Plasma 5.21 review - Very slick, just one or five oily patches

Can you hear the drums, Fernando? There's a new Plasma release out there, marked 5.21. Which means test I must and see what the future of this typically phenomenal desktop environment brings us. Now, if you've not followed my KDE adventures lately, then I was kind of pleased with the LTS edition, similarly enthused when it comes to Plasma 5.19, and really happy with 5.20, which I felt should have been the LTS. It was everything I could have hoped, and then some. Well, almost. This makes today's experiment all the more interesting. There's an almost Ancient Greece drama level of tragic heroism in Linux, so any good or decent release must often follow with a disappointment. But hopefully, it ain't going to be the case today. Begin to explore, we shall. [...] Plasma 5.21 is pretty nice. Very refined. But it also has problems, including some there weren't there in the previous release. And this kind of thing always alarms and dismays me. Yes, there will be bugs, but I've yet to find a single Linux-associated project that has ultra-robust, detailed, fully defined, mapped and formalized QA procedure that involves 90% of the total software effort. Alas, no one wants to do the boring stuff. Take the System Monitor as an example - no need for it, KSysGuard could do with minor fixes and maybe a rename, the rev counter dashboard and broken functionality add no value. The font issues are also new. The crashes, well. That said, this is still one dope desktop environment. It is really way ahead of anything else GUI Linux, and it has hallmarks of a pro product. But not quite. There's always a little bit of that open-source hobbyist chaos lurking around, like an old enemy. Still, I am largely pleased and hope to see more awesomeness from the KDE team. Plasma 5.21 is pretty, elegant, cohesive, consistent, fast, and builds on a solid foundation. Shame about the bugs, but let's hope there will be a fundamental, methodological shift in the approach so that every future Plasma release shines, and there never be random regressions. One can hope. As for 5.21, definitely worth testing and enjoying.

GNU/Linux on Devices: Jetson Xavier NX, Fast Sense X Robotics AI Platform, Raspberry Pi, and More

  

• IP67-rated edge AI gateway runs Linux on Jetson Xavier NX

  Axiomtek’s rugged, IP67-protected “AIE800-904-FL”edge AI computer runs Ubuntu 18.04 on a Jetson Xavier NX with GbE with PoE, HDMI, 2x USB 2.0, M.2 B-key for NVMe, and mini-PCIe with SIM. The AIE800-904-FL follows other edge AI gateways featuring Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX module including Axiomtek’s own recent AIE100-903-FL-NX. While that slightly more feature rich, dual-LAN box sits on a desktop, the AIE800-904-FL is available with wall- and VESA-mount kits and is protected against water and dust per IP67. The fanless system is designed for traffic management, city security, smart manufacturing, and other outdoor edge AI applications.

 

• Robotics kit runs AI code on Myriad X, Coral Edge TPU, and Elkhart Lake GPU

  The “Fast Sense X Robotics AI Platform” runs Lubuntu and ROS on Intel’s Elkhart Lake with up to 2x Myriad X and 3x Coral Edge TPU M.2 accelerators for up to 20-TOPS AI. Moscow-based startup Fast Sense Studios unveiled an 84 x 55 x 30mm, Intel Elkhart Lake based embedded computer comprised of 3x stacked boards designed for deployment on robots. The Fast Sense X Robotics AI Platform provides autonomous robots or drones with 3D navigation with depth estimation and obstacle avoidance, fusing data from multiple depth cameras and LIDAR sensors. The system also supports object and pose detection and web-based telepresence.

 

• Cast your Android device with a Raspberry Pi

  It's hard to stay away from the gadgets we use on a daily basis. In the hustle and bustle of modern life, I want to make sure I don't miss out on the important notifications from friends and family that pop up on my phone screen. I'm also busy and do not want to get lost in distractions, and picking up a phone and replying to messages tends to be distracting. To further complicate matters, there are a lot of devices out there. Luckily, most of them, from powerful workstations to laptops and even the humble Raspberry Pi, can run Linux. Because they run Linux, almost every solution I find for one device is a perfect fit for the others.

• NXP unveils i.MX 8ULP Cortex-A35/M33 secure processors

  NXP will offer support for Linux and Android on the Arm Cortex-A35 core(s), and real-time operating systems on the Cortex-M33 core with FreeRTOS the most commonly used option on other i.MX 8 heterogeneous processors.

Today in Techrights

• The World Wide Web Has Become Proprietary and the Last Remaining 'Major' Browser That Was (Pre-EME) Free Software Is Rapidly Becoming Useless and User-Hostile (It's Monopoly- and Surveillance-Sponsored)
• Links 8/3/2021: Waffle 1.7.0 and a Look at the New Pardus (19.5)
• Real Feminism is Grassroots, Not a Corporate Ploy (to Improve Image and Sales)
• Gemini Capsules and Pages Now Accessible in a Web Browser, Qutebrowser, But Qutebrowser Has Issues
• IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 07, 2021
• Moving Away From the World Wide Web is a Wise Move, at Least to the Degree Which is Possible
• The Banality of Bribery
• When I Discovered People Trafficking in Free/Open Source Software
• Links 7/3/2021: AviDemux 2.7.8, Thunar 4.16.4
• Links 7/3/2021: Sparky 2021.03, SystemRescue 8.00, and FreeBSD 13.0 RC1
• IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 06, 2021
• How To Deal With Your Raspberry Spy -- Part V: All The Rest

Kernel: Git, Intel, AMD and Bugs

   

• Applying mailing list patches with 'git b4'

  b4 was created by Konstantin Ryabitsev and has become a very frequently used tool for me. It supports a lot of different ways for interacting with the Linux Kernel mailing lists. Of these the b4 am subcommand is what I primarily use. This subcommand downloads all of the patches belonging to a patch series and drops them into a .mbox file. But! It doesn't apply them to the repository we're currently in, and herein lies the itch that I would like to scratch.

 

• Intel Lunar Lake ‘Next-Gen’ Core CPUs Get First Support In Linux Patches, Expected To Succeed Meteor Lake By 2023

  The support page was spotted by Coelacanth's Dream (via Osuosi / Videocardz). The patch adds support for Intel Lunar Lake CPUs on the Ethernet e1000e network driver (Gigabyte NIC for Linux and Virtual Systems). The Lunar Lake is clearly listed as a next-gen Client Platform which confirms that it will be launching for both desktop and mobility segments. Other than that, there's not much that we can decipher from the support page.  

• AMD Has A Very Exciting Announcement Next Week

  On the desktop side, Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 processors continue impressing on Linux that make us all the more excited for the EPYC 7003 series. 

• Linux Kernel 5.12 rc-1 Not Ready for Use

  In a recent message on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Linus Torvalds warned everyone not to use the 5.12-rc1 kernel, due to an “unusually nasty bug” that was not caught during normal testing. “The reason is fairly straightforward,” Torvalds explains, “this merge window, we had a very innocuous code cleanup and simplification that raised no red flags at all, but had a subtle and very nasty bug in it: swap files stopped working right … the offset of the start of the swap file was lost.”  Swapping still happened, he says, “but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results.”