I did, including an extra PCB. I was half expecting to damage stuff while learning, so I was really happy that we ended up with all three boards fully working, after locating and fixing some cold solder joints.

       

• CY's Take on PWC#067

  This is a part of Perl Weekly Challenge(PWC) and the followings are related to my solutions.  [...] The discussion of Perl 7 in blogs.perl.org # was so hot last week made me too shy to write PWC experience (stop, it's just an excuse!). Some discussions were quite technical for a beginner. Anyway as a beginning coder in Perl 5, I would add "use warnings" in my final coding stage from now on to prepare for the change.

• Glyph Lefkowitz: Zen Guardian

  Moshe wrote a blog post a couple of days ago which neatly constructs a wonderful little coding example from a scene in a movie. And, as we know from the Zen of Python quote, there should only be one obvious way to do something in Python. So my initial reaction to his post was of course to do it differently — to replace an __init__ method with the new @dataclasses.dataclass decorator. But as I thought about the code example more, I realized there are a number of things beyond just dataclasses that make the difference between “toy”, example-quality Python, and what you’d do in a modern, professional, production codebase today.

• Ian Ozsvald: Weekish notes

  I gave another iteration of my Making Pandas Fly talk sequence for PyDataAmsterdam recently and received some lovely postcards from attendees as a result. I’ve also had time to list new iterations of my training courses for Higher Performance Python (October) and Software Engineering for Data Scientists (September), both will run virtually via Zoom & Slack in the UK timezone. I’ve been using my dtype_diet tool to time more performance improvements with Pandas and I look forward to talking more on this at EuroPython this month.

• Quickly Use Bootstrap 4 in a Django Template with a CDN

• PSF GSoC students blogs: [Week 5] Check-in

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-in #6

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-In: Week 6