FOSS apps (all on Flathub)

Some of the AI related apps I've been using that are both Free Software and offline (where it runs on your computer without using network services in the cloud) are:

• OCR: "Frog" can take screenshots, select images, accept drag and drop, and you can paste an image from the clipboard. It'll read the text on the images and immediately have a text area with the result. flathub.org/apps/com.github.te… — it's powered by Tesseract. Note: The completely optional text-to-speech that Frog has does use an online service. But the rest is offline.
• Speech to text: "Speech Note" does text to speech, speech to text, and translations... all locally on your computer, and it supports GPU acceleration (which isn't needed, but it makes it a little faster). flathub.org/apps/net.mkiol.Spe… — This is basically the all-in-one "Swiss army knife" of ML text processing. Thanks to being a Flatpak, you don't have to do anything special for the dependencies. It's all taken care of for you. It also has tons of different models (for different voices, different backends) all available from within the UI, which just needs a click for downloading.
• Upscaling images: There are two that do something similar, using some of the same backends. A nice and simple one is "Upscaler". flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.the… Another one that's cross platform is "Upscayl" flathub.org/apps/org.upscayl.U… — these both use ESRGAN and Waifu2x in the background.
• Closed captioning: "Live Captions" uses an ML model to transcribe text realtime. It's wonderful for when a video doesn't have subtitles, or when you're participating in a video call (which might also not have CC). There's also a toggle mode that will transcribe based on microphone input. The default is to use system audio. flathub.org/apps/net.sapples.L…
• Web page translations: Firefox, for the past few releases, has the ability to translate web pages completely local in-browser. It does need to download a small model file (a quantized one around 20 megabytes per language pair), but this happens automatically on first use. All you need to do is click the translate icon (when it's auto-detected) or go to the menu and select "Translate page...". Firefox is located in your distribution already (and is usually installed by default in most Linux distributions) and is available as an official package from Mozilla on Flathub as well. Newer versions keep improving on this, improving speed (it's pretty quick already), improving accuracy, improving reliability (sometimes you have to try to translate a couple of times on some pages), and adding languages. But what's there in the release of Firefox is already great.

Chat and image generation (more advanced)

While all the above are graphical apps and on Flathub (some may have distro packages too), there are some additional AI/ML things you can run on Linux as well:

• Chat ML: "Ollama" (ollama.ai/) is a friendlier wrapper around llama.cpp and lets you run a variety of models (some FOSS, some just source-available-and-gratis, some not at all).

You can run Ollama in a container to make it even easier. Even a Podman container on your user account works. (You don't need to set it up as a system container.) The instructions for Docker work on Podman (just swap the docker command for podman instead).

While the official instructions only list CPU (which is fine for some of the smaller models) and NVidia, it's also possible to use an AMD GPU too:

# Enable device as user (run once per boot)
sudo setsebool container_use_devices=true

# Set up the ollama server for AMD acceleration (run once per session)
podman run --pull=always --replace --detach --device /dev/kfd --device /dev/dri --group-add video -v ollama:/root/.ollama -p 11434:11434 --name ollama ollama/ollama:0.1.22-rocm

# Command-line interaction (run any time you want to use it — the last part is which model you want to use)
podman exec -it ollama ollama run llama2

If you want a web UI like ChatGPT, then you could also run this instead of the command line interaction command:

podman run -d --replace -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v ollama-webui:/app/backend/data --name ollama-webui ghcr.io/ollama-webui/ollama-webui:main

When done, run podman stop ollama and podman stop ollama-webui to free up resources from your GPU.

There are also integrations for text editors and IDEs, similar to GitHub's CoPilot. Neovim has a few already. VS Code (or VS Codium) has some too (like twinny and privy).

• Image generation: "Stable Diffusion" is the go-to here. There are a bunch of forks. Some of the better ones are:
  
  • "Fooocus" github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus/ — an easy to use streamlined app (with some advanced settings) where you don't need to prompt as much or tweak settings to get a good result by default.
  • "SD.next" github.com/vladmandic/automati… — A fork of the Automatic111 fork of the default Stable Diffusion web app that uses the Gradio UI.
  • "ComfyUI" github.com/comfyanonymous/Comf… — A node-based UI for Stable Diffusion.
    ...and there are a ton others. Forks of forks of forks.

  
  

Krita, GIMP, and Blender all have plugins that can interface with some of these too (usually using a SD Automatic111 API).

For Stable Diffusion on AMD, you need to have ROCm installed and might need to set or use an environment variable to make it work with your card. Something like:
HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=11.0.0 or HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 (depending on your GPU). Prefixing means just putting that at the beginning of the the command with a space and then the rest of the command. Setting it as a variable depends on your shell. You might need to export it for some (like for bash). Prefixing it is fine though, especially when you use ctrl+r to do a substrang search in your shell history (so you don't need to retype it or remember silly-long commands).

As using these image generating apps pulls down a lot of Python libraries, I'd suggest considering setting up a separate user account instead of using your own, so the app doesn't have access to your local files (like stuff in ~/.ssh/, ~/.local/, your documents, etc.). Setting up containers for these is not so easy (yet), sadly. Some people have done it. And they do run in a toolbox or distrobox podman container... but toolbox and distrobox containers don't really contain so much, so you're better off using podman (with a "docker" container) directly or running it as a separate account for some type of isolation from your user account files.

Everything else above is at least contained (via containers or Flatpak) to some degree... but stuff locally via pip installs can do anything. And it's not just hypothetical either, for example: PyTorch nightly was compromised for a few days on Christmas of 2022.

There are some graphical apps on Flathub for connecting to Stable Diffusion and a ChatGPT AI (which ollama now has)... but in the course of setting them up, you basically have a web and/or text-based UI to interact with.

Install Frog on Linux | Flathub

Extract text from images

^Flathub

Firstly, i want to start off my comment to state a few things. I am arab living in the middle east myself, so i am very biased.

Look, i get where you're coming from; i do. But this there's a reason why we have such heavy disagreements. I'm going to comment on a few things, but know i'm not trying to come off as rude or accusative; just trying to discuss.

(I'm going to assume by your use of "democrat" you mean people who desire democracy, and not a US democrat)

And still we can’t stop fighting against each other? No one here supports the rise of what hates this great community. We should stand together and share the spirit described. We certainly do to some extent, but every time we don’t and instead of discussing start fighting against each other, the fascists will jump for joy, since we support their rise

Well, genocide is naturally going to have a lot of fierce debate around it. We can fight zionism and fascism at the same time, we don't have to stop the world for each and every single issue and solve them one by one; we can try to solve multiple.

It’s the ongoing war in Gaza

Genocide*

But let’s not do it in a way that makes fascists to triumph and us to peter out in an endless fight regarding this topic which we can’t really change. There are so many topics we could influence, one of the most obvious being to be a digital alternative to BigTech’s platforms.

I heavily disagree. Apathy is just exploited by the enemy. Even if our total impact is small, it is worth it.

Generally:

The most important Usenet-rule for us: Don’t feed the troll. If it’s obvious that your discussion partner doesn’t want to discuss constructively, don’t answer. The most obvious trolls are those with accounts younger than a week (sometimes just insulting). If such an account appears in a discussion: Ignore + report. It might be a good idea to check the account age before discussing with someone.

What seems obvious is to argue in good faith.

Do not insult anybody, it won’t help you nor anybody else. No lemmy user is a nazi/etc. At least I didn’t see one so far. If you want to insult a lemmy user e.g. as nazi, first calm down, maybe wait some time before responding. If you still want to insult this user, it definitely is the better choice to ignore that user. Calling someone a nazi or insulting in another way is nothing that will help us in any sense. If a user actually advocates nazi ideas, it is a troll. If you want to start insulting: Don’t do it. If it’s a troll: Don’t respond, don’t feed it, just report it and shut up.

Please (!) use sources. If you state something which isn’t your opinion or an obvious fact, don’t say “Uh, I heard it somewhere”, but name a reliable source.

If there’s already an ongoing discussion between two users, only join it if you have something important to say. It’s not very helpful if there are four people discussing with one person at the same time.

I wholeheartedly agree.

What we should definitely agree on is the meaning of “Zionism”. The simple definition I have in mind is: Zionism is to advocate for the foundation of a Jewish national state (as a result of the Jewish experiences during the holocaust and centuries of persecution) and thus the approval for Israel to exist (which is one of the two conditions we need for a 2 state solution). That’s the most common German definition, but it doesn’t really fit e.g. the US-American definition

That's debatable, since zionism is about advocating for an ethnostate. But your latter comment, it not fitting the "US-American" definition is false. It's the most widely used definition. Hell, it's literally the original definition. Zionism is about the Palestine region, not just anywhere.

Why am i bringing this up? Because there were already people there. No matter what, they don't just have a right to establish their own ethnostate, claiming the land where there were already people of different ethnicities/cultures living there for an incredibly long time.

This is afaik about zionism and i may be missing something. So, if i got something wrong here, then please correct me.

What is happening in Gaza to civilians is fucking awful, and not the smartest thing for Israel to do, and some aspects of Israeli military activity ~~may be~~ are war crimes, and it doesn’t have to be genocide for it to be tragic. [As far as I know, meanwhile several international organisations like UN have declared it a genocide, so that part is obsolete.]

"Not the smartest thing to do" is a bit of an understatement, it's a genocide after all 😁

Stop with the fucking history lessons about what the Israelites did, or what the Ottomans did, or what the British did, or whatever. IT IS FUCKING IMMATERIAL. There is a pile of dog shit in the living room. Instead of arguing about whose dog took the bigger shit in the living room, maybe focus on how we clean up the dog shit.

The first thing that should be done first and foremost, is stopping the violence and genocide. But to claim history has absolutely no stake/meaning in this is wrong.

We as Lemmy-users should act as described earlier, constructively discuss the topic. Middle East is one little topic we do not agree on in comparsion to all the great things we can agree on

I'm sure this is worded wrong, but one little topic? There are hundreds of thousands of human beings suffering and dying because of these conflicts, It is not a little topic. This isn't a small disagreement to have with someone.

That's it. Apologies if i sounded rude anywhere, it's 9pm and i'm tired 😁

I would consider creating a swapfile if you have an SSD. There should be countless tutorials for doing it on Ubuntu.

It might mean your windows or Ubuntu install gets sluggish, but even 32GB (less than 10% of a typical storage drive!) of spare swap space can let your active and memory-hogging processes breathe instead of invoking the SystemD-OOM killer.

For what it's worth, I think Ubuntu is also fairly aggressive with memory management. I remember complaints that it was a little too hasty to kill user processes under memory-limited scenarios. not sure if that was addressed

VMs will crash because of running out of RAM.

It sounds like that's exactly what's happening with your setup, however you probably don't need to buy more RAM to fix it.

Type free, or free -h, into a terminal to see how much RAM and swap space is being used.

Swap is a tool that allows you to use your storage drive as additional RAM when necessary. If nothing indicates swap usage when using free, then you need to enable swap space.

Ask AI "How do I enable swap on Linux" and it should give you good instructions.

Generally-speaking, USB mice/trackballs don’t need drivers.

Except to program the buttons

antimicrox

I will check this out

I use Debian Linux

Hopefully will work for me too

Windows games that have integration

not games, other than the profile layout, but system monitors in windows display on it.

g13d

Will check this out as well, the display stuff I could learn to live without, if it will let me program the buttons I will be happy.

if you want game-specific bindings

in windows you can also change profiles by pressing the little round button on the top left, but need the display to see what game is selected

Generally-speaking, USB mice/trackballs don’t need drivers.

Except to program the buttons

No, like...okay. How do I best put this?

"Driver" software is going to be software designed to talk directly to hardware.

In Linux, if you go looking for "driver software microsoft trackball", you probably won't generally find what you're looking for to bind things to mouse buttons.

In Windows, it's common for you to buy a device and for it to be bundled with some software written by the device vendor. That's because the device vendor is writing the software to sell their product. They're selling you a package of software and the device, and they're bundling the software specifically because they want the hardware to sell. While technically the "driver" part is only the bit that talks directly to the hardware, and often there's a lot of other software bundled, it's not uncommon to use "driver" more-colloquially to just refer to all the bundled software.

In Linux, while sometimes vendors do release proprietary software with their hardware, you're more-likely to be using software from some open-source projects. Those projects don't care about how some specific piece of hardware does in the market. They just want the functionality to be available everywhere. So unless a piece of hardware is truly unique or requires some way of specially interfacing with it, you're more-likely to be using a software package that works with many different pieces of hardware. They won't call it a "driver".

In general, for things like mice, the hardware-level stuff is all in the kernel already, because the USB standard already defines how those devices need to act to present their extra buttons; it's not necessary to add additional special software to talk to the hardware. Instead, you're just looking for a piece of software that can send a series of keypresses or whatever when you click a button, something like antimicrox.

Windows games that have integration

not games, other than the profile layout, but system monitors in windows display on it.

Fair enough. Just wanted to moderate expectations. I vaguely recall that Logitech had some other full-size "gamer keyboard" in the past that had a text display with some sort of game integration. I think I remember Teamspeak integration being on the list.

kagis

I don't think that this was it; what I'm remembering was an older keyboard, but:

amazon.com/Logitech-Programmab…

A color GamePanel LCD displays game stats, system information, VOIP communication data, video playback, image slideshows

I'm guessing that the VoIP there is talking about Teamspeak, and they mention "game stats".

And I don't think that there's an out-of-box way to have something like that running under Linux for your G15 and displaying specific-game-relevant information.

goodbye-microsoft.com/

p.s. oh, wait, the link doesn't work anymore. too bad

Installing dual boot over a default windows installation would be tricky, bordering on infeasible. Because you would need to shrink the windows partition live (which is not supported (and even if you could, requires free space and comes with meaningful risk of data loss)) and alter the UEFI boot entries, which is also very risky and engineered to be protected from unauthorised writes.

Plus windows on a dual boot-one disk system can constantly erase your Linux entries (thanks Microsoft), making it basically unusable every month without grub knowledge to restore the boot entry. So this setup won't work on many systems.

So you'll pretty much only ever be able to install to another disk. And the portion of non-savvy users with a spare, unused disk is going to be effectively nonexistent.

Why doesn't show f Droid older releases as well? I'm 100% sure f Droid have these versions stored somewhere..
Like versions that 1, 5 or even 8 years old.

They can just add a button "show all versions".

Linux in corporation fails in multiple ways, the most prevalent is that people need to collaborate with others that use proprietary software such as MS Office that isn't available for Linux and the alternatives such as LibreOffice aren't just good enough. It all comes down to ROI, the cost of Windows/Office for a company is cheaper than the cost of dealing with the inconsistencies in format conversions, people who don't know how to use the alternative X etc etc. This issue is so common that companies usually also avoid Apple due to the same reason, while on macOS you've a LOT more professional software it is still very painful to deal with the small inconsistencies and whatnot.

Linux desktop is great, I love it, but it gets it even worse than Apple, here some use cases that aren't easy to deal in Linux:

• People who need the real MS Office because once you have to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won’t cut it;
• Designers who use Adobe apps that won’t run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays. Who wants to deploy GPU passthroughs for others? Makes no sense;
• People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;
• Electrical engineers: Circuit Design Suite (Multisim and Ultiboard) are primarily designed for Windows. Alternatives such as KiCad and EasyEDA may work in some cases but they aren’t great if you’ve to collaborate with others who use Circuit Design Suite;
• Labs that require data acquisition from specialized hardware because companies making that hardware won’t make drivers and software for Linux;
• Architects: AutoCAD isn’t available (not even the limited web version works) and Libre/FreeCAD don’t cut it if you’ve to collaborate with AutoCAD users;
• Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as the ones that exist fail even at basic tasks like dragging and dropping a file.

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience. It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.

From a more market / macro perspective here are some extra reasons:

• Companies like blame someone when things go wrong, if they chose open-source there's isn't someone to sue then;
• Buying proprietary stuff means you're outsourcing the risks of such product;
• Corruption pushes for proprietary: they might be buying software that is made by someone that is close to the CTO, CEO or other decision marker in the company, an old friend, family or straight under the table corruption;
• Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often fall under the last point that besides that they have have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
• Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don't require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the "sharp angles" between multiple solutions that aren't related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
• Open-source requires a level of expertise that more than half of the developers and IT professionals simply don't have. This aspect reinforces the last point even more. Senior open-source experts are more expensive than simply buying proprietary solutions;
  
  • If we consider the price of a senior open-source expert + software costs (usually free) the cost of open-source is considerable lower than the cost of cheap developers + proprietary solutions, however consider we are talking about companies. Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they're easier to replace and you'll pay less taxes;

  
  

• Companies will prefer to hire services from other companies instead of employees thus making proprietary vendors more compelling. This happens because from an accounting / investors perspective employees are bad and subscriptions are cool (less taxes, no responsibilities etc);
• The companies who build proprietary solutions work really hard to get vendors to sell their software, they provide commissions, support and the promises that if anything goes wrong they'll be there. This increases the number of proprietary-only vendors which reinforces everything above. If you're starting to sell software or networking services there's little incentive for you to go pure "open-source". With less companies, less visibility, less professionals (and more expensive), less margins and less positive market image, less customers and lesser profits.

Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The "experts" who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don't even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren't aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn't aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn't even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.