today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 17, 2023

• FSF Blogs: Parents, domestic violence victims, lawyers: Read about people who protect their privacy with free software

• Best 20 KDE Plasma Themes for Everyone

  A fresh list of stunning KDE Plasma themes for your awesome KDE desktop. KDE Plasma is a popular and highly customizable desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems. One of the key features that users love about KDE Plasma is its ability to transform its appearance using themes.

• 100 Days to Offload – take off

  So, I’ve been procrastinating instead of jumping into the 100 Days To Offload bandwagon. This is something I’ve contemplated for a long time, so it is a bit ironic that I failed to get started. The idea is to just write, and that is what I intend to do from now on.

  Hopefully the 100 posts during a year means that I finally get into a habit of blogging. It’s been a very on and off thing for me, but I want it to be a part of my routine.

  As a part of this, I’ll probably expand a bit on what I cover in this blog. The title is Life of a Developer, and my life has been quite dramatic over the past couple of years, so I’ll try share a bit about that.

• New Chinese language PETs

  Forum member icake has created these for EasyOS:

  https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=95296#p95296

  That's great!

  I have added them to the "oe-kirkstone" repository, installable via PKGget. You can also get them directly:

  http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/packages/pet/pet_packages-kirkstone/

• WPS Office for Linux Gets New Look, Now Supports Ubuntu 22.04+ [Ed: But it is proprietary software; use LibreOffice with ODF instead.]

  A new version to the free (but not open-source) WPS Office is available for Linux. It’s been an age since I last mentioned WPS Office on this blog. The main reason for this is I don’t use office software (and if I even need to, LibreOffice suffices). But I am not everyone; WPS Office has its fans – so this post for is for them, and for those interested in alternative Linux office suites.

• Towards HTTPS by default [Ed: Mass surveillance company pretends to value privacy, imposes outsourcing of "trust" to itself]

  For the past several years, more than 90% of Chrome users' navigations have been to HTTPS sites, across all major platforms. Thankfully, that means that most traffic is encrypted and authenticated, and thus safe from network attackers. However, a stubborn 5-10% of traffic has remained on HTTP, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on or change that data. Chrome shows a warning in the address bar when a connection to a site is not secure, but we believe this is insufficient: not only do many people not notice that warning, but by the time someone notices the warning, the damage may already have been done.