If I create a OSS app with analytics to detect & log crashes with feature use, is it a bad practice? I think analytics is really helpful in finding:-...
Many people who deliberately choose open source, are also into privacy. I’m not sure what people like. But you’ll definitely face some rejection by people like me. I like to file bugreports myself. I get my apps from F-Droid and they usually strip those telemetry libraries from the source. But for people who use Obtanium or Google Play, it’ll work. I think there is a good share of users who are fine with crashreports. Maybe the majority. You could make the app ask for confirmation before sending the report. Or offer two variants of the app, one normal and one without. Or let people like F-Droid offer the latter.
If it’s more than crash reports, I think it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.
I like the old fashioned way of doing free software. Have a community around the project, a bugtracker and engage people in a discussion about future developments. I’m happy if that’s baked into an app if it’s opt-in and it’s an open backend or something simple, meaning you don’t include the whole Firebase, Crashlytics, … stuff. But it’s up to the developer. If you like it, and your audience isn’t privacy nerds, include it and see if people complain.
Yeah, the maintainers of F-Droid will probably appreciate you did the work for them.
And I think it’s a sound approach. I mean the Linux ecosystem works the same way. We have upstream developers, and distributions and maintainers who adapt the packages for the user. We can have all the diversity, modern tools and also distributions like Debian that swich everything to privacy per default because their users like that. I think the same approach works for android and I really appreciate I get to choose between F-Droid, Obtanium and the Google Play store.
Nah, I disagree. I think it’s a general place to hang out and talk. And the community name and description don’t include the word ‘news’. There are other communities for that.
We’d have 1 post every two weeks and little to no engagement if this was about news only. Use a different community or a RSS feedreader for news.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea. As of now I don’t think they have diverged much. So they’re (still) about the same. It was mainly created because of the takeover of the domain and trademark by a for profit company. Not because of different functionality.
I think it’s just a larger undertaking. Like mentioned in the last comments. People either need to address that as the main focus for some new major release and work on it. Or subdivide it and find people to work on the individual components to make it happen (gradually).
Also there is always the thing with hobby / free software projects. Sometimes people focus on functionality and features and not so much on asthetics and the first impression. I agree the welcome screen is somewhat important as it’s the first thing a new player sees. But I also like the developers to work on features which enhance the actual gameplay because I just see that screen for 10 seconds and it’s kind of a waste of time to improve it for someone like me. The current screen works alright. There are several dynamics affecting projects: “Perfect is the enemy of good” (don’t make it too complicated) but also sometimes a makeshift solution or something that works “okay” stays inplace indefinitely because “it works” and people concentrate on other stuff. That’s just how things work. It takes deliberate effort to work against those dynamics.
So I’d say the cause is, their focus is somewhere else.
Yeah, I had sound and printing break on Windows, too. And my mom’s Windows PC breaks every year and a half. I’d say go for linux if you’re comfortable with that, it’s pretty robust. Or MacOS that also seems not to break.
(Of course something like Arch or EndeavourOS is more complicated and may break. Fedora, Debian, Mint … will be a better choice for stability. My Debian install runs without mayor issues for 5 years now. If you don’t do silly stuff an mess with the system, they’ll outperform windows.)
Most people choose an OS because they’re used to that specific workflow and know the quirks and how to get around. That’s why many peoole use Microsoft, not because it’s better. School/College/University is a good time to try something. After that you’re pretty much stuck.
That’s right. To add a few things: X11 isn’t bad. It’s just a big and complex piece of software that has grown for multiple decades. And nobody wants to do big changes or add new things anymore.
Wayland is the modern and “fresh” new approach. I’ve had some issues with my NVidia graphics card. But that wasn’t Waylands fault, but the NVidia drivers. I have a laptop with just Intel graphics and both X11 and Wayland run excellently on that machine.
With Linux we often get many choices, and have several alternatives available to do the same / a similar job. That is a bit complicated for someone new. But we should embrace it, be glad that we can pick whatever suits our individual needs. Wayland still has some issues on a few specific setups, but eventually it will replace X11 as the default.
The X font server has been deprecated like 10 years ago. I doubt you’ll find it as an option in a modern distribution. Nowadays fonts are rendered by the client (application) with something like the Cairo library (if I’m not mistaken).
I’m not sure. The benefit of open source is that you can just take it and use it. And even incorporate it into your own projects. And it’s super easy, all you have to do is make the source available if it’s copyleft.
Now people want to add money to the mix, define valid use-cases, have me file paperwork to become a non-profit etc… Especially adding money to the mix could turn out bad in my eyes. Currently people are incentivised by other things. Software development and usage is a level playing field and you get gifted awesome programs. I’m really not sure if more capitalism helps. (But yes, I also think it’s annoying that companies like IBM, Amazon and Google make big money and often don’t contribute. And maybe handling money is unavoidable, for example since nowadays many projects need to pay for infrastructure, or do automated builds / tests / CI and that also costs money unless Github helps you out.)
I already dislike the growing amount of Source-Available software, and software that contains the commons clause. Can I now share this with my friends? Can they invite some more people to the instance? Do I need a lawyer and do proper accounting if they contribute paying for the server? What if the software relies on other software (libraries/databases) that aren’t free anymore?
Ths might be a silly question, but asking those is how i learn sometimes. I’m trying to install my first Linux distro to set up a Plex server and one of the few things I know is you need a wired internet connection. My intended server location is across the house from my router, and there isnt much room there to set up...
I’m not sure if Ubuntu requires a wired internet connection. I’ve installed a different distro yesterday and wifi worked fine during the installation. The installer asked me to connect to network and I used the wifi. I’ve never plugged a network cable into the machine. Maybe it’s the same with Ubuntu. But sure, there are other possibilities. Offline installers and/or you can install Linux on a different machine and then swap the harddisk/ssd. Just take care not to overwrite the internal disk of your laptop. Make sure it writes to the correct disk (or unplug other ones).
Seems you just plug in the cable on Linux and you’re done. Low latency video can be transferred over network for example with gstreamer/pipewire and files with any file transfer protocol.
With GStreamer you can build a pipeline you like, you don’t need to use RDP, you can send uncompressed frames plain over network like in the video. I’m not an expert on graphics processing. SLI or NVLink are (I think) proprietary parallel processing interconnects. But NVidia didn’t invent parallel processing. I’m sure there are other solutions available. Though, I somehow doubt those will help you because they’re generally tailored to other (HPC/datacenter/simulation) purposes and not for gaming. And I think they use something like Infiniband for that and not thunderbolt.
With the speed, mind the first article is 5 years old. And I’m not sure how the hardware in the second one compares to what Linus uses or if it’s even the same generation of Thunderbolt. It’s probably gotten way faster since. I can’t try because only 1 device I own supports thunderbolt at all.
I think transferring files over thunderbolt networking or low latency video is nothing new. It can be easily replicated. And setting up 2 gstreamer pipelines is just two (lengthy) commands. Replicating NVlink is another thing, though. We probably need an expert on graphics drivers to tell if that already exists or how difficult that would be to implement. Most people will probably just fit 2 graphics cards into one computer or buy one faster GPU because that is both cheaper and way faster than connecting them in 2 separate computers with added latency.
(MPI would be an example of an open standard to do parallel computing with arbitrary interconnects.)
I’m sure there is a way to make signing the CLA part of the pull request process on Github. I’ve been asked to do it. Not sure how Github works nowadays, maybe it was part of Github or an external bot.
And I don’t agree with the other people here. I think having complete copyright makes some things easier. And if you do an open project, maintain it for years, do 99% of the work… You’re allowed being paid with the contributions.
Mind there are other licenses than just the GPL. You could just pick a MIT license / Apache / BSD instead and maybe you don’t need the contributors to sign over their copyright anymore, because these licenses cover pretty much everything and transfer it to everyone, including you.
I have a few Linux servers at home that I regularly remote into in order to manage, usually logged into KDE Plasma as root. Usually they just have several command line windows and a file manager open (I personally just find it more convenient to use the command line from a remote desktop instead of directly SSH-ing into the...
Yes. Running anything as root is potentially dangerous. And a browser is a complex and big piece of software with many security issues that can be (potentially) triggered remotely. So it’s bad because of two reasons.
Btw a desktop environment also is a complex and big piece of software with potential issues. Running the whole desktop as root is another thing you wouldn’t do for extra security.
The proper way is to just create a user account and run the desktop and browser as a user. Open a terminal and ‘su’ or ‘sudo’ to limit root rights to the operations that actually need those permissions.
Just running everything as root certainly works. But you do away with all the extra layers of security and end up with something as secure as MS-DOS or a Windows in the 90s or early 2000s.
Greetings, fellow FOSS fanatics! I’ve been scouring the internet in the past month for any kind of open source implementation of the Miracast protocol that could run on Android (or Android TV) as a receiver with no luck....
Not necessarily. There are other operating systems and frameworks for embedded devices. Especially for commercial products. It doesn’t have to be something like Linux and GPL code.
This is a list of many other choices with many of them having non-copyleft licenses. And a thermostat is a comparatively simple device. They could also have implemented most things themselves and just taken a network-stack to connect it to the outside world. (I think network is something that is very complex and companies just buy a solution instead of writing all of that code.)
I want to run a command and see all of its output on the left hand side, while simultaneously searching/grepping for particular lines on the right hand side. In other words, I want a temporary vertically split screen in my CLI, ideally with scrollback on each side of the split, but where I expect the left hand side to be...
It’s copy and pasting 5 lines into the terminal and hitting enter. It’s not that hard. If it’s not worth the 15 seconds of ‘work’ you probably don’t need the software that badly.
And it’s not the default. Usually you shouldn’t add random software sources and download software from some websites. Your Linux package manager should be the source for software. (Software Manager / Store / Synaptics, … whatever Ubuntu calls it) It installs software with one or two clicks with the mouse, the software there is tested and tied into the rest of the systems and tens of thousands of packages are available. No malware guaranteed, and updates are handled automatically.
And with other Operating systems it’s also ridiculous: You need to find the website of some software, avoid malware and copycats that advertise similar software with ads, click download, click ‘yes’ I accept a download with a harmful extension. Then you need to open the file manager and double click on it. Then a window opens and you need to click ‘next’. Accept the terms. Give permission to install and maybe remove a few ticks and choose a location. I’d say it’s about the same amount of work and the downside is it doesn’t necessarily handle updates and security fixes.
I think Ubuntu doesn’t have Mullvad available in their own repository. I took another approach and imported their settings/profile into the VPN/network manager that is available per default on many Linux distributions. No install required at all. But importing the settings isn’t easier, so YMMV here. And I think you have to create a profile for each and every country/endpoint which is a bit cumbersome, depending on what you’re trying to do with the VPN.
But how do you think you install software on Windows? You download a random installer from the internet and double-click it. The installer is an executable file and runs some code on your computer to set up the software. I’d argue it’s exactly the same.
In the one instance you copy and paste code and run it. In the other instance you execute an installer that also contains the random code. And you can’t even have a look what happens.
The real issue is: You have to trust the vendor. If you don’t trust Mullvad, don’t run their 5 lines of code. But you then also shouldn’t install their software and not run their windows installer. I don’t see a way around this ‘trust’ issue.
The proper way of course would be a standardised process that also confines the software into containers with minimal permissions. Something like Android Apps. In theory you could add a default update process so the vendor just needs to define an update server in the (apk) installer file. Google didn’t do this, but they want people to use their Play Store. And I don’t think we have a permission system that is actively used on any of the major desktop operating systems, anyways.
Glad you were able to figure it out. Yeah, there are a lot of settings and different moving parts involved in doing audio. And the config files are all over the place. It can get nasty.
There has to be a way to make your settings and that pipeline the (system) default. Or at least change the profile that gets loaded for your specific soundcard and change and override the channel mapping so it won’t load something else first.
So I finally decided to join my university Linux group, and has I been helping people with simple problems in discord for a while they put me in the helpdesk....
Thanks. Yeah I spent some time with it and drew some finite-state machines with TikZ(?), other diagrams, we assembled a few physics homework assignment scripts to tidy the data from experiments, do linear regression and generate beautiful diagrams. It also taught me a bit about typesetting and proper formatting. I ‘wasted’ quite some time with it but a homework assignment in TeX looks almost like a scientific paper. Depending on the later career it’s a good skill to have. And I still prefer writing stuff with that instead of fighting LibreOffice. YMMV, since I also like programming and prefer text and the command line over GUIs.
If I create a OSS app with analytics to detect & log crashes with feature use, is it a bad practice?
If I create a OSS app with analytics to detect & log crashes with feature use, is it a bad practice? I think analytics is really helpful in finding:-...
deleted_by_author
I love my Gitea. Any tips and tricks? (sh.itjust.works)
The issue to create a new main menu for Minetest has been open for 6 years. (github.com)
Years have gone by and hundreds of comments have been written about the proposal, but the main screen still looks like this:...
Fedora, Arch, or EndeavourOS?
Hi, I was here and asked about a few distros already, so here’s a quick summary of my situation:...
ELI5 the whole Wayland vs X11 going on.
Title
What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it (www.theregister.com)
Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address....
VR Porn
Can anyone recommend me a free VR porn website? (Download or streaming) I recently bought a quest 3 and I wanna try how that feels.
Can I pre-install Ubuntu on an SSD?
Ths might be a silly question, but asking those is how i learn sometimes. I’m trying to install my first Linux distro to set up a Plex server and one of the few things I know is you need a wired internet connection. My intended server location is across the house from my router, and there isnt much room there to set up...
Can this be replicated with opensource software?[p2p file transfer over thunderbolt, and extremely low latency Video and game streaming (no encoding)] (www.youtube.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/10454803...
How do I make contributors to my project transfer copyright to me?
Is there a pull request template that does this?...
Linux in the corporate space
I made this post because I am really curious if Linux is used in offices and educational centres like schools....
Is it actually dangerous to run Firefox as root?
I have a few Linux servers at home that I regularly remote into in order to manage, usually logged into KDE Plasma as root. Usually they just have several command line windows and a file manager open (I personally just find it more convenient to use the command line from a remote desktop instead of directly SSH-ing into the...
FOSS Miracast/WiDi receiver for Android TV?
Greetings, fellow FOSS fanatics! I’ve been scouring the internet in the past month for any kind of open source implementation of the Miracast protocol that could run on Android (or Android TV) as a receiver with no luck....
Is my 'smart' thermostat violating the GPL?
So, I know very little and have a poor understanding of the software licenses, hence why I’m asking....
Is there such a thing as split-screen grep?
I want to run a command and see all of its output on the left hand side, while simultaneously searching/grepping for particular lines on the right hand side. In other words, I want a temporary vertically split screen in my CLI, ideally with scrollback on each side of the split, but where I expect the left hand side to be...
New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?
mullvad.net/en/help/install-mullvad-app-linux...
Need Some Help Troubleshooting Ubuntu Surround Sound
I had sound working fine with one problem: the center and rear right channel were swapped....
Recommendations
So I finally decided to join my university Linux group, and has I been helping people with simple problems in discord for a while they put me in the helpdesk....