So, this morning, after years and years of using the GUI in Linux, I gave up. The state of the GUI does nothing but deteriorate over time for accessibility, and it's exhausting. It's only getting worse. We're far, far away from what it used to be, years ago. Certainly, the QT framework has improved since 5 and now 6 came out, but GTK? Oh dear, oh dear... So, let's dive into it. #linux#xorg#wayland#a11y#accessibility#blind
#Wayland protocol proposal: the server decides whether to use client-side or-server-side decorations, but the client may challenge it to a duel. Each must have another Unix process as a second. Server gets to choose the weapons.
If you use #Firefox on #Wayland you might know the privacy indicator. Yeah, that little floating window that's supposed to be "always-on-top" and positioned at the top of the screen, just that it isn't because on Wayland we don't want apps to have the power to do such things by themselves. The one that mostly duplicates stuff that's provided by your DE already, informing you that you're sharing the screen.
The #RaspberryPi 5 is here and like its predecessor it supports decoding and displaying H.265 in 4K@60fps.
Some of you may wonder: does that really work on a modern #Linux / #FDO desktop? If my laptop fan starts spinning when playing such content, how can the PI handle it?
Here I'd like to draw your attention to a pretty cool feature we just introduced in #GNOME45 - support for YCbCr or YUV pixel formats in the system compositor (Mutter).
A customer of mine is looking for a #Wayland expert to contract, related to frame capture as part of a streaming stack. Let me know if you or someone you know would be a good fit!
📢 New blog post! Released last week, Weston 12.0 brings a number of highlights including two new backends, support for multiple scanout devices & new protocol implementations. Here's a look at some of the changes that have landed: https://col.la/weston12#Wayland#OpenSource
Someone please tell me screen reader support isn’t broken on the major Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu that ship Wayland as default.
(I can’t get the modifier key for Orca to work under the latest Fedora Silverblue and, according to the linked issue, it’s because… it just doesn’t work under Wayland? That can’t be right, right? It would mean the major Linux distributions are inaccessible.)
Wow, OK, so I wasn’t missing anything. It looks like the only available screen reader on major Linux distributions is broken and has been for some time.
Lack of accessibility not being a show stopper for an operating systems blows my mind.
We’re talking about distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with enterprise customers (aren’t there some accessibility laws that apply here? 🤔)
For those of you interested in our recent video offloading / zero-copy playback work: I quickly put together some #livi#flatpak s to make it easy to test stuff already. Compositor offloading should work on all semi-recent Intel/AMD and a variety of ARM64 devices.
So @gnome is removing the x11 session, leaving just the Wayland one.
If this goes out before Orca, the GNOME screen reader, is fixed to work on Wayland, it will mean that people who rely on screen readers will have no way to use one on GNOME. And thus on the major Linux distributions.
So I’m hoping the plan is that this change will not land until GNOME has a working screen reader.
Testing Artemis on Linux via Waydroid
Overall no problems found yet. This will be rather useful for faster testing, along with tablet UI testing later on.