trying out some new (to me) software

A couple of apps I'm testing in Linux appear to be winners. Time will tell.

DeaDBeeF, which I mentioned in a post last month, seems to have quickly replaced Audacious as my favorite music player for Linux -- although it's a close call. DeaDBeeF might be the best fit for me, but I'm keeping Audacious installed, as it's definitely worth keeping as well.

I prefer a lightweight audio player over a media player (I don't normally bother with video, etc.). I've gone with Audacious for the past few years, and I think it's generally considered to be the better of the two music players. 

Today I'm taking my first look at the Brave web browser (https://brave.com/). Although I've used a few different web browsers in Linux, most of my time's been spent with Firefox. I can't see myself giving up Firefox anytime soon. But Brave brings an interesting approach, and it seems fine here so far. I added it in Debian Buster, using these commands found at https://brave.com/linux/:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https curl

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg arch=amd64] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main"|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install brave-browser

This adds the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list and installs the browser.

Brave does seem to be faster than Firefox, but scrolling web pages is slow and clunky. I found something that helped somewhat: I brought up the Flags menu by typing brave://flags/ in the search bar, and then enabled "Smooth Scrolling". Better, but still not quite as quick and smooth as scrolling in Firefox.

I haven't had any issues yet with Brave doing what I think of as "normal" stuff. Happy with it so far.

not a fork!

One of the more interesting Linux distros out there: Void Linux (https://voidlinux.org/)

 

The Void Linux page at DistroWatch: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=void

And, check out the recent review by Jesse Smith: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20210329#void 

I'm very tempted to try installing and using this distro. My next big project, maybe!

cool date

Lucky day, or what? Today's date:  4/3/21

change can be good

I'm testing out the deb822-style format for control files used by apt, replacing the older one-line-style format used in the sources.list file. I couldn't find any "official" Debian documentation on this topic except for what's contained in man sources.list (see https://manpages.debian.org/buster/apt/sources.list.5.en.html).

I did find a couple of pages online that helped a bit:

"How to use the new DEB822 apt format on Ubuntu" - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-the-new-deb822-apt-format-on-ubuntu/

"Explanation of the DEB822 Source Format" - https://repolib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/deb822-format.html


I tested the new format in Debian Buster. Here are the lines I was using in the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ buster-updates main contrib non-free

I renamed the sources.list file with the following command:

$ sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list-bkup

Then I created the new file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-sources:

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources

The contents of the debian-sources file:

Types: deb
URIs: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/
Suites: buster buster-updates
Components: main contrib non-free

Types: deb
URIs: http://security.debian.org/debian-security
Suites: buster/updates
Components: main contrib non-free

Finally, I ran the following to make sure everything worked correctly:

$ sudo apt update


Users can decide for themselves if they like the newer format or prefer to stick with the older one. I think the deb822 format makes it a bit easier to see, at a glance, how things are set up.