The thing with Wayland, is that if you don’t use gnome/kde/tiling-compositors, your options are pretty limited, actually the closest to an independent stacking compositor would be wayfire.
You can make things work, but with a lot of nuances here and there, to the point you get tired of dealing with them… gtk4 not paying attention to GDK_DPI_SCALE, no file manager recognizing gvs except for nautilus, which guess what, it’s already gt4, electron apps built on top of latest (22) electron and gtk3, not paying attention to GDK_DPI_SCALE either, wf-shell doesn’t offer tray, and waybar does, but waybar doesn’t offer a launcher button, but wf-shell does, and so on…
I actually recently got around a week trying to make myself comfortable with wayland, but for me it lags behind from Xorg.
But perhaps the author is right, and if Xorg would have been dropped altogether, wayland would be in better shape, but that we won’t ever know… On the other hand who knows if someone would have forked it, or revive it after noticing too many users complaining. It’s been many years since its introduction, and wayland is still not up to being a workable replacement for Xorg for a good amount Xorg users (usually not considered in the bulk numbers though). Every now and then I try it, when reminding myself of this “the register” post, but haven’t gotten to the point of really wanting to migrate…
Hopefully things will change, but till then, I really hope Xorg keeps it up.
I read somewhere, loonson was going to change ISA to risc-v, can’t remember when. But this article shows they’ll keep on mips, apparently (“his company plans to build out a software ecosystem that will allow Chinese users to run more applications on the LoongArch ISA natively”)?
I think they should move to risc-v. I know mips ISA was open sourced as well, one or two years back, but still…
I have mix feelings with blog post…
While decentralization is good for many reasons, and distributed systems are even better than decentralized ones, saying fascism, providing nazis a place to gather, and giving voice to extremists, are not a decentralization problem or weakness, and the post sort of accepts that as given and sort of provides workarounds through quarantining and the like.
People will always find a place to gather, and make themselves feel. Before there was centralized social media places, and even before internet, there were fascists and nazis. And when big corps started to van people they consider unacceptable on their spaces, then they built and found other places for them, so whether centralized or not, people will find ways to gather and share their thinking, whether that’s something big corps, big media, or common sense find those thoughts acceptable or not.
The real problems on centralized services are giving too much control and power to a few ones, who have their own agenda, their own interests, their own criteria, without giving a damn on what’s true or not, what’s common sense or no, what benefits majority or not. Big media has always concentrated too much power, and now big tech corps do the same, and they interests are not there to represent everybody’s interest. The vanning culture of Today, the censoring culture of Today, the dislike of different opinions of Today, are not just because of centralization, but sure are empowered and accelerated by centralization, and those are as corrosive to society as fascism and extremism, actually that mono-thinking and mono-culture might actually be a sort of those things culturally thought as bad. Not to count how centralization affects privacy, and adds way more risk to data we would like to preserve, given single points of control, single points of failure, and single points of risk.
To finish, I hoped much more about such title, but oh well…
Well risc-v is a nice open ISA, not open source HW. Even when some companies post the chisel code, or the rtl one on github, doesn’t necessarily make it open source. There are vendors with proprietary risc-v based IP already.
On the other hand really open HW is really hard to happen. The Fabs recipes for different technologies, is like secret sauce. And securing the produced HW vs the chisel/rtl code is really hard, starting form the fact the business ecosystem is mostly fabless (except for Intel and adn a few IDS companies around), and companies designing usually include proprietary IP from vendors (who knows what they add into their IP), so no way to verify that code, and it’s impossible for every company to design everything (too much complexity and too much expertise on a diverse ecosystem of different technologies). Then when having the rtl and gatesims somehow verified, companies send to a 3rd party for the “physical” design, including tracing and routing plus “mask” design, and as long as there’s equivalence between the original design (which already incorporated proprietary IP) and the one send back by the 3rd party company, then it goes to the Fab (though the 3rd party company could have introduced something, obscured somehow so equivalence is not broken), and then finally, even if the Fab doesn’t introduce anything the original company is not aware of, in the end the recipe for whether 14nm, 7nm, 2nm, and everything related to how the company achieves what it does, is not open either (there are of course theory, papers and talks about the processes, but what the Fab finally does, has to be protected against competitors). All the original company can do, is to verify the functionality of the resulting Si, starting from postSi verification all the way down to product verification. But several key pieces were even proprietary IP and libraries to start with, the thing goes through several hands until it lands to the Fab, and what ended in the final Si is not fully known, all you can do is verify under certain scenarios the thing does what it was intended for, :)
So in the end fully open HW is really hard to get. But an open ISA is better than current status quo, and hopefully it might motivate for more openness on the HW industry…
In general, I don’t like the idea of having flatpak, snapcraft and appimage, packages. First, and this is different between them, but in the end they all suffer the same one way or another, there are huge binary dependencies blobs, whether coming with the same app, or having to be installed from the package provider. At some point I tried to install Liri from Flatpak, and it was a nightmare of things having to be installed, when I already had most things natively built by the distro I used.
As opposed to opinions from Linus himself, I prefer SW to be built from the same system libraries and dependencies, rather than each app coming along with their own set of binary dependencies. Getting GNU/Linux to behave like MS-Win, where you can install whatever binary, from whatever source, and perhaps even duplicating a bunch of stuff you already have on your system is crazy. One thing that gets solves easier, when having contained apps, is when depending on same things but from different versions, and that to me is not ideal either. To me, as done by distros, one should avoid as much as possible having different versions of same SW, but if in need, then rename one including the version as part of the name, or something, but mainly avoid having a bunch the same thing with multiple versions all over. Guix handles that more elegantly of course, but I haven’t had the time, neither the guts to go for Guix yet (still in my ist of pending stuff).
The other thing, is that although now a days everything comes with a signature to check, on distros provided packages, which are built from source, besides minimizing the amount of stuff needed, one can always look at how the packages are built (arch and derivatives through the PKGBUILs and companions), tweak and build oneself (eg, currently fluxbox head of master, and from a while back, doesn’t play nice with lxqt, then with the help of fluxbox devs I found the culprit commit, revert it, and still apply the same distro recipe with my own patch, and moved on). No matter being signed, binary packages are not as flexible, that besides the fact several just proprietary, and one might not even be aware, since the move is to be more MS-Win like, even with auto updates and such…
Building having in mind minimal systems and ecosystems, and have mostly free/libre or at least open source SW, makes thing much better for me. One can end up with bloated huge systems, if wanted, but at least not with bunch of duplicates unnecessarily.
Ohh well, if only TOR exit nodes were not able to be used to spy on users, if government agencies would refrain to host exit nodes (and other nodes), and if exit noes wouldn’t allow for some exit nodes monopolizing (at times single user had been found controlling good amount of exit nodes), neither hijacking.
I’m really glad people investigates on how to protect privacy better, and TOR has contributed to that. But although the efforts to sanitize the TOR network, as a user, one really doesn’t know if one is getting the opposite effect. Agencies with resources are also able to deanonimize TOR users… So it’s really hard now a days, as a user, to go trust any internet mechanism intended to protect one’s privacy. VPNs are no better, perhaps even worse, since now it’s about trusting a centralized service which has it easier to spy on users.
Privacy on the net is near impossible now a days, :(
DuckDuckGo? No thanks, its search engine based on blink, and now a browser app…
Better use Mull, or any other FF based browser…
From a technical stand point you’re right, particularly because of limitations imposed on cisc x86 instructions decoding, which given the complexity don’t tolerate as many concurrent decoders as opposed to risc, besides many other advantages of risc. But also, from a technical stand point, take into account that the current intel x86 implementations are really risc ones wrapped around to support cisc. However there are several limitations still, particularly while decoding.
I believe apple architecture and design decision, go just beyond risc, like sharing the same memory among different processors (cpus, gpus, and so on). That gains M1, M2, and coming SoCs an edge… So it’s not just about risc…
But my opinion was more about current sanctions, technology banning, and all that sort of artifacts used to restrict and constrain Chinese technology. SoCs are not as short term as one might think, since it’s not cheap investment. So to me, since several years back, they should have focused on risc-v, to avoid such non technical huge problems. They have all resources necessary to pursue a different path, than the more costly and limiting one. Of course changing takes time, but again, they have everything they need to do so. That’s why it was a surprise to see investment on x86 compatible CPUs. But hey, they know their business better than anyone else, :)
why developing a x86 compatible arch? Wouldn’t it be better for China to focus on Risc-V? They even had Loongson, but it’s MIPS based…
Not sure if intel will demand something, or if it actually licensed something (not their business model), so short term might help keeping some x86 SW, but mid term and long term, this doesn’t make much sense, does it?
True, but here it’s the thing which is somehow concerning… GNU has attempted to bring sel4, and other interesting ukernels to hurd, with so few hands, and no one really getting interested. And now that Google tries it, oh, how innovative…
I like the move to ukernels, and focus on clean by design. However as mentioned by others, it’s still Google… We’ll see. It’ll be interesting to see where this new effort leads. Will this take over Google’s mobile OS eventually, or chromeOS, or would there be a PC kind on Google OS?
Calibre has CLI as well, if the GUI is really offensive. On Artix, part of pacman -Ql calibre:
calibre /usr/bin/calibre
calibre /usr/bin/calibre-complete
calibre /usr/bin/calibre-customize
calibre /usr/bin/calibre-debug
calibre /usr/bin/calibre-parallel
calibre /usr/bin/calibre-server
calibre /usr/bin/calibre-smtp
calibre /usr/bin/calibredb
calibre /usr/bin/ebook-convert
calibre /usr/bin/ebook-device
calibre /usr/bin/ebook-edit
calibre /usr/bin/ebook-meta
calibre /usr/bin/ebook-polish
calibre /usr/bin/ebook-viewer
calibre /usr/bin/fetch-ebook-metadata
calibre /usr/bin/lrf2lrs
calibre /usr/bin/lrfviewer
calibre /usr/bin/lrs2lrf
calibre /usr/bin/markdown-calibre
calibre /usr/bin/web2disk
calibre /usr/lib/
calibre /usr/lib/calibre/
calibre /usr/lib/calibre/calibre/
...
Although ebook-convert shows on its man page as converting from one epub format to another, it can as well convert to pdf. I don’t know if it’s possible to convert from pdf to epub, but if the calibre GUI’s does it, perhaps some of calibre’s CLIs can do it as well.
Pandoc can also convert from epub to pdf, though my experience with pandoc as a very basic user is that the results, are not of the quality I’d expect, but again, that is without using special arguments, css, and stuff, perhaps advanced users can get the best out of pandoc…
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Also:
Tracking One Year of Malicious Tor Exit Relay Activities (Part II)
I’m wondering if it’s still that bad now a days
FYI: kmail does support office365 + exchange, the thing about the kontact suite is its akonadi DB dependency and all kde deps required. It’s like anything kde you install, brings a bunch of other stuff, usually not anything you end up using…
However I do like how kmail integrates with local gnuPG, rather than Thunderbird’s librnp, which I end up replacing with Sequoia Octopus librnp…
Don’t worry, I checked on BiglyBT before. It does the dual function, it does hook to i2p trackers, which are special, and can as well hook to clear internet trackers, and whatever is being downloaded can be shared and exposed on both. It’s a specialized i2p torrent client, like vuze.
That’s what I was trying to avoid using, :( I’m looking to see if I could use any torrent client, and just tunnel its traffic into the i2p router, like if it were a VPN or ssh tunnel. But so far, it seems you need a specialized torrent client, which can connect as a minimum, to i2p trackers, and use the different i2p file sharing protocols…
If I’m mistaken, let me know, but it seems that’s the only way. At least what I’ve read. Oh well, dI don’t trust VPNs, and I don’t like the idea of using something I don’t trust, unless forced to do it…
Thanks a lot !
ohh, so I can use any torrent client (rtorrent for example), as long as I only use i2p sort of trackers, or so I understand from your post, and also from the wiki, perhaps specifying the binding address and port, or something like that…
Sorry if way too OT, :( What torrent i2p client are you using? I don’t like the idea of vuze with a plugin, neither biglybt. I’m more inclined to something like rtorrent (ncurses, and if used with detached screen, then on any ssh session you can remotely monitor, without needing additional remote accesses or web publishing)…
well, to me data brokers exist only because it’s possible to profit from it, and in the end, no legislation will totally ban that practice. The issue is apps developers trying to monetize through users data, and the monetizing model found is not going anywhere, popularized by big companies, and now followed pretty much by anyone wanting to monetize. Users really need to become aware of the issue in the 1st place, and not just few, I mean, like 80% or so of them, and to start with, stop using OS that share their data underneath, and as most of it is proprietary, that means getting rid of android, ios, ms, etc, and use at least open source OS, but preferable FLOSS ones. Then start picking privacy respecting apps, and as much FLOSS as possible. And if a good chunk of user become aware, and start changing their habits and consumption culture, then that monetizing model will be really impacted. No legislation will cover all corner cases, to get rid of the bad practices, there will always be front/back doors found. It’s culture and consumption which needs changing. And as with anything worth, it’s the hardest to get, :(
I wouldn’t go that far as the “guy with a computer”, for example in the case of gnu+linux phones, and gnu+linux non desktop (mobile). There are several apps needing to be adapted to the mobile form factor and touch screen, and plain lack of apps as well, that mos probably flatpak or similar are required on gnu+linux phones.
But I truly dislike the bunch of stuff one gets installed, when installing any flatpak or similar package, both, other flatpak packages, plus what each package itself carries within. It’s way bloated in my humble opinion.
As an Artix/Arch user, I prefer AUR packages, and I even prefer AUR requiring building, over the binary (*-bin) ones, so that I get system libraries being linked, and the right built packages. And only if there’s no option (mainly unavoidable proprietary/closed apps) then I go with AUR binary packages. But if only available through flatpak or similar, then I prefer looking for an alternative SW/app.
Besides the bloated way of that kind of packaging, there’s some sort of centralization. Although there are different flatpak repos, for example, there’s sort of a “central” one, where you find most of the stuff, and then you go to other repos offering some things you don’t get on the “central” one, and if you don’t like their packaging policies, then as usual, go have your own and package yourself, I’d guess… Distros, having their different policies (not just packaging ones):
- vanilla vs making many changes
- rolling release vs. periodic releases
- only free SW vs. free separated from non free vs. not caring at all
- single packages when possible vs. splitting everything when possible
- having a social sort of contract vs. not caring
- focusing on security vs. other focus
- focusing on privacy vs. other focus
- graphical installation vs. CLI installation
- toolset and tooling choices in general
- musl vs glibc
- guix vs apt vs yum vs pacman vs xbps vs …
- enterprise focused vs end users focused
- business oriented vs non profit oriented
And the divergent policies adopted by different distros grow beyond those ones. Such variety can’t be compressed into a single solution fits all. And if you’ve heard pretty influential and vocal open source guys challenging that diversity, and particularly the ability to building the SW differently, I suggest double thinking what that really means, and how that would affect different users, having divergent policies affinities. I, for example, would prefer to use gnu+guix, but given the current hw assigned to me at the office, I can’t be as free/libre SW focuses as I’d like, but I still try preferring as much free/libre SW as possible (slack and zoom are necessary evils in the office for example)…
So this reach diversity, in my mind is good and needed, and having several people building stuff is also good, since having just a few, with unique and common policies, might become dangerous…
Just another opinion, not exactly the same as the one from the “guy with a computer”, but my opinion aligns somehow with theirs.
This is totally new to me, and to be honest, habits are hard to break, so I’ll try to use singular “they” when not sure. Basic/cheap English grammar lessons for non native English speakers never teach you anything about singular “they”. How sad, cause then one who tries to write/speak as best as possible, might not be correct because of how they got to learn a bit of English.
I know this will sound as blasphemy, but what I’ve read from Skakespeare, I’ve did in Castellano, hehe, so I wouldn’t notice what you mentioned. Good to know.
well, that’s my plan as well, however I’m missing mobile versions of apps, soe far only available for desktop, since the from factor is different, I guess the gui should be different as well. The best would be using at lest Qt apps, which might work on mobile… BTW, although I don’t like flatpack, I’ll have to start using I’d guess, if moving to gnu+linux phones. I do like the fact what comes with pinephones now a days is manjaro with plasma mobile.
I guess I can get used to some non mobile apps working on a phone, but I maintained my family’s phones with lineageOSforMicroG, no gpapps installed, and mostly using f-droid, except for few apps without alternatives (including whatsapp, which my mom and sister can’t get rid of), so I don’t see how I can keep them up to date with current good old xiaomi redmi 4x (which by the way are pretty comfortable, like 4.5 inches, which are easy on short hands).
Although lineageOS is opensource, it depends on a bunch on non free proprietary stuff, which gets stuck on old linux versions. And as mainstream is google, there’s nothing good to be expected about not breaking old devices. Moreover, where it reads “iptables can’t be restored in any meaningful way”, it means upstream (yeah, google) purposely broke it so bad, that it almost looks like that breaking devices stuck at old linux versions was their intention. Iptables keep working fine on Today’s 5.17.4, on any gnu+linux desktop distro, so there’s no reason to break it, just because of using newer linux versions. Ohh well ! Sad times, specially when depending on corporates provided stuff…
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keep in mind, that fork author is investigating how to enable google login, pushed with requests from ex Vanced users… See my comment about it below:
BTW, I just mentioned it as the fork the provided blog URL talks about. I’m concerned with the direction it might take, since several ex Vanced users are pushing for getting to login to youtube, as Vanced did:
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe/discussions/164#discussioncomment-2577669
And it seems their requests will be heard at some point:
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe/discussions/164#discussioncomment-2415244 https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe/discussions/164#discussioncomment-2456960
So, not sponsoring polymorphic newpipe. If only it remained as newpipe with sponsorblock…
I felt I needed to provide additional information about polymorphic newpipe, :)
FYI: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
They’re deciding on the fork name still, to then, have a fdroid repo I’d guess. It already supports notification updates:
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe/issues/14#issuecomment-748393890
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DDG unfortunately is more concerned about profiting, down ranking what’s told to do so, and what’s more convenient for itself, and has great marketing. It’s no better than Searx in that it’s also meta search engine, just with better marketing. Well perhaps not as simple as that, but not that far either. Quoting someone:
BTW, I always thought duckduckgo was a pure engine, and it does as well some meta searching through bing.
So, they succeeded with marketing. The situation is exactly the opposite. It’s 99.99% rebranded Bing (and Yahoo and Yandex) with a slight touch of DuckDuckBot.
From a delete Lemmy post:
https://lemmy.ml/post/43595/comment/22034
Besides, searx uses multiple sources, not just google, which you can enable disable on the settings, as a user of any instance, :)
How about code being sent through SMS? Or using an OTH token, or something not forcing an app? Where I live, what’s worse about those token apps, is that some do not work if not under google play. Some do, but most don’t. I had to show them their app didn’t work in a LOS4uG phone (no GApps at all), and they sold me the OATH token, they were not even going to sell it to me, because banks are enforcing the app, which to me it’s a horrible practice. But banks are private entities, so I don’t know if there can be legal actions filed against those practices, though I’m no lawyer, neither I have time, neither money to start such demands, but I’m thinking it should be possible.
In my country the government is also trying to enforce QR codes through an app, right now the enforcement was put on pause, given an action filed against it, but I’m suspecting it’ll still be enforced in the end… It’s sad to see where things are moving…
Ohh, that’s similar to using libredirect which keeps a curated list of frontends.
The bad thing is not keeping local copies of subscriptions wherever supported, so if the user forgets to keep backups, that additional layer does it for the user, and can change to any frontend instance keeping the same subscriptions for all, and even preferences, :). That’s perhaps way beyond the scope of any tool…