I’m very familiar with you, haha. You keep popping up wherever I go these days. You’re everywhere. Maybe not quite as omnipresent as Neal Gompa.
I can think of a few Flatpaks that could fit on that list.
They dont include that? I thought they would…
It’s the same old story with codecs. Fedora would love to support as many codecs as possible, but H.264 is patent-encumbered so they can’t. They had hardware decoding support through Mesa a few years ago but then they…changed it.
Fedora Atomic wants to include the OpenH264 enablement package for Firefox inside the Fedora Flatpak eventually which will solve most of the problem as that is where people are playing H.264 most often.
So this is an issue with reproducability? I dont think so? Cisco builds the binaries for Fedora and it gets installed. The packages are not from their repos, but the typical sync issues would not occur on Atomic.
My understanding is OpenH264 is provided in binary-only format to Fedora because otherwise the royalty-free license cannot apply (i.e. Fedora can’t build it from source). Fedora only ships free software. OpenH264 is free software. But it’s binary-only. So they need to trust Cisco has built the binary correctly. I assume the reason they don’t include it by default is because the only way to trust it’s built from the same sources is to reproduce the build. Otherwise, I really don’t see the issue.
OpenH264 is not a part of the base system so you need to layer it on. OpenH264 doesn’t have support for High 10 Profile video which is fairly common off the web and is generally inferior to x264, I’ve found, but at least it’s something.
And the reason I mention “5 years” is because by then, most of the patents on H.264 will have expired. With the exception of the new ones from just a few years ago that no one really uses. Maybe Fedora can enable x264 in their ffmpeg build then and we can stop talking about it. I am so sick of talking about H.264.
I use Fedora kinoite-main from uBlue which is very close to upstream but fixes many issues for me.
Call it a personal challenge or whatever but I’m sticking to Fedora Silverblue for the foreseeable future. uBlue is almost certainly a better experience for most people.
Yeah for sure, I think for Intel and AMD too, hardware h264 for example.
That’s not true if you’re using Flathub packages. Flathub ships userspace Mesa drivers which enable hardware decoding for Intel and AMD GPUs even with H.264 and H.265.
but their base images have a ton of stuff I dont agree with (toolbox, missing random packages, too simplistic installer…)
uBlue does solve the two big issues with Fedora, which is codecs and proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Any other issues are tiny in comparison. I will say I prefer Toolbox to Distrobox, despite using Distrobox first. I certainly understand that’s an unpopular opinion and not one a lot of people share. It’s probably the same reason you use KDE and I use GNOME (most of the time).
I’ve always hated the Fedora installer. Does uBlue do something different?