LIBREM 5 is shipping, Chromium opens up, and Ubuntu Web Remix offers a Chrome OS alternative

This month, we have the Librem 5 finally shipping to backers, a new open source Chrome OS alternative, Google being more open with Chromium, and tons of Linux gaming improvements.

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Ubuntu Web remix was announced, and it's an interesting project. It's billed as an open source alternative to Chrome OS, and employs Firefox instead of Chrome or Chromium, it also supports Android apps.

Linus Torvalds has expressed interest in the latest Apple M1 Macs, which, for those who don't know, are custom designed processors that will only be appearing in Apple's macs, and that are pretty freaking amazing in terms of performance and battery life.

AMD released their radeon RX6800 and 6800XT graphics cards. While these seem very powerful, tickling Nvida on their higher end models, the launch day situation is far from optimal on Linux.

The LIBREM 5, as a mass produced phoen, is now finally starting to ship to backers.

Tuxedo launched yet another Linux laptop, called the XMG Fusion 15

Proton, the company behind ProtonMail and ProtonVPN, has enabled early access to Proton Drive, their online storage offer.

There was an interesting article published after the announcement of the PinePhone KDE Community edition, which points out to critics that the phone might be weaker than what people are used to, and that it's not a flagship, but that it's also not the point.

Youtube-DL has been reinstated by Github after the project's repository had been taken down following a DMCA request.

I happened upon a very interesting article about OpenStreetMap, and how it's currently being used and contributed to by the biggest companies in the world, namely Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or Microsoft.

Long time viewers will know I'm not a big fan of Google, or of Blink, their web rendering engine, but it seems like Google is taking steps to please me. Well, probably not that, but at least they're opening up Chromium and Blink to more outside developers.

Lutris 0.5.8 was released, and despite the small version number, it's a huge improvement. This game manager is now better integrated with the lutris website that lets you download game installers, and games from 3rd party services no lmonger depend on a lutris install script, which means you can just install them as-is, even if they don't have one.

Collabora has now put their patches to the Linux kernel for review. This set of patches aim to help windows games work with better performance on Linux.

Wine 5.22 was released, with even more libraries converted to the PE format, improvements to the startup times by caching the fonts, better video playback, and 3DES cipher support

Nvidia will officially support Linux with its Geforce Now service, using Google Chrome.

Valve has finally updated the Proton container runtime in Proton 5.13. It means that overlays like ManGoHUD or post processing layers like vkBasalt couldn't run on proton games because of the way the game was contained and isolated from the core Linux system.

Firefox 83 was released, and it brings a big change: the Warp update to their Javascript engine is now on by default.

[princemj]

I'm So Excited, Gaming On Linux Is Really Getting Better And Better 🥳

[bestledisthe]

any OEM building a Linux laptop should be using AMD GPU 👀

[TheEmeraldArrow]

Don't change "oofers" please, we love it!

[master]

It's great how linux is alive and it improves rapidly! Really enjoyed the video thank you

[skoda]

Interesting fact: rs2009 is an 11 year old kid and has already created 2 awesome distros!

[MegaManNeo]

That Ubuntu Web Remix distro is something I wished to exist for a while now.
Hopefully the project says alive as I'd love to see how it performs on older ThinkPads or Chromebooks in the long term.

[RainbowCornet]

An "opto-mechanical keyboard" is a keyboard that uses optical switches. Optical switches use light sensors instead of physical contact pieces to detect actuation. It's a highly reliable mechanism that creates the potential for really smooth-feeling switches.

[JessicaFEREM]

Optomechanical means that the keyboard uses light beams like a mouse and not metal contacts like normal mechanical boards

[andrew]

As I watch these videos every month I feel like the Free Open Source ecosystem continues to grow exponentially. We all were saying 2018 was "The year of Linux on the desktop" but based on how things are going I feel like it's only the tip of the iceberg. Back in 2017 I had an idea that GNU/Linux and other Open Source services will explode in popularity mostly in the years 2022-2025 because Windows software compatibility will be near perfect as well as Android app compatabilty. Looking now it may come sooner than later!

[jishnubiswas]

Lutiris update is sick dam i can see linux gaming rising .

[RedFenceAnime]

I get that OSM mappers have a feeling their space is being invaded by big corporations.
Because it's supposed to be a map made by local people, who know all the little things which google could never guess.
But to me this is a huge improvement. Let the mappers focus on touch-ups while the companies do all the legwork.
Also they're improving the FOSS project which you can use without their spyware apps.

[minhajd]

That 'oofer' spelling feels oof.

[cheaterman]

Been using Fx 83 for a while now, didn't realize they advertised the performance and resource usage improvements, but I can tell you I noticed them (and it all makes sense now). RAM usage almost cut in half here, browsing is generally snappier on battery (I massively underclock my CPU down to 900MHz), etc. Can't tell about stability yet, but to be fair Firefox pretty much never crashes on me (nor do individual tabs) so if that doesn't changes (didn't so far) we're good! It would be fun to see how Chrome/Chromium fares in my setup, haha - I have a huge persistent session with hundreds of tabs among 9 windows, I'd probably be swapping all over the place...

EDIT: (But I'm not trying Chromium, ain't nobody got 9 spare hours to compile the beast...)

[felipekinoshita]

i think webrender is enable by default on firefox 84 on linux! Great video Nick!

[kuhluhOG]

2:45 considering the supply shortage of these cards, I doubt they have any to do that themselves xD

[JustinCrediblename]

WHOA! FINALLY! THE SAME DAY THAT I SWITCHED TO LINUX!!

[mdavid]

I suspect the PC manufactures such as Dell, Lenovo, HP will develop computers with ARM processors ...seeing the performance of Apples M1. Lets hope they follow a standard.

[fakedeltatime]

I thought that AMD drivers on Linux were open source, so what's that story about?

[skoda]

Ubuntu Web Remix ÿ-ers a Chrome OS alternative

[dstinnettmusic]

Ubuntu Web Remix is from the same person who made the recent Ubuntu Unity remix.