There are so many reasons to enjoy the Linux desktop. One reason I often state up front is the almost unlimited number of choices to be found at almost every conceivable level. From how you interact with the operating system (via a desktop interface), to how daemons run, to what tools you use, you have a multitude of options.
The same thing goes for web browsers. You can use anything from open source favorites, such as Firefox and Chromium, or closed sourced industry darlings like Vivaldi and Chrome. Those options are full-fledged browsers with every possible bell and whistle you’ll ever need. For some, these feature-rich browsers are perfect for everyday needs.
There are those, however, who prefer using a web browser without all the frills. In fact, there are many reasons why you might prefer a minimal browser over a standard browser. For some, it’s about browser security, while others look at a web browser as a single-function tool (as opposed to a one-stop shop application). Still others might be running low-powered machines that cannot handle the requirements of, say, Firefox or Chrome. Regardless of the reason, Linux has you covered.
Let’s take a look at five of the minimal browsers that can be installed on Linux. I’ll be demonstrating these browsers on the Elementary OS platform, but each of these browsers are available to nearly every distribution in the known Linuxverse. Let’s dive in.
GNOME Web
GNOME Web (codename Epiphany, which means “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something”) is the default web browser for Elementary OS, but it can be installed from the standard repositories. (Note, however, that the recommended installation of Epiphany is via Flatpak or Snap). If you choose to install via the standard package manager, issue a command such as sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser -y for successful installation.
Epiphany uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is the same engine used in Apple’s Safari browser. Couple that rendering engine with the fact that Epiphany has very little in terms of bloat to get in the way, you will enjoy very fast page-rendering speeds. Epiphany development follows strict adherence to the following guidelines:
Simplicity – Feature bloat and user interface clutter are considered evil.
Standards compliance – No non-standard features will ever be introduced to the codebase.
Software freedom – Epiphany will always be released under a license that respects freedom.
Minimal preferences – Preferences are only added when they make sense and after careful consideration.
Target audience – Non-technical users are the primary target audience (which helps to define the types of features that are included).
GNOME Web is as clean and simple a web browser as you’ll find (Figure 1).
The GNOME Web manifesto reads:
A web browser is more than an application: it is a way of thinking, a way of seeing the world. Epiphany’s principles are simplicity, standards compliance, and software freedom.
Netsurf
The Netsurf minimal web browser opens almost faster than you can release the mouse button. Netsurf uses its own layout and rendering engine (designed completely from scratch), which is rather hit and miss in its rendering (Figure 2).
Although you might find Netsurf to suffer from rendering issues on certain sites, understand the Hubbub HTML parser is following the work-in-progress HTML5 specification, so there will be issues popup now and then. To ease those rendering headaches, Netsurf does include HTTPS support, web page thumbnailing, URL completion, scale view, bookmarks, full-screen mode, keyboard shorts, and no particular GUI toolkit requirements. That last bit is important, especially when you switch from one desktop to another.
For those curious as to the requirements for Netsurf, the browser can run on a machine as slow as a 30Mhz ARM 6 computer with 16MB of RAM. That’s impressive, by today’s standard.
QupZilla
If you’re looking for a minimal browser that uses the Qt Framework and the QtWebKit rendering engine, QupZilla might be exactly what you’re looking for. QupZilla does include all the standard features and functions you’d expect from a web browser, such as bookmarks, history, sidebar, tabs, RSS feeds, ad blocking, flash blocking, and CA Certificates management. Even with those features, QupZilla still manages to remain a very fast lightweight web browser. Other features include: Fast startup, speed dial homepage, built-in screenshot tool, browser themes, and more. One feature that should appeal to average users is that QupZilla has a more standard preferences tools than found in many lightweight browsers (Figure 3). So, if going too far outside the lines isn’t your style, but you still want something lighter weight, QupZilla is the browser for you.
Otter Browser
Otter Browser is a free, open source attempt to recreate the closed-source offerings found in the Opera Browser. Otter Browser uses the WebKit rendering engine and has an interface that should be immediately familiar with any user. Although lightweight, Otter Browser does include full-blown features such as:
Otter Browser can be run on nearly any Linux distribution from an AppImage, so there’s no installation required. Just download the AppImage file, give the file executable permissions (with the command chmod u+x otter-browser-*.AppImage), and then launch the app with the command ./otter-browser*.AppImage.
Otter Browser does an outstanding job of rendering websites and could function as your go-to minimal browser with ease.
Lynx
Let’s get really minimal. When I first started using Linux, back in ‘97, one of the web browsers I often turned to was a text-only take on the app called Lynx. It should come as no surprise that Lynx is still around and available for installation from the standard repositories. As you might expect, Lynx works from the terminal window and doesn’t display pretty pictures or render much in the way of advanced features (Figure 5). In fact, Lynx is as bare-bones a browser as you will find available. Because of how bare-bones this web browser is, it’s not recommended for everyone. But if you happen to have a gui-less web server and you have a need to be able to read the occasional website, Lynx can be a real lifesaver.
I have also found Lynx an invaluable tool when troubleshooting certain aspects of a website (or if some feature on a website is preventing me from viewing the content in a regular browser). Another good reason to use Lynx is when you only want to view the content (and not the extraneous elements).
Plenty More Where This Came From
There are plenty more minimal browsers than this. But the list presented here should get you started down the path of minimalism. One (or more) of these browsers are sure to fill that need, whether you’re running it on a low-powered machine or not.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
PvP battles are finally on the way to Pokemon Go. Developer Niantic had previously teased that the highly requested feature was in the works, although it hadn't provided any details on when they would arrive or how they would operate. Now, the official Pokemon Go Twitter account has shared a new screenshot that gives us our first glimpse at them.
The image, which you can see below, should look immediately familiar to anyone who has played a mainline Pokemon game. It shows a rival player standing at the opposite end of a battle arena, with a designated spot for each trainer's Pokemon in the middle of the field.
Unfortunately, Niantic hasn't shared any more details about PvP battles beyond that screenshot, so we don't know how they'll be initiated or whether they'll use the same combat system as Gym and Raid Battles, which have you tapping the screen quickly to power up Charged attacks. It appears we won't have to wait too long to learn more, however, as Niantic says the feature will be added to the game "soon."
Niantic has been working on a number of new features for Pokemon Go this year. Earlier this summer, the developer rolled out friends lists and trading, while this month saw the arrival of Adventure Sync, a feature that allows the game to track your walking distance even when idle. Niantic is also testing a PokeStop nomination system, although that is currently only available to high-level players in certain parts of the world.
Pokemon Go's next Community Day kicks off on November 30. This time, the event runs through the entire weekend and brings back all of the featured Pokemon and special moves from previous Community Days. Niantic is also rolling out a new set of Field Research on December 1, which likewise brings back previously featured Pokemon and some popular tasks.
Koei Tecmo has been one of the biggest supporters of the Switch and it doesn’t appear as if it will be slowing down production on the hybrid platform any time soon. Following the announcement Dead or Alive Xtreme 3: Scarlet would surface on Nintendo’s latest system early next year, the Japanese company is now reportedly teasing a new game announcement for Switch, PlayStation 4 and PC via a new website, with the following line:
“The fated battle begins.”
The big reveal is scheduled for 6th December. As Gematsu notes, this announcement will take place in Japan many hours before the Video Game Awards has even started in the US. Given how this game will also be appearing on multiple other platforms, don’t expect to see any special Nintendo cross-overs like Hyrule Warriors or Fire Emblem Warriors. While you might have already convinced yourself it’s another announcement linked to the long-running Warriors series, some fans are speculating Ninja Gaiden could make a comeback.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 11-30-2018, 06:32 PM - Forum: Windows
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Minimizing trial and error in the drug discovery process
In 1928, Alexander Fleming accidentally let his petri dishes go moldy, a mistake that would lead to the breakthrough discovery of penicillin and save the lives of countless people. From these haphazard beginnings, the pharmaceutical industry has grown into one of the most technically advanced and valuable sectors, driven by incredible progress in chemistry and molecular biology. Nevertheless, a great deal of trial and error still exists in the drug discovery process. With an estimated space of 1060 small organic molecules that could be tried and tested, it is no surprise that finding useful compounds is difficult and that the process is full of costly dead ends and surprises.
The challenge of molecule design also lies at the heart of many applications outside pharmacology, including in the optimization of energy production, electronic displays, and plastics. Each of these fields has developed computational methods to search through molecular space and pinpoint useful leads that are followed up in the lab or in more detailed physical simulations. As a result, there are now vast libraries of molecules tagged with useful properties. The abundance of data has encouraged researchers to turn to data-driven approaches to reduce the degree of trial and error in chemical development, and the aim of our paper being presented at the 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is to investigate how recent advances, specifically in deep learning techniques, could help harness these libraries for new molecular design tasks.
Deep learning with molecular data
Figure 1: The chemical structure of naturally occurring penicillin (penicillin G) and its representation as a graph in a GGNN. The messages passed in the environment of a single node are shown as curved arrows, and the neural networks that transform the messages are shown as small squares. Repeated rounds of message passing allow each node to learn about its surroundings (gray circles).
Deep learning methods have revolutionized a range of applications requiring understanding or generation of unstructured data such as pictures, audio, and text from large datasets. Applying similar methods to organic molecules poses an interesting challenge because molecules contain a lot of structure that is not easy to concisely capture with flat text strings or images (although some schemes do exist). Instead, organic chemists typically represent molecules as a graph where nodes represent atoms and edges represent covalent bonds between atoms. Recently, a class of methods that have collectively become known as neural message passing has been developed precisely to handle the task of deep learning on graph-structured data. The idea of these methods is to encode the local information, such as which element of the periodic table a node represents, into a low-dimensional vector at each node and then pass these vectors along the edges of the graph to inform each node about its neighbors (see Figure 1). Each message is channeled through small neural networks that are trained to extract and combine information to update the destination node’s vector representation to be informative for the downstream task. The message passing can be iterated to allow each node to learn about its more distant neighbors in the graph. Microsoft Research developed one of the earliest variants of this class of deep learning models—the gated graph neural network (GGNN). Microsoft’s primary application focus for GGNNs is in the Deep Program Understanding project, where they are used to analyze program source code (which can also be represented using graphs). Exactly the same underlying techniques are applicable to molecular graphs.
Generating molecules
Figure 2: Example molecules generated by our system after being trained on organic solar cell molecules (CEP database).
Broadly speaking, there are two types of questions that a machine learning system could try to solve in molecule design tasks. First, there are discriminative questions of the following form: What is the property Y of molecule X? A system trained to answer such questions can be used to compare given molecules by predicting their properties from their graph structure. Second, there are generative questions—what is the structure of molecule X that has the optimum property Y?—that aim to invent structures that are similar to molecules seen during training but that optimize for some property. The new paper concentrates on the latter, generative question; GGNNs have already shown great promise in the discriminative setting (for example, see the code available here).
The basic idea of the generative model is to start with an unconnected set of atoms and some latent “specification” vector for the desired molecule and gradually build up molecules by asking a GGNN to inspect the partial graph at each construction step and decide where to add new bonds to grow a molecule satisfying the specification. The two key challenges in this process are ensuring the output of chemically stable molecules and designing useful low-dimensional specification vectors that can be decoded into molecules by the generative GGNN and are amenable to continuous optimization techniques for finding locally optimal molecules.
For the first challenge, there are many chemical rules that dictate whether a molecular structure is stable. The simplest are the valence rules, which dictate how many bonds an element can make in a molecule. For example, carbon atoms have a valency of four and oxygen a valency of two. Inferring these known rigid rules from data and learning to never violate them in the generative process is a waste of the neural network’s capacity. Instead, in the new work, we simply incorporate known rules into the model, leaving the network free to discover the softer trends and patterns in the data. This approach allows injection of domain expertise and is particularly important in applications where there is not enough data to spend on relearning existing knowledge. We believe that combining this domain knowledge and machine learning will produce the best methods in the future.
Figure 3: Example molecule optimization trajectory when optimizing the quantitative estimate of drug-likeness (QED) of a molecule after training on the ZINC database. The initial molecule has a QED of 0.4, and the final molecule has a QED of 0.9
For the second challenge, we used an architecture known as a variational autoencoder to discover a space of meaningful specification vectors. In this architecture, a discriminative GGNN is used to predict some property Y of a molecule X, and the internal vector representations in this discriminative GGNN are used as the specification vector for a generative GGNN. Since these internal representations contain information about both the structure of molecule X and the property Y, continuous optimization methods can be used to find the representation that optimizes property Y; the representation is then decoded to find useful molecules. Example molecules generated by the new system are shown in Figures 2 and 3.
Collaborating with experts
The results in the paper are very promising on simple molecule design tasks. However, deep learning methods for molecule generation are still in their infancy, and real-world molecule design is a very complicated process with many different objectives to consider, such as molecule efficacy, specificity, side effects, and production costs. To make significant further progress will require collaboration of machine learning experts and expert chemists. One of the main aims of this paper is to showcase the basic capabilities of deep learning in this space and thereby act as a starting point for dialogue with chemistry experts to see how these methods could enhance their productivity and have the most impact.
Pokemon Go Brings Back Six Legendaries For December's Field Research
December is almost here, which means Niantic will soon roll out a new batch of Field Research tasks for Pokemon Go. As usual, if you complete enough of these before the month ends, you'll earn an encounter with a rare Pokemon. This time around, however, the developer is giving players another chance to catch not one, but six previously featured Legendaries.
Each time you achieve a Research Breakthrough in December, you'll earn another chance to capture one of six Legendaries: Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Raikou, Entei, or Suicune. Each of these Pokemon was featured with previous Field Research tasks this year, making this a good opportunity to catch any of the ones you missed the first time around (or simply add more Legendaries to your collection).
The Legendaries aren't the only things returning to Pokemon Go in December. Niantic says it is also bringing back "some of the most popular Field Research tasks from past months." As before, you'll be able to acquire these by spinning the Photo Disc at different Poke Stops. In order to achieve a Research Breakthrough, you'll need to complete at least one Field Research task a day for seven days.
The new Field Research tasks are scheduled to roll out on December 1 at 1 PM PT / 4 PM ET. You'll have until then to complete your current slate of tasks and earn an encounter with Shedinja, the Bug/Ghost Pokemon first introduced in Ruby and Sapphire.
Pokemon Go's next Community Day celebration is scheduled to begin on Friday, November 30. This time around, the event will run through the entire weekend and bring back every featured Pokemon and special move from previous Community Days. Another Gen 4 Legendary, Cresselia, is also now available in Raid Battles and will remain there until December 18.
WayForward Joins Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night Development Team
In a recent Kickstarter update, it has been revealed WayForward will be assisting with the development of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. After a series of delays, Producer Koji ‘Iga’ Igarashi said the experienced team would help him realise his “vision” for the game, and would hopefully be able to make it even better.
“In consideration of their past achievements, WayForward will be helping the development team realize my vision for this game. Maybe I am even more excited than everyone else – with their help Bloodstained will become an even better game.”
He went on to reveal how WayForward had already started helping out and was currently trying to stamp out “really tough bugs” before the game is released.
The independent developer will join forces with ArtPlay and DICO. WayForward, as most Nintendo fans will know, is incredibly skilled when it comes to creating side-scrolling games and is best known for the Shantae series. Hopefully Bloodstained turns out to be just as brilliant, whenever it is released on the Switch in 2019. According to Iga, a launch date announcement should be sooner rather than later now that WayForward is helping out.
If you would like to experience Bloodstained right now, there’s an 8-bit spin-off titled Curse of the Moon, which was released on the Switch eShop earlier this year.
Are you anticipating the release of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night? Are you glad to hear WayForward is helping? Tell us below.
Teslagrad Receiving A Physical Makeover On Nintendo Switch
The platform puzzle game Teslagrad has already been released a few times digitally on Nintendo systems and now it will finally receive the physical treatment on the Switch.
Following its arrival in December last year, the art director on the Rain Games’ eShop release asked fans on Twitter which box art they would prefer for Teslagrad’s physical release. Take a look at both of them in the tweet below:
There’s currently no information about the publisher handling the physical release of this game, or when exactly it will arrive. In our review, we gave the Switch version of Teslagrad eight out of ten stars and said it was worth double-dipping for the portable iteration. It may even be worth purchasing a third time if you enjoyed it on previous occasions.
Will you be adding this game to your physical collection whenever it does arrive? Which box art do you prefer? Tell us below.
With the recent release of Fedora 29, Fedora 27 officially enters End Of Life (EOL) status on November 30, 2018. This impacts any systems still on Fedora 27. If you’re not sure what that means to you, read more below.
At this point, packages in the Fedora 27 repositories no longer receive security, bugfix, or enhancement updates. Furthermore, the community adds no new packages to the Fedora 27 collection starting at End of Life. Essentially, the Fedora 27 release will not change again, meaning users no longer receive the normal benefits of this leading-edge operating system.
There’s an easy, free way to keep those benefits. If you’re still running an End of Life version such as Fedora 27, now is the perfect time to upgrade to Fedora 28 or to Fedora 29. Upgrading gives you access to all the community-provided software in Fedora.
Looking back at Fedora 27
Fedora 27 was released on November 14, 2017. As part of their commitment to users, Fedora community members released about 9,500 updates.
This release featured, among many other improvements and upgrades:
GNOME 3.26
LibreOffice 5.4
Simpler container storage setup in the Fedora Atomic Host
The new Modular Server, where you could choose from different versions of software stacks
Of course, the Project also offered numerous alternative spins of Fedora, and support for multiple architectures.
About the Fedora release cycle
The Fedora Project offers updates for a Fedora release until a month after the second subsequent version releases. For example, updates for Fedora 28 continue until one month after the release of Fedora 30. Fedora 29 continues to be supported up until one month after the release of Fedora 31.
The Fedora Project wiki contains more detailed information about the entire Fedora Release Life Cycle. The lifecycle includes milestones from development to release, and the post-release support period.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 11-30-2018, 12:21 PM - Forum: Windows
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Redesigning the Office app icons to embrace a new world of work
Design is becoming the heart and soul of Office. Learn how we evolved our visual identity to reflect the simple, powerful, and intelligent experiences of Office 365.
Whoever said that nothing is more intimidating than the blank page probably never faced a redesign.
The last time we updated the Microsoft Office icons was in 2013, when selfies were new enough to become Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year and emojis were new enough to be considered buzzworthy.
Clearly, a lot has changed since then — including how people get things done.
Over 1 billion people from vastly different industries, geographies, and generations use Office. They work on different platforms and devices and in environments that are faster, more distracting, and more connected than ever before.
To support this changing world of work, Office is transforming into a collaborative suite that lets you work together in real-time from almost any device. We’ve infused our tools with powerful AI: you can get insights from data with less effort, write a paper using your voice, or make your resume using LinkedIn insights. We’ve also added totally new apps to the suite like our AI-powered meetings and chat service, Microsoft Teams. In the end, it’s great design that makes these experiences fluid and seamless.
As a signal to our customers, we’ve evolved our Office icons to reflect these significant product changes. We’re thrilled to share the new icons for Office 365 with you today and tell the story behind their creation.
Carefully crafted designs that honor heritage and welcome the future
From the get-go, we embraced Office’s rich history and used it to inform design decisions. Strong colors have always been at the core of the Office brand, and new icons are a chance to evolve our palette. Color differentiates apps and creates personality, and for the new icons we chose hues that are bolder, lighter and friendlier — a nod to how Office has evolved.
We also used gestalt principles to further emphasize key product changes. Simplicity and harmony are key visual elements that reflect the seamless connectivity and intuitiveness of Office apps. While each icon has a unique and identifiable symbol, there are connections within each app’s symbol and the collective suite.
Flexible visual systems that work across platforms, devices, and generations
Today’s workforce includes five generations using Office on multiple platforms and devices and in environments spanning work, home, and on the go. We wanted a visual language that emotionally resonates across generations, works across platforms and devices, and echoes the kinetic nature of productivity today.
Our design solution was to decouple the letter and the symbol in the icons, essentially creating two panels (one for the letter and one for the symbol) that we can pair or separate. This allows us to maintain familiarity while still emphasizing simplicity inside the app.
Separating these into two panels also adds depth, which sparks opportunities in 3D contexts. Through this flexible system, we keep tradition alive while gently pushing the envelope.
Human-centered designs that emphasize content and reflect the speed of modern life
We all know modern life is faster and more connected: we’re living in it. Office supports this by making it fast and easy to express ideas, collaborate with others, and stay focused and in the flow. It’s why Office apps compose together, enabling users to open PowerPoint or Excel beside conversations in Teams or Outlook.
To reflect this in the icons, we removed a visual boundary: the traditional tool formatting. Whereas prior Office icons had a document outline for Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet outline for Excel, we now show lines of text for Word and individual cells for Excel. By focusing on the content rather than any specific format, these icons embody the collaborative nature of the apps they represent.
Similarly, we’ve changed the letter-to-symbol ratio. Traditionally, the letter occupied two-thirds of the icon, and the symbol took up one-third. We’ve changed this ratio to now emphasize the symbol because while the letter represents the tool itself, the symbol speaks more to people’s creations.
Being part of the design community
Our new icons will begin rolling out across platforms in the coming months, starting with mobile and web. They are the result of many iterations, a lot of research and testing, and plenty of late nights and weekends. They’re also part of an ongoing journey. As designers, we love the creative community’s ability to inspire each other and create momentum, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.
Target may be ready to concede and enable Apple Pay at retail
By Roger Fingas Thursday, November 29, 2018, 06:48 pm PT (09:48 pm ET)
One of the biggest U.S. retail holdouts for Apple Pay, Target, may be preparing to launch official support at its stores in the near future.
The technology is already working at the Metreon location in San Francisco, some posters on Twitter have claimed. Another noted that while they didn’t try Apple Pay, they were able to use a contactless card, which only works with NFC-enabled terminals.
Target has so far resisted not just Apple Pay but any NFC-based mobile payment option for its stores. Shoppers can use Apple Pay in the Target iOS app, but at retail the closest equivalent is a scannable barcode in the app.
The Twitter anecdotes were first highlighted by 9to5Mac.
It is possible that the Metreon store has simply enabled NFC by accident, but merchants will often test Apple Pay on a small scale before official rollouts. Target has also been under public pressure to support the platform, given the popularity of the iPhone and Apple Watch in the U.S.
Target has some 1,850 stores nationwide, and is where many Americans do weekly shopping for clothes, groceries, and other necessities. It also sells some Apple products, such as iPhones.
