FOSS - ensuring even new hardware stays in use when vendor-support eventually ends!
Whether or not you install GNU/Linux on it today, your new #Mac will eventually lose #Apple support. Thanks to the impressive work of #Asahi#Linux project (@AsahiLinux), it will not need to end up in the landfill once it does.
Project activity, software launches, updates, a spotlight on #sup3rS3cretMes5age - a one-time, self-destructing messaging service, and more in this week's self-hosted recap!
We're pleased to announce that Codethink are sponsoring this year's Electromagnetic Field in Eastnor. Taking place 30th May - 2nd June, Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival, featuring everything from knitting and blacksmithing, to computer security, and online privacy.
The reality is, you always take a chance when contributing to an open source development or projects. Just because you made a contribution, does not mean you own the project or can decide the path that project takes. Those of us who donated understood the risk (or at least, I hope most people did).
That said, when someone takes a proactive driving stance claiming they will deliver, you kind of hope you can take them for their word. And expecting the main website to be online is not a big ask, especially when that serves as a gateway for people to learn about and use the project you are funding. That, after all, was the reason I donated.
Just spent today at work with Linux. Fedora's Mate spin still works well generally, and Orca is much more stable. And, according to Orca, the system never even ran over about 3 of the 16 GB of RAM on that Intel NUC. I set up Emacs and Emacspeak, Firefox, Bitwarden, VS Code, and never even took my laptop out of the bag. Of course, I really miss a lot of NVDA addons, like the OpenAI one, sounds for entering browse and focus modes, and the Thunderbird addon most of all. But I was able to log into, and use, Salesforce and Google Sheets. So now when I get a good workflow with Markdown and such, I think I'll just about, maybe, be able to start using it more. Packages are all up-to-date, Orca will alwasy be current, and hopefully I can one day move to a desktop environment with a proper notification center! Oh, and I'll have to see if Pidgin still takes up more RAM the more I use it.
Note that I still wouldn't expect a regular computer user to get into Linux, as far as setting it up. But, honestly, having the #BTSpeak out on the market makes me hope that more power users and programmers will hammer Linux into more of a shape that blind people can be at home with.
Just dropped a new episode of The Self-Host Cast featuring a casual conversation with Ivan, the developer of the #vehicle maintenance tracking application #LubeLogger.
Would love some feedback on ways to improve or suggestions for future episode topics!
i really like #flatnotes, but it's a little bit too minimalistic ... thinking about switching to another #note taking solution ... but there are so many options. #obsidian , #logseq , #joplin ?
main requirements are that its needs to be quick and easy to use; syncing the notes between desktop and android phone (not through external cloud, needs to be #selfhosted) ... preferrably 100% #foss - so i guess obsidian is already out?
Apply for Summer of Nix 2024 to join one of four teams in making selected free and open source software (FOSS) projects work reliably on a whim using Nix and NixOS.
Deadline May 10.
Summer of Nix is a rare opportunity for students or early-career professionals with diverse technical skills and interests to practice disciplined software development with Nix while contributing to the public good and receiving some payment for it.
Listen to the @projetslibres_podcast with Walid interviewing Lwenn Bussière, Technology Assessor at NLnet, about #NGI0 and NLnet.
Lwenn: "The Internet infrastructure that we know very well comes from free software and is based on an often invisible, often unpaid work of volunteers and enthusiasts. We fund people who actually build sustainable solutions for the Internet."
The podcast is in French with transcriptions in both French and English.
"Welcome in the #commons sweat shop, my dear friend. Slave away with us until the whip of #Hypercapitalism wears you out. Here's a set of FSF quality approval labels to plaster on your work of hard labour."
"Thank you! Let's change the world then. I'll start burning myself out, right away.. 😍"
#KDE will mentor ten projects in Google Summer of Code (#GSoC) this year, including two projects for #LabPlot, a FREE, open source and cross-platform #DataVisualization and #DataAnalysis software.
#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"
Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform isEVERcompletely, and totally secure.
That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.
Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
Can you recommend a good open source podcasts app for Android? Google Podcasts is shutting down soon, and I don't think I want listen to podcasts on YT Music
This is wonderful news but seeing the list of patrons, why does #Valve not join the sponsorship programme though? - I know (or I think at least) that they often/occasionally sponsor #KDE (as an org, or devs) to do some work for them, and I'm not denying that they contribute a lot through funds/code to #FOSS/#Linux, but seeing that the #SteamDeck comes shipped with #KDEPlasma (which I still think is a really smart decision) and since Plasma is a huge part of the Steam Deck (literally half of the software exp), it'd be great to see Valve commit to a recurring sponsorship programme to the KDE folks.
They certainly have the money for it, surely. I hope this will be true someday.
If you're using GNU/Linux. Please use opensnitch, it's criminally underrated. It notifies you of network requests made in real time, and you can choose to allow them or not (it comes with a lot of filtering options as well): https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
Radically Open Security, the nonprofit computer security company donates 90% of its profits to NLnet. Today @ros turned 10 years old and crossed the magical number of 1 million euro in donations to NLnet.
Happy birthday ROS! And thanks a million :-).
We interviewed ROS co-founder and CEO Melanie Rieback to learn why she decided to give the company such an unusual business model.