Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011, 5 days ago

Here’s a smaller sample size (2417 people at the time of writing) but all you need to do is fill in your details on the website: www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics/

X is at 66% and Wayland is at 33% for GamingOnLinux.

Spectacle8011, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

GNOME is working on a new Accessibility Toolkit for all desktops, funded by the $1M from STF. It’s intended to make accessibility better on Wayland.

Watch thisweek.gnome.org for updates on accessibility; there’s usually one. Here’s a very recent article about how it’s going from LWN: lwn.net/Articles/971541/

“At this point, some of you might be thinking ‘show me the code’”, he said. The audience murmured its agreement. Rather than linking to all of the repositories, he provided links to the prototypes for Orca and GTK AccessKit integration. Campbell said these would be the best way to start exploring the stack.

If all goes well, Newton would not merely provide a better version of existing functionality, it would open up new possibilities. Campbell was running out of time, but he quickly described scenarios of allowing accessible remote-desktop sessions even when the remote machine had no assistive technologies running. He also said it might be possible to provide accessible screenshots and screencasts using Newton, because the accessibility trees could just be bundled with the image or pushed along with the screencast.

The conclusion, he said, was that the project could provide “the overhaul that I think that accessibility in free desktop environments has needed for a little while now”. Even more, “we can advance the state-of-the-art not just compared to what we already have in free desktops like GNOME”, but even compared to proprietary platforms.

He gave thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund for funding his work through GNOME, and to the GNOME Foundation for coordinating the work.

There was not much time for questions, but I managed to sneak one in to ask about the timeline for this work to be available to users. Campbell said that he was unsure, but it was unlikely it would be ready in time for GNOME 47 later this year. It might be ready in time for GNOME 48, but “I can’t make any promises”. He pointed out that his current contract ends in June, and plans to make as much progress as possible before it ends. Beyond that, “we’ll see what happens”.

Also: github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

Spectacle8011, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

My understanding is that AccessKit is an entirely separate thing to the portal.

Unfortunately, for several things, your choices are X, which is broken by design and few developers QA their software for anymore, or Wayland, which works pretty well in many areas, but where several important (or even basic) features are quagmired by bike shedding. But things are improving really quickly, and part of that is everyone shifting focus to Wayland.

I recently tried to navigate my GNOME desktop via screen reader and did not enjoy the experience. If I ever need it, I hope it works properly by that point…

At least for me, X is a worse experience on every computer I own (including the NVIDIA one), which is why I use Wayland. Neither is problem-free. I’m fortunate enough not to depend on accessibility features; perhaps my opinion would be different then.

Spectacle8011, 4 days ago

I have three monitors and a NVIDIA GPU. I’ve only been able to get them to work properly on Wayland.

Spectacle8011, 4 days ago

It might be because one of my monitors is actually a graphics tablet. GNOME’s scaling just didn’t work in either session such that all three monitors were scaled correctly, but KDE’s Wayland session was able to handle it properly. Or at least, the least bad.

I also use Wayland because X11 had some lag when operating the desktop normally (I guess the pros call it “frame-pacing issues”?), whereas only XWayland programs will flicker for my NVIDIA GPU. And games aren’t part of that category. I don’t use a lot of XWayland applications anymore, so I actually haven’t seen the flickering for a while. The Steam client is the absolute worst, but… I’ve been doing my gaming on Windows lately 😬

Spectacle8011, 11 days ago

Yeah, let’s not mention Gnome breaking every peace of itself every update

This is not my experience.

Spectacle8011, 12 days ago

GIMP’s GTK3 port was finished several months ago. What remains to be done for GIMP 3.0 is bug-fixing and porting to the new Plug-in API.

The best way to upgrade to GTK4 is to upgrade to GTK3 first. There was some talk about working on GTK4 soon after GIMP 3.0 is out, but whether that will happen or not is uncertain.

Spectacle8011, 12 days ago

GIMP has been releasing two versions for several years. First, the Stable release, which is the 2.10.x series. Second, the development release, which is the 2.99.x series, which is where the GTK3 work has been done. The work from the development release will culminate in the Stable release reaching 3.0. GIMP will continue to support 2.10.x for some time after 3.0 becomes stable, but eventually they will stop supporting it.

Most of the work right now is focused on the development release and getting GIMP 3.0 stable and ready for release, but they’re still doing a little more work to tide users over until 3.0 is out. If you’re curious how work on 3.0 is going: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/milestones/27#tab-i…

GTK3 brings Wayland support among other features and yes, it looks nicer. GTK3 is still maintained while GTK2 has been obsoleted, which means bug fixes are still landing. Once they’re at GTK3, that makes it much easier to move to GTK4, which brings even better Wayland support (i.e. color management will actually be possible) and a much better UI in my opinion.

Spectacle8011, 1 month ago

VBA scripts. I have a friend who works in the radio/telcom industry…but ends up doing a bunch of other stuff. This friend makes extensive use of VBA scripts to get the job done. You can’t do that on the web version, and you can’t do it in Calc.

Word is just for document interchange. Other businesses and clients use Word documents, and they don’t display reliably correctly in any other program but Word.

Spectacle8011, 1 month ago

Oh, so you should suck up to Microsoft being incompatible with their own standard because they’re incompatible with their own stabdard? Is that basically what you’re saying?

I don’t use Microsoft Office, but I use Adobe. If the people I collaborate with or I work for use Adobe and need to edit my files, I’m not going to give them something done in Scribus instead of inDesign. That would be doing a bad job and also limiting their choices significantly with who they can go with in the future to edit their files. Same principle applies to Microsoft Office.

Spectacle8011, 1 month ago

My friend’s response:

Yep, but they make shit so much easier They took my 2 weeks of turning CSVs into other CSVs into 2 days

🤷‍♀️

Spectacle8011, 1 month ago

Adobe Creative Cloud doesn’t work in CrossOver.

Spectacle8011, 1 month ago

Just disable Javascript; it will load fine.

Spectacle8011, 1 month ago

Not only companies: …archlinux.org/…/OY2DLNWTZOBPAHFE5FSV4Q6AIWGZO6KV…

Spectacle8011, 1 month ago

It’s been 5 years. I don’t think they’re going to change the license to allow distributions to distribute MongoDB more easily.

We should actively be against corporate leeching.

In a world without free software, Amazon will build their own proprietary software for servers that is better than everyone else’s, and will be in the same position. At least with Redis, multiple employees of AWS were core maintainers for Redis. It isn’t like Amazon didn’t contribute anything back. Now that it’s non-free, they’ll just fork it. Again.

All this really accomplishes is making licensing a headache for everybody, which is the main reason people and organizations use free software.

I think free software developers should be able to make money from their software, and money from working on their software. I also think everyone else should be able to, too.

To put it another way, open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation.

Additionally, Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic. Redis doesn’t belong to Redis, either.

Spectacle8011, 2 months ago

what else is there aside from games?

The Steam client…

Spectacle8011, 2 months ago

Have you tried setting up Affinity Suite with the community guide?

Spectacle8011, 3 months ago

pacman would allow me to install weak dependencies with a simple command-line option rather than black magic wizardry that rivals ffmpeg filtergraphs.

Spectacle8011, 3 months ago

What I want to do is install all of these Optional Dependencies that are part of the wine-staging package without specifying every one of them:

<span style="color:#323232;">Optional Deps   : giflib
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-giflib
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  gnutls
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-gnutls
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  v4l-utils
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-v4l-utils
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  libpulse
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-libpulse
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  alsa-plugins
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-alsa-plugins
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  alsa-lib
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-alsa-lib
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  libxcomposite
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-libxcomposite
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  libxinerama
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-libxinerama
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  opencl-icd-loader
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-opencl-icd-loader
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  libva
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-libva
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  gtk3
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-gtk3
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  gst-plugins-base-libs
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  vulkan-icd-loader
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-vulkan-icd-loader
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  sdl2
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  lib32-sdl2
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  sane
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  libgphoto2
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  ffmpeg
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  cups
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  samba
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                  dosbox
</span>

–asdeps doesn’t seem to do that. apt has –install-recommended, I think, or something similar. And for all the bad things I could say about apt, that’s a nice feature.

Spectacle8011, 3 months ago

In this case, many of these dependencies are required for a lot of games to work properly in Wine. Dosbox is used as an emulation tool. I don’t know of another package manager that doesn’t give you an option to install all of the optional dependencies.

Spectacle8011, 3 months ago

I don’t think Signal is interested in doing that.

Spectacle8011, 3 months ago

The concerns about AWS servers are around metadata. If metadata were not a concern, why not just use Whatsapp? They use the Signal protocol so messages are end-to-end encrypted by default, and most people already have it or are willing to download it as compared to Signal.

Spectacle8011, 3 months ago

That seems like the wrong place to link to. Shouldn’t you be linking to Sealed Sender?

Spectacle8011, 3 months ago

It’s the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.

The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.

Spectacle8011, 3 months ago

I somehow missed A YEAR OF SPRINGS, which is a fantastic visual novel by npckc. It’s discounted by 29%.