Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

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.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

No idea. It was the first time I ever used Linux. Ubuntu just booted into GRUB rescue mode after a month, and the only thing I can remember doing is installing another desktop environment. On Arch, I’ve had KDE and GNOME installed side-by-side for years now.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Installed KDE and GNOME at the same time. Ubuntu did not like that.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

pushed useless crap like the activity view to people

This is easily the best part of GNOME. I wish macOS implemented mission control as well as GNOME has implemented Activity Overview, because using macOS feels like typing with one hand tied behind my back.

slow animations that can’t be completely turned off.

Go to GNOME Control Centre > Accessibility > Seeing > Reduce Animation. It also sets it globally so websites can choose to respect this setting. What animations remain?

They try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).

They removed it because nobody wanted to maintain the code, which was generally agreed to be subpar, and it was blocking development elsewhere in Nautilus. They acknowledge it was a dumb idea to implement this functionality inside of Nautilus in the first place when they should have done it in the shell. They realized they were leaving users in the lurch here, so offered a few solutions like installing Nemo Desktop. They even developed a GNOME shell extension prototype before removing it that users could move straight to.

Wait, this is not GNOME, this is Nautilus as a file manager app. There are more providers of desktop icons, namely nemo-desktop is one of the best and you can use that together with Nautilus and the rest of GNOME. Why would you use a worse provider of that functionality?

It wasn’t part of some grand design decision that precluded desktop icons. They just made a bad technical decision 20 years ago that ended up accumulating a lot of technical debt.

Now, if you wanted to complain about something, shell extensions are certainly a horse worth beating. Or only letting you set shortcuts for the first four workspaces and forcing you to use Dconf for more. This is really dumb design.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

You’ll try it and it’s going to end up in the drawer of unfinished projects.

Guilty as charged.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I have a lot to say about the Pinephone, but in the interest of not re-iterating what has been said before, I’ll just say this:

Correctly inserting the SIM card was the most harrowing experience I’ve ever had with a phone.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

The Linux Foundation and Kernel devs don’t really deal with the OS layer much. This is something that would need to be implemented at the desktop environment level; like GNOME or KDE. Neither LF nor Linus Torvalds has any say over that.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

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 :)

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

There’s Lightworks, too, although it’s geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It’s powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There’s no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don’t need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

One main reason I went back to Arch BTW is that there aren’t, contrary to the old self a declaration by Suse, that many software available for my use case, so I ended up with tons of ppa’s, sorry, Suse Vendors who relied on each others for libraries, and it eventually broke down my system when some stuff wasn’t available but was required, while some may be available from 4 different, private, repos.

This is the reason I abandoned both Fedora and openSUSE when I tried them. I like plenty about both of them but things are just simpler on Arch. Despite Arch having less software than most distributions, it tends to be the software I actually want or need to use. The few programs not present can be installed from the AUR. Writing new PKGBUILDs is simple and there is no bureaucracy.

Arch is a pain upfront but I’ve found it tends to save you time later on. It’s not without its downsides, though; the primary one being that I’m the one responsible for managing everything and there are plenty of things I don’t know.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

It took an hour or two to compile and takes up about 5GB of space. The only program I’m really interested in is Xcode, which doesn’t work at the moment.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

GNOME changed the way I used desktops. Dolphin changed the way I used file managers.

I always set Nautilus to use one-click behavior, but it doesn’t have handles like Dolphin does. And Dolphin has a built-in terminal. And other niceties. I like Nautilus too. I think both desktops have some good ideas and I like to bring some KDE ideas over to GNOME and vice versa.

But if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that GNOME is much better designed than macOS.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I like them both. GNOME’s desktop metaphor is nicer but it can be replicated on Plasma with a few shortcuts. Plasma has a few niceties not present in GNOME. GNOME is prettier. Dolphin is a better file manager than Nautilus. GNOME programs don’t have a way of rebinding keyboard shortcuts.

It just depends on what I consider more important at the time.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don’t live in India, so I don’t know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It’s the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn’t affected?

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Does Unity support Wayland?

Nope. However, UnityX, a prototype desktop environment (which will be available as a variant of Unity once ready), will include Wayland support.

I realize the name was likely chosen for completely unrelated reasons, but I can’t stop laughing about UnityX being the only variant of Unity with Wayland support.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Maybe a different perspective could help?

YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn’t pay if the user hits “Skip”. Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.

I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It’s beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain’t free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it’s more friendly than Google search ads…

I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

The reasons are made clear on their roadmap.

The GTK3 port is done, and now they need to finalize the new extension API and improve their color space support (particularly CMYK). It would be nice if Wayland had a color management protocol extension standardized by then, but I don’t think it’s a blocker.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Here’s why.

Because I like the 2-clause BSD license. I am not a fan of “copyleft” or forcing obligations on people in general. I want my software to be available for anyone who wants to use it.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

The GPL is a better choice if you want to make money from the software. With a pushover license, your competitors can extend the program and profit from it in a way you can’t because they aren’t required to give the changes back. The GPL evens the playing field. Of course, you often see the original company requiring a CLA so they retain copyright over all of the code.

On the other hand, it does enable possibilities that you would be very unlikely to get otherwise. For example, Cedega (formerly WineX) forked Wine when it used a pushover license and brokered deals with game companies to make the DRM compatible with WineX/Cedega. That meant you could play these games on Linux-based OSes with Cedega, but not Wine. I really wonder if it would have been possible to make Wine compatible with some of these DRM schemes otherwise. Consequently, however, Cedega could not incorporate any changes from LGPL’d Wine, as that would have required them to license Cedega under the LGPL, too.

That’s another issue. You can incorporate MIT-licensed software in GPL software, but you can’t incorporate GPL software in MIT-licensed software. So going with the GPL gives you more options. As SerenityOS is building everything from scratch, this isn’t an issue, but you can well see how it could be. The LGPL is far less disruptive to people who want to release their software under a pushover license. It only requires you give back any changes to the LGPL-licensed part, and does not cover other parts of your program. Personally, I really like the LGPL. It levels the playing field while being quite compatible. It’s not perfect either, of course.

It’s a tricky question, and there are no right answers. Ultimately, the decision is up to the developer and I can’t fault any choice, including the decision to use a proprietary license.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

That’s also my preference, but very few games are free software. And most of the games I want to play are encumbered with DRM or cost ten times as much to get DRM-free. Of course, I buy them DRM-free because the DRM doesn’t work with Wine, but if it worked with Cedega…well, I might re-evaluate.

The purpose of the GPL isn’t to force companies to pay up to get out of copy left.

That’s why it was created, but in practice, many companies make money by selling exceptions. See Cal.com and CKEditor5, for instance. I didn’t mention this at all in my comment, though, so I’m not quite sure which part you’re responding to. By “level playing field”, I meant that everyone can improve Sourcehut and sell a service with more features, but they need to release those new features under the same license, meaning they will make it back to Sourcehut proper. Selling exceptions isn’t the only way to make money from free software.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

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”:

• github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3833
• github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3684

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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: privsec.dev/posts/linux/desktop-linux-hardening/#…

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.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

What really needs to happen:

Flatpak packages should ask for every permission they need, and the user needs to approve every one of them.

Right now, we have this weird in-between state where some flatpak packages ship with limited permissions (like Bottles). That’s because every permission the package asks for is immediately granted. The user doesn’t get a chance to refuse these requests. This current model serves to make life more difficult for non-malicious flatpak packagers while failing to protect users from malicious packages.

Also, GNOME needs a Flatpak permissions center like KDE. You shouldn’t need to install a third party program to manage permissions.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

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

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Cheers. I use Krita myself, but I’ve heard people say “Krita is terrible; try FireAlpaca.” I think that might be because it has performance issues on other operating systems; I’m not in a position to test. It’s good to hear Krita is basically ahead on all fronts except learning curve. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see a Linux version. FireAlpaca advertises a Dark Mode, but I’m guessing it’s a paid-only feature.