James'Techblog

  XFCE, a very old and lightweight desktop environment, is a flagship of many distributions including Manjaro, Lite, and others. XFCE has always had this touting for being medium to lightweight on lower spec hardware and beyond. XFCE comes with many of its own applications and settings managers and is stable and never gets in a hurry to update and change, that said, the latest release has many new improvements and features to the interface. It brings a new mimetype viewer/editor in default applications menu, a new icon set by default, many improvements to the panel and some performance improvements to the overall compositing of the desktop. Power management has seen some improvements expected to improve battery performance and life on mobile hardware. The panel includes more granular controls and new toggles for things that included a checkbox before. There is a new dark-mode feature for the xfce panel that should help blend with matching wallpapers and help with eye strain. Arch Linux

  Vivaldi web browser, a browser founded by Vivaldi Technologies and the co-founder of the old Opera browser, has recently released a snapshot in their 3.5 branch before final which has the technical preview build of a email client and feed reader. The work for these implementations is on going and should be in the next final release slated for sometime later this year or towards January of next year. Vivaldi promised the offering in the beginning with one of their first desktop previews ever. Vivaldi said that in a future release they would implement it, but at the time they didn’t even have the stand alone web mail yet. Vivaldi’s email started as web mail and users could test it without having the browser installed. Web mail is still available, but now you can access the same mailbox in your vivaldi browser. The email client, while robust, still has a few kinks to work out and this process will be on going for some time, however, it is currently usable with the likes of Fast Mail and

  Microsoft, the company behind Windows and Xbox are distributing their new Edge built on Chromium engine cross platform. Just recently while browsing my usual tech news sites, I found an article stating that Edge is coming in October of 2020 to Linux as a preview release before the final. Microsoft already had an Edge built on their IE Trident engine, but it was losing in marketshare and failing miserably as an everyday browser. No one was using it, it had sparse plugin and extension support and many were only using it to download Google Chrome. Since Chromium is open source and full of compatibility, it makes sense to use an already established engine with so much support to back end their browser as they focus solely on the UI experience moving forward. Microsoft didn’t stop there though, they also work with Google on the open source Chromium code to make it better suited for their needs as well. In this new iteration of the browser they promise to offer better plugin and extension

  Linux is inherently more secure than other operating systems by the wide range of permissions that it uses for each individual file. Most new users who install Linux on their desktops will do so in a way that their default user has access to the Wheel group. The Wheel group manages things like installing to and uninstalling from as well as system configurations using sudo privilege. It does this in a way that is secure. Normally the user won’t directly be able to access these services without typing sudo or super user do. Sudo tells the shell that the user is requesting elevated privilege directly and asks for the sudo password found in the passwd file. Sudo also suggest switching a user from the normal group level of User to Wheel, but unless the user’s name is already in the Wheel, the user will not be able to gain root access anyway, not even with a password. This type of access control prevents many user apps from gaining access to Kernel space memory and control. In Linux, each

  EFI or secure boot, has long been a bit of a mixed bag with Linux. Linux isn’t like proprietary OSes that get signed to boot directly with Secure Boot enabled in the Bios firmware. Secure Boot is a security feature written into BIOS for the purposes of Microsoft to only allow signed software to boot. This is meant to in theory at least, limit rootkits and malware from handling startup of the computer. This did workout to be a ploy for Microsoft to monopolize as systems with this turned on would only work with Microsoft signed OSes. Ubuntu does have a key that allows it to boot, however, getting the OS to work after installation can be a task without taking some precautions first. Many people will have to manually partition their drives in a way required for secure boot. Linux installers will typically assume you want your drive formatted to EXT4 or some variant of EXT that is typically used by Linux. Secure Boot enabled will sometimes prevent Linux from booting this way and so it’s n

  Using Brave for over a week now, I can safely say that this browser is one of the best open sourced pieces of software for viewing the web that I have ever used. It’s lightning fast and is pre-configured for people who are new to the internet or are wanting to learn bit currency. Brave uses BAT tokens to pay both creators and users alike with a Brave Rewards feature that can be set to automatically contribute to preferred creators while using the users’ wallets. Brave browser strips advertising scripts and trackers from web pages, but with rewards enabled, will occasionally send you ad notifications in the browser itself which when clicked will take you to a page for that ad and will add BAT tokens to your account. Brave has recently released their sync 2.0 which is touted to be much more comprehensive than their older synchronization function. This sync now allows users to sync not only bookmarks, but also history and passwords as well. Brave doesn’t use google synchronization as it