Never heard of that, I hope accessibility on Wayland improves.

Here's a recent article: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/

So do I.

Neal Gompa mentioned that Flatpaks dont have the permission holes to allow screen readers? Thats crazy and may be possible to fix with a global override.

I think GNOME is working on a portal for that. After the Newton stack is in a good state.

Same here. I think it would be nice to create 2 or so base images on an individual host like Codeberg, but I am completely new to all that container stuff.

Codeberg is probably a good host for that.

Currently doing a bit of work, upstreaming some secureblue things (btw the admin blocked be because they… dont like annoying questions?).

Lol. How strange.

Matrix is also horrible for Dev work. People dont use threads so they just spam stuff in a single chat and it just bad…

I don't much like Discord either. Issue tracker is the right place for this sort of discussion in my opinion. Or Sourcehut's mailing lists are fine too.

Also, these change processes are damn slow, but hey, thats fine I guess?

I guess that's kind of the point :)

I want to start doing some videos, no idea why OBS just has h264 hardware? I mean it doesnt matter but why no VP9? AV1 will come in 30.1 you know when that is stable?

I'm usually converting other people's media, so I don't have much experience with OBS. But as for VP9, the industry was gun-shy about it because MPEG-LA threatened to sue Google over patent infringement for it. Essentially the same sort of deal with Sisvel and AV1, except MPEG-LA never followed through on it. Hardware encoding for VP9 has apparently never taken off, but hardware decoding is all around.

Do you know what flatpaks (that are not VLC) have ffmpeg as a binary included?

There's: https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.YaLTeR.VideoTrimmer

Browser benchmarking

Honestly, as long as I don't notice it, it doesn't bother me. I only noticed Flatpak Nautilus' launch time because it was instant.

Toolbox: Is it considerably faster?

I think so. It at least seems more reliable. I got a bunch of weird bugs with Distrobox in the beginning but I guess I was pushing it pretty far.

I need to start learning some real language as my bash scripts start getting a pain.

I kind of hate Python but it's at least more pleasant than Bash. I've no experience with Go, but it's probably nice to write.

Well I hope you use an Ubuntu container because I bet these packages are also not “verified” on Arch ;)

Ah, well, I use Arch for all my other computers so I feel like I'm already trusting Arch's devs for all my packages. What's one more?

I use 90% verified

I make an exception for Anki and MakeMKV.

You could use Debian Testing which is rolling afaik.

I kind of hate Debian and Ubuntu's userpsace :) It's okay on servers.

Does Arch have Rstudio stuff?

It has it in the AUR, but not as an official package. In most cases the AUR is just as good anyway.

Or maybe dnf5 could solve this?

DNF5 will definitely shake things up. Because rpm-ostree is going away to be replaced by dnf again.

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":

• https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3833
• https://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: https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/desktop-linux-hardening/#flatpak

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

I also prefer chromium dev tools, though it isn’t that bad to switch to Firefox’s dev tools.

I actually vastly prefer Firefox's dev tools to Chromium's. There are keyboard shortcuts to open every tab, it has a color picker, it has a multi-line Javascript console, and in general I find it more intuitive. Chromium developer tools seem to be less complete than Firefox and harder to use.

I just learned Chromium technically has a color picker tool, but you need to scroll through CSS propetries to find a color selector, click the color, then click the color picker. With Firefox, I tap CTRL+SHIFT+I to open dev tools, click the color picker which is front-and-center, and it copies the hex code to my clipboard. This is a microcosm of my overall experience with Chromium's developer tools. Everything is slower or further out of reach.

I don't know how it ended up this way.

I tried Lutris and Bottles, but I didn't give Heroic much of a shot. Personally, I think Bottles is the nicest one, though I'm still using Lutris. Although, for my use case (Japanese language visual novels), Lutris makes it easier to select Japanese Locale for specific games, and hopefully with the next release, it will let you choose Locale when installing games: https://github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/493

I think the Lutris Installer is generally less finicky than Heroic and Bottles as it automatically detects the game executable after installation. It isn't always successful, but it usually is.

Does the Heroic Flatpak bundle a runtime similar to the Lutris Runtime? It seems to imply that it bundles Wine versions, but what about all the other usual dependencies, like DXVK, Faudio, etc.? There doesn't seem to be much information on that.

I'll share the one thing that made my life much easier: Gamescope. So many visual novels don't fullscreen properly, and Gamescope is a great workaround for that. The upscaling stuff is nice too.

all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14

That was what I originally wanted! They were sold-out by the time I needed to buy one, so I went with an ASUS Scar something-something.

Most of the laptops I own are Dell laptops which originally came with Windows, on account of the 5-year repair deal where they repair it wherever you are (making use of IBM's network to do so). I didn't get a chance to see how the latest one worked with Windows 11 because I wiped it immediately...

I've heard good and bad things about Framework with Linux. I don't know if I would end up buying it either way, as it seems like it would demand more experience than I have.

Some good pointers, thanks! I imagine it's mostly the 120Hz display that's killing my battery life...which is a shame, but alas, sacrifices need to be made sometimes. I'll have to give these things a try!

Was it hard to find an AMD dGPU laptop? There are almost none where I'm based.