Canonical Announces Plex as a Snap, DuckDuck Go Reaches 30 Million Direct Searches a Day, Purism's Librem 5 Phone to Ship with GNOME 3.32 Desktop, Libre Computer Project Launches the La Frite SBC and Google Releases Oboe

News briefs for October 12, 2018.

Canonical yesterday announced that Plex has arrived in its Snap Store. You now can download the multimedia platform as a snap for Ubuntu, KDE Neon, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, OpenSUSE and Zorin. For more details, see the Ubuntu Blog.

DuckDuck Go, the privacy-focused search engine, has reached the milestone of 30 million direct searches a day. According to The Verge and Search Engine Journal, DuckDuck Go's market share is estimated to be .18%, compared with Google's 77% and Bing's 5%; however, DuckDuck Go's traffic is up 50% from last year.

Purism's Librem 5 phone will ship with the GNOME 3.32 desktop, which is scheduled for release March 13, 2019. Softpedia News reports that GNOME developer Adrien Plazas invites "GNOME and GTK+ app developers to adapt their applications to work both on their favorite GNU/Linux distribution and on the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone, which will use Purism's Debian-based and security-oriented Pure OS operating system by default." See also Adrien's blog post for more details on Librem 5 + GNOME 3.32.

The Libre Computer Project recently announced its new open-source, libre ARM SBC called La Frite. Phoronix reports the new 512MB model will ship for $5 USD, or you can get the 1GB version for $10 USD. In addition, "the $5 ARM SBC is said to be 10x faster than the Raspberry Pi Zero" and also includes real HDMI, Ethernet and USB ports. La Frite, the miniature version of Le Potato SBC supported by mainline Linux and Android 8, should be available in November. See the Kickstarter page for details.

Google yesterday released Oboe, a C++ library for creating real-time audio apps. According to the post on Packt, one of Oboe's main benefits is "the lowest possible audio latency across the widest range of Android devices". See the GitHub repository to get started with Oboe.

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.

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