I heard of that one a while back. Not being someone who enjoys music often or has very demanding needs, I just use Amberol. But fooyin might be nice to look into for my KDE desktop.

I maintain a list of recommended Flatpak apps.

I'm very familiar with you, haha. You keep popping up wherever I go these days. You're everywhere. Maybe not quite as omnipresent as Neal Gompa.

I can think of a few Flatpaks that could fit on that list.

They dont include that? I thought they would…

It's the same old story with codecs. Fedora would love to support as many codecs as possible, but H.264 is patent-encumbered so they can't. They had hardware decoding support through Mesa a few years ago but then they...changed it.

Fedora Atomic wants to include the OpenH264 enablement package for Firefox inside the Fedora Flatpak eventually which will solve most of the problem as that is where people are playing H.264 most often.

So this is an issue with reproducability? I dont think so? Cisco builds the binaries for Fedora and it gets installed. The packages are not from their repos, but the typical sync issues would not occur on Atomic.

My understanding is OpenH264 is provided in binary-only format to Fedora because otherwise the royalty-free license cannot apply (i.e. Fedora can't build it from source). Fedora only ships free software. OpenH264 is free software. But it's binary-only. So they need to trust Cisco has built the binary correctly. I assume the reason they don't include it by default is because the only way to trust it's built from the same sources is to reproduce the build. Otherwise, I really don't see the issue.

OpenH264 is not a part of the base system so you need to layer it on. OpenH264 doesn't have support for High 10 Profile video which is fairly common off the web and is generally inferior to x264, I've found, but at least it's something.

And the reason I mention "5 years" is because by then, most of the patents on H.264 will have expired. With the exception of the new ones from just a few years ago that no one really uses. Maybe Fedora can enable x264 in their ffmpeg build then and we can stop talking about it. I am so sick of talking about H.264.

I use Fedora kinoite-main from uBlue which is very close to upstream but fixes many issues for me.

Call it a personal challenge or whatever but I'm sticking to Fedora Silverblue for the foreseeable future. uBlue is almost certainly a better experience for most people.

Yeah for sure, I think for Intel and AMD too, hardware h264 for example.

That's not true if you're using Flathub packages. Flathub ships userspace Mesa drivers which enable hardware decoding for Intel and AMD GPUs even with H.264 and H.265.

but their base images have a ton of stuff I dont agree with (toolbox, missing random packages, too simplistic installer…)

uBlue does solve the two big issues with Fedora, which is codecs and proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Any other issues are tiny in comparison. I will say I prefer Toolbox to Distrobox, despite using Distrobox first. I certainly understand that's an unpopular opinion and not one a lot of people share. It's probably the same reason you use KDE and I use GNOME (most of the time).

I've always hated the Fedora installer. Does uBlue do something different?

It matters as the security rating is based on that, apps like KDE Systemsettings or Flatseal show that etc.

That's a good point.

Linux has a tiny marketshare people dont care about security that much permissions on Linux are more complex than on the actively restricted Android. External media, devices, filesystems etc

That's true.

I think my issue with the Flatpak sandbox is I understand how it works and what its limitations are (and I'm mostly fine with them), but the average user doesn't. I was reluctant to try Flatpak before understanding how it worked, but now that I know how it works, I think it's fantastic! But it's also a work-in-progress. What we have now is good, but I think it could be better. Not entirely sure how it gets better though.

Thats why I like Fedora Atomic. The core is as small as possible, the apps are just base stuff or upstream stuff like the Desktop. Everything else is a Flatpak.

I'm still not really sure where I stand on Fedora Atomic. Lack of H.264 decoding by default is a damaging choice. They should just include openH264 in the base image, reproducibility be damned. Give it 5 more years and maybe this will be revisited...

Nova + Zink + NVK will solve some of the problem with NVIDIA (maybe even very soon), but not hardware decoding currently, which is a big one.

Gamescope doesn't work great in a Toolbox. It works fine in Flatpak, but Bottles doesn't let me use Gamescope options. I think Lutris does, but I haven't tried it out yet.

And how am I supposed to install fonts without layering them on?? I've been copying them to ~/.local/share/fonts manually.

I think the idea is cool. But I think a few more parts of the ecosystem need to be in place first. I'll keep using it for now.

Hm, odd. I'm playing Rocket League with Proton fine with no flickering. I'm using KDE. Proton 8 shouldn't have any of the Wine Wayland stuff yet...

And yeah, I had a massive flickering problem for my entire monitor on 535, but the problem is now localized to XWayland programs on 545, so it's an improvement for me.

PHP 8.0 is no longer supported so I hope they update the “really, really old technology” to at least PHP 8.1 today.

Most likely. This blog was written in February 2022; support for PHP 8.0 was only dropped in November 2023.

So you'd think, but why else would Adobe bother developing a web version of Photoshop? Good to know, though.

Obviously it defeats piracy, but that argument doesn't make sense if Adobe is still shipping a native version of Photoshop.

Ah, I can see how that might be useful. I first learned about the command pallette when I needed to instruct everyday users on taking a full-page screenshot on Chrome...it's far more complicated than Firefox's method of Right-Click > Take Screenshot. Just another odd thing, lol. Interestingly, Firefox is considering implementing this feature: https://github.com/firefox-devtools/ux/issues/101

I don't think it would make much sense in my workflow right now but I can see how it would benefit others. Quickly turning on accessibility constraints I'm sure would be very useful. One thing Firefox's dev tools is desperately missing is search. I get along fine without it, but it would be nice to have.

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..?

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.

Is your issue that Lutris is buggy or limiting? I haven't encountered buggy behavior in Lutris, and it gives you a ton of options. I like some parts of bottles but I would really like to be able to change cover art without editing a config file, lol. It's definitely the easiest way to get started with Wine though.

There's Heroic Games Launcher too, by the way. It has less features than Lutris but it's probably easier to use? It's also prettier than Lutris, I think. What issues were you having with Lutris?

I'm assuming uralsolo is talking about free software as in, software which gives users the four freedoms.

I don't think all software needs to be free, but in some ways, it's no longer the issue of the day. In this day and age, a lot of what we're using is no longer really software. We're using services with client-side Javascript which is nominally free software (but not really). Most of the actual software is sitting behind a server. I see this as good and bad. It means users of less popular operating systems get access to the same services as users of popular operating systems so long as they have browsers, and the negatives are, well...I'm sure you don't need my help to think of some.

It's hard to make money with free software because everyone has the right to commercially exploit it. For this reason alone, I don't think it's necessary for all software to be free, but I'll be there to celebrate the programs that are free.

Cool project! I'm always on the lookout for more search services. It works without Javascript, which is great! It's very clean and focused.

The Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for Google are embarrassingly large. Here's a comparison from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-speed.html

It's a little surprising that Duckduckgo's SERPs are even bigger...

I know of a few others that fit this use case, if anyone's interested.

Kagi's interface works entirely without Javascript and is a meta-search engine with results from Google, Bing, and its own indexes, and I think it has some of the best results (paid search though).

Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index and is accessible without Javascript.

Another cool, fast search engine with its own index (though smaller) is Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/

This one is free software, and you can view the sources here: https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu

And there's also Searx, which is a fairly lightweight (but nowhere near as much as Blaze is) metasearch engine released as free software: https://github.com/searxng/searxng