Hi all! Either my Google fu is failing me, or such a cursor software might not have been done yet.

Is there a cursor-customizing software in which I can change the cursor image based on a .png/.gif file (or set of png files), and the image flips depending on movement direction in the X-axis? I kinda want to make a huge cursor, but don't want the image to get in the way of the direction the cursor is traveling.

And um, mint cinnamon btw?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20962151

Hello Linux folks, i would like to share one little hack which i have found.

On fedora, zram-generator comes installed and configured by default with lz4 algorithm i believe, and no disk swap, if you have 8gb of ram or more, that is fine, but if you have 4gb or less, systemd-oomd either kills you games when they use too much memory, or you face an OOMD and get your system frozen.

When configuring fedora, normally i would create an in-disk swap, so that my computer wouldn't freeze but face a MASSIVE slowdown when on way too high memory usage, i also set zram-generator to use the zstd algorithm so that zram compression rate is higher but slightly slower, like that i can use my low memory more efficiently with a lower risk of OOMD.

I was watching a bringus studios video once, where he tried to run counter-strike 2 on a ps4 using linux and proton; the game would always use too much memory and that would freeze the system before it got a change to actually launch, the strange ps4 linux was using in-disk swap, and so, increasing swapiness to 100 bringus tried to leverage that to make the game run. He was sucessful. In disk swap is very slow, so the performance was crap, but that does not matter...

So i saw that, and had the idea to combine it with zram-swap to avoid the in-disk swap penalty, also using zstd as the algorithm to make the most out of the memory, and it was a massive sucess! Some games which would make my system very unstable or straight up freeze on certain launch attempts started launching and working just fine! and without dumb in-disk swap slowdowns!

While running modded Victoria 2 i have noticed my system is using about 3.3 to 3.4GB of swap, and about 3.5 gb of ram, so about 100 to 200MB of real uncompressed memory usage, assuming zstd is running at level 1 of compression, and achieving at least 3.0 as compression rate, in thesis, my system has now the equivalent to 10GB of ram, well about it's weight! even more impressing considering how low are the numbers we are working here!

tldr: setting your swapiness=100 while using zstd as your zram-generator compression algorithm, and no in-disk swap will help your system use the most out of your ram with negligible performance penalty

From the Creator of HeliumOS, a distro based off AlmaLinux or CentOS Stream on top of the technology of Fedora Atomic Desktops, Bazzite, Fedora coreOS and RHEL Image Mode.

This is a pretty big thing, as extreme stability + stable packages makes the perfect workhorse for an install-and-forget PC.

Together with KDE or other Desktop Environments (CentOS 10 will have Plasma 6 in the external "EPEL" repos) this will be more than a great Windows 10 replacement.

Have all your apps as Flatpak or with a Fedora Distrobox, no problems.

Maybe even an image using packages of the "CentOS Stream Hyperscale SIG" that backports newer Fedora kernel, systemd, mesa and others for improved hardware support, GPU tasks, drivers etc.

After getting this setup for work for a few clunky applications I was curious if anyone has any knowledge of a similar solution hosted on Linux?

Here is the link to the resource I used. Remote Desktop Service

Games are technically run inside a virtual machine because of differences in how Apple Silicon and x86 systems address memory—Apple's systems use 16 KB memory pages, while x86 systems use 4 KB pages, something that causes issues for Asahi and some other Arm Linux distros on a regular basis and a gap that the VM bridges.

Rosenzweig's post shows off screenshots of Control, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Ghostrunner, Cyberpunk 2077, Portal 2, and Hollow Knight, though as she notes, most of these games won't run at anywhere near 60 frames per second yet.

"Correctness comes first. Performance improves next," she writes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20819143

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/animatrix

This program written in C will create some basic animation of ascii-art loaded from a txt file, while rendering the matrix effect in the terminal window.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/23486789

This full packed release comes with three new staging protocols:

• system bell - allowing e.g. terminal emulators to hand off system bell alerts to the compositor for among other things accessibility purposes

• fifo - for implementing first in first out surface content update behavior

• commit timing - for adding time constraints to surface content update

Other than this, the presentation timing protocol protocol got a version minor bump describing how to deal with variable refresh rate.

Other protocols saw the regular clarifications and bug fixes, and some deprecated events is now properly indicated as such in the XML. Please see individual commits for details.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20783411

The Clipboard Project is a clipboard manager that works entirely in your terminal. It has tons of swanky features including this new one in 0.9.1 that lets you securely ignore copying passwords and other things like that!

Link to the code: https://github.com/Slackadays/Clipboard

I know of CryFS and encFS which both failed an Audit.

I know LUKS and veracrypt which work but are both tedious and not useful for my use case.

I want to encrypt folders on Linux and then sync them with a cloud or just store them locally.

There is goCryptFS which is in Go, i.e. memorysafe which is good. It also failed the audit when it comes to cloud sync.

The issue: if an attacker has access to the encrypted files over time, if you always upload changes, they can crack you.

This would not be relevant for local file stores, but for synced ones it is.

There I used Cryptomator, which has many downsides though

• the app is GUI only, the CLI variant is last released 2021, which I dont consider maintained when it comes to security? Or is it?
• the GUI App is in electron, no Wayland support
• the app devs dont care about flatpak rules and store secrets outside the app container, meaning the app is unconfined by default, you need to manually add an override and it is still pretty insecure in the case that all untrusted apps are flatpaks

KDE KVaults only supports insecure algorithms, goCryptFS would be the most secure for local only stuff, but that was abandoned as a Fedora package and is only available from COPR, currently. (I should learn RPM packaging once again).

Cryptomator seems to be the only one 1. Suitable for cloud sync (not encrypting everything always again) 2. That passed an audit.

The CLI may be fine if it just interacts with the GUI app? I wonder how that would work with the Flatpak.

Do you know any alternatives?

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/23483164

On Thursday, the Bundestag's Budget Committee decided to increase the funding for the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) with the majority of the parliamentary groups in the traffic light coalition. A total of almost 29 million euros is now available for 2025. This is around 4 million euros or 15 per cent more than initially planned by the Federal Cabinet. Almost 3.4 million euros of this is directly attributable to the STF, whose budget for 2025 was initially set at 15 million euros.

590,000 more than planned will also flow into the ‘Bug Resilience Programme’ coordinated by the STF, for which a total of 2 million euros will now be available in 2025. It is intended to ensure that security vulnerabilities in software are not only found, but also actually fixed. In total, the STF will end up with around 19 million euros, compared to just 17 million in 2024.

The SFT plays a central role in the development of open source software as a basic digital technology. Among other things, the STF managers organised competitions to promote active collaboration on open source infrastructures. The government has so far disappointed free software advocates

‘These investments make us less dependent on large providers, more resilient to digital crises and promote Germany's digital sovereignty,’ emphasised Anna Kassautzki, digital policy rapporteur for the SPD parliamentary group. Maik Außendorf, digital policy spokesperson for the Greens, emphasised that Germany is thus taking on a ‘pioneering role in open source’

The Open Source Business Alliance (OSB) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) had expressed their disappointment with the course taken by the Ampel in 2022. In its coalition agreement, the government had explicitly emphasised the importance of open standards and interfaces as well as open source for digital sovereignty. However, there are no concrete plans for an alternative hyperscaler, especially for cloud projects.

Instead, dependencies on Microsoft, for example, would be further cemented. The federal government's licence costs for proprietary software providers have recently reached a high level in the billions. The OSB Alliance has just called for the administration to switch its IT completely to open source.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3679507

What has your experience with Linux been like so far? How long has been your Linux journey? Mine began while I was studying computer science, and I've been in love with Linux since.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21244508

The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 24.10 has been released, featuring the new and beautiful KDE Plasma 6.1 simple by default, powerful when needed.

Codenamed “Oracular Oriole”, Kubuntu 24.10 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 6.11 based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.116 and 6.6.0, KDE Plasma 6.1 and many updated KDE gear applications.

I hear that a lot but, how bad is it really? Does it affect you (if you use Debian)? Aren't there ways to install newer versions of most things that actually matter?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21161182

Plasma 6 has come into its own over the last two releases. The wrinkles that always come with a major migration have been ironed out, and it’s time to start delivering on the promises of the new Qt 6 and Wayland technology platforms that Plasma is built on top of.

Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. It implements more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol, and enables it by default. There is also improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles, as well as HDR performance. A new tone mapping feature built into Plasma’s KWin compositor will help improve the look of images with a brightness or set of colors greater than what the screen can display, thus reducing the “blown out” look such images can otherwise exhibit.

When it comes to power management You can now override misbehaving applications that block the system from going to sleep or locking the screen (and thus prevent saving power), and you can also adjust the brightness of each connected monitor machine separately.

Plasma’s built-in app store and software management tool, Discover, now supports PostmarketOS packages for your mobile devices, helps you write better reviews of apps, and presents apps’ license information more accurately.

In Plasma 6.2, KDE have overhauled System Settings’ Accessibility page and added colorblindness filters. They've also added support for the full “sticky keys” feature on Wayland.

This and more in full anounncement and changelog.

I want to create a collage of 20 screenshots from a video, arranged in a 5x4 grid, regardless of the video’s length. How can I do this efficiently on a Linux system?

Specifically, I’d like a way to automatically generate this collage of 20 thumbnails from the video, without having to manually select and arrange the screenshots. The number of thumbnails should always be 20, even if the video is longer or shorter.

Can you suggest a command-line tool or script that can handle this task efficiently on Linux? I’m looking for a solution that is automated and doesn’t require a lot of manual work.

Here's what I've tried but I only get 20 black boxes:

#!/bin/bash

# Check if input video exists
if [ ! -f "$1" ]; then
    echo "Error: Input video file not found."
    exit 1
fi

# Get video duration
duration=$(ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$1")

# Calculate interval between frames
interval=$((duration / 20))

# Extract 20 frames from the video
for i in {1..20}; do
    ffmpeg -ss $((interval * ($i - 1))) -i "$1" -vf scale=200:-1 -q:v 2 "${1%.*}_frame$i.jpg"
done

# Create collage
montage -mode concatenate -tile 5x4 -geometry +2+2 "${1%.*}_frame*.jpg" output_collage.jpg

# Clean up temporary files
rm "${1%.*}_frame*.jpg"

echo "Collage created: output_collage.jpg"