Episode Details

Discussion

• Samsung’s Linux on Dex magically turns Android into Ubuntu 16.04 on high end devices. It’s another stab at convergence. Canonical tried with Ubuntu Touch, the project is now maintained by the UBports community. The Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign was propped up by corporate purchases, could big IT departments buy Dex in bulk?

• New Deepin’s out and boy does it look sexy in the screenshots. Compare with KDE Plasma or Elementary OS. Inspired by Mac OS but open source. The Chinese distro has been a focus of a ‘spyware affair’. Lenovo’s Superfish scandal. Red Star OS. Bloomberg’s spying hardware story.

• Mycroft have been raising ton of money and are hiring. It looks like the project is still going strong. They have investments from all sorts of places. The Mark I might not have been a serious competition to Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, but the Mark II is going to be better. Maybe it will even know what beans are. You can give it a try on a Raspberry Pi, Linux PC or an Android device as well. Mozilla’s speech recognition.

• Purism might be shipping the Librem 5 dev kits in December. The Librem 5 will be as much privacy friendly as their laptops are now.

• New Apple computers might or might not be able to run Linux. Apple might be completely switching to Arm. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been flirting with Qualcomm. Intel and AMD might be in hot water.

• Going ‘open source only’. Use Open Street Map instead of Google Maps. pCloud and NextCloud can replace Dropbox for cloud storage. Could we ditch propri