Ubuntu is fine. Pop!_OS if you're set on Flatpaks instead of Snaps.

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.

It doesn't describe me either, but I had nothing meaningful to contribute to the discussion.

The default is completely sandboxed. Developers need to allowlist exactly what they want. So it is transparent.

The default before the developer touches it doesn't matter; compare this to Android, iOS, or macOS's permission system. An app needs to ask for permission to use the microphone or access your files. With Flatpak, all a developer needs to do is specify --filesystem=home or --socket=pulseaudio and if the user hasn't specified global options like --nofilesystem=home, then the developer gets access to it. Having a sandbox that is optional for the developer rather goes against the point of a sandbox, don't you think?

I'm not unsympathetic to Flatpak developers, though. The status quo on Linux for decades has been, "you get access to everything." If Flatpak enforced that sandbox, more than half of the apps on Flathub right now just wouldn't work because they don't support the filesystem portal.

I think GNOME and KDE need to do the work of manually restricting Flatpak apps' access to sensitive permissions like home by default, maybe in a few years when the idea of the filesystem portal has had time to gestate among developers. Kind of like how Firefox's HTTPS-only mode (which I think should be the default) prevents you from accessing the website unless you give permission.

That's something we can work on, I think. At least we have a way to get there.

KDE Plasma now includes a GUI settings page that allows to change these.

I think GNOME needs to integrate that into their settings, I mean just include damn Flatseal as a settings page…

I recall saying the exact same thing. They have a built-in area for it in the Apps section. They'll probably get around to it eventually...

There are packagers maintaining a shitload of apps at once.

It's pretty crazy. I think this is probably the craziest example: https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/f3wrez/much_love_to_felix_yan_an_arch_maintainer_from/

Felix Yan is awesome to be maintaining thousands of packages for Arch. But man, that's a lot of work. If we could reduce the workload of our package maintainers who rarely receive any gratitude (usually only demands) and let them focus on the really important packages, I think that would also be awesome.

Will still be using 4.79 GiB?

It will use more, but not exponentially more if de-duplication works as well as is claimed. The problem with AppImages is that they don't include all of the dependencies, making them less reliable. At the expense of storage space, Flatpak bundles everything for reliability.

De-duplication works better the more Flatpak applications you have installed. e.g. de-duplication saves TheEvilSkeleton over 50GB of storage space here: https://tesk.page/2023/06/04/response-to-developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/#but-flatpaks-are-easier-for-end-users

I believe all Flatpaks incorporate the codecs already.

Flathub even has hardware decoding with the drivers they distribute. However, Flatpak applications need to specifically opt in to ffmpeg-full rather than the normal ffmpeg package, which has support for patent-encumbered codecs.

Fedora Flatpaks, on the other hand, have no such codec support.

Fedora is a top-tier project and I completely understand why they weren’t comfortable risking patent law unnecessarily.

💯

It might be because one of my monitors is actually a graphics tablet. GNOME's scaling just didn't work in either session such that all three monitors were scaled correctly, but KDE's Wayland session was able to handle it properly. Or at least, the least bad.

I also use Wayland because X11 had some lag when operating the desktop normally (I guess the pros call it "frame-pacing issues"?), whereas only XWayland programs will flicker for my NVIDIA GPU. And games aren't part of that category. I don't use a lot of XWayland applications anymore, so I actually haven't seen the flickering for a while. The Steam client is the absolute worst, but... I've been doing my gaming on Windows lately 😬

My understanding is that AccessKit is an entirely separate thing to the portal.

Unfortunately, for several things, your choices are X, which is broken by design and few developers QA their software for anymore, or Wayland, which works pretty well in many areas, but where several important (or even basic) features are quagmired by bike shedding. But things are improving really quickly, and part of that is everyone shifting focus to Wayland.

I recently tried to navigate my GNOME desktop via screen reader and did not enjoy the experience. If I ever need it, I hope it works properly by that point...

At least for me, X is a worse experience on every computer I own (including the NVIDIA one), which is why I use Wayland. Neither is problem-free. I'm fortunate enough not to depend on accessibility features; perhaps my opinion would be different then.

It's been 5 years. I don't think they're going to change the license to allow distributions to distribute MongoDB more easily.

We should actively be against corporate leeching.

In a world without free software, Amazon will build their own proprietary software for servers that is better than everyone else's, and will be in the same position. At least with Redis, multiple employees of AWS were core maintainers for Redis. It isn't like Amazon didn't contribute anything back. Now that it's non-free, they'll just fork it. Again.

All this really accomplishes is making licensing a headache for everybody, which is the main reason people and organizations use free software.

I think free software developers should be able to make money from their software, and money from working on their software. I also think everyone else should be able to, too.

To put it another way, open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation.

Additionally, Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic. Redis doesn't belong to Redis, either.

It was interesting to hear your perspective!

I'm a newbie programmer (and have been for quite a few years), but I've recently started trying to build useful programs. They're small ones (under 1000 lines of code), but they accomplish the general task well enough. I'm also really busy, so as much as I like learning this stuff, I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to it. The first program, which was 300 lines of code, took me about a week to build. I did it all myself in Python. It was a really good learning experience. I learned everything from how to read technical specifications to how to package the program for others to easily install.

The second program I built was about 500 lines of code, a little smaller in scope, and prototyped entirely in ChatGPT. I needed to get this done in a weekend, and so I got it done in 6 hours. It used SQLite and a lot of database queries that I didn't know much about before starting the project, which surely would have taken hours to research. I spent about 4 hours fixing the things ChatGPT screwed up myself. I think I still learned a lot from the project, though I obviously would have learned more if I had to do it myself. One thing I asked it to do was to generate a man page, because I don't know Groff. I was able to improve it afterward by glancing at the Groff docs, and I'm pretty happy with it. I still have yet to write a man page for the first program, despite wanting to do it over a year ago.

I was not particularly concerned about my programs being used as training data because they used a free license anyway. LLMs seem great for doing the work you don't want to do, or don't want to do right now. In a completely unrelated example, I sometimes ask ChatGPT to generate names for countries/continents because I really don't care that much about that stuff in my story. The ones it comes up with are a lot better than any half-assed stuff I could have thought of, which probably says more about me than anything else.

On the other hand, I really don't like how LLMs seem to be mainly controlled by large corporations. Most don't even meet the open source definition, but even if they did, they're not something a much smaller business can run. I almost want to reject LLMs for that reason on principle. I think we're also likely to see a dramatic increase in pricing and enshittification in the next few years, once the excitement dies down. I want to avoid becoming dependent on this stuff, so I don't use it much.

I think LLMs would be great for automating a lot of the junk work away, as you say. The problem I see is they aren't reliable, and reliability is a crucial aspect of automation. You never really know what you're going to get out of an LLM. Despite that, they'll probably save you time anyway.

I’m no expert, but neither is most of the workforce (although kernel work is, again, much more in the expert realm).

I think experts are the ones who would benefit from LLMs the most, despite LLMs consistently producing average work in my experience. They know enough to tell when it's wrong, and they're not so close to the code that they miss the obvious. For years, translators have been using machine translation tools to speed up their work, basically relegating them to being translation checkers. Of course, you'd probably see a lot of this with companies that contract translators at pitiful rates per word who need to work really hard to get decent pay. Which means the company now expects everyone to perform at that level, which means everyone needs to use machine translation tools to keep up, which means efficiency is prioritized over quality.

This is a very different scenario to kernel work. Translation has kind of been like that for a while from what I know, so LLMs are just the latest thing to exacerbate the issues.

I'm still pretty undecided on where I fall on the issue of LLMs. Ugh, nothing in life can ever be simple. Sorry for jumping all over the place, lol. That's why I would have been interested in Linus Torvalds' opinion :)

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.

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