Skip Navigation

User banner
Posts
8
Comments
311
Joined
2 yr. 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.

  • 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: https://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: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

  • It's pretty good! I wish System Settings was less confusing/overwhelming and it had more graphics tablet options, though.

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

    This is not my experience.

  • 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: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/milestones/27#tab-issues

    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.

  • 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.

  • Adobe Creative Cloud doesn't work in CrossOver.

  • 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.

  • what else is there aside from games?

    The Steam client...

  • 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.

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

  • 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:

     
        
    Optional Deps   : giflib
                      lib32-giflib
                      gnutls
                      lib32-gnutls
                      v4l-utils
                      lib32-v4l-utils
                      libpulse
                      lib32-libpulse
                      alsa-plugins
                      lib32-alsa-plugins
                      alsa-lib
                      lib32-alsa-lib
                      libxcomposite
                      lib32-libxcomposite
                      libxinerama
                      lib32-libxinerama
                      opencl-icd-loader
                      lib32-opencl-icd-loader
                      libva
                      lib32-libva
                      gtk3
                      lib32-gtk3
                      gst-plugins-base-libs
                      lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs
                      vulkan-icd-loader
                      lib32-vulkan-icd-loader
                      sdl2
                      lib32-sdl2
                      sane
                      libgphoto2
                      ffmpeg
                      cups
                      samba
                      dosbox
    
      

    --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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.