Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

Zion isn’t going to see my comment because I’m from an instance that lemmy.world blocks. If somebody thinks my comment might be useful to Zion, please pass it on in my stead by reposting it.

The only thing I’m trying to prevent is someone taking the entire project, changing some strings and icons and releasing a paid Android version based on my work.

If you released your program under an open source license, they wouldn’t even need to change anything. They could simply republish your program unmodified for a price. Open source is fundamentally incompatible with restricting commercial use because it means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation.

One way you could restrict this is by trademarking the name you publish your program under. This way, no one will be able to publish a version of your program with the same name, as they would be violating your trademark. The good thing about this is that trademarks have nothing to do with copyright and so are fully compatible with open source licenses. The bad news is that someone could always republish your program under a different name. If you’re primarily concerned about users confusing another program with yours, though, trademarks are a great option. You should register a trademark for the name anyway…before someone else does.

I don’t have a particular license to recommend that prevents commercial redistribution, but you appear to be looking for a “source-available” license. You might need something custom…every program I’ve heard of that is source-available has their own custom license (Futo Temporary License, the TrueCrypt license, Microsoft Shared Source Initiative, etc.) The closest thing I could find was the Commons Clause. I know very little about it, though.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

I didn’t see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it’s not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.

More than likely very few people own a pinephone, and the few that do don’t read pinephone news. Thanks for posting this.

As for me, I’m not buying another pinephone/GNU+Linux compatible device until both the community and the manufacturer get their shit figured out. I bought the PInephone expecting it to one day become more useful to me, so I guess that’s on me.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

But if the GNU Project created an OS based on SerenityOS, would it be GNU/Serenity? 🤔

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

GIMP

Anything in particular you think should be on this roadmap that isn’t?

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

Fair enough. For me, GIMP isn’t workable until at least the milestones in 3.0.2 are complete (non-destructive editing), so I actually don’t use it much beyond basic projects. The gradient issue you mentioned sounds like a part of the non-destructive editing workflow they want to bring in. What the roadmap shows is that they at least have a lot of ambition for improving GIMP and introducing new features.

I’d LOVE to know that stance has changed, but hearing ‘Yeah, we’ll never do that,’ is the point at which you start looking for other projects to try to use and help with.

I’ve never been involved with the development side, so I couldn’t say. I do follow GIMP news. The GIMP project has been famously stubborn in some areas. Since Jehan has taken over as the maintainer, I’ve heard they’ve become more flexible, but that was a few years back. Of note, they now want to remove Floating Selections in GIMP 3.0 which many people complained about but GIMP historically has said, “nah, we’re keeping it.” But they changed their minds recently. So perhaps the culture is changing.

From what I understand, anyway. I’m a complete outsider. Perhaps the core contributors felt that changing the way selection handling works would introduce a significant disruption to people’s workflows? I can only speculate…poorly.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

For a moment, I thought this meant Slack was now only going to work on Wayland compositors…

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

What’s wrong with GNOME Boxes? My experience has been great for the past two years. Better than Virtualbox.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

I also had a pretty terrible experience with Fedora KDE not too long ago. Too many issues to count. In the end, I couldn’t start a Plasma session from the display manager anymore so I gave up.

I really wanted to like Fedora, but…well, Fedora does not seem to like me. My experience on Arch KDE has been great. Like night and day. Still a few small bugs, but annoyances and not showstoppers. My experience with GNOME on Arch has been fantastic. Only one program was broken in GNOME that isn’t in KDE. It makes me wonder why I ever tried to leave…

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

so Cannonical/Ubuntu stepped in, did it for cheap (~$1/machine)

What did they charge for?

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

I found this page on hardware enablement. My understanding is that new hardware isn’t supported with old kernels, which older LTS releases are stuck with. So Ubuntu solves this problem by backporting newer drivers to the older kernel release.

That’s quite an interesting way of making money. I guess if Dell wanted the newer drivers, they could just install a newer version of Ubuntu. But since they wanted more stability, they preferred that Canonical backport the fixes to an LTS release.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

I’ve never used Ubuntu much, but that was interesting to know! Thanks for sharing.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

Wine will not run Photoshop because of the DRM. More than fifteen years ago, you could run Photoshop in Wine, but Adobe’s DRM is probably what killed it. You might be able to get Affinity Photo running in Wine with some manual tweaks, though. I haven’t personally tried in over a year, but there are people on the Affinity forums who have been able to get it working.

Photoshop would probably work alright in a VM, though. GNOME Boxes is a good zero-configuration Virtual Machine manager.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

Open Raster as an interchange format instead of PSDs. It would be nice if I could open the same file in GIMP or Krita that I can in Photoshop.

Spectacle8011 , 8 months ago

Disabling DXVK is the way to do it in Lutris. It’s in the Runner Options tab for the game settings. If you create a new Wineprefix using WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/newprefix wineboot, it will use WineD3D (the D3D➜OpenGL converter) by default. It’s what Wine uses for all Direct3D APIs up to Direct3D 11. DXVK is a completely separate project to Wine, but Lutris and Proton bundle it and use it by default. Lutris is completely usable without Vulkan, despite the scary warning.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

Forty years ago, Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop the GNU operating system

This is completely true. The GNU Project’s plan was to build an operating system in 1983, and they intended to call it GNU. The fact that they didn’t build every tool for the operating system doesn’t change their goal or the work they put into it. We have GNU Guix now, an operating system “entirely composed of free software”, so mission accomplished?

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

I haven’t been subscribed to a streaming service for about five years. Well, sometimes I pay for a month of Hidive. I usually just buy the show/film on disc and rip it. A decent amount of the shows I want to watch are old and not even on a streaming service.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

Honestly I laugh at the people whining about password sharing getting shut down. It was never really intended to be used that way

To quote Netflix, “Love is sharing a password”: twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref…

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

If you want to play visual novels, you should watch out for games encumbered by DRM.

It’s possible to play non-Steam games without Lutris, Bottles, or Heroic Games Launcher, though it’s a little more annoying. The easiest way to install DXVK in a Wineprefix is using Winetricks. Just run WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/name winetricks dxvk.

The problem is Winetricks doesn’t support updating DXVK. Lutris makes managing DXVK a lot easier; you can turn it on or off and it will update DXVK and other compatibility components automatically.

Vulkan support is of course required for DXVK to work, but DXVK isn’t your only option for Direct3D translation. You can also use Wine’s OpenGL translation layer, WineD3D, which requires no setup. The downside is that WineD3D’s compatibility and performance is generally not as good as DXVK for the same versions of the Direct3D APIs. However, if your GPU doesn’t support Vulkan, then you need to use WineD3D.

On the other hand, if your GPU does support Vulkan, Lutris’ documentation provides a good place to start on installing Vulkan support for your distribution: github.com/lutris/docs/…/InstallingDrivers.md

I wrote a guide explaining how the various components of Wine work to make games compatible. That might help you understand what exactly you need to do if you’re not using a Wine manager. And, if you want to make things easier when working in the terminal, you can try these Quick-Access Shell Functions the Winetricks wiki provides.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Reasonably sure, but willing to be corrected. See this section of the Winetricks code (it’s just shellscript):

<span style="color:#323232;">        # Don't install if already installed
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        if test "${WINETRICKS_FORCE}" != 1 &amp;&amp; winetricks_is_installed "$1"; then
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            echo "$1 already installed, skipping"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            return "${TRUE}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        fi
</span>

Followed by:

<span style="color:#323232;">winetricks_is_installed()
</span><span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    unset _W_file _W_file_unix
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    if test "${installed_exe1}"; then
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        _W_file="${installed_exe1}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    elif test "${installed_file1}"; then
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        _W_file="${installed_file1}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    else
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        return "${FALSE}"  # not installed
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    fi
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    # Test if the verb has been executed before
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    if ! grep -qw "$1" "${WINEPREFIX}/winetricks.log" 2>/dev/null; then
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        unset _W_file
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        return "${FALSE}"  # not installed
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    fi
</span>

Winetricks determines whether a verb has been installed by writing and reading to a winetricks.log file found in the root directory of the Wineprefix you’re working with. It also tests if the file actually exists too, but let’s just focus on winetricks.log for simplicity.

The first time Winetricks installs the dxvk verb, which takes the latest DXVK release at the time you run it, it writes dxvk to the winetricks.log file. When a new version of DXVK is released, and you run WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever winetricks dxvk, it will hit winetricks_is_installed and read ~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever/winetricks.log to see if DXVK is already is installed. It will see that dxvk is in the log file and give up.

When I was writing the Visual Novels on GNU/Linux guide, I did a lot of experimentation with Winetricks. I installed dxvk in a Wineprefix a few months ago and haven’t touched it since then. A new version of DXVK was released three weeks ago. When executing the dxvk verb in that Wineprefix again, I get:

<span style="color:#323232;">Executing w_do_call dxvk
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dxvk already installed, skipping
</span>

Years ago, Winetricks would write a new verb definition for every new DXVK release. Presumably when it was much less stable. You can see remnants of that with the 100+ verbs for installing particular DXVK versions. Now it just takes the latest stable release. Yay for the maintainers, because that’s a lot less work. As a side effect, Winetricks doesn’t have a way of updating it normally.

Why doesn’t Winetricks have the ability to update verbs? Well, you’re often installing very specific versions of a native DLL to override the builtin Wine component. You don’t want that changing on you randomly. The w_get_github_latest_release function, which extracts the latest release, was created purely for and only used for DXVK. DXVK is the only component that really works like this in Winetricks.

There is an easy way of updating DXVK anyway. Just run Winetricks with –force:

<span style="color:#323232;">WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever winetricks --force dxvk
</span>

Now, admittedly, I misspoke about Winetricks “not supporting updating DXVK”. I learned this option exists just now. So you can force-update it with –force, which bypasses winetricks_is_installed and installs the latest version of DXVK. Guide has been updated accordingly; thank you for making me look into this again!

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

I had some problems with alt tabbing in really old versions of Warcraft 3 (1.27 and older)

Have you tried Gamescope? I experienced similar issues with a lot of older visual novels. Gamescope was the cure-all for windowing issues like this. That said, if WineD3D works better than DXVK for the game, there’s not much reason to look into it.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

Oh does it not add new entries for every new DXVK release anymore?

Looks like the last time a verb for a new DXVK version was added was dxvk2010 or DXVK 2.1, in February this year. We’re up to DXVK 2.3 now. Because the Winetricks codebase is around 20,000 lines of shellscript and I’m not the best at reading shellscript…I don’t think the dxvk verb updates the Wineprefix’s DXVK version based on what the newest version is. I think that’s just an alternate way of installing DXVK; you can pull the latest stable release, or you can install a particular version.

I think executing a particular verb for a DXVK version would override whatever DXVK dlls you currently have installed in that prefix, too. I have no idea how to check what DXVK version is installed a particular Wineprefix, though.

even though it says DXVK (Latest) and that it’s from year 2023

That’s based on the verb metadata; not what version of DXVK you currently have installed. A contributor bumped the year for the dxvk verb from 2017 to 2023 in a commit in February this year.

Oh I had no idea about this, and I normally just use winetrick’s GUI while using it so I would’ve had to look up how to update dxvk if not for you explaining it.

Happy if it helps. I’ve never used the GUI, but it’s awesome that they managed to create a functioning GUI frontend with shellscript. Insane, really. God I hate shellscript…

So far I haven’t had an issue with DXVK being too old, but I mostly play older games

You probably won’t get an issue with DXVK being “too old”, but newer versions of DXVK implement more features (particularly for D3D12) and include bug fixes to improve compatibility or performance. From the 2.3 release notes:

Fixed a minor issue with D3D9 feedback loop tracking.

Test Drive Unlimited 2: Fixed shadows on grass.

Tomb Raider Anniversary: Improved performance.

So you want to be running the latest version for better compatibility. That said, I mostly play visual novels. My biggest problems are still DRM and media playback, which DXVK has very little to do with.

Unrelated but I’ll check that guide out, I’ve had trouble playing VNs that are in Japanese, as without LANG=“ja_JP.UTF-8” wine /path/to/game.exe they won’t even run but even with it the fonts don’t work and are shown as empty boxes.

You’re the exact person this guide was written for! This sounds like an issue that’s easily fixed by installing fakejapanese with winetricks. More info here: wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:prob…

And if you have .txt files in the game directory (like documentation or whatever) with garbled text, that’s probably because they’re encoded in Shift JIS. There’s an easy fix to make them readable: wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:prob…

(That last one had me scratching my head for a very long time)

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

I don’t have a lot of experience with this, but if you want more logs, you can try upping the WINEDEBUG debug channel: wiki.winehq.org/Debug_Channels

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

Profile switching is a big one for me.

You can change profiles by going to about:profiles. I find the way it’s implemented in Firefox preferable to other browsers but I can see why others wouldn’t.

You can also start up the profile switcher when you launch Firefox when launching it from the command-line with firefox -p.

Is this what you were talking about, or were you referring to something different?

but I would like to at least have the option for H.265 support.

Google Chrome only recently implemented this via hardware decoding. I imagine it’s possible for Firefox to do the same thing without infringing on patents, as the browser doesn’t implement a decoder this way; rather, they use the decoder implemented by NVIDIA et al.

I can only laugh when I consider Google announced they were dropping H.264 support 12 years ago: blog.chromium.org/…/html-video-codec-support-in-c…

H.264 support only exists in Firefox by the grace of Cisco. Out of curiosity, why are you interested in H.265 support?

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

Oh, mobile. That’s not a platform I use often. I’ll defer to you on that!

All my media is in HEVC and I dont want to have to buy a video card for the server just so I can transcode it to Firefox when everything else can play HEVC out of the box.

As far as I know, Google Chrome did not support HEVC until last year. Safari is still the only browser with a software decoder for HEVC, but I’m pretty sure it was the only one with any form of decoding support for HEVC until 2022. Let me check caniuse!

caniuse.com/hevc

So, it seems Samsung Internet (a browser I’ve never heard of, but presumably is the default on Samsung devices) also supported HEVC decoding for a long time, but aside from that, even hardware decoding support in Chrome is super recent: bitmovin.com/google-adds-hevc-support-chrome/

I was going to make a snarky comment about VP9 being good enough for Sisvel since they’re trying to chase down Google for patent infringement royalties on HEVC, but yeah, transcoding all that media does not sound fun.

But on the other hand, a bug triager for Mozilla opened a new ticket for HEVC support 3 months ago: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1842838

It’s a strange ticket. No description at all, and why would they care about bugs for a video codec they don’t support? It suggests Mozilla is going to do…something with HEVC sometime in the future. Shrug.

Edit: Did some more digging. See this ticket: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1853448

HEVC playback will be supported via the Media Foundation Transform (MFT) and WMF decoder module will check if there is any avaliable MFT which can be used for HEVC then reports the support information.

HEVC playback can only be support on (1) users have purchased paid HEVC extension on their computer (SW decoding) (2) HEVC hardware decoding is available on users’ computer

HEVC playback needs hardware decoding, and it currently only support on Windows. HEVC playback check would be run when the task is in the mda-gpu, which has the ability for hardware decoding. On other platforms, HEVC should not be supported.

Hooray for Windows users, I guess.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

A popular spreadsheeting program that was displaced by Microsoft Excel in the '90s.

There’s also this infamous quote:

DOS ain’t done until Lotus can’t run

More information investigating the source of this quote: www.proudlyserving.com/…/dos_aint_done_t.html

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

They do say that:

Usually combined with the kernel Linux, GNU forms the backbone of the Internet and powers millions of servers, desktops, and embedded computing devices.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I’m just quoting the Free Software Foundation themselves. I didn’t say I agree with them. It’s a deceptive use of language that is rather unbecoming of an organization normally so careful with its words.

Edit: For the record, I think the GNU Project’s biggest contributions have been to the desktop, not the server world.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

I’m familiar with the history of GNOME, and somewhat with Xamarin and Mono. While I have made that argument in the past, it was pointed out to me that the GNOME name was used to ride off the coattails of the popularity the GNU project had in the '90s, and they ended the association when it stopped being convenient for them.

(A GNOME developer pointed this out to me using this language; I could link you to the interaction, but it was on reddit)

I mean, both RHEL and Debian use Glibc which means the vast majority of the Linux applications running outside the cloud are calling into GNU code.

This also includes the proprietary NVIDIA driver, which only works with glibc.

Unlike GNU, his vision of the Linux desktop was populated by music players, spreadsheets, email / calendar programs, PDF viewers, and video editors.

I think this is a strange characterization of the GNU Project’s goals. This is the Initial Announcement for the GNU Project:

To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.

and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen.

Do you know something I don’t? I don’t think the GNU Project was against multimedia software; they were just focusing on the more fundamental stuff first.

---

The GNU Project’s biggest contributions were when the kernel was in its infancy. The most major contribution is undoubtedly the GPL. Without it, Linux would not be where it is today. I think enough has been said on that subject, but it’s what made RHEL billions. It’s the philosophy of free software that has made so much of the programs today possible. It’s incredibly important.

Obviously, we also have the GNU Project financially backing Debian GNU/Linux in its infancy. And while you say GNU wasn’t involved in the GUI layer, that’s not true. They worked on the free Harmony toolkit as a matter of high priority, and would have kept working on it if GNOME had not been so successful. Thanks to the success of another GNU project, GIMP, the GTK toolkit was able to be repurposed for general usage.

I don’t think it’s fair to discard contributions that never panned out like HURD and Harmony, because it shows GNU was actively involved in making the desktop better for everyone, which has really been its mission from the start. Maybe they’re not “the backbone” of the desktop, but I think it’s fair to say their biggest/most notable contributions have been to the desktop, not the server.

I don’t contribute to the GNU Project because frankly, they don’t do anything I consider worthwhile at the moment. I don’t contribute to the Linux Foundation, either. I contribute to user-facing software I’m interested in, like Lutris, GIMP, and Kdenlive.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

It’s a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.

I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It’s by the same writers.

The NET is…fun…

That’s a nice piece of hardware you’ve got there.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

You’ve got Firefox and Brave. Edge + Chrome are based on the free software Blink engine, while Webkit is one of the only free software projects Apple develops and maintains. Who doesn’t use VLC? Bitwarden is a popular password manager. About 50% of the world uses Android, which is nominally free software with some proprietary components. Blender is the world’s most successful free software project. A surprising amount of mainstream artists use Krita. People who download torrents are probably using a free software BitTorrent client like qbittorrent, Deluge, or Transmission, rather than uTorrent. A lot of people use the uBlock Origin extension, which is a free software content blocker.

And hey, everyone who has played DOOM was playing a game released under the GPLv2 in 1999, minus the game data.

File hosting isn’t really an issue of free software, because very few people will host their own cloud storage server. It’s more about relying on servers to provide a service rather than software, which is a good and bad thing.

This is kind of a neutral point, but a lot of software has become services accessed through a web client (browser). This means anyone on any operating system can access the service so long as they have a browser, which evens the playing field for us SerenityOS and Haiku users :^).

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

As the OSI says in the post linked above:

This is not to say that Elastic, or any company, shouldn’t adopt whatever license is appropriate for its own business needs. That may be a proprietary license, whether closed source or with source available. […] What a company may not do is claim or imply that software under a license that has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative, much less a license that does not meet the Open Source Definition, is open source software. It’s deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.

A lot of companies are trying to redefine what “open source” means. And regrettably, this is probably something that was inevitable with a name as open to interpretation as “open source”, but it’s unfortunate that the OSI was denied the trademark for the term. If they owned the trademark, nobody would believe projects like ElasticSearch and MongoDB are open source when they do not meet the Open Source Definition (OSD), because those companies wouldn’t be able to claim they are.

Open source was never about preventing people from making a profit. That sounds more like the original Linux license, where Linus Torvalds didn’t want money to change any hands in the process of conveying the software. I can’t imagine how much worse things would be if Linus never transitioned to a license that met the OSD. My belief is that there is nothing wrong with making money so long as the software meets the OSD. I know at least the GNU Project actively encourages people to sell free software.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

The gaming performance issues you were facing might be related to Vulkan support for the card, if it works better on Windows, as apparently Kepler cards don’t have great support for Vulkan: bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=273935

I see Vulkan 1.2 is actually the latest version of Vulkan that supported Kepler architecture GPUs like the GT 730, which stopped receiving non-security updates after October 2021: …custhelp.com/…/support-plan-for-kepler-series-ge…

On Windows, games probably used OpenGL. If you were playing games with Proton, it prefers DXVK because it offers better compatibility and performance than wined3d’s OpenGL translation layer. DXVK 2.0 and onwards have used Vulkan 1.3, which requires a GPU newer than yours. I don’t know whether Steam (and Proton 8+) falls back to using DXVK 1.10 or falls back to OpenGL/wined3d.

Either way, that means you haven’t been getting the latest performance improvement updates in DXVK since late 2022. So force-enabling wined3d’s OpenGL translation layer with PROTON_USE_WINED3D might help, if it’s not doing that already? I don’t know if OpenGL would actually perform better, so this is kind of a long shot…

If you were playing Native GNU/Linux games, it might be different.

I second the openSUSE recommendation. My brief experience with it was really nice.

Edit: Ah, I see you’ve quit gaming, lol. Well, either way, if you use Wine with DXVK, maybe the above will help.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

I keep wanting to buy it because of the amazing sales pitch, except it provides zero value to me. I already use my laptop in bed, lol… and if I’m going outside, I’m not going to be playing games. It doesn’t even make sense to pack for going overseas because my laptop works great for that. And it doesn’t work very well as a new computer because it’s likely far more underpowered than my other computers for video editing and other work I need to do, but is nonetheless a cool feature.

Not that it matters at all. Valve still don’t sell it in my country.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

You won’t get anything as useful as RDP or plain old Teamviewer

Is there something I’m missing? Teamviewer is available for Linux and I’ve done remote support with it: www.teamviewer.com/en/download/linux/

I…assume it also works as the machine being remoted into?

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

Ah, I see. I only used it once, so it’s not something I do often, but it worked perfectly for me as a client to a Windows computer.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

All in all, having AV1 support heavily benefits the open source community, as AV1 itself is an open source codec. This means that AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that makes it suitable for adoption in various open source projects. It was also designed to solve long-standing patent litigation issues that were common in other codecs in the industry.

It was certainly designed that way. However, Sisvel believes that AV1 uses patented technology in the specification. Sisvel announced this one year after the AV1 standard was finalized, and not during the three years the standard was being developed. Of course, patent holders can’t be expected to deeply investigate every new technology that’s coming out on the market…but this was the largest new technology, formed by a coalition of some of the biggest companies in the world deliberately designed to get away from patent-licensing organisations like MPEG LA, under development for 3 years. Read into Sisvel (and its member companies) motivations as you will.

Nonetheless, Unified Patents is hard at work challenging invalid AV1 patents, among others:

• unifiedpatents.com/…/gevc-patent-in-sisvel-av1-po…
• unifiedpatents.com/…/kaist-etri-av1hevc-patent-pa…
• unifiedpatents.com/…/interdigital-av1vp9-patent-j…
• unifiedpatents.com/…/two-xylene-jp-patents-revoke…
• unifiedpatents.com/…/interdigital-sisvels-av1-poo…

Don’t know who Unified Patents is?

Unified is a 350+ international membership organization that seeks to improve patent quality and deter unsubstantiated or invalid patent assertions in defined technology sectors (Zones) through its activities. Should Unified determine that its goals can be better served by settling a post-grant challenge (or agreeing to never file any challenges), Unified will consider settling in exchange for a license, though never for money. As with all aspects of its challenges, Unified acts independently when settling, and never provides members with advance notice of negotiations, draft settlement agreements, or actual settlement.

They also do…prior art competitions?

Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on three patents owned by Speir Technologies, an Atlantic IP Services subsidiary.

We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone, and include tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests. Visit PATROLL today to learn more about how to participate.

In other news, more than half of the H.264 patents have expired, and all the essential ones will be expired by 2027.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

Seriously though, a stable API is not the GTK/GNOME developers’ agenda here. Nobody wanting a stable API should write software with this toolkit.

This blog post doesn’t mention GTK, but I’ve heard GTK will sometimes implement breaking changes in minor version bumps. I was thinking about writing some software with GTK, and I haven’t been deterred so I guess I’ll learn the hard way, but has GTK 4 had any of these stability problems yet?

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

There are also Windows users who rely on niche business applications. Wine isn’t great for that sort of software yet. Another big one is the creative industry. While the VFX industry is very Linux-focused, and 3D is very viable, other parts of video production are not. And GIMP needs non-destructive editing before it can even think of competing with Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Inkscape is a viable vector image tool. The many other Adobe programs don’t have great alternatives, and if you need to collaborate, that means you all need to switch to a new program. Then there are the retraining costs to consider.

Gamers have the easiest time in switching to Linux. The amount of compromises and sacrifices you need to make in other industries are much greater right now.

However, Adobe is trying to bring some of their programs, like Photoshop, to the web. It’s unlikely we’ll see stuff like After Effects on the web, but Photoshop, Illustrator, maybe even inDesign could possibly, maybe be there in a few years. Photoshop web is already in beta (though it’s garbage). The web continues to be the great equalizer.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

I think Krita is a more viable competitor to Photoshop than Gimp at this point… It’s also great for pen tablet drawing and arguably superior in that category.

Absolutely agree it’s there for artists. Krita is a very successful project and I hear mainstream artists talk about it often, while not being an artist myself. Well, technically I own a Cintiq…

I haven’t been able to get it to work well with PSDs, though, and I find the interface clunky for the sort of image editing I’m doing. I find GIMP easy enough to use, but it unfortunately lacks some crucial features. 3.0 is right around the corner (for real this time), so I’m hopeful. Unfortunately, PSD is a must because of collaboration. GIMP’s ingest of PSD is better. But Krita does have non-destructive effects.

What I’m really hoping for is Affinity Photo to work well in Wine. Most people can get it running now but I think it’s a little buggy or lacking in performance. I’ll have to give that a shot soon.

But yeah, video editors are lacking. Kden live is ok (and awesome for the price)

As it so happens, I’ve thought about this a lot.

Kdenlive is definitely the best free software option but the lack of hardware accelerated playback really kills it dead in the water for me. I’m hoping it will improve soon, given the success of the fundraiser. DaVinci Resolve is fantastic but needing to transcode footage if you have H.264/AAC source footage (geh, I know, but some of us do) and being stuck with H.264 hardware encode in the best-case scenario is not great. I found Lightworks was the best option in terms of professional features + workflow. Proprietary, but hey, at least it works really well on Linux.

Audio editors are behind too. Audacity is pretty good for 2 track. Bitwig is a great multitrack alternative to Ableton… But Ardour isn’t developed enough for a pro studio and I’ve never seen one that uses Linux. Part of this is poor support for vst plugins developed for Windows, mostly due to their copy protection.

That’s a shame to hear! I don’t work with audio on a very professional level, so Audacity is fine for my use cases. It’s improved in a significant way since the Muse Group acquisition (mainly non-destructive editing, but plenty of other stuff). I’m also annoyed but unsurprised to hear that DRM has thwarted compatibility yet again.

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

The GNU kernel was not originally supposed to be called the Hurd. Its original name was Alix—named after the woman who was my sweetheart at the time. She, a Unix system administrator, had pointed out how her name would fit a common naming pattern for Unix system versions; as a joke, she told her friends, “Someone should name a kernel after me.” I said nothing, but decided to surprise her with a kernel named Alix.

Source: www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I like Kdenlive and used it for a few months, but I also really like Lightworks. Lightworks is proprietary, but it’s also a professional tool. Unlike DaVinci Resolve, it will decode and encode H.264/AAC, and most people don’t need much more than that, though AV1 is also supported. The color correction tools in Lightworks are better than Kdenlive’s and the cutting tools, while they take a while to get used to, are quite nice when paired with they keyboard. Best of all, Lightworks is a lot faster to startup, doesn’t crash as easily and it’s always responsive.

The most annoying part has to be dealing with licenses. If you use up your two licenses, you need to contact their support via email to shuffle them around. It’s a great program, but this is super annoying. It also discourages you from purchasing the perpetual license because you don’t want to get stuck in this situation. Mind you, their support is very friendly so I have no doubt they’d help you out, but it’s an issue of needing to ask them in the first place. DaVinci Resolve’s licensing system at least works perfectly fine, no matter what, or so I’ve heard. If you activate a new computer, it will just deactivate an old installation, and that’s it. No need to wrangle customer support while everyone’s on holiday…

The other professional option on GNU/Linux is DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve is a very nice NLE at a very nice price, though proprietary. But $500 is a lot better than the $800,000 it used to cost. Annoying to install although fat-tire’s containerization project is worth a look for easy installation. However, it doesn’t work for my source footage, even with Studio. The free version doesn’t support H.264 decode/encode or AAC decode/encode, which are the two main codecs you’ll see with MP4, the most ubiquitous (and patent-encumbered) video format in the world. The Studio version supports H.264 decode/encode only with NVIDIA GPUs, but it still doesn’t support AAC decode/encode. It can encode H.264 though, which will leave you with an MP4 file with no audio track.

To use DaVinci Resolve with H.264/AAC in a livable way, you need a NVIDIA GPU, you need to purchase the Studio edition, and you need to transcode your audio from AAC to something Resolve can ingest. There are scripts to automate this. Optionally, you should also purchase a third-party AAC encoder plugin for Resolve so you don’t need to transcode again after rendering, assuming you’re targeting H.264/AAC on render. If you’re not, you can just render to Quicktime/PCM .mov.

As much as I love DaVinci Resolve, I kind of didn’t think that was worth it for me at the time so I went with Lightworks which supports H.264/AAC encode fine with their Free/Paid licenses. I think I’ll come back to DaVinci Resolve after 2028, when the patents for H.264 and AAC have finally expired (hopefully), and DaVinci Resolve includes decode support for AAC (hopefully). I might still use the Fusion tab for creating some VFX, but I’m trying to see if I can work with Natron first.

As for other NLEs:

• Cinelerra-GG: I quite like this editor, but damn it is particular and some things are just annoying to do. I’ve also heard it has color management issues… that was the main reason I stopped using it. That, and I can’t actually get it to build anymore, haha. The manual is super amazing and beats out almost every other NLE mentioned here except DaVinci Resolve. It’s not a bad read even for just generally learning video editing.
• Blender VSE: It works okay but the workflow is very slow and the lack of sequences (only projects) only makes things more annoying.
• Openshot: I’m not a fan of the interface and found the workflow, at least initially, slow.
• Shotcut: Seems nice enough but it didn’t work for me. I forget why.
• Pitivi: It crashed the instant I tried working with 4K footage.

Edit: Olive is nice too but very early stages. Color tools are very basic. And unfortunately development is winding down.

Ah…sorry, I just realized this probably isn’t the response you’re looking for. But I’ve spent a lot of this week trying to find a professional NLE on GNU/Linux and that was what I came up with. For the record, I’m a GNOME user and I liked Kdenlive the most out of free software NLEs. I’m looking forward to the new improvements to come from the fundraiser to improve workflow!

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

I don’t know if they’re still 720p locked on the free version.

Yes, it’s still locked to 720p on the free version, but the Create plan is very competitive at $9.99 a month. It has all of the features of Pro except encoding is limited to H.264/AAC and AV1 on Vimeo/YouTube, and you have no control over the encode aside from resolution. That was enough for me, though. I’m not doing anything super professional but I’m doing more than you can do easily with most of the NLEs on the list above.

I’ve tried LW before but I never really liked the workflow.

The workflow kind of broke my brain when I first looked at it a few years back but after acclimating to it I quite like it. The cutting is keyboard-based in a way most other NLEs aren’t, but yeah, it can definitely be annoying without some tweaks. Were you using Lightworks when they didn’t have a Fixed Layout option? The Flexible Layout pretty much leaves you to it, but the Fixed Layout is very reminiscent of Resolve. What I love most about Lightworks is definitely the speed. It’s the fastest and most responsive NLE I’ve ever used (Cinelerra probably comes a close second). And it gives you good Color tools and many other powerful features! Not a common combination. The community is also full of knowledgeable people, but that’s true of Resolve too.

Anyway, if you’re happy with Resolve, there’s no reason to consider switching. Pricing wise Resolve beats out Lightworks after two years of Pro license ownership and the licenses are less annoying. Main reason I went for Lightworks is I didn’t want to be forced to keep a NVIDIA GPU forever. It seems less disruptive to my workflow in the long run. How is Resolve stability-wise for you? I’m still trialing Lightworks but the ownership cost is leading me to re-consider Resolve…

Having a look at the Resolve 18 Codec manual, I see they’ve moved from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8.6. I’m glad they didn’t kill the GNU/Linux version or something along with CentOS, lol…

Spectacle8011 , 9 months ago

TIL Firefox could use the updated GNOME File Picker with thumbnails. Just set widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker to 1 instead of 2.

For KDE.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I wish I’d known how to use node-based compositors like Natron to produce VFX so I don’t have to keep going back to macOS to use After Effects.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Oh my goodness, I’m sorry to hear that this is happening to others but I am so glad its not just me. This has been something that’s driving me crazy, because I knew it wasn’t a cable / GPU issue due to the fact that it doesn’t occur in Windows.

I know right! I thought it was something I did! You don’t know how many times I’ve gone into the back of my monitor and tried to shove the HDMI cable in just a bit further, to no effect. I thought I’d broken it by trying to run Sway or something…

Nope, the driver is just that bad. Ughhh.

KDE is worse, but GNOME isn’t great either. It’s been going on for months! Additionally, I have “Prefer Maximum Performance” set, but it hasn’t helped much. I’ve seriously been considering an AMD card next year… I have an RTX 2060S with 535.98.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

TIL Teslas are better designed than this BMW model 🤷‍♀️

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Car is on some sort of lease program where you trade it in for the next model after a few years. There would need to be some way of installing a manual release without causing damage to the car…or preventing BMW from taking it back.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Yeah, uhh…it’s pretty stupid. The more I think about it, the more shocked I am that BMW is so aware of this that they need two separate warnings for it in the handbook, but make it the owner’s responsibility not to put themselves in that situation…?