Most Flatpaks depend on the Freedesktop Platform runtime, or GNOME/KDE runtimes, which are derived from it. This contains several hundred common dependencies and librarires programs need, like gcc and python. When you update the runtime (change it from 22.08 to 23.08 in the manifest), all the dependencies are updated too. Many simple applications don't depend on many more dependencies than are available in the runtime. Some...have more complicated dependency trees.

But counterpoint: the developer will update the dependencies when they are known to work properly with the application. Upgrading GTK3 to GTK4 in the GIMP flatpak will just break the application. Same thing with Krita and the dozens of patches to libraries it depends on. If you upgrade the application in the name of security before it's compatible, all you end up with is a broken application. Which I guess is more secure, but that's not helpful to anyone.

Kernel-level anti-cheat drivers for games, mainly.

Fossify Messages has a release on Github too.

You're not going to convince anyone to suffer inconvenience for something that has no tangible benefit in their eyes. The best you can do is give people the option to contact you on Signal and explain (briefly) why you prefer it. After enough experience, you realize there is no argument you can make that will convince people to care about privacy. The people who join you on Signal either already care about privacy (but maybe didn't realize it) or value your comfort over theirs.

Personally, I would rather send unencrypted SMS instead of using a Meta-owned service. I don't want to be part of the network effect keeping people on Facebook. Everyone with a SIM card in their phone already has access to SMS, but few use it if they can help it, so I don't think I'm contributing to a network effect by doing this. The only MMS client I use is Signal, so anyone can contact me over there if they want more functionality. That's the only tactic I use, and so far, it has been unsuccessful.

I've heard some artists prefer FireAlpaca to Krita. Is there anything it does better than Krita?

I don't work with music at all, so most of this update doesn't mean much to me. However, it's nice to see the export window was improved—I want my single-click behavior, damn it.

The telemetry is limited to update-checking and error reports. Distributions will disable update-checking because they already handle updating Audacity. Error reports need to be manually submitted. It's possible that most distributions just disable networking altogether when building Audacity, if it even exists in their repositories at all. Fedora's package is waaay out of date. Arch disables networking altogether.

Audacity has still instituted a CLA. This is quite worrying. But nothing has happened yet.

So it does! I didn't know that. Admittedly, I don't actually use that much proprietary software on Linux-based systems, so my knowledge is limited. It'd be interesting if Lightworks or DaVinci Resolve were one day distributed with Flatpak, although Blackmagic Design believes Flatpak can't handle DaVinci Resolve's needs.

But hey, a community-built Flatpak for Resolve exists already.

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.

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 :^).

Pretty bad. My gaming laptop gets 2 hours on Arch and 4 on Windows. My work laptop gets 4 hours on Arch compared to 6 hours on Windows. My 2-in-1 laptop from 8 years ago gets about the same, if not more. My 2009 laptop gets like 8 hours, and probably more than Windows would.

Edit: I use auto-cpufreq, but this doesn't help much. Power-profiles helps a little.

On which, it’s suspicious that this is probably driven or associated with AI.

The landing page mentions this:

Code faster with generative AI

Work quickly and efficiently with AI assistance from Google built-in, including code generation, code completion, translating code between programming languages, explaining code, and more, all powered by Codey, a foundational AI model trained on code and built on PaLM 2.

I left it out of the main post because I um, didn't think it was particularly newsworthy.

Raivo was never free software anyway: https://github.com/raivo-otp/ios-application/blob/master/LICENSE.md

Modification, duplication, and (re)distribution of the Services in binary or published format ("Processed Format") for any purposes and/or reasons is strictly prohibited without the explicit permission from Raivo OTP. Permission for modification, duplication, and (re)distribution of the "Service" in Processed Format can be requested via GitHub.