Linux, Alternative OS, & Retro Computing News - Sep 3, 2022

Date:
Sat, 03 Sep 2022 23:35:47 GMT

Description:
Thunderbird fork to improve quality, convert Arch to AppImage, & Serenity OS tackles... Emoji?

FULL STORY ======================================================================

Behold! The most important news stories of the week! How much time did it take for an open source alternative to be made?

This is a rather interesting chart. Put together by Andr Staltz , this chart takes a number of popular, proprietary pieces of software and then measures how long it took for a viable, open source alternative to be produced.

I cant firmly attest that all of the data is correct but, at first glance, at least some of it is.

The author then goes on to plot out the data showing how quickly open source alternatives are made over time. The results are both fascinating and expected.

As time goes on open source alternatives to proprietary systems are being
made at an ever-increasing speed. It would be interesting to add some additional projects here to get some more data points AmigaOS, MS Windows, etc..

I highly recommend reading the full article for all of the details.

Betterbird 91.13.0 released on 22nd August 2022

I was alerted to the Betterbird project by a member of The Lunduke Journal Community , and it seems worth a look. From the project description:

Betterbird is a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird , Thunderbird on steroids, if you will. Betterbird is better than Thunderbird in three ways: It contains new features exclusive to Betterbird, it contains bug fixes exclusive to Betterbird and it contains fixes that Thunderbird may ship at a later stage.

To further explain the reason for Betterbird existing, the project provided this example:

Based on the current situation in version 102, a look at quality assurance,
or lack thereof, is appropriate. Thunderbird has never had an organised quality assurance team, they let the product ripen at the customer site, at worst causing data loss like for version 102. The 102 release with mbox and MSF corruption causing data loss and deleted MSF files was nothing short of disastrous.

The Betterbird team isnt exactly wrong here. Ive used Thunderbird for many years (well over a decade) and I can recall several instances of serious bugs in Thunderbird causing significant loss of data for me, personally. Testing and QA has been a noteworthy problem with Thunderbird for a very long time.

Betterbird just released their latest version (91.13.0) for Linux, Windows, and Mac. And, when you look at the chart of features added (and bugs fixed) in this fork of Thunderbird it certainly looks compelling.

New script can convert Arch packages to AppImage .ISOs

Im a big fan of AppImages single .ISO images that contain a piece of software, and all of the necessary dependencies to run it on a reasonably modern Linux system. But a big issue is making them. While some tools exist to aid in the packaging of AppImages, the process hasnt exactly been automatic.

A new Python script entitled arch2appimage gotta love on-the-nose naming fixes this issue by taking an Arch package (such as from the AUR) and auto-magically turning it into an AppImage. Dependencies and all.

The resulting AppImage should then, in theory, run on any semi-modern Linux distribution.

Very, very handy.

The Serenity OS project tackles Emoji?

The Serenity OS project has tackled yet another item that nobody was quite expecting: Emoji. If you go to emoji.serenityos.net you can see a full grid of the standard (UTF-8) emojis and watch as the Serenity OS crew recreates
all of them in a low-res, pixel art, open source style.

Why? Who knows! But I rather dig that theyre doing it! Itll help emojis to fit in a bit nicer on systems with more 1990s style interfaces. Like
Serenity OS. Which is probably why theyre doing it. ;)

At last check they had recreated 772 of the standard set of 1853. With progress moving crazy fast much like everything else this team tackles.

Sure. Why not!

The Lunduke Journal Community About the Lunduke Journal Subscriber Perks

The Lunduke Journal Weekly Schedule:

Monday - Computer History
Tuesday - Computer & Linux Satire
Wednesday - Podcast ( Subscriber Exclusive )
Thursday - Computer History ( Subscriber Exclusive )
Friday - Wildcard day! Anything goes!
Saturday - Linux, Alternative OS, & Retro Computer News Article
Sunday - Linux, Alternative OS, & Retro Computer News Podcast Share
Subscribe now





======================================================================
Link to news story: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-alternative-os-and-retro-computing-2d6


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 (Linux/64)
* Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100)