Plus our take on the pending death of Flash, some great work by the Debian project & Mozilla updates us on Project Common Voice.

Sponsored By:

• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Ubuntu MATE 17.10 Alpha 2 — We’re not happy, proud, pleased or ambivalent to announce this alpha. No, not us. The is our most “Super” alpha ever and we’re ecstatic to present this fine release for your distro delectation. Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is brimming with new toys to play with.
• Uptake of Fedora 26 is really strong — It's already surpassed F24 and those of you still on F23.
• Boltron preview — Fedora’s Modularity Working Group (and others) have been working for a while on a Fedora Objective.
• openSUSE Leap 42.3 — “By avoiding major version updates in the base system as well as the desktops, the upgrade to Leap 42.3 is a rather unadventurous matter,” said Ludwig Nussel, openSUSE Leap release manager.
• The death of Flash — Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
• Some people don’t want it to die — Open sourcing Flash spec would be a good solution to keep Flash projects alive safely for archive reasons.
• Update on Debian Reproducible Builds Project — At the start of 2015 it was safe to say that Debian was fairly alone in the quest for reproducible builds, and a relevant number of developers were unconvinced by the effort's goals. Thankfully, this is not true anymore.
• More on Mozilla’s Project Common Voice — Today’s speech recognition technologies are largely tied up in a few companies that have invested heavily in them.

Plus we discuss the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey, the really fancy new trick Opus has pulled off in the latest release & more!

Sponsored By:

• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: June 23, 2017 — We’ve got hardware accelerated video decoding working in a Proof-Of-Concept using a GStreamer and VA-API pipeline. The result is 3% CPU usage to play an h264 4K 60FPS video on Haswell. 4K h265 HEVC is also playable but requires a Skylake or later processor.
• 2017 Linux Laptop Survey — So we've established this Linux Laptop Survey in conjunction with Linux stakeholders to hopefully gather more feedback that will be useful to many different parties -- this survey isn't just for our own benefit and enjoyment at Phoronix.
• Jolla Summer 2017: CEO's Update — It has been a while since our last update about the remaining Jolla Tablet refunds – we are committed to it and we will be progressing on it in a pace our financial situation permits us to do. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
• Mozilla launches Firefox Focus for Android — Like the iPhone and iPad version, the Android app is free of tabs and other visual clutter, and erasing your sessions is as easy as a simple tap.  
• Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView — Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView. Barbara Bermes, product manager for Firefox Mobile at Mozilla, told eWEEK.
• Project Common Voice — Project Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice recognition engine that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web.
• Opus 1.2 — Speech quality improvements especially in the 12-20 kbit/s range + Improved VBR encoding for hybrid mode + More aggressive use of wider speech bandwidth, including fullband speech starting at 14 kbit/s + Music quality improvements in the 32-48 kb/s range + Generic and SSE CELT optimizations + Support for directly encoding packets up to 120 ms + DTX support for CELT mode + SILK CBR improvements + Support for all of the fixes in draft-ietf-codec-opus-update-06 (the mono downmix and the folding fixes need --enable-update-draft) + Many bug fixes, including integer wrap-arounds discovered through fuzzing (no security implications)
• Comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 — Here's a comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 so you can hear for yourself how the quality has improved and how Opus now sounds in general. As an anchor (OK, and also to make us look good!), we've also included MP3 samples.