November 27, 2019 MP3

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In our Innards section, we talk more about Linux Mint and Clem’s comments.

And finally, our listener feedback.

LINUX INNARDS:

Clement Lefebvre on Episode 321

oh.. mint tools and apps, cool

mintbackup should list all added software, not just software added through mintinstall

but it does so only in Mint, not in LMDE

it relies on a list of pre-installed software which is generated by ubiquity (that’s something live-installer doesn’t do atm)

you might remember Alberto Milone’s Envy

that’s how it started, then he was hired by Canonical and worked on drivers and integrating them with the OS

that’s jockey;

nowadays this is just embedded in something we don’t use in Mint called software-properties-gtk

anyway, ubuntu-drivers is the backend (libs and command line utilities) behind all that

and it’s used by two frontends, software-properties-gtk in Ubuntu and mint-drivers in Mint

in 19.3 mint-report will put a little warning icon in your taskbar if it detects drivers for you, so it won’t just be the welcome screen telling you about mint-drivers

although it’s integrated in Mint, timeshift is not developed by us

https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

GitHub

teejee2008/timeshift

System restore tool for Linux. Creates filesystem snapshots using rsync+hardlinks, or BTRFS snapshots. Supports scheduled snapshots, multiple backup levels, and exclude filters. Snapshots can be re…

I never tried to export a timeshift backup from one machine to another

I suppose it could work, but you’d need the entire timeshift dir… since backups are incremental

it’s probably better to ghost or disk image though

to move a window to another workspace: ctrl-alt-shift + arrow

alternatively, drag the window with the mouse, press arrow button

you can use expo too (ctrl-alt-up)

or there might be extensions using the edges.. but that’s usually used for tiling

open as root and open in terminal have been in Mint (in all DEs) since the very start

since we dev nemo, we just made these core features, but we also still add these to caja and thunar

regarding snap, the main issue is vendor locking. Imagine you’re developing software for windows and it happens to work more or less for mac and linux.

you don’t want to spend too much time testing it in various distros and you definitely don’t want to package it in a hundred different formats.

somebody comes to you and say “we’re Ubuntu, put your software in our store and it’ll work everywhere in every Linux distribution”

it sounds good and you don’t have to worry about it anymore

if there are commercial aspects you negotiate them with ubuntu, if there are integration aspects, Ubuntu tells you what to change

basically if there’s money involved it goes to Ubuntu, if there’s one theme and one DE to work with, it’ll be the ones used by Ubuntu

if you go here

https://www.spotify.com/ie/download/linux

Music for everyone.

Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need.

first you’re told Linux is a 2nd class citizen and you’re lucky Spotify supports it

second you’re told whatever distro you’re running is a 2nd class citizen and all they care about is Ubuntu.. but that’s ok cause you can install snap

they could have an appimage, they could have a flatpak repo, if they didn’t want to work on it, they could put it in flathub (or just link to it, since it’s already there

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.spotify.Client)

Flathub—An app store and build service for Linux

Find and install hundreds of apps and games for Linux. Enjoy GIMP, GNU Octave, Spotify, Steam and many more!

they could basically make it so a Fedora user or an Arch user isn’t constantly reminded they’re running a weird distro to access a software app they’re actually paying for

eventually if they think snap is great they’ll drop their APT repo and if we won’t have access to a .deb anymore

do you guys remember what happened when adobe delegated the Linux distribution of their flash plugin to google? for a while we were stuck with old broken versions in Firefox and the only format we were getting updates for was the one that was supported by chromium..

and then we found out it couldn’t play DRM, but the one in Chrome could

you basically do not want to rely on a commercial third party between you and the editor, there’s a huge conflict of interest.

as it turns out Flash died, good riddance.

(on Episode 320):

Linspire was one of the easiest ootb distribution for a while. When we developed mintinstall, to many people we became the first distribution with an “app store”. At the time Android and iOS already had one though, and Linspire already had CNR. You had to pay for it and Linspire wasn’t as popular, but it was an inspiration for us.

I also remember something had been done before Mint in PCBSD if I remember well…

ok I found it, mintinstall was introduced in Mint 3.0 Cassandra (2007), it was predated by Click’n’Run (Linspire) and a solution (I think it was PBIdir) in PCBSD.

it’s weird to look back after so many years :slight_smile:

and all of that was after Google and Apple had done their app stores in Android/iOS of course.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

Marc

David

Gordon

George from Tulsa

Topic for MintCast:

What, if anything, do these other distros offer that Mint doesn’t?

If it’s something like “newer software” how about a Mint user taking a Timeshift snapshot, trying the new install from PPA or otherwise, so if things don’t work out, safely reverting?

How about a guide to updating software versions within Mint, if that’s important to the user?

CHECK THIS OUT!

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Next Show: Nov 17, 2019 – 2PM central time

WRAP-UP:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …