Wayland Buddies

We spend our weekend with Wayland, discover new apps to try, tricks to share, and dig into the state of the project.

Plus System76's new software release, and Fedora's big decision.

• System76 Blog — The New Firmware Manager — we’re excited to announce that you can now check and update firmware through Settings on Pop!_OS, and through the firmware manager GTK application on System76 hardware running other Debian-based distributions.
• pop-os/firmware-manager — Generic framework and GTK UI for firmware updates from system76-firmware and fwupd, written in Rust.
• Richard Brown on Twitter — Today I’m stepping down as openSUSE Chairman, leaving the Project in the fine hands of the openSUSE board and it’s new Chair, @GeraldPfeifer.
• Approved: Fedora 31 To Drop i686 Everything/Modular Repositories - Phoronix — The FESCo group gave their formal approval today for permitting these i686 repositories to be removed beginning with Fedora 31
• Jupiter Extras: Chris and Wes React to LINUX Unplugged — Nothing is worse than your past self. So we play old clips of LINUX Unplugged and react.
• Scan for network vulnerabilities w/ Nmap - Linux Academy YouTube — With data breaches becoming so common, it's vital to be proactive in finding and patching severe vulnerabilities on our system. One of the free/open-source ways you can scan for these vulnerabilities is by using Nmap.
• How to copy directories with SCP recursively tutorial - Linux AcademyYouTube — When working with servers you will often find yourself in a situation where you need to copy files from one machine to another. You can package them into a tarball and then copy a tarball over to a remote machine and then unpack it there. This is not a bad option but you can also use SCP to copy the files as they are and preserve the directory structure, without the need for packaging.
• Linux Archives – Linux Academy
• What’s Taking Wayland So Long? » Linux Magazine — Over the years, the project’s goals have evolved, but more or less remained: the development of a simpler, more efficient, and more secure display server.
• pp3345/gnome-with-patches Copr — This repo contains gnome-shell and mutter builds based on the official Fedora ones with some additional patches (mainly to improve performance).
• rafaelmardojai/firefox-gnome-theme — A GNOME👣 theme for Firefox🔥
• Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator — Tilix is an advanced GTK3 tiling terminal emulator that follows the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines.
• GNOME 3.34 Works Out Refined XWayland Support For X11 Apps Run Under Sudo - Phoronix — This allows the X11 clients to now work from a different VT without any extra environment variables set besides the DISPLAY. In other words, the same user on the same system can now more easily run clients with XWayland thanks to this commit coming late in the 3.34 cycle.
• The MATE Desktop Is Becoming Quite Usable On Wayland Via Mir - Phoronix — The MATE desktop is seeing Wayland support thanks to Mir doing the heavy lifting. This is also becoming one of the leading examples of Mir's use-case following Canonical engineers re-tooling their display server with Wayland support after pulling back from their original design goals around Ubuntu Touch and mobile/convergence.
• Plasma/Wayland Showstoppers - KDE Community Wiki — This page tracks the Wayland showstoppers through out the stack .
• Wayland misconceptions debunked | Drew DeVault’s Blog — This article has been on my backburner for a while, but it seems Wayland FUD is making the news again recently, so I’ve bumped up the priority a bit. For those new to my blog, I am the maintainer of wlroots, a library which implements much of the functionality required of a Wayland compositor and is arguably the single most influential project in Wayland right now; and sway, a popular Wayland compositor which is nearing version 1.0.
• Flameshot — Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software.
• Auto Move Windows - GNOME Shell Extensions — Move applications to specific workspaces when they create windows.
• Ed Therriault on Twitter — @ChrisLAS I’ve been out of the loop for a bit as I’ve been focusing on work and family but I need to know what’s a good incremental backup solution that will use very little storage. I’ll be uploading them to google drive. Ubuntu server 19. Thank you for your time.
• seemoo-lab/opendrop — An open Apple AirDrop implementation written in Python
• anirudhajith/process-wallpaper — Shell and python scripts that set the desktop wallpaper to a word cloud of the most resource-hungry processes.
• Huge Survey of Firmware Finds No Security Gains in 15 Years – The Security Ledger — A survey of more than 6,000 firmware images spanning more than a decade finds no improvement in firmware security and lax security standards for the software running connected devices by Linksys, Netgear and other major vendors.