myMPD – standalone and lightweight web-based MPD client

My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience to be present. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being with an audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and still on hold given the coronavirus pandemic. I’m therefore listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format, and stored locally. Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem. MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis. myMPD is a standalone and lightweight web-based MPD client. Its developer claims myMPD is designed for minimal resource usage and requires only very few dependencies.

Games: CLI, Tristam Island, GamerOS and Much More

• Best Command Line Games for Linux – Linux Hint

  This article will list various command line games available for Linux. These games do not require you to commit a lot of time and can be played in short bursts. If you are using a lightweight Linux distribution with minimal UI elements or using a headless OS based on Linux, this list should be useful for you.

• Tristam Island is a Infocom-inspired text adventure available on over 30 platforms | GamingOnLinux

  Okay, now this is quite impressive. Tristam Island is a text adventure designed like old Infocom works and it's playable across more platforms than you might expect. Developed by Hugo Labrande using modern, open source tools on Linux naturally it has first-class Linux support. However, it's also available on over 30 other platforms too. From Linux to Windows, Amiga to Spectrum and even some calculators can run it. The technical details of it are just as impressive as the adventure you go on. The developer also supplies the plain ".z3" file to run in your favourite interactive fiction interpreter. It could run pretty much anywhere. "After crashing your plane at sea, you end up drifting to a small island, with not much to survive. You explore, and find out the island was inhabited, years ago. But why did the people leave? And why is there a fence around the white house at the top of the hill?"

• SteamOS-like couch gaming Linux distribution GamerOS expands with a new release | GamingOnLinux

  Need an up to date Linux distribution for your living room big screen experience? GamerOS can fill that gap for you while Valve sit on SteamOS. GamerOS is one of the easiest ways to get a full-screen Steam experience on a big screen, with no-fuss updates and a whole bunch of special tweaks to make it run as nicely as possible. Not only that, it has a bunch of extras to support other stores and platforms too. With the release of GamerOS 21 the standard components included have been upgraded like the Linux Kernel 5.9.9, Mesa 20.2.2, NVIDIA 455.38, RetroArch 1.9 and updates to their Steam Tweaks and Steam Buddy apps too. Their Steam Buddy is web-based tool you use to manage non-Steam stuff, with these release it expanded to support the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation Portable through emulators. It also now has audio controls, it will generate banner images based on game titles when one isn't available, fixes gamepads not working with the Epic Games Store and more fixes.

• Cloud Gaming Services: Explained and Tested on Linux - Boiling Steam

  Here’s a quick test run of some of these game streaming services, and I’ll explain what they do. In particular, we’ll see how well each service fares on the desktop Linux side.

• 340 or so days later and I am still lost in The Longing | GamingOnLinux

  Remember the unique mix of point and click adventuring with an idle game in The Longing? It's supposed to have taken people 400 days to finish and it released back in March 2020 - to which I was impressed with it. This is because when you start, a big timer at the top of your screen will count down from 400 real-time days. It's a painfully slow game, and one that's very much the anti-AAA shot some readers might be needing. It's all about loneliness, and the longing to know more and have more. It's such a thoroughly strange experience. The Longing sits between a point and click adventure with an idle game. You can walk around, interact with things and explore for a while. However, certain parts of it force you to wait. You might need something to grow or get broken before you can pass, or even just opening a big door might take an hour or two. You can just quit and come back, and time will continue on so you don't need to have it open.

• Jedi: Fallen Order arrives on Stadia, six new free games for Stadia Pro for December | GamingOnLinux

  Google continues to boost their game selection with many fan favourites continuing to arrive on their Stadia game streaming service. They also have big plans. As of right now, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is available to buy on Stadia and it's 60% off at $23.99 / €27.99 / £23.99. The sale on that will end on December 3. They're also offering a free Stadia Premiere Edition (Controller + Chromecast Ultra) with pre-orders of Cyberpunk 2077 and I do have to admit I love the feel of my own Stadia Controller.

• Re-live the experience of Half-Life with Black Mesa: Definitive Edition out now | GamingOnLinux

  Black Mesa: Definitive Edition is the final big update to the re-imagined fan-made Half-Life game, and it's looking pretty awesome. Easily the best way to experience the first part of Half-Life. Don't get me wrong, the original from Valve still has plenty of true charm but for modern audiences it's not the ideal way to try and get into it. Black Mesa (especially now with the Definitive Edition) makes it easier for a new generation to get invested into the crazy world that is Half-Life and experience the adventure of Dr. Gordon Freeman.

• NVIDIA plan to support Linux with GeForce NOW using Chrome | GamingOnLinux

  For a while now you've been able to stream games using NVIDIA GeForce NOW in your browser, however it looks like NVIDIA will be making that a bit more official for Linux. Currently on certain platforms like Windows and macOS, NVIDIA have a dedicated downloadable application for their GeForce NOW streaming service. They expanded support into the browser for ChromeOS / Chromebooks in the Summer, which initially needed other platforms to spoof their browser string to ChromeOS but that hasn't been needed for a while.

• Radeon RX 6800 Series 1440p Linux Gaming Benchmarks With 15 GPUs - Phoronix

  While the new Radeon RX 6800 series is suited for 4K gaming, a number of premium readers inquired about seeing 1440p gaming benchmarks for the cards. Now that all the initial launch coverage is out of the way, here is a look at the Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT with 15 graphics cards in total for this round of Linux gaming benchmarks focused at 1440p. Up for this comparison based on the cards I had available were the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 2060 SUPER, RTX 2070 , RTX 2070 SUPER, RTX 2080, RTX 2080 SUPER, TITAN RTX, RTX 2080 Ti, and the RTX 3080 (unfortunately, the RTX 3080 remains my lone Ampere card at the moment with NVIDIA not yet sending out the RTX 3090/3070 for Linux testing). On the Radeon side is the RX 5600 XT, RX 5700, RX 5700 XT, Radeon VII, RX 6800, and RX 6800 XT. The very latest open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers were used for this testing, which does incorporate the recent driver optimizations. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan test cases were conducted. The GPU power consumption and GPU core temperatures were also monitored on a per-test basis.

Sysmon – A Graphical System Activity Monitor for Linux

Sysmon is a Linux activity monitoring tool similar to Windows task manager, was written in Python and released under GPL-3.0 License. This is a Graphical visualization tool that visualizes the following data. By default distribution like Ubuntu comes with a system monitor tool, but the drawback with the default monitor tool is it does not display HDD, SSD, and GPU loads. Sysmon adds all the features to a single place similar to the Windows Task Manager.

Kubuntu 20.04 LTS Review: The Familiar Operating System

Here's my review on Kubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa. Two years ago I call it friendly computing, now in 2020, I call it familiar operating system for everyone. We have so many good news with Kubuntu today and let's go, I hope you enjoy my review. Kubuntu 20.04 has a lot of benefits and a little of issues. I believe it is a familiar operating system most computer users can afford, by purchasing real Kubuntu laptops or by installing manually, you can push your computing for daily purposes, teaching and graphic designing quickly and comfortably. To complete everything, let's not forget it is a Long Term Support edition which will receive Ubuntu-based updates for five years until 2025 and desktop-based updates until 2023. Win-win solution, nice to everybody, that's Kubuntu Focal for you. That's my review.