Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011 , 6 months ago

I don’t see a problem with this business model. They’re doing work maintaining software they don’t want to maintain, so charging for it makes sense. It’s surprising to me that Windows doesn’t already charge a yearly subscription fee for OS upgrades.

Many people aren’t going to pay the annual fee and will keep using Windows 10 without the security patches anyhow, so obviously this will weaken a lot of people’s security, but, well… Microsoft needs to make money. And it’s not like they need to worry about their customers defecting to another operating system. You can’t just download and install macOS on an old Dell machine. If they’re going to buy a new computer, it makes sense to get a less expensive one than what Apple’s offering, ergo they’ll get a new Windows 11 computer.

And if they wanted to and could use Linux…well, they’d already be using it. Overall, I’m completely nonplussed about this announcement. If you weren’t going to pay Microsoft money, nothing has changed. If you need a longer support period, you now have an easy option. And hey, there’s always the chance Microsoft will backtrack and provide free updates anyway. Especially given the lack of details on pricing, it seems like they’re sounding out the idea rather than fully committed to deploying it.

Spectacle8011 , 6 months ago

One main reason I went back to Arch BTW is that there aren’t, contrary to the old self a declaration by Suse, that many software available for my use case, so I ended up with tons of ppa’s, sorry, Suse Vendors who relied on each others for libraries, and it eventually broke down my system when some stuff wasn’t available but was required, while some may be available from 4 different, private, repos.

This is the reason I abandoned both Fedora and openSUSE when I tried them. I like plenty about both of them but things are just simpler on Arch. Despite Arch having less software than most distributions, it tends to be the software I actually want or need to use. The few programs not present can be installed from the AUR. Writing new PKGBUILDs is simple and there is no bureaucracy.

Arch is a pain upfront but I’ve found it tends to save you time later on. It’s not without its downsides, though; the primary one being that I’m the one responsible for managing everything and there are plenty of things I don’t know.

Spectacle8011 , 6 months ago

I like them both. GNOME’s desktop metaphor is nicer but it can be replicated on Plasma with a few shortcuts. Plasma has a few niceties not present in GNOME. GNOME is prettier. Dolphin is a better file manager than Nautilus. GNOME programs don’t have a way of rebinding keyboard shortcuts.

It just depends on what I consider more important at the time.

Spectacle8011 , 6 months ago

GNOME changed the way I used desktops. Dolphin changed the way I used file managers.

I always set Nautilus to use one-click behavior, but it doesn’t have handles like Dolphin does. And Dolphin has a built-in terminal. And other niceties. I like Nautilus too. I think both desktops have some good ideas and I like to bring some KDE ideas over to GNOME and vice versa.

But if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that GNOME is much better designed than macOS.

Spectacle8011 , 6 months ago

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Spectacle8011 , 6 months ago

The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don’t live in India, so I don’t know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It’s the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn’t affected?

Spectacle8011 , 6 months ago

Does Unity support Wayland?

Nope. However, UnityX, a prototype desktop environment (which will be available as a variant of Unity once ready), will include Wayland support.

I realize the name was likely chosen for completely unrelated reasons, but I can’t stop laughing about UnityX being the only variant of Unity with Wayland support.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Maybe a different perspective could help?

YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn’t pay if the user hits “Skip”. Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.

I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It’s beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain’t free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it’s more friendly than Google search ads…

I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Installed KDE and GNOME at the same time. Ubuntu did not like that.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

No idea. It was the first time I ever used Linux. Ubuntu just booted into GRUB rescue mode after a month, and the only thing I can remember doing is installing another desktop environment. On Arch, I’ve had KDE and GNOME installed side-by-side for years now.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

What’s next? Hopefully, Microsoft won’t start injecting a poll at shutdown demanding to know why I’m turning my PC off for the day.

Well, if you decide to run Windows Server, I have news for you…

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Exchange.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

In fairness, it’s so there’s a log of why the machine was shut down. It’s for the sysadmins in charge rather than Microsoft. In practice, most people just choose “Other” as the reason so it’s fairly useless. I have no idea if there’s a way to turn it off, though.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Microsoft Exchange. For running an email server. It’s easily the most popular use for Windows servers.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Here’s why.

Because I like the 2-clause BSD license. I am not a fan of “copyleft” or forcing obligations on people in general. I want my software to be available for anyone who wants to use it.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

The GPL is a better choice if you want to make money from the software. With a pushover license, your competitors can extend the program and profit from it in a way you can’t because they aren’t required to give the changes back. The GPL evens the playing field. Of course, you often see the original company requiring a CLA so they retain copyright over all of the code.

On the other hand, it does enable possibilities that you would be very unlikely to get otherwise. For example, Cedega (formerly WineX) forked Wine when it used a pushover license and brokered deals with game companies to make the DRM compatible with WineX/Cedega. That meant you could play these games on Linux-based OSes with Cedega, but not Wine. I really wonder if it would have been possible to make Wine compatible with some of these DRM schemes otherwise. Consequently, however, Cedega could not incorporate any changes from LGPL’d Wine, as that would have required them to license Cedega under the LGPL, too.

That’s another issue. You can incorporate MIT-licensed software in GPL software, but you can’t incorporate GPL software in MIT-licensed software. So going with the GPL gives you more options. As SerenityOS is building everything from scratch, this isn’t an issue, but you can well see how it could be. The LGPL is far less disruptive to people who want to release their software under a pushover license. It only requires you give back any changes to the LGPL-licensed part, and does not cover other parts of your program. Personally, I really like the LGPL. It levels the playing field while being quite compatible. It’s not perfect either, of course.

It’s a tricky question, and there are no right answers. Ultimately, the decision is up to the developer and I can’t fault any choice, including the decision to use a proprietary license.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

That’s also my preference, but very few games are free software. And most of the games I want to play are encumbered with DRM or cost ten times as much to get DRM-free. Of course, I buy them DRM-free because the DRM doesn’t work with Wine, but if it worked with Cedega…well, I might re-evaluate.

The purpose of the GPL isn’t to force companies to pay up to get out of copy left.

That’s why it was created, but in practice, many companies make money by selling exceptions. See Cal.com and CKEditor5, for instance. I didn’t mention this at all in my comment, though, so I’m not quite sure which part you’re responding to. By “level playing field”, I meant that everyone can improve Sourcehut and sell a service with more features, but they need to release those new features under the same license, meaning they will make it back to Sourcehut proper. Selling exceptions isn’t the only way to make money from free software.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

The reasons are made clear on their roadmap.

The GTK3 port is done, and now they need to finalize the new extension API and improve their color space support (particularly CMYK). It would be nice if Wayland had a color management protocol extension standardized by then, but I don’t think it’s a blocker.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I’ve heard some artists prefer FireAlpaca to Krita. Is there anything it does better than Krita?

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Cheers. I use Krita myself, but I’ve heard people say “Krita is terrible; try FireAlpaca.” I think that might be because it has performance issues on other operating systems; I’m not in a position to test. It’s good to hear Krita is basically ahead on all fronts except learning curve. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see a Linux version. FireAlpaca advertises a Dark Mode, but I’m guessing it’s a paid-only feature.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I use both GNOME and KDE. I do have a system tray, but it’s for a single program: fcitx-mozc. If I didn’t need to build ibus-mozc from source, I would just use that. iBus IMEs get their own spot in the top right without needing appindicators. That being said, I don’t need the system tray either as I can just switch between Japanese and English with CTRL+SPACE. But it’s nice to have some kind of constant indication what IME I’m using.

On the subject of a dock, though, I love the way GNOME completely separates it from the workspace. It just takes up space and I don’t have any utility for it. Windows and macOS only allow you to hide the dock; not remove it completely. I’ve accidentally opened the dock by moving my cursor to the corner of the screen way too many times and it is sooo annoying. This never happens on GNOME because it’s just not possible.

Also I tend to think it’s been designed for people who are more comfortable using a keyboard. I’m mostly a mouse person.

That’s absolutely true, but you can navigate GNOME completely with a mouse. If you’re on a laptop, you can use the trackpad to flick between workspaces with three fingers. Every aspect of the GNOME desktop is navigable with the mouse, including the Activity Overview. GNOME’s workflow changed the way I use computers.

One thing I miss from KDE is GNOME’s tiling. KDE’s is far more inconsistent. But there are a lot of things I like more about KDE too. I use it in basically the same way as GNOME.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I wonder if the same is going to be true of Thunderbird. Thunderbird actually requires you use Mercurial to contribute at all, rather than managing both git and Mercurial.

That being said…it’s kind of odd to me how swiftly Mozilla of all companies/orgs is to embrace a code forge hosted by Microsoft for their main software. Surreal, even.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Aussies tend to be quite direct. It’s basically our natural state. I get how it can be perceived as hostile, but I don’t actually think Brodie is very abrasive. He seems like a pretty relaxed guy.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

What really needs to happen:

Flatpak packages should ask for every permission they need, and the user needs to approve every one of them.

Right now, we have this weird in-between state where some flatpak packages ship with limited permissions (like Bottles). That’s because every permission the package asks for is immediately granted. The user doesn’t get a chance to refuse these requests. This current model serves to make life more difficult for non-malicious flatpak packagers while failing to protect users from malicious packages.

Also, GNOME needs a Flatpak permissions center like KDE. You shouldn’t need to install a third party program to manage permissions.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

I don’t doubt it, but this is a good place to start.

This claim has interesting phrasing:

Adding X11 sandboxing via a nested X11 server, such as Xpra, would not be difficult, but Flatpak developers refuse to acknowledge this and continue to claim, “X11 is impossible to secure”.

If you look at the GNOME post, you’ll see they haven’t argued against including a nested X server at all:

Now that the basics are working it’s time to start looking at how to create a real sandbox. This is going to require a lot of changes to the Linux stack. For instance, we have to use Wayland instead of X11, because X11 is impossible to secure.

I’m not saying they haven’t refused to acknowledge this elsewhere, but it’s strange to point to this blog post which acknowledges that the sandbox is very much a work-in-progress and agrees with Madaidan that X11 is hard to secure.

Does Xpra provide better sandboxing than XWayland? If not, I think the Flatpak developer’s solution to this is: just use Wayland. And obviously, there’s plenty of room to improve with the permissions Flatpak does offer.

I did some searching on the Flatpak Github for issues and found that you can actually use Xpra with Flatpak, and the answer is “just use Wayland”:

• github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3833
• github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3684

---

This is also concerning:

As odd as this may sound, you should not enable (blind) unattended updates of Flatpak packages. If you or a Flatpak frontend (app store) simply executes flatpak update -y, Flatpaks will be automatically granted any new permissions declared upstream without notifying you. Using automatic update with GNOME Software is fine, as it does not automatically update Flatpaks with permission changes and notifies the user instead.

Source: privsec.dev/posts/linux/desktop-linux-hardening/#…

It’s great that GNOME Software notifies you when permissions change! I don’t use Flatpak enough to know, but I hope flatpak update notifies you too if you don’t use the -y option.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I don’t try explaining this stuff anymore. I’m extremely bad at it and I know most people will either not care or not care enough. And that’s fine. It’s easier to let people think I’m a luddite. I prefer to wait for them to ask me why I use technology differently than to preach to them, and most of the time, they don’t ask. It’s always easier to let people convince themselves than to try to convince them.

I tell them to install Signal and message me there, and if they don’t want to do that, they can SMS me. Signal is a better idea if they want faster responses as I rarely check my phone but do check Signal Desktop fairly regularly. I have tried to get KDE Connect working so I can respond to SMS more timely but it was annoying and I gave up.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I ran an iPhone for many years and never updated anything at all. The apps were updated automatically.

Edit: Ah, you’re talking about an iOS update. Forgive my lack of reading comprehension. Apps that have been automatically updated have been known to stop working, however.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I’m always worried about over explaining or sounding pendantic.

That makes two of us :)

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as o and not wo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:

• 大文字と小文字を無視する
• だいもんじとこもじをむしする

Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That’s the sanest suggestion (who’s with me?):

• ダイモンジトコモジヲムシスル

Of course, you’re kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don’t generally render unicode…so let’s go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

It doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It’s romanized as “Shi”. If you know your Japanese, you’ll know “Shi” is how you pronounce 死; or “Death”. The word is not usually written in Katakana, though. There’s also ツ, which is romanized as “Tsu”.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

KDE has an overview now too! It’s mapped to Super+W by default. And they’re continuing to make it fancier in Plasma 6.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

What non-AGPL software were you hoping to be compatible with fediverse software? Or am I misunderstanding why you want non-AGPL software?

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Every Dell laptop I’ve ever owned has had a key repeat issue. Mind you, this was an issue on Windows too. Otherwise, I bought a Dell Latitude last year and it has worked great.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I don’t work with music at all, so most of this update doesn’t mean much to me. However, it’s nice to see the export window was improved—I want my single-click behavior, damn it.

The telemetry is limited to update-checking and error reports. Distributions will disable update-checking because they already handle updating Audacity. Error reports need to be manually submitted. It’s possible that most distributions just disable networking altogether when building Audacity, if it even exists in their repositories at all. Fedora’s package is waaay out of date. Arch disables networking altogether.

Audacity has still instituted a CLA. This is quite worrying. But nothing has happened yet.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I should have specified that the Audacity CLA allowed Muse Group to relicense Audacity from GPLv2 to GPLv3. Yes, I agree with you that not all CLAs are bad. While you keep the copyright to all your contributions, because the copyright is assigned to them (? I’m not actually sure about this), they can relicense it. The CLA agreement.

You grant MUSECY SM LTD, an affiliate of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar, (“Company”) the ability to use the Contributions in any way. You hereby grant to Company , a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contribution and such derivative works.

There was quite a lot of confusion and outrage about this at the time, so I can’t recall whether Muse Group specifically said they wanted to include Audacity in Apple’s app store or this was given as an example of why the CLA could be beneficial. My rebuttal was this is not a particularly noble cause. There was also the argument that the FSF requires you to sign a CLA for its own projects so it can reserve the right to relicense it if it benefits the project. My rebuttal to this was…well, it’s the FSF. The day the FSF relicenses their software under a non-free license is the day they die.

All in all, I’m not worried yet.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

This is the kind of high-quality technical discussion I don’t understand a word of that rarely surfaced on reddit.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

That’s a great explanation! Thank you, I get it now. I always did wonder what exactly IPC was about. Yay for Rust in the kernel.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

This confused the hell out of me last month. You can install two different versions off fmpeg/gstreamer on Fedora. One version of ffmpeg—the completely free, patent-unencumbered version—is available in Fedora’s official repositories. This one does not include decoders for H.264 or H.265. You can still install OpenH264 from Cisco and use that to decode H.264 video, but there is no “free” way of decoding H.265 video. For that, you need to go to RPMFusion, which is not associated with Fedora. They ship the H.265 and AAC decoders, among other codecs that cannot be shipped without paying a licensing fee. RPMFusion is a third-party and they believe they can’t/won’t be pursued for patent infringement.

And all of that is great, but I installed ffmpeg from RPMFusion and it still didn’t work. I had to mindlessly copy commands until it did work. So you’re not alone. I’m just giving you the context in case you were curious.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

They should make a search engine. If Kagi can do it, why can’t Mozilla?

The biggest provider of Kagi’s results is Google. They are unique in that they have their own Tinygem and Teclis indexes to augment results, though. Mozilla could certainly operate a plain Google proxy like Mullvad does with Leta, but I don’t think they’d be making more money out of it than just agreeing to Google’s exclusive terms.

Building a search engine with an independent index is hard. Mojeek has done the best job of it, but you can tell there’s a disparity in result quality even if they’re improving.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I would be interested in seeing Mozilla invest in making Mojeek better. I think they could be a good match. An independent browser engine and an independent search engine. On the other hand, I don’t want Mozilla to acquire them and kill them a few years later. Their short attention span is one quality I wish they hadn’t cribbed from Google.

A search engine is an interesting idea, but:

1. it needs to be independent. Mozilla can’t be depending on Google or Bing. After Bing got what they wanted, they started choking their proxies by pushing prices up substantially. Depending on Google is a similar folly.
2. they need to be committed to it. This isn’t some project Mozilla can cook up in three or four years and abandon two years later. It needs to be a long-term strategy with hundreds of millions of dollars invested.

That’s why I think Mojeek could be a shortcut. But either way, I don’t think Mozilla has the bandwidth (or guts, frankly) to commit to this sort of project.

But you are right, they are still depending on the monster that is Google.

And as long as you’re depending on them, you might as well take as much as you can.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

Most games just work these days and it is only a handful that don’t,

To add my own experience, I play a lot of Japanese visual novels (it’s a good 80% of what I play). Very few Japanese visual novels are released on Steam. But if they are on Steam, they’re usually DRM-free or work in Proton anyway. However, most of these games are English-only. I play them in Japanese.

So I need to get my games from other places, like digital storefronts such as DLsite and DMM. However, I quickly found out that absolutely no games that DMM sells will work in Wine. This is because they are all encumbered with a form of DRM that isn’t compatible with Wine. DMM is the largest digital storefront for VNs. DLsite sells some games with various kinds of DRM. PlayDRM does work in Wine, but the rest doesn’t. They also sell DRM-free games. The selection isn’t as large, but it’s good. We recently got the DRM tagging feature in VNDB, so it should give you a good idea of what games are incompatible.

You can also buy VNs physically. Some games are DRM-encumbered but many are DRM-free. You generally don’t know until you buy, though, and it can be an expensive mistake. Hopefully we can change that with the new VNDB DRM tagging system.

Even when they’re not DRM-encumbered, though, you have a decent chance of facing issues with media playback. Older games using DirectShow you can probably get working with native DLLs using Winetricks. If it’s a newer game that uses Media Foundation, you might not be able to get it to work at all. Worst case, the game crashes on the opening movie. I’m looking for a way to improve that section of the wiki since I know very little about Media Foundation for solving these issues.

There also tend to be a bunch of Windowing issues with older VNs like fullscreen being broken. Gamescope will solve those issues.

So, while you can play a lot of VNs in Wine, you need to be careful about it. Fortunately, only two of the VNs I bought are unplayable and they’re both from DMM.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

This news is notable because a mainstream proprietary software publisher has chosen to officially distribute using Flathub. I couldn’t care less about Discord, but it says a lot about Flathub’s mindshare. Proprietary publishers tend to pick AppImage, but this is the first publisher I know of that has chosen Flathub instead. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend.

That being said, Cassidy obviously had a very active hand in convincing Discord to adopt the Flatpak package.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

So it does! I didn’t know that. Admittedly, I don’t actually use that much proprietary software on Linux-based systems, so my knowledge is limited. It’d be interesting if Lightworks or DaVinci Resolve were one day distributed with Flatpak, although Blackmagic Design believes Flatpak can’t handle DaVinci Resolve’s needs.

But hey, a community-built Flatpak for Resolve exists already.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

It is! And OBS is awesome. But it is not proprietary.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

This is the original developer/maintainer of Sway and Wlroots’ opinion on NVIDIA with regard to Wayland. This doesn’t seem like an unfair opinion to me. Gamescope breaks regularly due to bugs in NVIDIA’s proprietary driver; even if they know what the issue is, they can’t send patches to fix it because it’s proprietary. The best they can do is open a bug and beg them to fix it, which is what they do. If there’s an issue on Intel or AMD, they can just send patches upstream to Mesa, and I would guess they do.

Thankfully, with the heavy active development of NVK, this might change in a few years.

Mind you, I’ve actually had a better experience on KDE Wayland than Xorg. Categorically…with the exception of Steam. While the games themselves play fine, the client is very glitchy. But it’s a small price to pay for all the other nonsense I’ve had to deal with on GNOME/KDE X11.

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

I haven’t missed a thing. I don’t even get most of my news from Lemmy or Reddit communities; I get it from RSS feeds or books. I lurked /r/linux for a long time after I stopped actively contributing. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I started contributing to Lemmy, the first collection of online communities I’ve been a part of in years. I’m of two minds about it.

I’m actually grateful for it because I started complaining about things that have bothered me for a long time, and The Great Lemmy Migration made me realize, well, there’s no reason I can’t do something about that. It helped me change my attitude. So, in a very real way, I’ve contributed to several upstream projects because Lemmy made me rethink things and I am now less annoyed. It’s weird how Lemmy feels like an actual community in the way no other social site (including Reddit) has.

On the flip side, I think I spend too much time on Lemmy…but this week has been uniquely rough.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

Cheers!

Spectacle8011 , 7 months ago

It seems like this issue is finally, actually fixed with the new driver release.

I haven’t had a chance to try it out but the responses on the thread look promising.

Edit: Ah, I see you’ve already gotten the news. Well, good to hear.