elementary OS 6 Updates for November, 2021

This past week was Thanksgiving in the US, which for my family means decorating for the holidays is in full swing. In a similar vein, we’ve spent some extra time over the past month focusing on both visual and functional polish to make sure elementary OS 6 looks as good and works as well as it can—read on for the details!

OSMC November update is here with Kodi 19.3

At the end of the Summer, we released our largest update ever delivering a new version of Kodi, an improved video stack, support for new Raspberry Pi models and a large number of improvements and fixes. Since then, we've been working hard to deliver another significant update. This update also features Kodi v19.3 which has a number of bug fixes. One of the more significant changes in Kodi v19.3 includes a fix which improves the playback of videos which have high-bitrate TrueHD tracks. This would previously result in drop-outs when playing back some titles with HD audio passthrough enabled.

today's leftovers

• But Think Of The (World Wide) Users! | Hackaday

  History is full of stories about technology that makes sense to the designer but doesn’t really fit the needs of the users. Take cake mixes. In 1929, a man named Duff realized that he could capitalize on surplus flour and molasses and created a cake mix. You simply added water to the dry mix and baked it to create a delicious cake. After World War II General Mills and Pillsbury also wanted to sell more flour so they started making cakes. But sales leveled out. A psychologist who was a pioneer in focus groups named Dichter had the answer: bakers didn’t feel like they were contributing to the creation of the cake. To get more emotional investment, the cake mixes would need to have real eggs added in. Actually, Duff had noticed the same thing in his 1933 patent. It is easy to imagine a bunch of food… scientists? Engineers? Designers?… whatever a person inventing flour mixes in the 1930s was called… sitting around thinking that making a mix that only requires water is a great thing. But the bakers didn’t like it. How often do we fail to account for users?

• Children‘s book published about software, skateboards, and raspberry ice cream

  Today, 29 November, O'Reilly Germany publishes the book "Ada & Zangemann - A fairy tale about software, skateboards and raspberry ice cream" written by FSFE President Matthias Kirschner and illustrated by Sandra Brandstätter, among other things, character designer for the series "Trudes Tier" from the show "Sendung mit der Maus". The famous inventor Zangemann lives in a huge villa high above the city. Adults and children alike love his inventions and are desperate to have them. But then something happens: when Zangemann once again wants to take a close-up look at his inventions during a walk through the cityand with a loud thud, a child riding a skateboard hits him in the shin! Enraged, the inventor makes a momentous decision... The clever girl Ada sees through it all. Together with her friends, she forges a plan.

• How to Search DuckDuckGo From the Linux Terminal [Ed: MakeUseOf irresponsibly suggests to GNU/Linux users that they use surveillance site and Microsoft proxy to search things; as if it's a geek's tool; DuckDuckGo is an elaborate scam, a privacy fraud, an expensive ploy that poisons sites with bribes]

• More Features Begin Lining Up For Fedora 36 - Phoronix

  With a few weeks having passed since the Fedora 35 debut, more feature work and planning around next spring's Fedora 36 are underway. Already accepted for Fedora 36 are some of the usual package updates that come as little surprise for living on the bleeding-edge. Among those updates are the likes of Autoconf 2.71, Java OpenJDK 17 as the system JDK, PHP 8.1, OpenSSL 3.0, and others. Some of the planned changes for Fedora 36 include using DNS-over-TLS where supported, replacing FBDEV kernel drivers with SimpleDRM, DNF/RPM copy-on-write enablement for all variants when running on Btrfs, and more. This Wiki page continues tracking the Fedora 36 changes that have been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo).

• Adaro Energy optimizes business efficiency with SUSE Ed: SUSE is shilling SAP's proprietary software as is typical]

  “The deployment of SAP S/4HANA on SLES for SAP Applications is an important step that provides real-time analytics for business insights throughout the enterprise, thereby aiding agile monitoring and decision making.” Eka Suharto Head of IT Adaro Energy.

• SUSE joins the Graviton Launch | SUSE Communities

  AWS Graviton is an amazing technology. Custom built 64-bit Arm processors that helps to optimize price performance for a variety of cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. Compared to general-purpose instances, Graviton delivers major cost savings for scale-out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, data/log processing and much more.

• It’s Time More Linux Distros and DEs Become ‘Linus-Proof’

  The past few weeks have rattled the desktop Linux community. Popular tech YouTuber Linus, not Torvalds but Sebastian, decided to use Linux on desktop for a month. Linus Sebastian wanted to see if Linux has gotten to the point where it is user friendly enough that any tech nerd can pick it up and run? His focus was also on gaming on Linux because PC gaming is an area Sebastian covers a lot. That’s an interesting concept and many in the Linux community got excited because it was free publicity for desktop Linux to a wider tech audience.