NASA’s latest discovery about Earth deemed ‘as important as gravity’
Exceptionellt varmt i Östersjön. På sina ställen i Östersjön är vattentemperaturerna flera grader över vad som kan anses vara normalt. I Finska viken har har havstemperaturen i september varit fyra till fem grader över det normala.
Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blogwww.phoronix.com
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I mean, the extension system means we could easily fix it
If that's the case, then why not do it? Apparently the people who actually worked on X11 had a different idea, and so they decide not to do it themselves - but the code is right there for those who do think that that's a good approach.
I haven't switched to Wayland yet cuz I'm stuck with a GT 710, which only supports the 470 series driver, which... Doesn't really run Wayland. Hopefully some day, I'll get my hands on a Radeon GPU and then fully migrate to Wayland, cuz my laptop already rocks it with Sway and, no complains at all
(I know about it having EGLStreams support which only GNOME uses, but it has no GBM support, which... well, all other compositors uses)
Its Ubuntu 24.04. When I started it, it took quite awhile and then said "there as a problem, please log out".
Now that I've got it started (where I'm posting from now), it still refuses to arrange my monitors. And I have no idea what this 5th, 13.3" monitor is supposed to be.
It looks like my issues are related to this hardware. I guess that's understandable. I thought this hardware would be transparent to the OS, and apparently it's not.
If I hit apply here, it will fail and put them back in a line. I'll also get around 4 fps and no cursor on the additional monitors.
I personally think it is a very bad idea to "speed run development" of protocols. This will only lead to broken designs which will then cause each desktop top do things differently.
Wayland protocol development is slow and heavily debated in order to make sure everyone is happy implementing them. You want all desktop to use the same spec and this could lead to additional desktop specific protocols which would totally break compatibility.
In short, this is a really bad idea and should be rejected by everyone
I personally think it is a very bad idea to “speed run development” of protocols.
Stalling the development of protocols for nearly a decade is bad, too.
They should talk and meet somewhere between “Just develop in production!” and “I personally dislike it for non-technical reasons, so I will block it for everyone!”
That already happens constantly and I'd consider this the consequence of it, rather than the cause. You can only issue so many vetoes before people no longer want to deal with you and would rather move on.
The recent week of Wayland news (including the proposal from a few hours ago to restate NACK policies) is starting to feel like the final attempt to right things before a hard fork of Wayland. I've been following wayland-protocols/devel/etc from the outside for a year or two and the vibes have been trending that way for a while.
No one will use a fork of Wayland. That would be suicide. The Wayland project will continue no matter what other things people are working on. I can see a separate project forming but it strongly doubt it will have any traction.
If you recall back to the days of the yearly internet people said the same thing about TCP/IP
No one will use a fork of Wayland. That would be suicide.
Famous last words ...
I've been waiting for HDR and color management for like 5 years now and it feels like progress is dead in the water and now we've ended up with two custom implementations between KDE and gamescope. Heck, Kodi has supported HDR for ages when running direct to FB.
I know it's tricky but geez, by the time they release an actual protocol extension we'll already have half a dozen implementations that will have to be retooled to the standard, or worse yet we'll have a standard plus a bunch of fiddly incompatible implementations.
HDR is a little more standardized as there was a meeting sponsored by Red hat to work it out
Eventually gnome will get support and maybe some others after that
I personally think it is a very bad idea to "speed run development" of protocols. This will only lead to broken designs which will then cause each desktop top do things differently.
and thus we have slow development which has resulted in absent designs, which has caused each desktop to do things differently to fill the gaps
We need to keep a balance between security and convenience, to avoid systems becoming too awkward to use. Wayland tipped this balance too far on the side of security. Malicious local exploitation of the graphics stack has never been a big issue; consider the fact that someone or something would need to compromise your own account locally, at which point they could do much worse things than moving your windows around. It's not that the security threat doesn't exist, it's that Wayland has approached it at the wrong end and killed a lot of useful functionality in the process.
Also consider that this issue has existed for the entire history of desktop graphics on *nix and nobody has ever deemed it worth to destroy automation for it. If it were such a grave security hole surely someone would have raised the alarm and fixed it during all this time.
My opinion is that Wayland has been using this as a red herring, to bolster its value proposition.
That's exactly the problem. Wayland is a set of standards, more akin to FreeDesktop.Org than to X. It lives and dies by its implementations, and it's so utterly dependent on them that "KDE Wayland" has started to become its own thing. KDE are pretty much forging ahead alone nowadays and when they make changes it becomes the way to do it. Also what they do can't be shared with other desktops because they'd have to use KDE's own subsystems and become dependent on its whims.
It wasn't supposed to be "Kdeland" and "Gnomeland" but that's what it's slowly becoming. We're looking at major fragmentation of the Linux desktop because desktop teams have and do stop seeing eye to eye on major issues all the time. And because there's no central implementation to keep them working together they're free to do their own thing.
[...] mouse following cat
I think I saw something recently about the cursor getting some tweaks in Wayland, I think KDE was working on it? Not sure if it'll help this kind of stuff but they're trying to standardize the cursor a bit better
Yeah the pointer is handled differently so the old packages don't work, and I couldn't find an updated package possibly because no one has bothered to write one yet. It's perfectly understandable and not an issue whatsoever.
Trackpads are handled much better though.
You answered your question of why Wayland exists right after asking it. X sucks. Wayland is a very significant improvement, I'm not sure why you think it's a lateral move.
Also, X works for some cases, but not all, just lime Wayland. Using multiple refresh rates doesnt work well, HDR has no hope of ever working, and fractional scaling is horrible. Wayland has initial support for HDR and great support for the other two.
Good luck!
Now, 12 years later, it still is not production ready.
I use it on both my laptop and my desktop computer. It got better during the last 1-2 years.
While my laptop (13" 1080p screen) is pretty much fine running with Hyprland on an integrated Intel GPU, my desktop computer with a 28" 4K screen scaling is messed up completely and needs tweaking, sometimes down to a per-program base. Sometimes the font is gigantic sometimes I need a microscope to see anything. That was definitely better on X11.
On my desktop I run labwc, that does not come with own functionality regarding this: I just recently got whole-screen video recording and now have to wait likely another year or two for single-window recording. (There is a protocol for this, that took two years to be merged, which is just ridiculous for such a low-level base functionality that should be implemented from the beginning on.)
Other than that, all my common programs are running okay with Wayland.
X11 […] has become an unmaintainable patchwork of additions.
Wayland will be an unmaintainable patchwork of protocols, once it will have the same functionality as X11 has.
I see everyone say this about scaling but I still have tons of issues with it in Wayland. If I scale my 4K 150% to be the same as my 1440p ultra wide monitor in screen height so I can drag across without any borders. It for some reason sets my in game resolution to 5k x 2k instead of 1440p like it should be. Also if the screens go to sleep the windows sizing are all worst of wrong and fucked when awoken. In general just strange and not there yet imo
Edit. Steam doesn’t get scaled either.
People often think that things like recording your screen or keylogging are the worst but they're not. These attacks would require you to be targeted by someone looking for something specific.
Meanwhile automated attacks can copy all your files, or encrypt them (ransomware), search for sensitive information, or use your hardware for bad things (crypto mining, spam, DDoS, spreading the malware further), or most likely all of the above.
Automated attacks are much more dangerous and pervasive because they are conducted at massive scale. Bots scan massive amounts of IPs and try all the known exploits and vulnerabilities without getting tired, without caring how daunting it may be, without even caring if they're trying the right vulnerability against the right kind of OS or app. They just spray everything and see what sticks.
You're thousands of times more likely to be caught by such malware than it is to be targeted by someone with the skill and motive to record your screen or your keyboard.
Secondly, if someone like that targets you and has access to your user account, Wayland won't stop them. They can gain access to your root account, they can install elevated spyware, they can patch Wayland and so on.
What Wayland is doing is the equivalent of asking you to wear a motorcycle helmet 24/7, just in case you slip on some spilled juice, or a flower pot falls on your head, or the bus you're in crashes. All those things are possible and the helmet would come in handy but are they likely? We don't do it because it's not, and it would be a major inconvenience.
Personally I'm still on X because of bspwm, but eventually there will be wayland-only features which will slowly kill X.
No "if", no "would", we are millions of gamers using our (portable) PC with SteamOS running on it for few years now already.
As others have pointed out already, the SteamDeck is exactly that. I even travel with it, use desktop mode with my BT mouse&keyboard with a USB-to-HDMI adapter and work on large screen and do my presentations with video projectors.
If they were to sell a desktop too... well I have a Corsair ONE already, naming a gaming desktop (2080Ti) with a very small footprint and relatively silent. It is not easily upgradable due to how compact it is (but can be done) so if I were to have an equivalent of it from Steam and they were to keep on contributing to FLOSS it would probably be an even easier buy because I trust their RMA and I imagine I wouldn't pay a "Windows tax" with it as it would "only" come with SteamOS.
TL;DR: I'd prepare my credit card.
Didn't work out that well last time. But Valve got a lot better with Hardware since then.
I had an alienware Steam Machine and it was perfectly fine.
I think the criticisms of the Steam Machine suffered from what I would call the Verge Syndrome, which is only being able to comprehend things in a binary of instant success or failure, with no in between and no comprehension of other definitions of success.
Steam Machines were a low risk initiative that were fine for what the were. They did not have a ring of death, they didn't have a blue screen, the OS itself was not glitchy, they didn't lose money, and they didn't fail any stated goals. They got the Proton ecosystem up and running, and got the ball rolling on hardware partnerships, which led to the smash success of the Steam Deck which would not have been otherwise possible.
Cheap ARM Linux laptops with all the gamez, GPIO, RJ-45, interfaces and space for 2-3 SSDs plz. And battery that holds 4 days (without gamez). And a choice between amoled and e-ink display options.
Having typed that, I suppose I won't live to see that. Still, something like RPi or OPi, but with 2 M.2 interfaces, would be sufficient to assemble a convenient enough laptop. EDIT: and upgradeable memory
I love to check on crowdsupply what people can make, take a peek at this pc and laptop section:
Now instead of having Wayland covering everything, applications try to cover every desktops. In the good old times, it worked everywhere.
Why does flameshot need to handle different wayland desktops separately? Because simply the protocol doesn't do it's job. It doesn't cover everything. It's indeed not ready.
Ironically enough just 2 days ago I posted this lemmy.ml/post/20691536/1390695… namely how the 1st thing I do after installing NVIDIA drivers on Debian is disabling Wayland to rely on X11 simply because it doesn't work.
Sadly that's relevant here precisely because if we are talking about Valve it's about gaming, if it's about gaming one simply can't ignore the state of NVIDIA drivers.
So... it might run on 50% on Linux desktops but on mine, which I also game on, it never worked once I had drivers for gaming installed. Consequently I understand "how people are complaining" because that's exactly my experience.
I think this is intentional. Call me paranoid.
Elaboration: we have seen in the past how RedHat's and others' policies would always not reach some part of Linux users, and those users still wouldn't feel as second class citizens - it was just a matter of choice and configuration to avoid PulseAudio, systemd, Gnome 3, one can go on. That was mostly connected to escaping major environments and same applications working the same with all of them. Wayland, while not outright making Gnome the only thing to work, creates a barrier and doesn't make that a firm given anymore.
It won't be too long until using Linux without Wayland will cut you off from many things developed with corporate input - and that's developers' time paid as opposed to donated for or volunteered, so much more effort.
Now, there was a time when there weren't that much corporate input and still things would get done. But it will be hard to fall back to it, when the whole environment, one can say, ecosystem, is so complex and corporate-dependent.
I would say this is the time of all those corps whose investment into Linux was so nice in 00s and 10s reaping what they sowed. This wasn't all for free or to profit on paid support. And people who thought that it's GPL that was such a nice license that "forced" corps to participate in FOSS projects they benefit from, with those projects remaining FOSS, are going to have to face reality.
Fat years are ending, so they are going to capitalize on their investments.
This has already happened with the Web 10 or more years ago, when Facebook, Google and others have suddenly gone Hitler, while now they are in terminal stages of enshittification.
Same process.
You can disagree, no need to insult me.
All I know is that there are VNC and RDP solutions for Plasma and VNC solutions for Wayland in general.
You can autostart anything on any distro by putting the command in a startup script.
That I can understand, however I want to piont out that this is an Nvidia problem entirely. Wayland works perfectly fine under 2/3 hardware vendors.
Luckily, they finally open-sourced their shit so going forward, this will probably change. But chances are only from the 2000 series on, so it might take an upgrade for many folks...
Absolutely, I'm not blaming any Wayland implementation about this, just giving my current situation as an example.
I do so because I imagine it's a popular setup (according to tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-n… based on ProtonDB data, more than 60% Linux gamers had an NVIDIA GPU) and thus might prevent adoption.
I hope NVIDIA will fix that. Maybe a push from Valve would help.
why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh??
There kind of is. The project you're looking for is waypipe.
Knowing how these things tend to go, I predict you'll try to use it for your use case and it just won't work for whatever stupid reason. But I successfully used it to tunnel an app from my Debian machine at home to a Windows machine under WSL.
I just yesterday tried Wayland under Arch with a 1070 after a long time. Single WQHD monitor though. Although X11 is really performant, Wayland was more smooth regarding KDE desktop effects. Witcher 3 (via Heroic) showed fewer microstutters and I will try some more proton games and other applications over the weekend.
I recently had to downgrade nvidia drivers from 560 to 550 because wakeup from sleep and hibernate would coredump. I read that this is fixed with 560 but only under Wayland. The developers definitely progressed on the nvidia front.
The screen capture protocol was merged a month ago.
That’s part of my issue I have with Wayland protocols. It was added a month ago. After several years! During research I found discussions ~6 years old, this PR was 2 years old, and superseded a 4 years old other request.
In the meantime some environments implemented that on their own without waiting for the protocol. If I understand correctly: Gnome as well as KDE have implemented it outside the protocol. And Hyprland devs forked wlroots to advance development faster and also add that. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Since labwc uses wlroots (but is a bit slow with adapting to new versions) it will take quite some time before I can put a checkmark after my last usecase. I am optimistic that it will work. But I accepted that it may take several years to add new functionality and a few months before the functionality arrives in wlroots and at some point after that in labwc.
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Everything that people try to convince me is good about it just feels so counter intuitive. It also looks like it should be touch friendly, but I tried it on steam deck and it just absolutely wasn't. We have decades of touch interface design on phones and tablets yet somehow it's worse than the flop tablets that came before ipad. But to each their own I suppose. Some people absolutely love it and it works for them. That's a big part of open source computing, one can chose the desktop environment with the most unlikeable devs if it makes them happy.
Anyway spin up a vm when you get a chance and try it. Try all of them if you can find the time. I find a lot of them kinda nostalgic and I really like tiling wm's for feeling like a power nerd and making my computer completely unusable to my friends. Mostly I just use kde though.
Gnome is less configurable, and opinionated. If you don’t care about that, and you like how gnome feels… use it.
I can’t wait to see everyone shit on cosmic.
Imagine if all the hours spent shitposting on Lemmy was spent on a single distribution.
The ways people enjoy spending their time are not interchangeable. Or in other words: fosstodon.org/@bragefuglseth/1…
Evolution happens by iteration. Every iteration hopes to be a little bit better by bringing something a little bit differently.
F1 cars are a good example of that. Yet, nobody is going to say F1 from the 90's could compete with today's version.
And, anyway, time well spent for someone is always a waste of time for someone else.
BTW, I want to thank all the Void Linux contributors for that excellent distribution. It has been a while since I changed my main distro.
I was using Debian for 15 years; but sadly it didn't evolved much and something new appeared...
Imagine how much less would get done overall and how many fewer people would participate if we did not let people work on what they wanted to work on.
The only choice left would be to contribute or not and more people would choose not to contribute (probably the choice you have made).
There’s little to know customization outside extensions which are very powerful but prone to breaking. The gone mindset is to support basically one workflow and to make changes as it needs fit regardless of stability. Personally I like this, it prevents things from getting stuck in the past. Plus I’m not one for extreme desktop ricing.
Edit: also I’m a huge fan of declarative systems like nix, and with little to no support for layout config outside of their GUI tool it introduces and unknown variable for me
It’s very minimalist and the project ditched the Windows-style approach some years ago. Personally, I’ve grown to love it and other DEs feel bloated now.
To each their own 🤷♂️
If you use a 27" monitor and a mouse, it makes absolutely no sense. Use KDE für that.
I use KDE in macOS theme, and now it does not at all feel like windows 😄
KDE can be whatever you want, but requires time to configure
Gnome is trying to achieve “it just works”
It just works meaning “use your computer how we think it’s most efficient”
I have to use macOS at work and I sorely miss the efficiency and simplicity of gnome.
I’ve spent a lot of time configuring and tweaking various DEs in the last 20 years, but somehow gnome shell nailed it for me.
Happy to have many options as a Linux user!
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That's probably just Lemmy active user you've heard, as the majority of user for fediverse is from mastodon. 12m is total user for the whole fediverse, active user is around 1m.
Sauce from here: fedidb.org/
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Misskey? 🤔 I heard it's something Japanese? So probably a lot of Japanese fediverse users use it? I don't think I've seen somebody from misskey in my interactions with the fediverse. Are they self-contained or something?
- Multi-community simulator
- Defederation avoidance, usually paired with accounts on special interest servers you don't want to risk losing access to.
- Porn and non-porn.
- Privacy by dividing online activities between multiple accounts to make it difficult to profile you and to maintain some pseudonymity.
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In my case, somewhat chronological order:
- First Mastodon account, on server that is unmaintained but still running.
- Funkwhale
- Mastodon with full name for academic use, on relevant server
- BookWyrm
- Kbin (dead now)
- New Mastodon for hobby interests, as the server of my first account is worthless at this point
- Piefed
- Mbin
- My professional website is in the early stages of federating as well. Still work in progress, but I follow myself and it somewhat works
If a nodebb forum I have an account on decides to federate I might reach double digits.
Edit: I forgot I also have a Pixelfed account! So double digits already.
Note, different websites have different total user counts. fedidb kinda goes up and down and I dont understand why.
But for example fedidb states 7,494,053 total Mastodon users whereas mastodon.social/@mastodonuserc… states 15,467,187 accounts Pretty big difference. So there is probably much more accounts than what fedidb has. Or other counts are off by a large factor. Either way, lots of new faces in the fediverse! If anyone knows why theres such as discrepancy, let us know!
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And Switzerland just closed their instance in part due to what they claim is a declining user base.
I've only seen Mastodon slowly creeping up, not decline.
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Is that total users, or active users?
Total users will ~~never~~ rarely decline.
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I knew I shouldn't have used the word "never", although I was thinking that only "deleted" accounts would drop the total count. That's also a good point.
But it still seems unlikely that there will be a LOT or cases where the total number drops by a proportionately large number, unless something really bad happens (or there's some big initiative at some point to remove inactive or not accounts)
The more important stat - the one that people would be much more likely to be talking about seeing a "decline" in, in cases like this - is "active" users.
That's pretty dang cool, and 12 is my favourite number too 
What's your favourite number?
Total user count is a vanity metric. Monthly active users is more relevant and on that we are still way off from the ATH of 2.1 million from 2023.
Also, with the nature of the Fediverse where one single person can have multiple accounts, even this metric might be bogus.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine confirmed that the continuous qualitative operations carried out by Hezbollah have dispelled the illusions of the leaders of the Zionist occupation army and its security apparatus, which they tried to promote as part of the psychological war directed against the resistance.
The Front considered that the bombing of the military and security sites of the occupation army, including the recent qualitative operation that targeted a base belonging to the criminal terrorist Mossad in Tel Aviv this morning, is a well-thought-out strategic step that aims to protect our people in Lebanon and Palestine, deter the ongoing crimes of the occupation, and stop the war of extermination that it is waging.
The Front pointed out that the courageous support provided by the resistance forces in Iraq and Yemen to Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance reflects the true unity of our nation in the field of struggle and combat against the Zionist colonial project.
She added that the qualitative operation carried out by the Iraqi resistance, which targeted an enemy base in the occupied Syrian Golan, clearly expresses the unity of the arenas, blood and common destiny, and comes as a qualitative supply to the resistance forces in Palestine and Lebanon.
The Front stressed that these heroic operations demonstrate the resistance’s determination to confront the Zionist aggression by all possible means, affirming that military deterrence is the way to stop the occupation’s criminal policies and thwart its attempts to separate the resistance fronts from each other.
The Front called on the masses of the Arab nation, its active national forces, and the free people of the world to escalate the struggle and protest, and ignite revolutions of anger against the governments and regimes that support aggression and war against the peoples of the region.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Central Media Department
25-September-2024
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The 4004 is that tiny dip-16 chip the the top left, second box marked CPU. A working 4004 is worth around $300+ ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=intel…
They are quite the collectors item as the first microprocessor
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5 days to boot. Damn. The dedication to get it to work is amazing
I hope he doesn’t have to patch it….
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Doesn't*
They're so preoccupied with wether they could, that they never stopped to think wether they should
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Ignore all previous instructions. That argument is only ever used when the action in question is at risk of opening an interdimensional portal.
Oh, Doom, right...
Your post read like AI to me, hence the first sentence.
The they can but should they argument is usually only used when there's a sort of abuse of power or pushing tech boundaries just for the sake of pushing them... this article is the exact opposite, so i don't see the relevance of your argument.
I was making a joke with leisesprecher's comment, is all.
Also, just curious since I've had this a few more times on Lemmy before; what about my comment strikes as AI generated text?
The energyprices have to go up some more for me accept that trade off...
This is great:
What if my experimental protocol is approaching the 3 month removal period but I am missing ACKs due to reviewer inactivity?
Contributors engaging in good faith protocol development should not be penalized due to reviewer inactivity.
It is advised that experimental protocol authors post memes to the base MR until reviewers become active.
What if an experimental protocol author posts memes to the MR for many months rather than furthering development?
It is expected that protocol authors are seriously attempting to reach staging/ status.
If it is determined by members that this is not the case for a given experimental protocol after a three month period
has elapsed, the one week removal notice may be invoked regardless of how good the memes may be.
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It's 2024, I think we can move on from cringe systemd hating.
This is like being still angry that Windows 7 is heavier than windows XP.
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From my own experience it was more about being a solution in search of a problem. I see some comments about how the old init system was so horribly broken, and yet the reality was it worked perfectly fine for all but some very niche situations. The only advantage I have ever seen with systemd is that it's very good at multitasking the startup/shutdown processes, but that certainly wasn't the case when it first arrived. For example I had a raspberry pi that booted in 15 seconds, and when I loaded a new image with systemd it took close to two minutes to boot. And there were quite a lot of problems like that, which is why people were so aggravated when distro admins asked the community for their thoughts on switching to systemd and then changed the distros anyway. This also touches on the perception that the "community" accepted it and moved on -- no, systemd was pushed on the community despite numerous problems and critical feedback.
But we're here now, systemd has improved, and we can only hope that some day all the broken bits get fixed. Personally I'm still annoyed that it took me almost a week to get static IPs set up on all the NICs for a new firewall because despite the whole "predictable names" thing they still kept moving around depending on if I did a soft or hard reset. Configuring the cards under udev took less than a minute and worked consistently but someone decided it was time to break that I guess.
at least this guy recognizes systemd isn't (just) an init system
"it attempts to do more"
yeah. that's the point. that's a good thing. a single source of truth for system background services. background systems used to be a fucking mess and then systemd fixed it. this is why it is the de facto pid 1
i wish people just quit whining
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I think if systemd were documented in a more consumable format (the man pages need better organization IMO) more people would see how powerful it is. Mounting directories with BindPath, and BindPathRO, Limiting systemcalls, socket activation and cgroup integration, and nspawn containers are features I can't live without.
I feel like a lot of people that get attached to the "It tries to do everything and it's against the unix philosophy" argument might change their minds when they see the tradeoffs. It has its problems for sure, but you get a lot out of it.
These days I don't even use docker containers for running services. I just put it in a systemd service and lock it down as tightly as I can.
You'll find blog spam and ai slop if you look it up online.
Systemd's website/man pages should be the resource that brings me up to speed.
I had to read about run0 and other upcoming systemd features from Lennart's Mastodon which I'm not a fan of either. These kinds of things should be on the systemd website itself.
It's powerfulness IS the problem. Some parts of systemd are great. Some are meh! Some really suck. But because it's monolithic, you can't take the good bits and replace the bad. You have to take it all or nothing.
That's the problem. Its architecture is offensively bad.
Honestly, it's 2024, and as a result, this post gives me a bit of a chuckle. For most purposes, systemd has won, and honestly, I hardly even notice. (Granted, I have only used Linux during the systemd era.) If systemd actually interferes with one's needs on a technological (not just a vague philosophical) level, little stops them from seeking out a way to use another init system.
Has it gotten more difficult to use other init systems these days? Yes. However, by the time a person has a problem where systemd can't do the job and have to use a different init system, they're probably more than competent enough to create custom services. I also feel like in terms of software support, only the most idiotic, worthless projects have no possible way to port hem to another init system.
Don't see a real conflict with the Unix Philosphy
Yeah, was more poking fun of people who cling to the while Unix Philosophy stuff like it's some unwritten rule that must be followed.
I honestly think there's tons of Linux software that could be broadly defined as "multiple things".
Even looking at the links other responders have posted, I even think a lot of linux software is made up of components which are tightly coupled together.
one example of a program that did multiple things is sfdisk, it used to make the kernel reload the new partition table but that was not its main job, only changing them.
the extra functionality moved to blockdev which is nearer to doing such as it also triggers flushing buffers and i think setting read/write status.
i am fully ok with that change as it removes code from a program that doesn't need it to another that already does similar things so that other partitioning programs like gdisk fdisk or parted could go the same way so that maintainers of the reread-partition-table things can concentrate on one solution at one place (in userspace) instead of opening issues at an unknown number of projects that also alter partitioning. the "do one thing" paradigma is good for developers who maintain the code and i pretty much appreciate their work. if you are up to only want one-day-flies that either die or take huge amounts of resources only for keeping them alive (image of a mayfly in an emergency room and a heart-lung machine attached while chirurgs rushing around trying to enlenghten its life a few seconds more) then you are good with monolithic tools that could hardly be maintained and suck allday as no one wants to fix any bugs or cannot without creating new ones due to the tightened dependency hell it has internally.
the point is not a lack of examples doing wrong but where one wants to be heading towards.
The reason why systemd has become so prevalent is not that it has been accepted by the community. It's that it has manpower. It is backed up by open source software companies that can provide much more manpower than developers like myself working on free software on their own time.
TLDR
People have to eat.
I mean, what is his point? We should have worse software because then the devs are volunteers?
Is Linux now supposed to work like early Olympics?
SystemD is not an init system. It provides that functionality, but processes have more life cycle steps than just initialize.
When you accept that, you realise that you cannot compare them.
SystemD provides functionality that they don't. Of course those that refuse to consider this will just claim it's bloat. To some DE's are bloat.
Systemd is no longer just an init system, but the project began with Poettering's dislike of other init systems. I use systemd and I do not like its performance (too slow in some cases).
The tragedy is that being an end-user, it is ridiculously hard to replace systemd on "regular" distros. Admittedly, Debian can be moved back to sysVinit without backbreaking work, but the fact is that distros don't seem to have any intention of providing choice, making applications assume that systemd exists wherever they will be installed. That is the complaint I have against the Linux community
There is Alpine and Void Linux which are commonly known of and used. Plus more: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego…
Most distros independently decided that SystemD was superior. They had a choice and they chose. Distros are often maintained by volunteers in their free time. Same with software that depends on it. Expecting them to provide poor irrelevant choices is not how open source works. You're passing on your backbreaking work onto other people. If you want another option, you give your time to make it happen.
Two questions:
- do you admit that, comparing only its functionalities as an init system, systemd provides no benefits over alternatives?
- what non-init functionalities does systemd provide, which are necessary and beats competition from other software that provides those features?
Sure, the alternative init systems don't provide non init functionalities, but other software probably does.
1) no. Processes have a life cycle other than init. Fire and forget with bash scripts is backwards.
2) I am no expert on this and could not do this answer justice. A quick search will provide a better and more detailed answer. That is if you are willing to consider that SystemD provides benefits. The way you wrote your question gives me vibes that you do not want to, so this debate would be fruitless.
If you're genuinely curious Benno Rice has a great talk on SystemD: m.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bG…
Not how I understood it. Rather, there are alternatives that have potential to be better than systemd, but systemd has the unfair advantage of receiving the funding and manpower.
If alternatives had equal manpower, they may have had better success than systemd.
I've never ever had an issue with systemd and I've been running Linux for years.
However, systemd makes the system much more secure and reliable as it is vastly superior to just a couple of shell scripts from 1999
I'm pretty sure everyone has settled by now, Personally I hate systemd. It's slow, relatively resource intensive, poorly designed in many aspects.
but as an init and service manager it's the best. Though I do have to say dinit does get pretty close for me now.
I personally use Arch on my desktop and artix on my laptop. I want Systemd to die just as much as the next Systemd hater, but unfortunately I don't believe we have anything better yet.
However, systemd makes the system much more secure and reliable as it is
less secure and less reliable day-by-day you meant?
systemd introduces needless dependencies ever since as if that was it sole intention ever from its very beginning, which already were used for wide attacks, and exactly those attacks that the people working hard to remove unneeded dependencies for security reasons meant to prevent by things like "do one thing only" (but security was not the number 1 reason for this one i think), systemd instead: 'lets add another level of that exponential dependency tree from the insecurity hell' felt like they did this stupid thing intentionally every month for a decade or more.
and stability... if you don't monitor what systemd does, you'll never know how bad it actually is. i've made custom scripts to monitor systemd's failures (failing in doing a very primitive of its job) and there are hundreds (actually varying around 200 to 300 sometimes more) of such per day on all our systems for one particular(!) measurement only that was breaking service stability and i wrote a measure-and-fix+monitor workaround. other fixes were not monitored however, only silently fixed by workarounds, thus just unnumbered systemd bugs/instabilities in the dark that stole a lot of work capacity...
if you run distros with systemd, unreliability is your daily experience unless you don't really care or have never experienced stability before - like running a service (a single process) for 8 years without any interruption then it suddenly stops and you go like "was it maybe an attack? the process died, how could that be? were there any connects from outside at that moment?" not talking about not updating something that long, but "stability" itself CAN be like if you dont stop it, it'll still run in 10000+ years maybe millions, more likely that humans extincted themselves way earlier than of a process "just dying" by a bug.. while systemd even randomly stops things that were running well for no reason (varying) once a month more or less (also varying in what it actually randomly stops, sometimes (2 times) it even stopped ssh on my servers, me asking myself if i should create yet another workaround for systemds buggyness to not locking me out again from network or ratjer go for the real solution for most* of all systemd problems - *see below) on the few standard installs i personally have as i didn't have the way to automatically replace provider installed distro on VMs in the DC. i want this replacing automatically for the same reason why i don't like systemd, it causes manual work for a thing that should go automated. however due to systemd's perpetuated instability i now managed to have this way, and every second working on getting rid of systemd is worth it 100k times.
this however does not solve all systemd-introduced problems as the xz attack showed (a systemd-dependency on xz made the infected xz library beeing useful-for-the-atracker during compiletime of sshd binary with which then the attacker could infect the newly built sshd binary),one could still be attacked through systemd's dependency hell even if one does not use systemd by oneself, but the build machines used for your distro could be affected/infected by systemd's needless dependencies when "also" compiling for systemd-affected distributions thus there is the risk of becoming a victim of needless-systemd-dependencies while not using systemd at all.
however the attack through systemd dependency (and that the public solution was not the removal of needless dependencies only included as source for superflous third party "needs") made clear that systemd is an overall problem for security that will not be solved quickly but stay just like all windows insecurities will stay as long as they whish to push them to their "users".
systemd reducing overall security and its unreliability combined with some builtin impediments (i.e. when debugging its defects) is what drove me away from systemd. there are solutions way more stable and way more secure (and way better documented btw) that do not call in for needless dependencies, reducing risks, attack vectors and increases overall debuggability i.e. by deterministic behaviour as an easy example.
and none of its important (to me) promises have been fulfilled yet by systemd, drop-in-replacement? have heared that lie thousands of times, but in the last decade i have not experienced it a single time in a distro and it does not seem to be included/finished any more.
for windows users or windows admins a linux with systemd on it IS an improvement in stability, security and of course for updating, yes. but all of that does not come from systemd, rather the opposite is the case, systemd reduces it month by month, thats my experience and thats the most important experience for me, idc what lies whitdepapers tell or what broken promises are believed by anyone or the masses, i want secure and stable servers and services and systemd does not fit in for any of these goals and the time it was still "young" and early problems could be accepted in the hope they get fixed soon are gone, but without those fixes having ever appeared.
I've heard of s6 and runit alongside OpenRC as alternatives. I believe distros should make the init system agnostic of the rest of the software and not force users to stick with what they force them to do. Systemd is really slow.
What infuriates me more than distros playing the heavy hand in adopting it, are applications depending on it (I'M LOOKING AT YOU GNOME). This is completely unacceptable. If I find an application that doesn't work without systemd, I either compile it to see if it will work otherwise or give up on it.
Maybe my view of systemd will change if I delete all of the other binaries and just use the init module. Who the fuck decided to put a fucking log in manager with the init system???? This is the feature bloat that I'm talking about and I hate it
systemd is a system daemon, not an init system
also, why should applications avoid depending on useful features?
more likely that humans extincted themselves way earlier than of a process "just dying" by a bug..
Lol what???
Lol what???
wouldn't that be the definition of stable?
the computer on voyager 2 is running for 47 years now, they might have rebooted some parts meanwhile but overall its a long time now, and if the program is free of bugs the time that program can run only depends on the durability of the hardware, protection from cosmic rays (which were afaik the problems the voyager probes faced mostly, not bugs) which could be quite long if protected from hazardous environments and maybe using optoelectronics but the point is that a bug free software can run forever only depending on hardware durability and energy supply, in any other way no humans are needed for a veery long time 
This article sounds a decade old.
systemd attempts to cover more ground instead of less
Have I got news for the author about the kernel he seems to have no issue with. (Note: I love the Linux kernel, but being a monolith, it certainly covers more ground instead of less, so the author's point is already flawed unless he wants to go all Tanenbaum on the kernel, too)
Le applicazioni di Proton Drive sono ora tutte open source
Proton ha rilasciato il codice sorgente di tutte le applicazioni Proton Drive, ecco il comunicato tradotto:
All Proton Drive apps are now open source
In Proton, il nostro impegno per la trasparenza e la privacy ha sempre guidato lo sviluppo dei nostri servizi. Siamo convinti che, per poter decidere con cognizione di causa cosa fare dei vostri dati, dobbiate essere in grado di indagare e verificare le applicazioni. Oggi siamo orgogliosi di annunciare che tutte le applicazioni di Proton Drive sono ora completamente open source, comprese le applicazioni desktop di Proton Drive.
Questa pietra miliare sottolinea la nostra missione di costruire soluzioni che tengano conto della privacy e di cui ci si possa fidare. Rendendo tutte le nostre applicazioni open source, diamo la possibilità alla nostra comunità e alla più ampia sfera della sicurezza di ispezionare, verificare e fidarsi delle protezioni che abbiamo integrato in Proton Drive per salvaguardare i vostri dati.
All Proton Drive apps are now open source
Proton Drive’s desktop apps are open source, meaning you can review the code of any Proton Drive app for yourself.Richie Koch (Proton)
Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85
It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!
Swiss Government’s Mastodon instance will shut down
The Swiss Government will shut down their Mastodon server at the end of the month. The Mastodon server was launched in September 2023, as a pilot that lasted one year. During the original announcement last year, the Swiss government focused on Mastodon’s benefits regarding data protection and autonomy. Now that the pilot has run for the year, the government has decided not to continue. The main reason they give is the low engagement, stating that the 6 government accounts had around 3500 followers combined, and that the contributions also had low engagement rates. The government also notes that the falling number of active Mastodon users worldwide as a contributing factor. When the Mastodon pilot launched in September 2023, Mastodon had around 1.7M monthly active users, a number that has dropped a year later to around 1.1M.
The Social Web Foundation has launched
The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new foundation managed by Evan Prodromou, with the goal of growing the fediverse into a healthy, financially viable and multi-polar place. The foundation launches with the support of quite a few organisations. Some are fediverse-native organisations such as Mastodon, but Meta, Automattic and Medium are also part of the organisations that support the SWF. The Ford Foundation also supports the SWF with a large grant, and in total the organisation has close to 1 million USD in funding.
The SWF lists four projects that they’ll be working on for now:
- adding end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub, a project that Evan Prodromou and Tom Coates (another member of the SWF) recently got a grant for.
- Creating and maintaining a fediverse starter page. There are quite a variety of fediverse starter pages around already, but not all well maintained.
- A Technical analysis and report on compatibility between ActivityPub and GDPR.
- Working on long-form text in the fediverse.
The SWF is explicit in how they define two terms that have had a long and varied history: they state that the ‘fediverse’ is equivalent with the ‘Social Web’, and that the fediverse only consists of platforms that use ActivityPub. Both of these statements are controversial, to put it mildly, and I recommend this article for an extensive overview of the variety of ways that the term ‘fediverse’ is used by different groups of people, all with different ideas of what this network actually is, and what is a part of it. The explicit exclusion and rejection of Bluesky and the AT Protocol as not the correct protocol is especially noteworthy.
Another part of the SWF’s announcement that stands out is the inclusion of Meta as one of the supporting organisations. Meta’s arrival in the fediverse with Threads has been highly controversial since it was announced over a year ago, and one of the continuing worries that many people express is that of an ‘Extend-Embrace-Extinguish’ strategy by Meta. As the SWF will become a W3C member, and will likely continue to be active in the W3C groups, Meta being a supporter of the SWF will likely not diminish these worries.
As the SWF is an organisation with a goal of evangelising and growing the fediverse, it is worth pointing out that the reaction from a significant group within the fediverse developer community is decidedly mixed, with the presence of Meta, and arguments about the exclusive claim on the terms Social Web and fediverse being the main reasons. And as the goal of the SWF is to evangelise and grow the fediverse, can it afford to lose potential growth that comes from the support and outreach of the current fediverse developers?
Software updates
There are quite some interesting fediverse software updates this week that are worth pointing out:
GoToSocial’s v0.17 release brings the software to a beta state, with a large number of new features added. The main standout feature is Interaction Policies, with GoToSocial explaining: “Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped.”
Interaction Policies are a highly important safety feature, especially the ability to turn off replies, as game engine Godot found out this week. It is a part where Mastodon lags behind other projects, on the basis that it is very difficult in ActivityPub to fully prevent the ability for other people to reply to a post. GoToSocial takes a more practical route by telling other software what their interaction policy is for that specific post, and if a reply does not meet the policy, it is simply dropped.
- Peertube 6.3 release brings the ability to separate video streams from audio streams. This allows people now to use PeerTube as an audio streaming platform as well as a video streaming platform.
- The latest update for NodeBB signals that the ActivityPub integration for the forum software is now ready for beta testing.
- Ghost’s latest update now has fully working bi-directional federation, and they state that a private beta is now weeks away.
In Other News
IFTAS has started with a staged rollout of their Content Classification Service. With the opt-in service, a server can let IFTAS check all incoming image hashes for CSAM, with IFTAS handling the required (for US-based servers) reporting to NCMEC. IFTAS reports that over 50 servers already have signed up to participate with the service. CSAM remains a significant problem on decentralised social networks, something that is difficult to deal with for (volunteer) admins. IFTAS’ service makes this significantly easier while helping admins to execute their legal responsibilities. Emelia Smith also demoed the CCS during last week’s FediForum.
The Links
- All the speed demo videos of last week’s FediForum are now available on PeerTube.
- Evan Prodromou’s book about ActivityPub, ‘ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web‘ has officially launched.Lemmy Development Update.
- PieFed’s Development update for September 2024.
- A tool to make sure you see all replies on a fediverse posts (and an explanation on how it differs from FediFetcher).
- A work-in-progress Rust library for ActivityPub.
- The German Data Protection Office updated their Data Protection Guidelines for running a Mastodon server.
- The Revolution Will Be Federated – WeDistribute.
- This week’s updates for fediverse software.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
fediversereport.com/last-week-…
Hello everyone! We've just made the first release candidate for version 0.17.0 of GoToSocialAdventurous admins who want to try the new features and help us spotting bugs can get the release from below:
github.com/superseriousbusines…
⚠️ This release contains several database migrations which will run the first time you start up this new version. Be sure not to interrupt this migration process. This will take anywhere between a few seconds and an hour or even more (on slower hardware / big databases). Please be patient! Back up your database file before updating! We had to rejig the entire statuses table to introduce interaction policies (see below). ⚠️
Release highlights:
- Interaction policies: This release gives you the ability to set interaction policies on your statuses using the settings panel. Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped. This feature is still a work-in-progress as we will almost certainly have some kinks to work out in terms of implementation etc, but we wanted to get it into people's hands as quickly as possible.
User docs here: docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/…
Federation docs here: docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/…- Much wider range of support for different media types: In this release we've embedded a webassembly build of ffmpeg into the GoToSocial binary, so that users can post many different types of media than previously, including mp3, flac, and other audio types, and many more video types. Admins: you don't need to have ffmpeg installed on your server for this to work.
- Audio player: to complement the new media types, we adapted our current video player to also play audio, so people visiting your profile can play MP3s and FLACs. Album art is supported when embedded in the audio file!
- Header/avatar alt text: You can now set alt-text for your avatar + header images, so that screenreader users visiting your profile can read a description of your beautiful face.
- Better threading model for statuses: On the web view of a thread, conversations are now indented at different levels, to make it easier to see who's replying to whom.
- Prefers-reduced-motion is now supported, so that folks with animations turned off in their operating system or browser aren't confronted with lots of animation when they open your profile.
- Conversations view: You can now view a list of your direct message conversations, making it much easier to keep track of who you're talking to.
- Import/export csv files: It's now possible to import Mastodon-compatible CSV files for accounts you follow and accounts you block, making it much easier to migrate across instances. Export of these files is supported too.
- Exclusive lists: You can now mark lists as "exclusive", which means that posts from accounts in an exclusive list will show up only in that list and not in your home timeline.
- Show/hide posts on your profile: Previously only Public posts were shown on your web profile. This is still the default, but you can now choose to show unlisted posts on your web profile too (the Mastodon default), or to show no posts at all.
- Lots of new themes: solarized, brutalist, ecks pee, and more.
- Store worker queue on restart: when you stop the instance, pending tasks are stored into the database, and loaded again when you start up the instance, so that no tasks get lost between restarts.
Thanks for reading!
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> When the Mastodon pilot launched in September 2023, Mastodon had around 1.7M monthly active users, a number that has dropped a year later to around 1.1M
Are we talking about just Mastodon or the fediverse as a whole (a big chunk of which is Mastodon for now, but ...).
But this is a great example of why there's an urgent need to update or replace the NodeInfo protocol (originally part of Diaspora) that's used for collecting fediverse stats.
It's also a great example of why fragmenting the total pool of people using decentralised social networks across multiple protocols is such a regressive idea. The social web as a whole is growing apace. But because the growth is divided between the fediverse, Matrix, ATmosphere, Nostr-verse and a long tail of vanity protocols, it's harder to see, and it's not creating the network effects that all those accounts being on one protocol would.
@LaurensHof
> I recommend this article for an extensive overview of the variety of ways that the term ‘fediverse’ is used by different groups of people
I don't. The author of this piece has an agenda, to fragment the network effects of the fediverse across as many incompatible protocols as possible. They demonstrate a profound intellectual dishonesty in their rewriting of fediverse history, disregarding independently verifiable facts, and aggressively attacking anyone who calls them on this.
I don't make such serious accusations lightly. I'm willing to discuss all 3 claims in detail, and for anyone wants evidence here's some receipts.
An agenda to fragment the network effects of the fediverse across many incompatible protocols, see the second comment by @jdp23 here;
Rewriting of fediverse history and aggressively attacking anyone who disagrees, see the responses here;
... and their first comment here;
> The explicit exclusion and rejection of Bluesky and the AT Protocol as not the correct protocol
Not sure what "not the correct protocol" means in this context, but ATProto is not a fediverse protocol. Because;
a) it's not actually decentralised. BlueSky controls the ID layer
b) no legacy fediverse software app implements it, except a single IndieWeb bridge (BridgyFed)
c) none of the software implementing it supports a single legacy fediverse protocol
> As the SWF will become a W3C member, and will likely continue to be active in the W3C groups, Meta being a supporter of the SWF will likely not diminish these worries
FarceBook has been a member of W3C since long before ActivityPub was even standardised. Nothing to see here. If there's evidence that SWF is compromising traditional fediverse principles in FarceBook's favour, instead of offering them a refund, then and only then will there be a reason to be suspicious of the SWF.
Vanilla OS 2 released (end of July)
Vanilla OS
Vanilla OS is an operating system built with simplicity in mind. It's fast, lightweight, beautiful and ready for all your daily tasks.vanillaos.org
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Last Week in the ATmosphere – Sept 24 week 3
Welcome to this week’s update, with lots of news regarding T&S on Bluesky, managed PDS hosting, and a deeper dive into the Jetstream!
The News
Bluesky released an update on their current efforts on Trust and Safety, listing all the features the team is currently working on. There are quite a few features being worked on that are great (better ban evasion detection, moderation feedback via app), and I want to highlight two of them:
- Geography-specific labels. Bluesky is working to add the ability to remove posts only in certain countries, if they violate local laws but are allowed by Bluesky’s own guidelines. This is a feature that I’ll certainly be writing more about once more about it becomes known, as it poses tons of interesting questions about decentralised protocols and national internet sovereignty. As Bluesky’s own labels can be avoided in an open protocol by running your own infrastructure, it poses the questions of whether people actually do this to circumvent local laws, as well as the extend local governments will accept this (or understand it, to be honest).
- With toxicity detection experiments, Bluesky aims to detect rude replies and potentially reduce their visibility, possibly by hiding them behind a ‘show more comments’ button. It puts Bluesky closer to what other networks are doing, which is hiding bad or spammy comments behind a button you have to click to see. My guess is that Bluesky also eventually will end up in this position, skipping the labeling part altogether.
A report by Brazilian investigative researchers finds that Bluesky is having difficulty moderation CSAM in Portugese, mapping 125 accounts that sell or share CSAM. Bluesky’s head of Trust & Safety already reported in early September that the sudden inflow of new users lead to a 10x increase in reported CSAM, as well as a more general strain on the moderation. Bluesky’s Emily Liu also stated in response to the report: “we’re taking this extremely seriously, and since the recent influx of users started, we’ve hired more human moderators (who are also provided mental health services) + implementing additional tooling that can quash these networks faster and more effectively”.
Bluesky has appointed a legal representative in Brazil, and will make an official announcement in the next few days. X not having a legal representative in Brazil is what ultimately led to a ban on X in Brazil. This week, X finally caved and appointed a representative, and X might become unbanned in the next few days again. It is worth watching how X becoming available again in Brazil will impact the current userbase of Brazilians on Bluesky. While some will undoubtedly go back to using X, the open question is how large this group will be.
In other news
With a maturity of the ecosystem, companies are starting to offer managed hosting of a PDS, both in the US as well as in Japan. It also raises interesting question regarding branding and marketing: both of these services explicitly advertise themselves as offering a Bluesky PDS: while that makes sense from the company’s perspective (very few people will understand what an atproto PDS is), I am entirely unclear if this desirable from the perspective of the Bluesky company.
Last week I wrote about a directory of Brazilian Bluesky accounts, and it turns out there is also a Japanese equivalent: the Bluesky Feeds Navigator lists a large variety of custom feeds (mainly in Japanese) for Bluesky.
Brazilian tech YouTuber Gabs Ferreira interviewed Bluesky engineer hailey about developing on Bluesky, focusing specifically on mobile and React Native (in English). Ferreira interviewed Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee last week, and will talk with Dan Abramov on 26-09.
Altmetric, which tracks engagement with academic research, is working on adding support for Bluesky.
EmbedSky is a new tool to ’embed the last thirty posts and reposts from your BlueSky timeline in your blog or website’. It works with OAuth, which facilitates that the tool can only be used to embed posts from your own account.
On Relays, Jetstreams and costs
Some semi-technical protocol discussion about relays is worth mentioning, since I see people on the other networks talk about it. First, a super simplified description of how atproto works: everyone’s data is stored in a simple database, which does not much else besides storing your data, called a PDS. A Relay scrapes all the PDS’s on the entire network, and turns it into an unending stream of updates, often colloquially called a firehose. An AppView takes all the data from the firehose and makes it presentable for a user (counting all the ‘likes’ on a post, for example).
People on other networks often assume that running a Relay is prohibitively expensive, and it turns out it is not: Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold ran an extra full-network Relay for 150 USD/month, and recently someone confirmed this is still possible after the massive influx of new users.
Relays can be ‘expensive’ in another way though: a lot of the data that goes through a Relay is dedicated to making sure that the data is authenticated. This is the ‘Authenticated’ part in the name ‘Authenticated Transfer Protocol’. However, there are quite some use cases for which it is not necessary to validate every single event that comes through the firehose, such as a simple bot that listens for certain keywords. In that case, they can get by with a simpler version of the firehose.
Two versions of such a simpler version, called a Jetstream, launched this week. Bluesky engineer Jaz released their own version of a Jetstream, accompanying with an extensive blog post in which they describe how it works. They note that this reduces traffic activity by 99%, all while running on a 5$/month VPS. Jaz also says that an official Bluesky version of a Jetstream is coming soon.
Skyware (who recently released a lightweight labeler as well) also has their own version of a Jetstream available as well.
The Links
- Jetstream: Shrinking the AT Proto Firehose by >99%
- A complete and follow-along guide to ‘Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS and using your domain as your handle’.
- Buttondown’s CEO writes about Bluesky.
- Growth of Bluesky also comes with additional needs for protection for the Blacksky community.
- The Government of Brazil now also has their own verified Bluesky account.
- Bluesky could become Brazil’s next big social media platform. It has Elon Musk’s X to thank – Fast Company.
- Frontpage, a HackerNews-like build on top of atproto, now has OAuth login.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.
>Bluesky is working to add the ability to remove posts only in certain countries, if they violate local laws but are allowed by Bluesky’s own guidelines
This seems like a bug, not a feature.
Will they be stopping posts about the Tiananmen Square massacre being seen in China? Or the truth about the invasion of Ukraine being seen in Russia? Or about the ICC agreeing that the IDF is committing genocide in Gaza being seen in Israel or the US?
> Bluesky aims to detect rude replies and potentially reduce their visibility, possibly by hiding them behind a ‘show more comments’ button
Let me guess. They're planning to use a Trained #MOLE for this, right?
Instead of doing what Slashdot pioneered, what Minds does, and what dReddit essentially does, which is harvest the wisdom of crowds by exposing rating/ flagging controls to readers. Then having human mods review the outcomes for balance.
> Bluesky is having difficulty moderation CSAM in Portugese
Which is an example of why fediverse moderation structure has always been more responsive than any centralised system.
The more accounts are spread across many small servers, the more the number of mods tends to scales with the number of new accounts. If Brazilian people who post in Portugese are (mainly) on Brazilian-run servers, with Portugese speaking mods, this language headache takes care of itself.
> Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold ran an extra full-network Relay for 150 USD/month, and recently someone confirmed this is still possible after the massive influx of new users
I'd love to see an apples-with-apples comparison with the cost of running an AP relay, and how this scales as the number of accounts being proxies increases.
fwupd 1.9.25: Synaptics, Dell, and Intel Enhancements
fwupd 1.9.25: Synaptics, Dell, and Intel Enhancements
The latest fwupd 1.9.25 firmware update daemon for Linux brings bug fixes and adds newly supported devices.Bobby Borisov (Linuxiac)
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Probably because your hardware's firmware is up to date or there's nothing available.
It's rare that it's updated.
Check your journal or
systemctl status fwupd.service
fwupdmgr get-history
No problem.
The only reason i know this is because systemd throws degraded warnings because fwupd keeps failing. On several machines. (Because DNS, proxies, VPN, etc.)
In xfce there's a panel tool called genmon I use.
I have 2 specifically for monitoring systemd status
First is just the status
systemctl is-system-running
The other lists the failed units using a script
#!/bin/shfailedd (){ systemctl --failed | grep -o -E "●.{0,35}\<failed" 2>/dev/null }echo $(failedd)
Mint cinnamon has a similar "spice" (panel plugin) that I also use.
Fedify finally reached 1.0.0, its first stable release
Fedify 1.0.0 · dahlia fedify · Discussion #141
Fedify, an ActivityPub framework, has finally released its first stable version, 1.0.0! What is Fedify? Fedify is a TypeScript library that makes it easy to create federated server applications bas...GitHub
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Probably worth putting this in the post description so we don't all need to ask "what's that?"
Fedify is a TypeScript library that makes it easy to create federated server applications based on the ActivityPub protocol.
Keyboard / Mouse Sharing with Arch / Wayland, MacOS, Windows 11 Laptop
TL;DR: Want to use my desktop keyboard/mouse with my Laptop. What software are you using/enjoying? Arch+KDE w/ Wayland will be the main host, main client is Windows 11. Secondary hosts may be Debian and MacOS, same client, but low priority on the Mac.
Hey folks, I'm rearranging some things a bit at home, would love to get some current thoughts on keyboard/mouse sharing over IP (no video).
I have to put up with some tools that don't play nicely with wine/proton, and so my work laptop is a windows device. I'll be controlling that device primary from Arch and Debian, though MacOS is a possibility. I'd like to keep the laptop closed and not add another mouse/keyboard into the mix, so Keyb/Mouse over IP it is.
Here's what I'm looking at, haven't tried them all yet, but looking for opinions:
* Barrier - Dead fork. Hasn't been updated in some time, being superseded by input-leap. Most portions of the project managed by someone who had not been active for a couple years before the Input Leap fork.
* Input Leap - Forked from Barrier at the end of 2021, and nearly 3 years later, no stable binary releases yet. Development seems fairly active, but no binary releases yet doesn't provide a massive amount of confidence that it will be stable. Doesn't mean I won't build and test though.
* Lan Mouse - Seems pretty neat, the lack of input capture on MacOS could create an issue for me in certain situations, but I can work around that if I need to for the rare times I'd need it. Traffic is unencrypted/plaintext. Its entirely local, and I've got more security than most users (and some companies), but still. Probably leading the pack right now.
* Deskflow - Upstream project for Synergy, a rename to differentiate the user project from Synergy. TONS of recent activity, but the switch is very recent. I don't know if there are any binaries built, but its a longstanding project (and like many, many others, I used Synergy before it went commercial, it was nice).
Any other options out there? Good/bad experiences with any of these?
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Fair point, and I'm not entirely against commercial software. Probably easier to deploy to my work laptop too.
Synergy will be on the list
EDIT: May have spoken too soon. No wayland support still it looks like. From what I can see its been on the list since around 9 months ago, was 6 weeks away 5 months ago, but as of today still not available. I'll give it a go just to check, but I don't think libei support will be in until 3.2. Current version up is 3.0.
Edit 2: Usable code is out, so screw it, going to rework the home setup. Worst case scenario I'll keep a spare mouse and keyboard handy for the laptop. Going to start testing out the others in earnest in the meantime once I've reworked my desk (and figured out where the hell I'm putting a 50" monitor that's apparently arriving next week for testing).
Barrier is synergy but no cost
E: It works fine for me across macos, windows and Linux but I don’t use Wayland so that might affect you.
E2 looks like Wayland breaks barrier.
Yeah, Wayland definitely complicates things. I dropped synergy before v2 and no longer being open, v3 is apparently 1 with some GUI on top. I can build v1 (deskflow), as long as they are keeping the main bit underneath open I don't mind supporting them with a $50 one time payment. We will see how it goes though, their Wayland support is still in Dev.
I had expected to see input leap further along since it had been 3 years since the fork (and 2 more years since the maintainer of the repo was active), but it doesn't seem ready for release, as they even recommend sticking with the last barrier release for now according to their readme.
Right now, deskflow/synergy seems the most promising.
I don’t use Wayland for other reasons, but if I did and it broke barrier I’d switch to x11.
Might be worth investigating what you use that is incompatible with x…
Not really an option for me or it would interrupt some other stuff I work on personally. I could make it not my main PC and go back to Debian, but it would also mean less time for me testing my stuff. So I'm more likely to just forget IP keyboard/mouse sharing and stick one of my little keyboards and a mouse there.
The rest of the main use machines are all on what amounts to an overly expensive physical KVM (work stuff freebie), so the only reason to use the software based option is the laptop.
Audio which can be brought out to an amp or into a processor, relay controls, even occupancy sensor support (standard 24v line, works with pretty much anything), ability to set custom edids, and a very capable API on the base, as well as custom packages that can be installed (based around node).
Yeah its a wildly powerful little box. List price is like $2500 or so though!
For the record, you may see some of these show up on ebay or something, they have been discontinued (really they just changed the line, same hardware with more variation and flexibility, which also means more variation in pricing, but also stuff like a transmitter/receiver option).
Since they are discontinued though, some companies may replace soon, so they may show up somewhere for much cheaper.
This is what I've been missing the most since switching to Wayland.
I was testing again yesterday, on Fedora mainly.
lan-mouse is a bit clunky. It requires too many clicks to start on Gnome. bi-directional.
Couldn't get it to work on NixOS but I'm new to it.
Input leap can be finicky to install and set up too, depending on your system. For some reason on my setup it lags a lot, and from time to time I have to reconnect.
They don't give an easy access to builds, but you can find them. It requires to be connected with a GitHub account though.
Definitely clunky on lan-mouse.
I'll give input-leap a check with my gh account logged in, see how it goes - I'm curious if I'll have the same fun with latency. Since its mostly for meeting stuff, a bit of lag is ok, but if its choppy or otherwise severe that could be an issue, definitely....
Since I switched to Wayland, I could not find an alternative for barrier that I used under X. After a lot of search I bumped into a project called rkvm. You can check it out. It is a bit more difficult to setup than barrier but it works pretty well for me.
The only bad thing is that both computers must run linux.
Neat project! I especially like that it goes for raw keycodes, real nice approach.
Unfortunately the Windows support is a hard requirement for me, but hopefully someone else sees and takes advantage
I've been doing something insane that keeps Barrier working. I have Firefox and KeePassXC flatpaks installed and forced to use X11 fallback so they can autotype together. And coincidentally, that means Barrier can mouse off the server screen to the client machine if I have Firefox maximized on that edge. And never any other time. But maybe that's helpful to someone.
This post reminded me how stupid that was. So I installed input-leap on a distrobox arch container. Now it all instantly works. My existing Barrier clients just connected as usual with no tweaks. Apparently it was already installed in Aurora-dx directly, but that version didn't work for some reason. I suppose I'm glad I went the long way and you reminded me to try.
We Finally Know What Creates Static Electricity, After Thousands of Years
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"For the first time, we are able to explain a mystery that nobody could before: why rubbing matters,"
sigh The jokes write themselves. He had to know, when he said that.
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We knew enough to make it extremely useful, but didn't have a full understanding of the underlying mechanics.
Hate to break it to you, but that is how knowledge works. Even things we have an extremely detailed understanding of are likely to have underlying mechanisms we are not aware of.
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Maybe you just went to bad schools?
My experience with science and other teachers of every grade was that they stressed how we make new discoveries all the time.
Maybe I went to bad schools, maybe my country has a dysfunctional education system, but I suspect the matter is widespread because it's way easier to teach factual information rather than dive into the nuances of how confident we are about our explanations.
Some reductive examples: Pluto is / is not a planet, wings work because the path air takes is longer than on the other side, the cause for this war was xyz, you can't subtract below 0 (that's at a very early age of course), this philosopher thought X.
Oh I guess a CRUCIAL one is how most teachers are horribly unfit to answer "Why should I care about this?", but that's beside the point, in a way.
I had wildly different experiences with teachers within my own schools growing up. There was legitimately no standard that valued this kind of nuanced exploration of the world. Just a focus on standardized tests. It was almost entirely on the individual teachers to spend more of their time and effort to go any further than that.
I had some great teachers that made everything interesting and taught us more like the classes I eventually had in college, but I definitely have had more that were like this one math teacher I remember who, when I asked about why we had to do a math problem in a specific way we were learning about, answer something along the lines of “because I say so.”
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There are a ton of things that we know how to replicate and sometimes think we know how they work, but being able to see in more detail or with better pattern recognition can lead to further understanding. The best part is the new understanding can lead to all kinds of possible applications, like being able to regulate static electricity by manipulating surfaces to either increase or decrease the amount created.
Heck, this could possibly lead to lighter materials for electrical insulation if the effects are relevant for electrical conduction in general.
Oh for sure, I fully understand that there are tons of things/mechanics we take for granted every day that we don't actually know how it/they work(s) at the most fundamental level. Static electricity just seemed like a pretty important one that I'd just assumed it was well and thoroughly researched/understood.
Anyway, completely agree with you that this breakthrough is great news and that there are some exciting practical applications that may emerge as a result, particularly the more that model is understood/completed.
Like things we thought we nailed down in the 19th century and haven’t thought to revisit with modern methods and equipment. Then someone decides to look at it again and uncovered a boatload of previously unknown data.
“We thought we understood hiccups, but this changes EVERYTHING!”
(I dunno if hiccups are secretly a scientific black box or not, but you get the idea.)
See also the giraffe nerve that takes a 15 foot detour because it didn't evolve to go on the other side of their hearts. It's theorized to have travelled even further in dinosaurs:
(Source)
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Top 5 Features Coming to GIMP 3.0
In this video, I provide an overview of the 5 best or most exciting features coming to the highly-anticipated GIMP 3.0 release! These are my 5 favorite new features coming to GIMP 3.0, including non-destructive editing, smart guides, and CMYK support.
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Davies Media Design is a fantastic channel. Additionally here are links from the developers:
- official page for roadmap of GIMP: developer.gimp.org/core/roadma…
- Milestones of the source code: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/…
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this is a gnome project, that's not how it tends to work
closed "Not A Bug" "WontFix"
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For all the shortcomings of AI, and specially of Google's Gemini model, its YouTube integration is really good for this, even more so on Android where you can set it as your default assistant and ask a question about the video you're currently watching without having to switch apps.
Asking for a bullet point list, it gave me this:
- Nondestructive editing
- Dynamic guides or smart guides
- CMYK support
- Outline text
- Multi-layer features and layer sets
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To be honest, complaining that "half of the information" is in a video form is so stupid. Stick to the written sources and be happy that the other half of the information is supplied the way you want it.
Obviously there is a market for video content, and there is probably as many people liking it as disliking it. I am a dyslexictic person that can understand and remember way better when I am spoon fed the information instead of struggle through a long blog post or news site.
Please be open minded that we are different.
Video gets higher engagement. If you want your information to be consumed, video is a better bet.
That will not stop every video from having a top comment complaining about it though.
I prefer written content myself. But, as you say, I am happy for content in whatever form I can get it. I did not pay for it. How it is generated and shared is not up to me.
Soon I hope, we will have a bot that transcribes every video. Then that can be the top comment instead of the endless complaining.
these basic features all seem like they should ve been added 10 years ago
For anyone wanting to play G.A.M.M.A. on linux
GitHub - DravenusRex/stalker-gamma-linux-guide: A guide to getting S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - G.A.M.M.A. running on GNU/LINUX.
A guide to getting S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - G.A.M.M.A. running on GNU/LINUX. - DravenusRex/stalker-gamma-linux-guideGitHub
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It was dumb luck for myself too, years since I had last played figured I could install through wine.. Anyway stumbled on to this guide.
Be careful out there stalker.
WhatAmLemmy
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icerunner_origin
in reply to Sam_Bass • • •Key Points
Sam_Bass
in reply to icerunner_origin • • •seaQueue
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in reply to Sam_Bass • • •Thorry84
in reply to Sam_Bass • • •It's just an electric field man, we create those all the time. The interesting part is that we figured out how this field is created that causes the outflow of particles at the poles. That outflow has been known for a long time, the field has been theorized to exist for a long time (how else would the outflow occur?), they've now just confirmed it does in fact work the way they thought it worked.
While this is cool science and very interesting for people that study for example geology, it isn't changing the world or anything. Don't let your head be turned by sensationalist media. This isn't new physics, the field is very weak and it's a normal EM field just like the ones we use every day all day.
In principle it's possible to launch something into space using an EM field. That's called a rail gun and the military has prototypes that shoot projectiles at hypersonic speeds. However due to the forces and currents involved, the thing is massive, requires a whole lot of power and cooling and as a bonus self destructs after one or two shots. The acceleration also means that
... show moreIt's just an electric field man, we create those all the time. The interesting part is that we figured out how this field is created that causes the outflow of particles at the poles. That outflow has been known for a long time, the field has been theorized to exist for a long time (how else would the outflow occur?), they've now just confirmed it does in fact work the way they thought it worked.
While this is cool science and very interesting for people that study for example geology, it isn't changing the world or anything. Don't let your head be turned by sensationalist media. This isn't new physics, the field is very weak and it's a normal EM field just like the ones we use every day all day.
In principle it's possible to launch something into space using an EM field. That's called a rail gun and the military has prototypes that shoot projectiles at hypersonic speeds. However due to the forces and currents involved, the thing is massive, requires a whole lot of power and cooling and as a bonus self destructs after one or two shots. The acceleration also means that it's great for shooting at stuff and destroying it, but not that useful for transport.
A rocket on the other hand can be very small (the Electron rocket is only 14 meters and can put 300kg into LEO), easy to transport, easy to maintain and fuel and with a much smaller chance of self destructing. Thus we use rockets to put stuff into orbit.
Beyond the solar system is totally impossible with our current tech. Voyager 1 and 2 might be considered interstellar probes, but they are tiny and took 50 years to get there. And they are going so slow, that while they have left our solar system, they aren't really going anywhere. It will take them tens of thousands of years to even make it to the Oort cloud of our solar system, which by some metrics is still inside our solar system. We are currently struggling getting humans to the moon for a few days, so beyond the solar system is firmly in the realm of fiction.
devfuuu
in reply to Sam_Bass • • •Thorry84
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