The Paperweight Dilemma: Original Pinephone might lose future kernel updates if devs can't pay down tech debt
Fair enough. For me, GIMP isn't workable until at least the milestones in 3.0.2 are complete (non-destructive editing), so I actually don't use it much beyond basic projects. The gradient issue you mentioned sounds like a part of the non-destructive editing workflow they want to bring in. What the roadmap shows is that they at least have a lot of ambition for improving GIMP and introducing new features.
I’d LOVE to know that stance has changed, but hearing ‘Yeah, we’ll never do that,’ is the point at which you start looking for other projects to try to use and help with.
I've never been involved with the development side, so I couldn't say. I do follow GIMP news. The GIMP project has been famously stubborn in some areas. Since Jehan has taken over as the maintainer, I've heard they've become more flexible, but that was a few years back. Of note, they now want to remove Floating Selections in GIMP 3.0 which many people complained about but GIMP historically has said, "nah, we're keeping it." But they changed their minds recently. So perhaps the culture is changing.
From what I understand, anyway. I'm a complete outsider. Perhaps the core contributors felt that changing the way selection handling works would introduce a significant disruption to people's workflows? I can only speculate...poorly.
GIMP
Anything in particular you think should be on this roadmap that isn't?
What's wrong with GNOME Boxes? My experience has been great for the past two years. Better than Virtualbox.
For a moment, I thought this meant Slack was now only going to work on Wayland compositors...
I've never used Ubuntu much, but that was interesting to know! Thanks for sharing.
I found this page on hardware enablement. My understanding is that new hardware isn't supported with old kernels, which older LTS releases are stuck with. So Ubuntu solves this problem by backporting newer drivers to the older kernel release.
That's quite an interesting way of making money. I guess if Dell wanted the newer drivers, they could just install a newer version of Ubuntu. But since they wanted more stability, they preferred that Canonical backport the fixes to an LTS release.
so Cannonical/Ubuntu stepped in, did it for cheap (~$1/machine)
What did they charge for?
I also had a pretty terrible experience with Fedora KDE not too long ago. Too many issues to count. In the end, I couldn't start a Plasma session from the display manager anymore so I gave up.
I really wanted to like Fedora, but...well, Fedora does not seem to like me. My experience on Arch KDE has been great. Like night and day. Still a few small bugs, but annoyances and not showstoppers. My experience with GNOME on Arch has been fantastic. Only one program was broken in GNOME that isn't in KDE. It makes me wonder why I ever tried to leave...
So how else would you combat malicious forks like what happened to new pipe?
Trademarks. Anyone malicious can take your source-available code anyway, but if they infringe on your trademark by calling it "Firefox" or "Newpipe", you are legally in your right to take it down. Trademarks deal with fraud; copyright doesn't.
Iceweasel is a classic example of what happens when free software projects like Firefox seek to defend their trademark. They didn't want to allow Debian to use the Firefox name, as that may cause users to attribute quality problems to Mozilla when Debian is actually responsible because of the patches they had made.
Want to remove an app using the GrayJay name without your permission if it's a registered trademark? Here's a link to report it to Google Play.
Wine will not run Photoshop because of the DRM. More than fifteen years ago, you could run Photoshop in Wine, but Adobe's DRM is probably what killed it. You might be able to get Affinity Photo running in Wine with some manual tweaks, though. I haven't personally tried in over a year, but there are people on the Affinity forums who have been able to get it working.
Photoshop would probably work alright in a VM, though. GNOME Boxes is a good zero-configuration Virtual Machine manager.
Open Raster as an interchange format instead of PSDs. It would be nice if I could open the same file in GIMP or Krita that I can in Photoshop.
Disabling DXVK is the way to do it in Lutris. It's in the Runner Options tab for the game settings. If you create a new Wineprefix using WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/newprefix wineboot, it will use WineD3D (the D3D➜OpenGL converter) by default. It's what Wine uses for all Direct3D APIs up to Direct3D 11. DXVK is a completely separate project to Wine, but Lutris and Proton bundle it and use it by default. Lutris is completely usable without Vulkan, despite the scary warning.
Forty years ago, Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop the GNU operating system
This is completely true. The GNU Project's plan was to build an operating system in 1983, and they intended to call it GNU. The fact that they didn't build every tool for the operating system doesn't change their goal or the work they put into it. We have GNU Guix now, an operating system "entirely composed of free software", so mission accomplished?
Honestly I laugh at the people whining about password sharing getting shut down. It was never really intended to be used that way
To quote Netflix, "Love is sharing a password": https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I haven't been subscribed to a streaming service for about five years. Well, sometimes I pay for a month of Hidive. I usually just buy the show/film on disc and rip it. A decent amount of the shows I want to watch are old and not even on a streaming service.
Ah, okay. It sounds like you have a physical server, too...you would need to upgrade it yourself if you wanted to use AV1, right? Sounds expensive and annoying...
My understanding is the client needs to explicitly support hardware decoding with the relevant APIs, and Jellyfin probably accomplishes it with FFmpeg. There is no way Jellyfin would be implementing a software decoder for HEVC, but they should have no problem implementing hardware decoders for every platform.
iOS doesn't even have a software decoder for AV1 yet, but the iPhone 15 Pro hardware decoder is a start. Likewise, only expensive Android phones have hardware AV1 decoders right now. More desktop GPUs are implementing AV1 decoders. But this transition looks like it's going to take another 3 years (?) to hit every market segment (cheapest to most expensive)... sigh. I don't have an AV1 hardware decoder on any of my devices either. It's insane how long it takes for new hardware decoders to become mainstream. Many HEVC patents might be close to expiring by then, lol.
I don't have a lot of experience with this, but if you want more logs, you can try upping the WINEDEBUG debug channel: https://wiki.winehq.org/Debug_Channels
Oh does it not add new entries for every new DXVK release anymore?
Looks like the last time a verb for a new DXVK version was added was dxvk2010 or DXVK 2.1, in February this year. We're up to DXVK 2.3 now. Because the Winetricks codebase is around 20,000 lines of shellscript and I'm not the best at reading shellscript...I don't think the dxvk verb updates the Wineprefix's DXVK version based on what the newest version is. I think that's just an alternate way of installing DXVK; you can pull the latest stable release, or you can install a particular version.
I think executing a particular verb for a DXVK version would override whatever DXVK dlls you currently have installed in that prefix, too. I have no idea how to check what DXVK version is installed a particular Wineprefix, though.
even though it says DXVK (Latest) and that it’s from year 2023
That's based on the verb metadata; not what version of DXVK you currently have installed. A contributor bumped the year for the dxvk verb from 2017 to 2023 in a commit in February this year.
Oh I had no idea about this, and I normally just use winetrick’s GUI while using it so I would’ve had to look up how to update dxvk if not for you explaining it.
Happy if it helps. I've never used the GUI, but it's awesome that they managed to create a functioning GUI frontend with shellscript. Insane, really. God I hate shellscript...
So far I haven’t had an issue with DXVK being too old, but I mostly play older games
You probably won't get an issue with DXVK being "too old", but newer versions of DXVK implement more features (particularly for D3D12) and include bug fixes to improve compatibility or performance. From the 2.3 release notes:
Fixed a minor issue with D3D9 feedback loop tracking.
Test Drive Unlimited 2: Fixed shadows on grass.
Tomb Raider Anniversary: Improved performance.
So you want to be running the latest version for better compatibility. That said, I mostly play visual novels. My biggest problems are still DRM and media playback, which DXVK has very little to do with.
Unrelated but I’ll check that guide out, I’ve had trouble playing VNs that are in Japanese, as without LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8" wine /path/to/game.exe they won’t even run but even with it the fonts don’t work and are shown as empty boxes.
You're the exact person this guide was written for! This sounds like an issue that's easily fixed by installing fakejapanese with winetricks. More info here: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:problems#japanese_characters_aren_t_displaying_properly
And if you have .txt files in the game directory (like documentation or whatever) with garbled text, that's probably because they're encoded in Shift JIS. There's an easy fix to make them readable: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:problems#text_files_with_garbled_text
(That last one had me scratching my head for a very long time)
This was a use case I was introduced to directly before I discovered Firefox was introducing support for HEVC decoding.
I use HEVC because it has significantly better compression than older codecs, and many modern devices have hardware decoding support for HEVC.
If it weren't for iOS, VP9 could take its place, or so the Mozilla developers thought. HEVC and newer codecs like VP9, AV1, VVC, EVC, etc. offer better compression but often at the cost of compute. I imagine hardware decoding evens the scales a lot; I haven't done any benchmarking myself. I don't know how much impact the complexity of H.265 vs H.264 has on battery life, if any. Of course, hardware encoding on VP9 is not really a thing (AV1 is ahead of it, even), so HEVC has the edge there.
In a few years, AV1 hardware implementations will hopefully be ubiquitous; that would solve the efficiency and software patent problems at the same time. It'll probably coincide with the last of H.264's patents expiring. So on the one hand, I can understand why Mozilla is in no rush to support HEVC.
So I imagine you use a Chromium-based browser for Jellyfin?
More than likely very few people own a pinephone, and the few that do don't read pinephone news. Thanks for posting this.
As for me, I'm not buying another pinephone/GNU+Linux compatible device until both the community and the manufacturer get their shit figured out. I bought the PInephone expecting it to one day become more useful to me, so I guess that's on me.