• Force: This one's for the butterfingered Android lovers

• Motorola's new Beta Experiences program will let you test new Moto features before they're public

• 9 Android settings that'll strengthen your security

• Moto G6 Plus and G6 Play photos and details pop up on Carphone Warehouse's site

ExTiX is dubbed the "Ultimate Linux System," and it's been updated earlier today by developer Arne Exton to version 18.4, based on Canonical's upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS operating system. However, ExTiX is using the lightweight and modern LXQt 0.12.0 as default desktop environment instead of GNOME, and it's powered by the latest Linux 4.16.2 kernel.

"After removing GNOME I have installed LXQt 0.12.0," said Arne Exton in today's announcement. "Programs won’t crash or anything like that. And I haven’t discovered any bugs to report. While running ExTiX LXQt 18.4 live or from the hard drive you can use Refracta tools (pre-installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu system. A ten-year child can do it."

Today Feral Interactive released their much anticipated Linux port of Rise of the Tomb Raider, the game that was released for Windows in January of 2016 and then released for macOS last week. Feral's Mac port was relying upon the Apple Metal API while the Linux port is now their second game (after F1 2017) exclusively relying upon the Vulkan graphics/compute API rather than OpenGL. This morning I posted the initial Radeon results using the RADV driver while here is the NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux using twenty different graphics cards.

I had to keep reminding myself that I was not dealing with an extreme case of Arch Linux instead of GNU/Linux. NixOS is more demanding and definitely not a distro for users with anything less than advanced skills.

To say NixOS comes with a steep learning curve and lots of hands-on overhead is putting it mildly. If you are a typical Linux user who lacks sysadmin training, avoid NixOS like a malware attack hiding in plain sight.

Riot is a free and open source decentralized instant messaging application that can be considered an alternative to Slack. Take a look at features of Riot, installation procedure and usage.

KDE is a working on a new music player called Elisa. Can Elisa become the new default music player in most Linux distributions? Find out in this review of Elisa music player.

Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, is excited to announce a new release of its flagship enterprise-ready cloud document suite – Collabora Online 3.2, with new features and multiple improvements.

But there is an under-appreciated bit regarding images for an ARM laptop — or pre-installed Linux distro’s in general. And that’s the first-run experience. The Netrunner Pinebook image is delivered so that it boots to the Plasma 5 desktop, no passwords asked, etc. The user is called “live”, the password is “live”, and nothing is personalized. It’s possible, though not particularly secure, to use the laptop this way in a truly disposable fashion. A first-run application helps finalize the configuration of the device by creating a named user, among other things.

One of the under-documented features of Calamares is that it can operate as a first-run application as well as a system installer. This is called “OEM Mode“, because it’s of greatest interest to OEMs .. but also to distro’s that ship an image for users to flash onto (micro)SD card for use in a device.

It's a busy day in the software and hardware space today as well as a busy week for Oracle with several big releases this week. The latest is the general availability of the long-awaited MySQL 8.0 update.

MySQL 8.0 is a very significant update over the MySQL 5.7 series. MySQL 8.0 features a transactional data dictionary, a new document store with NoSQL support, and up to twice as fast MySQL database performance compared to version 5.7.

Direct: MySQL 8.0: Up to 2x Faster

• Linux 4.16.3

• Linux 4.15.18

• Linux 4.14.35

I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 18.4 LXQt Live DVD. (The previous version was 17.8 from 171012).

Linux gives you a lot of control over network and system settings. On your desktop, Linux lets you tweak just about anything on the system. Most of these settings are exposed in plain text files under the /etc directory. Here I describe some of the most common settings you’ll use on your desktop Linux system.

A lot of settings can be found in the Settings program, and the available options will vary by Linux distribution. Usually, you can change the background, tweak sound volume, connect to printers, set up displays, and more. While I won't talk about all of the settings here, you can certainly explore what's in there.

Meet Bo, a social robot with AI (Artificial Intelligence) capabilities, powered by Canonical's Ubuntu Linux operating system and optimized to welcome customers, as well as to help them navigate to find products and areas in your organization.

Bo was already used by several well-known brands like Etisalat and BT in a bunch of scenarios, including hospitality and retail scenarios, and it's being tested in large shopping centers in the United Kingdom, such as Lakeside.

More than four months in the making, the final KDE Applications 18.04 release is finally here, and it already started appearing in the stable software repositories of popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux. It's KDE Applications' first major release in 2018 and comes with numerous enhancements and new features.

Prominent new features in KDE Applications 18.04 include various improvements to the panels, menus, and folder view of the Dolphin file manager, along with the ability to sort and organize images by date, drag-and-drop optimizations, a new keyboard shortcut to open the Filter Bar, and better HiDPI support.

The embargo on the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X processors has expired now that these Ryzen+ CPUs are beginning to ship today. We can now talk about the Linux support and the initial performance figures for these upgraded Zen desktop CPUs.

• Rise of the Tomb Raider is now officially available on Linux, here’s a look at it with benchmarks

  Feral Interactive have teamed up with Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix once again to bring a top title to Linux, this time we have Rise of the Tomb Raider.

• Rise of the Tomb Raider tested on AMD RX 580

  To go along with Liam’s benchmarks of the game on his Nvidia GPU, I decided to also run some tests on my RX 580 to give you a picture of the AMD performance of the Rise of the Tomb Raider port. So, let’s go!

• Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux Performance On AMD Radeon GPUs

  Yesterday Feral announced that the long-awaited Linux release of Rise of the Tomb Raider would be coming tomorrow and now they have honored that release. Rise of the Tomb Raider is now natively available for Linux and this port is exclusively relying upon the Vulkan graphics API for rendering. Here are our initial benchmarks of Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux with Radeon GPUs while making use of the Mesa RADV driver.

• Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration Is Out Now on Linux

  Feral Interactive, the UK-based video games publisher, announced today the availability of the Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration video game on the Linux platform.

  After being released on Apple's macOS platform last week, the Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration video game comes today to Linux gamers, and this special edition has all the DLCs released since its official launch more than two years ago, including Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch, Blood Ties, and Cold Darkness Awakened.

• Linux Gaming Performance With AMD Ryzen 5 2600X / Ryzen 7 2700X

  Today the Ryzen+ "Pinnacle Ridge" processors begin shipping and we can now share with you the initial performance results for the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X processors. One of the most common questions I've received about these improved Zen processors since showing them off last week was inquiries/hopes about the Linux gaming performance, so those numbers are first up today followed by other Linux benchmark results forthcoming.

• simple

  Every now and then, for one reason or another, I am sat in front of a Linux-powered computer with the graphical user interface disabled, instead using an old-school text-only mode.

• A month with Dell XPS 13 (9370)

  After years of using Thinkpads, I went for a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Although I had bought devices with Linux pre-installed and laptops for friends as well, this  was going to be my first own laptop coming with Ubuntu straight from the factory.

• Thin Clients, The Walking Dead Of Computing

   

  Most of us are doing a lot on the web anyway. There’s not much difference between a web-application running on a server somewhere or a desktop application running on a server in the building. Thin clients just won’t die as much as haters wish.

• logstash 5.6.9 released with logstash-filter-grok 4.0.3

• Calamares GeoIP

  Calamares is a distribution-independent (Linux) system installer. Outside of the “big five” distro’s, many smaller “boutique” distro’s need an installer, and Calamares is a highly configurable one that they can use. There’s a few dozen distro’s that I know of that use it (although I’ve only actually installed maybe six of them).

• Cockpit 166

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 166.

 

• KDE’s New Elisa Music Player: So Close, Yet So Far Away

  With the rise of streaming services bringing easy access to media, owning your own music and movies is at a seemingly all-time low. In my case, it wasn’t until recently that I started recollecting local music files again once I started caring more about the quality of music that I was listening to.

• Atom-based embedded PC supports up to four removable SATA drives

  IEI’s Linux-ready “IBX-660” is a rugged, storage-oriented embedded computer with a Bay Trail Atom, 4x removable SATA bays, 2x GbE ports, 4x USB, HDMI, mini-PCIe, and -40 to 50°C support.

• Eclipse and Linux Launch Projects to Help IoT Developers

  The Eclipse and Linux foundations are offering new projects for developers working on Internet of Things (IoT) projects.

  Eclipse is introducing Mita, a language for embedded IoT. Linux has announced an open source reference hypervisor project designed for IoT device development.

• 7 tips from multi-cloud masters

• Google Kaniko Tool Wrenches on Container Privilege Concern

  Google unveiled an open source tool that targets container security issues tied to the granting of privileged access to a Docker-based container. Docker containers are by default not granted privileged access to root content, though that does limit their agility.

  Analysts have noted that the privileged and root access issues remain a sticking point for securing container deployments.

 

• An Update on Linux Journal

  First, keep the great ideas coming—we all want to continue making Linux Journal 2.0 something special, and we need this community to do it.

• Elections for openSUSE Board Run Until April 27

  The ballots for Elections to fill the three seats on the openSUSE Board are open until April 27.

• Rise of the Tomb Raider Comes to Linux Tomorrow, IoT Developers Survey, New Zulip Release and More

  openSUSE Leap 15 is scheduled for release May 25, 2018. Leap 15 "shares a common core with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 sources and has thousands of community packages on top to meet the needs of professional and semi-professional users and their workloads."

• Mass Rebuild to Remove .la files

• Slackware-current ChangeLog 20180419

  Hi folks, and welcome to the third ever Slackware Mass Rebuild (and the longest ChangeLog entry in project history). There were two primary motivations for rebuilding everything in the main tree. The first was to switch to the new C++ ABI. The second was to get rid of all the .la files in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Really, having .la files installed has been mostly obsolete since things began to use pkg-config instead, …

• The Linux Filesystem Explained

  Back in 1996 I learned how to install software on my spanking new Linux before really understanding the topography of the filesystem. This turned out to be a problem, not so much for programs, because they would just magically work even though I hadn't a clue of where the actual executable files landed. The problem was the documentation.

  You see, back then, Linux was not the intuitive, user-friendly system it is today. You had to read a lot. You had to know things about the frequency rate of your CRT monitor and the ins and outs of your noisy dial-up modem, among hundreds of other things.  I soon realized I would need to spend some time getting a handle on how the directories were organized and what all their exotic names like etc/ (not a for miscellaneous files), usr/ (not for user files), and bin/ (not a trash can) meant.

  This tutorial will help you get up to speed faster than I did.

• Self-hosted videos with HLS

• getting libleveldb1v5 fixed

• A filesystem for known_hosts

• Improve debootstrap time a bit, without local mirror

• Analysing Debian packages with Neo4j – Part 2 UDD and Graph DB Schema

• Easily Install Android Studio in Ubuntu And Linux Mint

• Linux screen Command: Keep Processes Running Despite a Dropped Connection

• 5 guiding principles you should know before you design a microservice

• How to Keep Processes Running after SSH Logout in Linux

• Linux sdiff Command Examples for Linux Newbies

• OSWbb – How To Install And Configure OSWatcher Black Box For System Diagnostics