Desktop Software: Thunar 4.16.4, Kate Themes, and XDG

• Thunar 4.16.4 Is Released

  The latest version of the Thunar file manager for the Xfce desktop environment has six bug-fixes and updated translations for four languages.

• Cross Platform Light & Dark Themes and Icons

  On the most Unices that use X11/Wayland and therefore are capable of running the full Plasma Desktop the state of light & dark themes and the accompanied icon themes is really good for KDE Frameworks based application. Just take a look at these two screenshots of a light and dark mode Kate running on GNU Linux/X11 & Plasma Desktop.

• Task-based menus for a file

  Just throwing this out for wider talk perhaps. I have been silently watching a list called xdg@lists.freedesktop.org. Now the list talks about freedesktop standards which basically is trying to have some sort of standards that all desktop environments can follow. One of the discussions on the specific list shared above is and was about ‘New MimeType fields in .desktop’ . It is a fascinating thread with many people giving loads of interesting view points. If you are into desktops even casually, you would enjoy the discussions thoroughly. [...] There are also lot of banking stuff that we cannot do on free software, especially in India as lot of powerful proprietary interests are there which make sure that no public API’s are available, or even if there is, it would be something half-done or after back and forth, they say, this is just for show, as had shared last year. I would probably add another section later to talk about it. From what little I know, in Europe the law mandates that there are public API’s not only for banking but wherever public money (read taxpayer money) is involved. Again, not all countries, but some more than others. At least, that is what I had seen over the years.

How to visualize complex data on Linux

You’ve probably heard of Elasticsearch – the search engine that enables you to index and then quickly search through your data. You may have created a few visualizations in Kibana, the GUI for Elasticsearch, pointing and clicking your way through the sleek interface. What you may not have used is a lesser-known visualization plugin called Timelion. Timelion is a fantastic visualization creation tool that makes it possible to write out your queries in its simple and powerful expression language to display graphs. It’s used for displaying time-series data such as population growth or hits to your website.

Btrfs Will Finally "Strongly Discourage" You When Creating RAID5 / RAID6 Arrays

For a number of years it has been known that the Btrfs RAID5 and RAID6 code is potentially unsafe and not nearly as mature as the native RAID support found in this Linux file-system for other levels. Finally now we are seeing the Btrfs user-space programs warn the user when attempting to create such Btrfs native RAID 5/6 configurations. There have been improvements to the Btrfs RAID 5/6 code in recent years but still it's not nearly as well off as the RAID 0/1/10 support. On the Btrfs Wiki there has been information on the RAID 5/6 status and the implementation's current shortcomings. But if you don't read the Wiki or past news articles about the iffy Btrfs RAID 5/6 code, you might not know about it... So finally in 2021, the Btrfs user-space programs are warning the user.

Glibc 2.34 and Going Beyond GNU Core Utils

• Glibc 2.34 Will Provide More Helpful Linker Diagnostics - Phoronix

  With the exciting "HWCAPS" feature of Glibc 2.33+ allowing for optimized versions of libraries to be more easily deployed on Linux systems, diagnosing issues around it can be a bit more complicated but on the way for Glibc 2.34 is a welcome improvement to help in such issues. Merging this week for the dynamic link (ld.so) in Glibc 2.34 is a --list-diagnostics option. This new option will provide a system dump of information around the glibc-hwcaps sub-directory selection as well as IFUNC resolver operation and other CPU/system details. This can be useful for ensuring the desired HWCAPS path is actually being used on a given system and other information for diagnosing bugs or other problems with this more complicated handling but performance beneficial HWCAPS feature. The IFUNC "indirect function" resolver behavior is similarly important at run-time.

• Moreutils – An Extension of GNU Core Utilities

  As you may know, I am a huge proponent of the GNU Core Utilities. I believe the tools included are required learning for any new Linux admin. Although it offers important everyday commands such as touch, head, basename, tail and many more, it cannot provide a tool for everything. This is where moreutils comes in. It provides some additional utilities that every Linux Admin or DevOps Engineer could use. In this article we will show you how to install the moreutils package and give a brief description of it’s packages. [...] Below is a list of utilities included in the moreutils package. Some Linux distributions do not include all the utilities in their package. So you may or may not have all of the commands listed below.