Raspberry Pi's Linux-Based PIXEL Desktop Now Available For PC and Mac (betanews.com) 50
From a report on BetaNews: If you own a Raspberry Pi, you're probably familiar with PIXEL. The desktop environment is included in the Raspbian OS. The Raspberry Pi Foundation describes PIXEL as the "GNU/Linux we would want to use" and understandably so. It offers a smart, clean interface, a decent selection of software, the Chromium web browser with plug-ins, and more -- and from today it's available for PC and Mac. The version of Debian+PIXEL for x86 platforms is described as "experimental" but having taken it for a spin, it seems pretty stable to me. To run PIXEL on your PC or Mac, download the image, burn it onto a DVD or flash it onto a USB memory stick, and boot from it. The desktop environment will load ready for use.
In case you're wondering... (Score:1)
It's basically LXDE reskinned to look more like GNOME 2.32 with some pretty icons.
just another DE (Score:1)
Slashdotted (Score:1)
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Torrent is available here :
https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/pixel_x86/images/pixel_x86-2016-12-13/
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Slashdotted? hahahaha, you're funny!
Re:Still not the year of the desktop on Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as IBMs computer monopoly was disrupted, but not in a way anyone (at the time) expected. These nuisance "toy" microcomputers came along. They were under IBMs radar because they were not a threat. Just as Linux was under Microsoft's radar for a long time. Before long, a manager could buy, within their own purchasing authority an Apple II with VisiCalc and have it on their desktop -- without involving any of the mainframe people and the attendant hassles of dealing with them. When IBM introduced their PC they thought there was a market for maybe a couple million units. Little did they know that a de-facto standard of clones would unleash a huge software industry that would drive the need for more of these cheap "toy" computers. And you know the rest. Those "toys" now dominate the industry and then formed the basis of large data centers full of hardware derived from these "toy" computers.
Disruption sometimes arrives in forms you don't expect. Microsoft was also quite unprepared for Android and still hasn't found an effective response.
Microsoft stated that the reason for the Linux on Windows subsystem was to attract developers back to Windows. WTF? A direct admission that open source was more attractive to developers? Yet in all the innovative things I've seen developers present in public, they largely seem to be running open source -- even if on Mac hardware.
Re:Still not the year of the desktop on Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
>the GPL's viral nature when involved with proprietary source code
What does that have to do with anything? If you're modifying the desktop software itself, or other parts of the OS, then yes, you need to give back your modifications, you can't simply claim 1,000,000 man-hours worth of code as your own because you added another 10 with something clever in it.
But if you want to make an application that runs on the OS, then you have no problem. You can even use most of the platform libraries which are under the LGPL, which explicitly grants the right to link to them from proprietary software.
Any lawyer that simply issues blanket advice of "stay away from the GPL" isn't worth their salt, they've just proven that they can't even be bothered to read to read the license, or lack the software-domain expertise to be able to understand it (in which case you really shouldn't be consulting them about anything software related). Now, if they said "Don't even look at GPLed code", that would be far more understandable - but when you're developing for a proprietary platform you wouldn't even have the option to look at the analogous code in the first place.
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if they said "Don't even look at GPLed code", that would be far more understandable
Not really. The learning aspect of studying Free software is never bound by viral licensing. See: Freedom 1. [gnu.org]
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Quite true. But looking at the code opens the possibility of accidental infringement, hence clean-room reverse-engineering of proprietary software, where the folks doing the reverse engineering never type a single line of code for the re-implementation.
And of course there's also the perpetual temptation to simply cut and paste - it seems like a great many developers have trouble with the idea that just because you can look at the code doesn't mean you can reuse it as you see fit. Or maybe it's a managemen
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I should also further clarify that I'm talking about your average "What's the GPL?" development house, where "Don't look at the code" is a huge step up from "don't use the programs or link to the LGPLed libraries"
If you're actually looking to work more closely than that with GPLed software (without GPLing your own work), then it's probably worth investing in a lawyer who's already familiar with it, as well as engaging in systematic developer training, as there truly are a lot of grey areas in the license, i
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You don't need a lawyer, it's a pretty simple rule: GPL is designed to keep code free and open.
If you plan to share your code, consider using/linking GPL. If not, don't use any GPL code in your project/product.
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All of Adobe's suite (Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere), Avid's suite (including ProTools, Sibelius, etc.), Imagineer's Mocha, The Foundry's NUKE suite, all of Autodesk's offerings, are all desktop applications I use daily (obviously not every single application in every single suite). Some certainly exist and work well on Linux, some don't, my point is merely that the range of desktop applications encompass more than Office suites, with much of the functionality not really translatable to online/cloud.
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Most of those are unknown to the general public, and we can see the same pattern here. To my dad, Linux=Ubuntu, because that's something he heard somewhere, even though I installed Linux mint on his computer. And he's still r
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mint is ubuntu with a different set of skins
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hmm, while I get your point, I think that's not quite fair. I've been a user of Mint for a while, then went back to Ubuntu when Ubuntu Mate came into play. Now I'm back on Mint Cinnamon due to the fact that Cinnamon works great on a 4K HDPI laptop. I'm just not into KDE, really don't like Unity and Mate doesn't handle 4K well. Mint Cinnamon handles 4k quite well, has all the other advantages of Ubuntu and has an even better update system. So IMO it's a lot more than just a skin
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dollars to doughnuts if I put cinnamon on ubuntu and got the exact same theme, you couldnt tell the difference
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Mac is misleading here, though, since:
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PIXEL is a nice dist (Score:3)
Otherwise there are already lots of Linux dists and few of them need to cut as many corners as Rasbian to get it to run on a slow embedded device.
Re:PIXEL is a nice dist (Score:4, Insightful)
Development is exactly why they are releasing it. They want people to be able to build on the platform without having to have the hardware. Very smart move.
Incompetently written headline (Score:4, Insightful)
What an incompetently written headline: "desktop now available for PC and Mac" makes one understand that it is just a desktop environment running on top of Windows and macOS, replacing Explorer.exe and the Finder, but still the same operating systems underneath running the same applications. Which is not the case at all.
Google cease and desist? (Score:1)
So, who's taking bets on how long before Alphabet or Google sends them a cease and desist notice for using the PIXEL name? Surprised it hasn't happened yet.
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If they were using it first (I believe they were) then Google won't likely do this.
Additionally they are in a different space, one is a phone, one is an OS distro.
Though... :)
Can I run PIXEL on my Pixel to drive my pixels? it's pixels all the way down! (need an ARM derivative named Pixel to run it on
Re: Google cease and desist? (Score:1)
But they sent a cease and desist letter to the developers of the Linux distro Chromixium (now Cub Linux) because the name included the prefix "Chrom-", and suggested it was too similar to "Chrome". I have no idea if that would hold up in court, but they did send the letter. So, wouldn't be surprised if they send one in this instance too.
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That's not unreasonable since they have Chrome OS in the same broad category of product or service : software, and in the same specific category, operating systems.
A few ages ago there was another dist. named 'Lindows' that ended up dropping that name. Kind of like naming your sugar beverage Bepsi or Cauke.
seriously? (Score:1)
Who would honestly use this interface over the default MacOSX interface? C'mon guys, this isn't even news.