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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2023

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  • AI has a lot of great uses, and a lot of stupid smoke and mirrors uses. For example, text to speech and live captioning or transcription are useful.

    “Hypothetical AI desktop” “Siri” “copilot+” and other assistants are smoke and mirrors. Mainly because they don’t work. But if they did, they would be unreliable (because ai is unreliable) and would have to be limited to not cause issues. And so they would not be useful.

    Plus, on Linux they would be especially unusefull, because there’s a million ways to do different things, and a million different setups. What if you asked the ai “change the screen resolution” and it started editing some gnome files while you are on KDE, or if it started mangling your xorg.conf because it’s heavily customized.

    Plus, every openai stuff you are seeing this days doesn’t really work because it’s clever, it works because it’s huge. Chatgpt needs to be trained for days of week on specialized hardware, who’s gonna pay for all that in the open source community?


  • Distributing software is not instantaneous. Assuming that Mozilla has already sent the update to flathub, it will take some time before it’s validated and available for download.

    If instead of flatpak you had used native packages, you would be in the same situation, as fedora’s update system keeps updates in testing until enough people say it’s fine.

    If you wanted to get the update as soon as possible, you would have to download the prebuilt binary from Mozilla, but then you would have to update manually and everything.

    Just be patient for a few days.



  • I think you are confusing “windows like” with “user-friendly”. A “bespoke archive, that you find on some developer’s website, that you extract and somewhere it contains an executable and assets, that you move where you want to keep them, and then the user remembers to manually update it sometimes somehow” is not how you usually do stuff on Linux and is not even user-friendly.

    Distributions come with programs like “gnome software” or “kde discover” that allows the user to graphically install programs from the distro’s package manager, or from flatpak or snap. It will also help them to keep them updated and to manage dependencies. That is user-friendly.

    I suggest using flatpak. It will work on almost all distros out of the box and will be easy to install and maintain for the user. If flatpak is too “bloated” for you because it uses containers, then you need to package it for every distro manually, but that’s a lot of work. If it’s something that just needs to be used once and never again, consider an appimage or a script, because they don’t need to be installed.

    Distros are different operating systems, it’s not gonna be easy to package for all of them without compromises.

    Also, if you really really really need to use your bespoke archive, you can do like native steam games do, and put every library you link in the archive, and link with relative paths instead of system wide paths, or with a launch script that loads your provided libraries. But that’s not a great user experience. Steam gets away with it because it’s the launcher that manages the whole thing.


  • edinbruh@feddit.ittoLinux@lemmy.mlCustom Libreboot 9020 Optiplex PC
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    1 month ago

    You are not supposed to power the GPU like that. You should use two separate cables from the supply. The other connector of the same cable is intended to “daisy chain” low power cards.

    It will probably work anyway, but better safe than sorry.

    Edit: I think it’s needed because:

    1. The power supply might have separate circuits for separate cables and might not be able to supply all the power needed by the GPU through just one
    2. The cable might not be rated to have that much power flow through and might overheat and melt over time
    3. If you could just fork the cable into two why would they put two connectors on the GPU, it’s not like they have different voltages, they are literally daisy chained




  • Obviously that’s not true… like, at all…

    Android phones use Surface Flinger, which is a compositor that has nothing to do with either Wayland or X11. But we could say it’s kinda similar to Wayland in the fact that it’s composited and uses something similar to GBM and GEMM for managing buffers.

    Android drivers don’t even use the same “semantics” as Linux drivers (android uses explicit sync, while Linux is implicit, but they are working on supporting explicit sync because Nvidia and because it’s better). It’s only in the last few years that you can use Linux drivers in android, plus some synchronization stuff.




  • that makes no sense - you need the key

    But if it’s stored in a keyring or similar (like on windows) and the client reads from it you don’t need the file with the plain text key. Like you don’t store the git credentials in a file, but with libsecret.

    I would prefer something that never ask for the password.

    Things like the gnome-keyring or kwallet keep all the passwords in an encrypted file, they get decrypted and kept in ram using your login password when you log into gnome/KDE session and programs can ask for passwords using some API. Once you log out the passwords are removed from ram and no one can read them. My goal is to have something like this, so I’m never asked for a password, I just log into my session and everything is available






  • Which is bullshit because DRM doesn’t effectively prevent ripping (source: you can find pirated hd content). So it’s literally only harmful to the customer.

    I’ll give you a quick demo of how DRM is literally useless at protecting content:

    • You need:
      • a machine with any Nvidia GPU series 600 or newer running Windows, a browser with DRM support (e.g. chrome), and optionally sunshine. This is not an uncommon setup
      • any other machine that can run moonlight (even a phone).\
    • Services often use widevine as DRM provider, so using the Nvidia machine visit this test page and make sure DRM is working
    • Normally the DRM api ensure that the decrypted content of that video can never in any form get out of a special GPU buffer, not even the browser can access it
    • enable sunshine on the machine
    • Connect from the second machine to the using moonlight and notice that the video is not being shared. DRM seems to be working correctly.
    • Now disable sunshine and enable Nvidia gamestream from GeForce experience, and set it up to share the whole desktop
    • connect from the second machine to the first using moonlight
    • now the video is being shared to the second machine, and DRM is circumvented. There is literally nothing preventing you from recording the screen on the second machine

    Now, this is a terrible way of ripping content, it causes at least one reencoding, which reduces quality (a lot of people won’t even notice it), but it is a stupidly simple working demo of DRM circumvention.

    Btw, that procedure is not the result of some study, reverse engineering, or any clever stuff. I was literally playing a game in streaming and I went “hmm, I wonder what would happen if I streamed widevine” and it just worked.


  • As the video points out, a lot of the work in xorg (and Linux in general, fwiw) is done by red hat engineers. So red hat cutting on that investment bears direct consequences for everyone else. Unless of course someone steps up and takes their place in maintenance, but it’s not gonna happen, which is literally why Wayland (and not some revamped xorg) is the future of Linux desktop.

    Also, red hat’s decisions often trickle down on most other distros. E.g.: systemd, pulseaudio, pipewire, gnome, not including proprietary codecs, etc.

    So, they technically don’t arbiter, but they definitely set the pace.




  • That’s weird because it’s against the law.

    A recent (few months ago) EU law mandates that if your platform is big enough (in the EU market) to gatekeep users from using other platforms, then it must interoperate with competing services. That means you should thrive because you make a better product, and not because it has more users.

    The fine is a considerable percentage of the company’s earnings, that supposedly even the likes of Amazon and Google cannot overlook.

    This includes Whatsapp that in a few months will have to be interoperable with competing services like telegram. This requires a protocol, the IETF is working on that. Google probably wishes to use RCS, but Matrix is also working with the IETF.

    Apple says iMessage is not that widespread in the EU and should not be included, Google says it is and should be regulated, that’s because this regulation will most likely have effects even outside the EU.