in reply to Pro

For anyone else who asked:
WTF is deepin?

It's less fun than the first guess I came up with based on the name "deep in", and it's really just a Chinese Linux Distro with a bunch of re-packaged and/or proprietary applications. Which, one would expect, to be completely balls "deep in" your private information.

in reply to cm0002

About GNUnet

What is GNUnet?

GNUnet is an alternative network stack for building secure, decentralized and privacy-preserving distributed applications. Our goal is to replace the old insecure Internet protocol stack. Starting from an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic protocol components and applications towards the creation of a GNU internet.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

External monitor power management issues


It feels weird to just jump into a generic Linux community and ask a question. It's nice being so small - kinda like the internet used to be.

Anyway, I've been running Linux servers for decades but only recently switched my desktop. I first tried Debian 12 and I'm now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - I switched in the hope of getting newer drivers and maybe fixing this issue.

I have a HP laptop with onboard Intel graphics and an external monitor connected with USB-C. In general it works great - until it doesn't. From time to time the external monitor does not wake up after a suspend. Normally turning the monitor off and back on will cause some sort of driver reset and it comes back. Once or twice this has not helped and I've had to reboot.

I'm running Xorg as Wayland on Tumbleweed won't start on t his machine. Wayland may have worked with Debian, I don't recall. I don't think it's worth listing details of my versions as it's happened on two distros and through a couple of minor updates to Xorg on openSUSE. It happens with KDE or LXDE.

Any suggestions?

in reply to GreatBlueHeron

you're running way too old a distro for what you want. debian 12 has its merits as a server, you install it and leave it be and it just works.

what you want - fluidity with power management, dock/undock, etc - although achievable with tweaking this and that isn't being worked on, not on X, not on debian 12, so it's not like those things will eventually get there. so you need a semi-modern distro, like ubuntu or fedora or even trixie.

wayland isn't new, it's default on a lot of distros since 2021 or so, so you can be sure that your use case was previosly met and solved. costs you nothing to boot e.g. F42 off a USB and try it out (has to be 42 as earlier live sessions default to X11). if you have lots of RAM, add the rd.live.ram switch so it copies the image to RAM and everything is super-snappy for testing and it doesn't touch your SSD.

Where to go for help with https://eggplant.place?


Total user error on my part.... I've managed to delete all the categories on my eggplant home page. This is stopping me from seeing my watch lists. I still have the edit layout button but there are no options for categories to edit. Any help would be appreciated.

Selfhosting DJ sets? (Soundcloud-style)


Hi!

I have a subsonic instance running but I rarely listen to Albums. Stuff I really like are DJ performances like by the channel The Moment.

So I thought: why not download and self-host them before Google makes Youtube sign-in only, (like Elon and Facebook did).

That stuff is probably quite hard to organize. But the type of music simply breaks the common services, like Jellyfin, or Subsonic.

I know of funkwhale. But I'd like to keep the contents private. I just wanna listen to music at work (so being open to the web is a plus). I thought funkwhale is a bit too... "social" for me. I'm a (re)uploader, not creator.

You got any ideas? Maybe a youtube-cloner with audio-only support? (I know how to download videos already)

Edit: Of course, I'd download the sets legally, e.g. from their patreon discord, or whatever. ;)

Also: I know that restricting it to my VPN would be ideal for security and legality reasons. But that's a bit inconvenient. And I want to check my options.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Prunebutt

Doesn’t get any more secure than a battle-tested web server hosting simple MP3 files and a text file.

Convenience might be a thing, though. I’m in the Apple ecosystem so their Podcasts app shows that feed on all devices and tracks listening progress, etc.

If I didn’t have that, I’m still a lifetime customer with PocketCasts and PocketCasts Web. So, that’s that. But if you don’t have anything similar in place, a self-hosted streaming server might be the best way to go, yes.

xkcd #3106: Farads


xkcd #3106: Farads

Title text:

'This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.' 'So, like, a single banana slice?'


Transcript:

[Cueball holds a stick while talking with Megan and White Hat.]
Cueball: This stick is one meter long.
Megan: Cool.
White Hat: That's a nice stick.

[Cueball holds a smallish rock.]
Cueball: This rock weighs one pound.
Megan: I'd believe it.
White Hat: Looks like a normal rock.

[Cueball holds a small battery.]
Cueball: This battery is one volt.
Megan: Seems fine.
White Hat: Might need a recharge.

[Cueball holds a capacitor while Megan and White Hat panic.]
Cueball: This capacitor is one farad.
Megan: Aaaaa! Be careful!!
White Hat: Put it down!!


Source: xkcd.com/3106/

explainxkcd for #3106

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

The last time I checked, mods weren't supposed to be able to ban people from communities that those people never interacted in before. Did something change or is this a form of abuse/glitch/oversight?


I’ve been noticing this more and more in the modlogs, with it proven via the “creator” option in some instances’ modlogs that the people doing the bans were mods and not admins, and when I first joined Lemmy, one of the things that were held as a universal truth was that this absolutely could not happen.

Building A Multi-Platform Feed Reader App - is it Worthwhile?


The idea


I want to build an app, in which you can subscribe or follow profiles or feeds from multiple platforms, including various fediverse platforms (lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, etc), blogs, and others (no idea what else yet).

App will have optional smart filtering and sorting, and optional algorithm based on your reading habits.

The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from. It should feel like a lemmy app if you see a lemmy post, feel like Mastodon if it's Mastodon, etc. This is obviously a monumental effort, so I will have to make concessions (hence north star).

Motivation


I see the recession of multi-source or Multi-Platform feed readers (RSS) as quite unfortunate to user choice and freedom.

I think this app, will promote a few ideals of mine:
- being intentional about content we want on our feed
- breaking boundary between different platforms (which is the spirit of ActivityPub)
- promoting open platforms: encourage non-profitting creators to make their content accessible on these platforms, and readers to read from them.
- consuming internet content without data mining, addictive scrolling, and having the choice to smart filter or sort your feed.


What are your thoughts? Do you agree that this is worthwhile?

Besides blog posts (RSS), lemmy, Mastodon, and other big fsdiverse platforms, what would you want to see on this app?

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to matcha_addict

I think a lot of open social media accept the RSS format.

Like for example if you add a “.rss” to the end of a bluesky profile url you get the rss feed for it.

So this actually seems quite doable!

I would say its something you dont need top efficiency. Don’t do it in Rust. It’s fine to use python or something.

Mitigating the "7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins"


This article is a response to Tim Chambers' recent writeup, titled The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix). It's a pretty great read, and I'm writing this not as a rebuttal, but to analyze and expand on the points made.

This is a musing on 7 problems that have been pointed out, with some ideas on what progress has been made to fix them.

in reply to 反いじめ戦隊

Well, no, this was just responding to a critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems.

It sounds more like you're talking about one of my previous blog posts, where I was talking about a super-flexible frontend that's basically a pagebuilder. Make no mistake, I would love to see custom profile music and radios! And I agree that accessibility needs to be way better!


My Dream Fediverse Platform


This article is a follow-up to an older post of mine, Towards a Greater Federated Architecture, and also a response from the wonderfully-thought out piece by Ben Werdmuller, If I Started Fresh. The goal here is to take the lessons learned from a variety of systems to propose the Fediverse platform I have always wanted to build: Postmodern.

No code has been written as of yet, but I am learning to program, from the bottom up, backend to frontend. I have some background in game design, Web development, and API clients, but I'm working on the more elusive foundational stuff. This is the only way I can possibly develop the confidence needed to build this thing.


The Fediverse, Social Web, Peopleverse, whatever you want to call it, has evolved considerably since it originally started back in 2008. During my entire time on the network, I've longed to design a platform of my own. I've learned a lot of lessons from amazing projects along the way: Hubzilla, Bonfire, Emissary, and ActivityPods have all done some really interesting things beyond what Mastodon offers to the network. I also think there's some really valuable ideas in both Nostr and Bluesky that are worth closer examination.

Before I dive into my technical brain-droppings of the past decade, let's establish a few core concepts.

Guiding Principles

1. It needs to be fun


On the surface, this might sound superfluous. What does it mean for a platform to be fun? This boils down to a few key areas that Fediverse platforms struggle with:

  • Ease of use - Good UX design is hard to execute well. As time goes on, I'm convinced that people want to use something without having to think too hard about conventions or side effects. They shouldn't have to dig under countless menus to find where the decentralization is.
  • Discovery - For the time being, the act of finding new, cool things to interact with or peruse is pretty bad. There's some promising work happening with Fediverse Discovery Providers. Regardless, discovery needs to also extend beyond simply finding stuff, and include a laser focus on finding people. Onboarding still kind of sucks, and there's a number of issues with trying to find your friends and connect with them.
  • Resiliency - One of the shakiest aspects of the Fediverse involves just how fragile instances can be. If an instance permanently goes down, and you didn't already have some alias set up to migrate your followers, you're dead in the water. Having to rebuild your social graph from scratch is the opposite of fun.
  • Control - This can mean a lot of different things: control over your timeline, control over how your space on the web looks, control over your connections, control over your data. A big missed opportunity in the space is that we'll say things like "you own your own data", but it's not exactly true. Your data mostly exists as a series of tables in a database, which can be serialized into a JSON export that you mostly can't use with anything.

It might seem like this is a catch-all, where you can throw any old thing into the guiding principle. Maybe it is. What I know is this: if the experience is bad for users, if they're getting harassed and seeing drama every day, if they don't really have much control over the platform, if they can't find their friends or cool things that interest them, then your platform is the opposite of fun.

2. Users should have maximum agency


Building on top of Principle #1, individual users should have total agency of how their experience is shaped online. This can be categorized in four ways:

  1. Visual / Conventional - the user decides what interfaces, themes, apps, and clients they will leverage to access the network. Custom designs and behaviors empower users to make their online space truly their own.
  2. Data Sovereignty - the user has strict controls over their data: what apps and services can use it, the extent to which different pieces are exposed to the Web, and the ability to seamlessly port the sum of that data from one place to another.
  3. Filtering and Connectivity - users should always be given the opportunity to decide what they see on their feeds, and what other people can see from them. This could take the form of filtering out keywords, blocking users and domains, leveraging a third-party labeling service, or being able to connect to individual accounts that may otherwise be banned instance-wide for everyone else.

Of course, this isn't to say that admins and moderators don't have a suitable place in community-building and curation. It's just that solely relying on them tends to result in communities where users have minimal input on policy, and admins have absolute authority. To me, this is a major barrier towards world-wide adoption of the Social Web, which is a goal for some of us in this massive, sprawling movement.

3. The platform must move the Fediverse forward


There's some absolutely amazing developments happening in the space. Most notably, the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals project has helped many different platforms standardize on undocumented behavior. It's the closest thing we have right now for improving ActivityPub implementations, in lieu of a formal update to the protocol spec.

FEPs are the reason why groups mostly just work across a variety of systems now, and related efforts such as the Threadiverse Working Group allows NodeBB, Discourse, Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin to federate together with minimal issues. It's not perfect, but the project is bearing a lot of fruit.

The problem is that some of the biggest projects in the space, such as Mastodon, have historically been pretty indifferent to these efforts. Often, they choose to forgo established agreed-upon FEPs to do their own thing, forcing everyone else to bend over backwards and support their unique way of doing things. At the end of the day, FEPs still aren't advancements in the ActivityPub protocol itself.

We need more Fediverse platforms to champion these collaborative efforts, both to help influence further development of the protocol as well as putting pressure on larger projects to work with the community.

4.) The experience must be unique


This might come across as wildly conceited, but I don't want to build yet another clone of a service that already exists. I mean no disrespect towards the people doing that, but I think we've barely managed to scratch the surface of what can be built. There's a certain appeal in imitating existing familiar designs and paradigms, and iterating on them to be better.

What I want to do is develop new concepts that aren't quite like anything else. Sure, there may be a passing resemblance to half a dozen different things, but I want to develop something bold. I'm tired of describing the Fediverse as "the alternative" and want so badly to instead describe it as "the future", but we have to take much bigger risks to get there.

Implementation Details


Here are some of the pipe-dream ideas I've been refining over the years. There are probably a lot of aspects that still need key considerations, some of which is still above my ability to program! I'm currently going to school for Computer Science, and practicing to make my coding skills more capable of tackling these big ideas.

Composable Interfaces


This is probably the biggest idea behind Postmodern, the platform I hope to one day abuild. What are Composable Interfaces? To keep it simple: composable interfaces are a way to construct a custom frontend with whatever data is available.

Composable interfaces are not necessarily new; prior art exists in the following Fediverse projects:

  • Hubzilla - You can write pages, a custom theme, and widgets using an elaborate template system. You have to write it yourself by hand, there's not really a way to preview these changes, and some of the more high-level customization has to be done by making calls to pieces of code that aren't super well-documented.
  • Bonfire - Customization is largely accomplished through modules, which can be bundled together into a sort of unique software distribution. So, you can choose to add a group forum module, a wiki module, and a video module, and Bonfire will snap those pieces together for you. Super interesting, kind of complicated, still yet to be battle-tested for communities.
  • Emissary- Really wild template system built on HTMX and HyperScript. Emissary is really different from other projects because it allows developers to dictate data schemas and actions from within the view template. A lot of contemporary developers might balk at this, because it kind of violates the MVC design pattern. However, Emissary is crazy flexible, and makes it possible for a developer to add support for custom Activity types and actions with a single template.
  • Dokieli - a full-blown decentralized client-side editing tool. It implements ActivityPub, Linked Data, and a swath of other technologies related to Solid. It's extremely powerful, but the interface looks like it has a significant learning curve. It's hard even for me, a Fediverse nerd with 15 years of experience, to fully grok.

Looking at these concepts, I think Emissary and Dokieli come the closest to what I want to build. The ability to build a custom UI with unique capabilities just by dictating what the template is doing is awfully compelling.

My personal head-cannon differs in one specific way: take Dokieli, and marry its capabilities with that of Emissary. Focus on the page-building, widget-building, stream-building elements, and give people the power to delve into a vast pool of social data that they can edit client-side without having to touch any template code themselves.
Don't worry, this ugly thing is just a mockup. There's a lot to figure out.
Instead of taking inspiration from page-building tools like Gutenberg, Elementor, or Wix, my thoughts are to instead take inspiration from layer-based image editors. Each layer in the builder/inspector thing is a component, which can be altered, rearranged, and adjusted in a number of different ways. You can mix and match existing components, or compose your own from scratch by reaching into the pool of data that your account is aware of. It's not unlike the WordPress approach to Blocks in 2025...but, hopefully this approach can be more intuitive.
Again, this is just conceptual. A whole lot of things need refinement.
For this to be viable, a lot of work would need to be done to overcome any potential learning curve. The tools need to be accessible, with the page layout exactly matching what the user sees on the screen.The experience could really suck if it's not implemented carefully. After all, we have to follow the first guiding principle: it has to be fun. Fighting with an editing tool is not that.
I wanted to draw more widget ideas, but I need to finish writing this.
To accomplish this, the most straightforward approach would be to create a core set of widgets with data types and settings, bundled together for different experiences. I'm calling these bundles-of-things complications, which can be thought of as the snapping together of atomic units to make something greater. An experience that has a lot of complications put together would pretty much work as its own frontend made of stylized, curated pieces.

If this sounds way, way complicated: yeah, I know. For a social client frontend, this idea pushes a lot of boundaries. I have some ideas about how to get there (maybe use GraphQL for the builder?), but a lot of it is going to probably diverge from the standard Web application stack. I have a lot of homework to do.

Next-Gen Permissions System


I've written about this a bit before in my last article about moving the Fediverse forward, but we need to get our act together about permissions systems. Mastodon's offering is woefully lacking when it comes to granularity.
Sigh.
ActivityPub has these nifty things called Collections, which is really just a representation of a collection of objects. You can pretty much put any object in there, so in a roundabout way, you can create a scoped list of people you're connected with. Theoretically, you could use collections of people as privacy scopes, dictating who can see certain things, or certain versions of things.



Projects such as Bonfire have taken the logical next step, where it's possible to establish boundaries and barriers for different collections of people, under a variety of conditions. This can apply to everything from individual posts to group communities to whatever else you can come up with.

I think it's absolutely important that we build a system that not only accounts for message delivery and access, but capabilities as well. You the user should be the one that dictates whether people can see a post, boost it, reply to it, whatever. In a decentralized system, this is kind of hard to figure out, but not impossible.

I still hold the belief that Object Capabilities might be our best bet, and Christine Lemmer-Webber published a paper a few months ago detailing what oCap-enabled ActivityPub would look like.m

Data as Documents


Some people will disagree with me here, but I think a document database architecture might be the way to go for this whole thing. A traditional relational database might be too limiting for this kind of insane flexibility, especially when you consider how different platforms try to account for the complex data structures necessary for ActivityPub.

Pleroma, for example, historically used the jsonb data type in PostgreSQL to hold reams and reams of nested JSON data. At a small scale, it's not so bad, but ActivityPub data can grow exponentially when you're interacting with lots of people and content.

For some time now, I've been thinking a lot about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Project. When first approaching Solid, it seems super abstract and complicated. You get all these people talking about RDF, TripleStores, Quads, WebID, and a lot of other stuff. As someone that has a pretty firm grasp on Fediverse systems, Solid initially caused a vein to bulge in my temple. I went on to explain the semantics here.
A file manager, representing files in a Solid Pod
TL;DR: Solid is kind of a specification for data, data storage, and access. It allows users to store their data in pods, and that data is represented as different kinds of documents and metadata. There is no relational database. Instead, the data in your Solid pod is used as a database itself. If you wanted to migrate all of the posts you've ever made, Solid makes it super easy to pick all that stuff up and move it somewhere else.
An ActivityPods instance. All of these applications access the same pool of data.
ActivityPods manages to marry the two concepts, and does the heavy lifting to translate these documents and data into something ActivityPub implementations can understand, and vice versa. The real magic here is that ActivityPods makes the act of building ActivityPub apps relatively seamless and straightforward. Developers don't have to think about both ActivityPub and Solid. They just need to write an ActivityPub app.
Mastopod, an ActivityPub social app that uses Solid.
I still have some outstanding questions about whether ActivityPods can effectively scale up. The Solid community in general is pretty small, and ActivityPods is an even smaller subset of either Solid or ActivityPub communities. A large-scale community instance with over 100,000 users (who all individually have their own pods) doesn't feel that feasible to me.

Still, I respect everything these guys are doing, and I think about building on top of ActivityPods pretty often.

Relay-Based Supportive Infra


Fediverse instances suffer somewhat from a fragile network. In fact, I would go as far as stating that tethering user accounts to Fediverse instances is an antipattern. We've mistakenly followed this trend for a long time, and put the sum of a user's entire social graph into one server. If that server goes down for good, you're toast.
A Nostr client's network settings, showing many different relays.
Nostr doesn't have this problem, because it doesn't have instances. Instead, user accounts are free-floating, peer-to-peer identities that dispatch posts to individual relays. Instead of individual instances where everybody logs on to post, everything is done through clients. Your identity is basically a public key, tied to a profile and some posts.

What I'm advocating for isn't necessarily the prioritization of one method over the other, but a hybrid approach that includes the best of both. What if Fediverse identities could be free-floating, separate things from instances, that persist even when an instance goes down?

Suppose that the Move activity in ActivityPub was just a method for detaching the identity from one instance, and attaching to another? Or, taking the approach that Hubzilla takes, suppose that you could mirror your identity to multiple instances by attaching your identity to multiple servers? You post in one place, it shows up somewhere else, too.

Another way that relays could be useful is in attacking the notorious Discovery Problem so prevalent in the Fediverse. As Nostr has continued to evolve, different relays have emerged that specialize in specific things:

  • Caching
  • Hosting Media
  • Search
  • Premium Long-Term Storage

Theoretically, it could also be possible for relays to take on the role of Fediverse Discovery Providers. These things could not only act as an index of content and people, but conduits that pull in news, book reviews, events, and maybe even a contact directory. Maybe your instance could just subscribe to relays, rather than trying to broker message dispatching and pulling in new content itself.

A Single-Identity Ecosystem


Finally, we get to what I consider to be the Achilles heel of today's Fediverse. As highlighted in previous sections, I think we do a terrible job of handling identity. In fact, we don't really do any job at all.
Sigh
Part of the problem here is that every Fediverse server in the network is a full-blown platform, rather than a client. The decision of the Mastodon project was to forgo the Client-To-Server part of the ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a bespoke API of its own. Mastodon's API grew so popular that many other Fediverse platforms adopted it, just to have access to a vast amount of compatible apps.

The primary side effect of every Fediverse server being a platform instead of a client is that every platform needs its own account to be used. This quickly leads to a nightmare scenario where it's possible to have 15 different accounts floating around that don't actually connect to each other in any meaningful way.
Reimagining various platforms as client frontends instead, using the same profile.
Granted, the Client-To-Server API has its fair share of complaints. It's under-documented, clients are expected to handle all logic on the client side, and seemingly nobody uses it anyway. However...it still exists, can be improved upon, and could be used in conjunction with ActivityPods.

I'm greatly interested in the prospect of building ActivityPods apps that work with Postmodern, where you're really just viewing different crafted experiences in specific clients.

In Conclusion


Congratulations on getting to the end of my big, weird rant about how I'd do things. Some of these ideas remain unproven, and may not actually be the solutions I end up going with. Still, much of this exists as the byproduct of lessons learned from observing different Fediverse platforms evolve over time. I hope to start by building small prototypes to test out various ideas.

Some of this (all of it?) might be super convoluted and complicated. The biggest thing I want to focus on, however, is the experience of building composable interfaces. I think this idea really has legs, and could potentially be a radically different approach to building for the Social Web.

If you have any insights, ideas, suggestions, or critiques, please feel free to reach out! This article was, believe it or not, something of a shortlist. There's a lot of things I didn't discuss (Bluesky-styled labelers, custom feeds, etc) that still belong in this vision somewhere. For now, these are simply the topics most resonant to me, that I wanted to pay special attention to.


in reply to Sean Tilley

critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems


Which are solvable by creating a customized SNS frontend.

Lemmy is a community first centric ActivityPub network, thus most frontend tailor UX for community engagement, and not SNS.

Similarly Peertube is for videos, thus the UX will tailor for videos centric experiences.

What you detailed was a SNS tailored UX, not a community or video one.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to FundMECFS

Technically Schyzerdütsch is High German (you could even say it's the Highest German, considering elevation), while what most Germans call 'Hochdeutsch' is actually standard german (which, to be fair, is mostly derived from High and Middle German dialects, as opposed to Low German (and Middle German is much more similar to High German than to Low German)).
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

XPipe - A connection hub for all your servers: Status update for the v16 release


Developer @crschnick@sh.itjust.works

Today I can share a major development status update of XPipe, a connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It can make your life easier when working with any kind of servers by eliminating all the commonly tedious tasks that come up when interacting with remote systems, either from the terminal or from a graphical interface. XPipe comes with integrations for SSH, docker and other containers, various hypervisors, and more without requiring setup on your remote systems. You can also keep using your favourite text/code editors, terminals, password managers, shells, command-line tools, and more with it.

Hub

Docker compose


This release introduces support for docker compose. Containers in compose projects are grouped together and can be managed all at the same time via compose project entries.

The container state information shown is also improved, always showing the container state in combination with the system information.

Compose

Batch mode


There is now a batch mode available that allows you to select multiple systems via checkboxes and perform actions for the entire batch. This can include starting/stopping, automatically adding available subconnections, or running scripts on all selected systems.

You can toggle the batch mode in the top left corner.

Batch

Password managers


The password manager integrations have been upgraded:
- There is now support for KeePassXC
- All password manager integrations have been reworked to work out of the box without configuration
- There is now support to use password manager SSH agents more easily
- You can now unlock the xpipe vault with your password manager

Password Manager

Terminals


The terminal integration comes with many new features:
- There is now built-in support for the terminal multiplexers tmux, zellij, and screen. This is especially useful for terminals without tabbing support.
- There is also now built-in support for custom prompts with starship, oh-my-posh, and oh-my-zsh.
- On Windows, you now have the ability to use a WSL distribution as the terminal environment, allowing you to use the new terminal multiplexer integration seamlessly on Windows systems as well.

SSH


Various improvements were made to the SSH implementation:
- The SSH gateway implementation has been reworked so that you can now use local SSH keys and other identities for connections with gateways
- The VSCode SSH remote integration has been reworked to allow more connections it to be opened in vscode. It now supports essentially all simple SSH connections, custom SSH connections, SSH config connections, and VM SSH connections. This support includes gateways
- There is now built-in support to refresh an SSO openpubkey with the opkssh tool when needed
- There is now the option to enable verbose ssh output to diagnose connection issues better
- For VMs, you can now choose to not use the hypervisor host as SSH gateway and instead directly connect to the VM IP

Other


  • Connection names, e.g. VM names, will now automatically update on refresh when they were changed
  • You can now launch custom scripts within XPipe with a command output dialog window without having to open a terminal
  • Various installation types like the linux apt/rpm repository and homebrew installations now support automatic updates as well
  • The k8s integration will now automatically add all namespaces for the current context when searching for connections
  • The application window will now hide any unnecessary sidebars when being resized to a small width. This makes it much easier to use XPipe in a tiling window arrangement
  • The webtop has been updated to have terminal multiplexers, proper konsole tab support, disabled kwallet, and more
  • Various error messages and connection creation dialogs now contain a help link to the documentation sections


A note on the open-source model


Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place with limitations on what kind of systems you can connect to in the community edition as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

Outlook


If this project sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub, visit the Website, or check out the Docs for more information.

Enjoy!

[Solved] "[OK] Reached target Graphical Interface" after login before getting booted back to the login screen


Hey all, semi-novice Linux user here.

I'm running EndeavourOS with KDE on a Lenovo with an Intel CPU and integrated GPU.

I was attempting to update my system today but kept getting the error referenced in this newsletter that I found after looking for the error online. I ran each command in the newsletter exactly as written and then rebooted my system.

After rebooting, I'm able to successfully get to the login screen and input my username/password but, instead of my desktop, logging in takes me to a command interface for about a second before reverting to the same login screen. The line in the title is the last entry shown in that command interface.

I've looked online for solutions but it doesn't seem like anyone with my same error is getting stuck on the login screen (most people seem to be stuck on Grub and are able to use e, ctrl+alt-F2, etc) and I'm just sorta lost on what to do at this point.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: Thank you to MyNameIsRichard for your help. It turns out that I needed to install plasma-x11-session as I am still an x11 user and a recent update made it necessary to install this package manually.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

I saw a guy carrying a stack of board games in my neighborhood today


He must have been going to a party, he had catan, he had uno, and he had Scrabble way up at the top. His stack wasn't balanced very well though, and Scrabble fell, the box burst open, spilling tiles everywhere.

So I went up to him and asked, "what's the word on the street?"

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

I wish there was a right click install button for deb files


I know it's not that hard $ dpkg -i but opening the terminal gives normies an aneurysm and thanks to the crazy gatekeeping gen alpha doesn't know what a file type is now.

I use Ubuntu btw. Personally, the App store's on Linux confused me a ton, setting up Flatpak and some other package repositories. I much preferred the windows way, shocker, with just downloading and double-click the exe file.

Do I have to make a pull request myself to get this done, or what is the debate on this?

XPipe - A connection hub for all your servers: Status update for the v16 release


Today I can share a major development status update of XPipe, a connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It can make your life easier when working with any kind of servers by eliminating all the commonly tedious tasks that come up when interacting with remote systems, either from the terminal or from a graphical interface. XPipe comes with integrations for SSH, docker and other containers, various hypervisors, and more without requiring setup on your remote systems. You can also keep using your favourite text/code editors, terminals, password managers, shells, command-line tools, and more with it.

Hub

Docker compose


This release introduces support for docker compose. Containers in compose projects are grouped together and can be managed all at the same time via compose project entries.

The container state information shown is also improved, always showing the container state in combination with the system information.

Compose

Batch mode


There is now a batch mode available that allows you to select multiple systems via checkboxes and perform actions for the entire batch. This can include starting/stopping, automatically adding available subconnections, or running scripts on all selected systems.

You can toggle the batch mode in the top left corner.

Batch

Password managers


The password manager integrations have been upgraded:
- There is now support for KeePassXC
- All password manager integrations have been reworked to work out of the box without configuration
- There is now support to use password manager SSH agents more easily
- You can now unlock the xpipe vault with your password manager

Password Manager

SSH


Various improvements were made to the SSH implementation:
- The SSH gateway implementation has been reworked so that you can now use local SSH keys and other identities for connections with gateways
- The VSCode SSH remote integration has been reworked to allow more connections it to be opened in vscode. It now supports essentially all simple SSH connections, custom SSH connections, SSH config connections, and VM SSH connections. This support includes gateways
- There is now built-in support to refresh an SSO openpubkey with the opkssh tool when needed
- There is now the option to enable verbose ssh output to diagnose connection issues better
- For VMs, you can now choose to not use the hypervisor host as SSH gateway and instead directly connect to the VM IP

Other


  • Connection names, e.g. VM names, will now automatically update on refresh when they were changed
  • You can now launch custom scripts within XPipe with a command output dialog window without having to open a terminal
  • Various installation types like the linux apt/rpm repository and homebrew installations now support automatic updates as well
  • The k8s integration will now automatically add all namespaces for the current context when searching for connections
  • The application window will now hide any unnecessary sidebars when being resized to a small width. This makes it much easier to use XPipe in a tiling window arrangement
  • The webtop has been updated to have terminal multiplexers, proper konsole tab support, disabled kwallet, and more
  • Various error messages and connection creation dialogs now contain a help link to the documentation sections


A note on the open-source model


Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place with limitations on what kind of systems you can connect to in the community edition as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

Outlook


If this project sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub, visit the Website, or check out the Docs for more information.

Enjoy!

in reply to crschnick

Are there any plans to make a Flatpak version of this? I've moved to an immutable OS and none of the options you have will install. Flatpaks are their preferred method. I know I could self host my own version which may be what I may end up doing anyway, but I'd prefer to have it more local yet another docker container. 😀

Edit: I just went with the Appimage which works.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Tiny cocktails


I am all in favor of this. There are beer flights at so many restaurants but tiny strong & delicious cocktails with small foods would be such a great starter to a meal. Something bitter but not enough to get drunk and not be able to enjoy the food.

When I am working up a recipe, often I will invite people over and make 4 different versions but then split each drink into 4 little dixie cups so that each of us have only one drink's worth of alcohol. That doesn't fix the drink getting too warm problem but does let us test them clear headed.

in reply to RBWells

Using downsized recipes is pretty standard for me when I'm drinking at home. For a lot of cocktails, half-size or third-size is just fine, especially when you start experimenting with ingredients and ratios. And I have something of an issue with actually committing to a full-size drink (i.e. I often get bored of it halfway through).

However, one of the biggest barriers to entry is the need for smaller glassware, which, while not impossible to source, is limited in its variety. “Where I see a lot of room for improvement is tiny rocks and tiny Highball glasses,” Zielinski says, noting that miniature coupes or diminutive Martini glasses are more readily available.


This is definitely an issue. I've been using stemmed liqueur glasses for small Martini-style cocktails, but even in somewhat smaller rocks glasses a half-sized Old Fashioned-style drink just looks lost.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Mod managers for Linux?


Original question by @communism@lemmy.ml

I've finally started having some free time lately and have been working through my Steam library, most of which is Windows games I'm playing with Proton.

I wanted to install some mods, and wanted a mod manager for this. Nexus Mods has Vortex, which is not available for Linux. In any case, running Windows games on Linux through Proton on Steam is fairly specific; the game files will be at certain locations on a Linux filesystem, not at the same locations as they would be on a Windows filesystem. So I think I would need software that has specifically been designed for this use-case (Windows games from Steam running on Proton).

Are there any such mod managers out there? What do other people do when playing games on Linux? I can't be the only person who wants to play video games with mods.

in reply to cm0002

steamtinkerlaunch has a mo2 and a vortex installer. I suggest the mo2. Playing skyrim with 400 mods and ENB as well as FO4 with 500 mods with ENB NAC. Both running extremely well on my nv3080. Well still have the FO4 NG stutter but overall playable.

Might have a hard time modding Starfield though. Last I checked STL installs an outdated mo2 version.

I have started modding cp2077 but haven't given it much time.

There is also rockerbacon's version. I think you can use lutris to install it. I think this is the newest version of MO2 so should work with Starfield. I recently tried it but the installer was complaining about a gtk-theme I have installed. I use KDE and whatever gtk theme I have is not compatible. Was in the middle of rewriting it in kdialog but i hit a snag and forgot about it. My bash is rubbish!

The biggest differences are STL is a whole program designed around proton/wine and offers a ton of tweaks that are as easy as clicking a button or dropdown for the most part. STL offers a single instance MO2 install using symbolic linking to all your game prefixes. While rockerbacon's is meant to be installed for each game. Both have their benefits and drawbacks.

Both devs are pretty fucking cool!

STL's interface is a bit odd at times but is well documented. Dont ever scroll over the right side of the Game Menu GUI as you can change settings you don't mean to. That said it works pretty damn well.

Mod managers for Linux?


I've finally started having some free time lately and have been working through my Steam library, most of which is Windows games I'm playing with Proton.

I wanted to install some mods, and wanted a mod manager for this. Nexus Mods has Vortex, which is not available for Linux. In any case, running Windows games on Linux through Proton on Steam is fairly specific; the game files will be at certain locations on a Linux filesystem, not at the same locations as they would be on a Windows filesystem. So I think I would need software that has specifically been designed for this use-case (Windows games from Steam running on Proton).

Are there any such mod managers out there? What do other people do when playing games on Linux? I can't be the only person who wants to play video games with mods.

in reply to communism

github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinke… for when you need MO2 or Nexus (that isn't Stardew). Keep in mind this will install a new instance of the app for each game you use it with (in its proton prefix folder).

github.com/Nexus-Mods/NexusMod… is the current version of the new Nexus Mod Manager App, which has linux support. Currently it only has game support for Stardew Valley.

As many others have said, go with PrismLauncher for Minecraft. Modrinth's launcher works fine too, but doesn't have curseforge support.

Nautilus Git Extension – basic git operations right from the right-click menu


simple Nautilus extension that adds git actions (Clone, Commit, Pull, Status...) to the right-click menu.

  • clone
  • status
  • switch branch
  • pull
  • stage all and commit
  • push
  • set credentials

Built with python3-nautilus, requires GTK 4.

Video example

Author Post

I did not make this. Just sharing

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Paramilitary


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramili…


A paramilitary is a military that is not a part of a country's official or legitimate armed forces.[1] The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of the term "paramilitary" as far back as 1934.[2]

photo: Legion of Frontiersmen, Edmonton Command, 1915 – a nationalist paramilitary group not officially affiliated with the Canadian Army

Cryptsetup 2.8 Released With Support For Inline Hardware Metadata Space - Phoronix


Linux Commands You Didn’t Know Were This Funny | by Abhinav Pathak | The Pythoneers | May, 2025 | Medium


in reply to Zippythezigzag

Even if this were to happen, you could easily rebase to Aurora (KDE version of Bluefin) or Fedora Kinoite. You wouldn’t be totally screwed.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to unskilled5117

Isn't Aurora still Fedora? Then it probably wouldn't solve the issue with gaming on Fedora being made so difficult to set up, that it forced one of the more popular distros to shut down.

Bazzite is a gaming focused distro, so I wager that that would be a major problem for a lot of people.

The only choice for a lot of gamers (including me) will simply be to not use Fedora, and find a new distro to switch to, which is a shame. (Although, it will probably just be SteamOS at that point). I'm also worried about my Lenovo Legion Go. It's unusable with Windows, and Bazzite being atomic is a really really good fit for it, and they have builds specially tailored for Legion.

But we still have two years to go, so we'll see. I don't think Fedora has the power and market share to force others to follow with depreciation of 32b, and unless other distros join in, it will just be a PR disaster and people will just begrudgingly move to other distros.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Fedora X11Libre change proposal withdrawn after 'overwhelmingly negative feedback'


Considering the overwhelmingly negative feedback, I am hereby withdrawing
this Change proposal
.

The reasoning is twofold:
1. I have always argued that Changes that are overwhelmingly rejected by the
community should not be approved by FESCo. So it would be very hypocritical
if I attempted to push this through over the almost entirely negative
feedback. I stand by my positions and also apply them to myself.
2. At this point, I believe that this has no chance of being approved by
FESCo for Fedora 43, so I do not want to waste everyone's time by continuing
this discussion that is not leading anywhere.

Fedora's FESCo To Decide Whether To Replace Upstream X.Org Server With XLibre Fork


in reply to Dataprolet

The guy gives a ton of "I don't care about anyone's use cases except mines" vibes too. Also called Gnome and KDE teletubbies DEs when I mentioned xcomposite being an important feature. Basically considering the widely known issues around multimonitor vsync and mismatched resolutions and all as basically not real issues with Xorg.

XLibre is 100% a political fork because the guy claims Xorg is deprecated by a big tech conspiracy pushing inferior software onto users. There's nothing wrong with wanting to continue Xorg's legacy but come on we don't have to pretend Xorg is this perfect thing that always works. Xorg has been hated for decades for a reason. This xkcd exists for a reason: xkcd.com/963/

in reply to Max-P

This. It's also hilarious and sad that the community around XLibre is trying to "keep politics out of FOSS" while supporting a clearly political fork.

EDIT: Also see my issue as a prime example.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Fedora's FESCo To Decide Whether To Replace Upstream X.Org Server With XLibre Fork


How to get AUDIO forwarding to work... if it's possible?


Original question by @WereCat@lemmy.world

Hi, so I will try to hopefully explain as best as I can.

These are my devices:

  • Windows PC -> Cable Headphone1 output
  • Linux Laptop -> BT Headphone2 output
  • Android Phone -> Phone speaker output

What I want to achieve:

Have audio from all devices output from Headphone1 on my PC without having to use physical or software mixer.

What I managed to get working but sux due to audio stutter or delay:

Have audio from all devices output from Headphone2

How?

  • Phone paired via BT to Windows PC, using app on Windows PC called Bluetooth Audio Receiver gives me the ability to listen to my phone audio via Headphone1 (does not work for Laptop)
  • Linux Laptop paired to my Windows PC as an audio device allows me to set the Laptop as a output audio device for the PC so I can listen to PC and thus to the Phone via Headphone2

BUT, this causes phone audio to stutter via Headphone2 and audio from PC has at least 500ms delay.

Wish there was a way to forward audio from Linux Laptop to Windows PC the same way as from Android Phone to PC.

Any clues?

in reply to cm0002

Have you or the original poster seen Audio Share?

"Audio Share can share Windows/Linux computer's audio to Android phone over network, so your phone becomes the speaker of computer."


However, I don't think using BT and software could ever fix the latency issue. Each of those layers just adds delay. It might be necessary to use wires for most of it if latency is a priority.

How to get AUDIO forwarding to work... if it's possible?


Hi, so I will try to hopefully explain as best as I can.

These are my devices:

  • Windows PC -> Cable Headphone1 output
  • Linux Laptop -> BT Headphone2 output
  • Android Phone -> Phone speaker output

What I want to achieve:

Have audio from all devices output from Headphone1 on my PC without having to use physical or software mixer.

What I managed to get working but sux due to audio stutter or delay:

Have audio from all devices output from Headphone2

How?

  • Phone paired via BT to Windows PC, using app on Windows PC called Bluetooth Audio Receiver gives me the ability to listen to my phone audio via Headphone1 (does not work for Laptop)
  • Linux Laptop paired to my Windows PC as an audio device allows me to set the Laptop as a output audio device for the PC so I can listen to PC and thus to the Phone via Headphone2

BUT, this causes phone audio to stutter via Headphone2 and audio from PC has at least 500ms delay.

Wish there was a way to forward audio from Linux Laptop to Windows PC the same way as from Android Phone to PC.

Any clues?

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Square Enix acknowledges Expedition 33 success as inspiration for next Final Fantasy as turn-based is still beloved by gamers


in reply to 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Yeah I understand that. And as I noted with the exception of firmware which almost universally requires running very out of date hardware I do the same. I'd like to get there with my phone but I haven't managed it yet. I have written off firmware being FOSS because as mentioned. You almost always need very old hardware for that outside of embedded devices. And if you go down the firmware rabbit hole you probably have to draw the line somewhere. Platform firmware is the one everyone focuses on but what about GPU or NIC firmware? What about microcode or firmware embedded in the IME or PSP? Yes you can sometimes neuter the IME but that doesn't apply to all CPUs. It's just an unwinnable rabbit hole without going to a fully open computing platform.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Scoopta

Yes - agreed on a points.

I think what the blogger of trying is to use OSS wherever it's possible. There are clearly parts which are not, but there are OSS BIOS alternatives to proprietary ones, OSS firmwares for some devices, OSS phones, OSS routers, and so on. By "maximizing" they just meant doing everything that was possible. Using an OSS-only operating system and software is the bare minimum and - as you said - is something many of us do: that's the easy part. Going the next step and replacing your phone, tablet, BIOS, and everywhere it's possible to use OSS is the "maximizing" part.

Mozilla: AI is Going Deeper in Firefox, But Trust me Bro we Are Not Going to Data Mine You or Sell Your Data.


Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts


in reply to Pro

Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) not have an audio jack?

After some of the criticism that we received about removing the headphone jack from Fairphone 4, we did consider bringing it back for The Fairphone (Gen. 6). However, we realized it would be at the expense of increasing the phone’s dimensions. We also looked into the consumer data and Fairphone 4’s weight and thickness were more of an issue than the lack of a minijack, so we decided to keep the same approach, although it was a difficult decision. We didn’t want to invest in OLED technology for the display and then not have improved the phone’s dimensions and weight. But just like with Fairphone 4 and Fairphone 5, we will still offer an adapter, which has had overall positive user reviews.


"We heard the criticism but decided that no, you would still need an adapter to use headphones, plus a USB-C hub to be able to charge the damn thing while listening to music or watching videos"

Funny how that's the same excuses that we get for modern laptops terrible design. "We HAVE to make it thinner so there's no space! You wouldn't want a laptop that's not complete shit if it meant it'd be less thin and breakable, would you?"

in reply to Dogyote

  • They are expensive. You can get wired earphones for 2 euros that actually work and are reasonably durable. It's not a great loss if they fall in a puddle or if I step on them.
  • They are a lot more failure prone. Half of those I tried didn't work or only half worked, and those that did work didn't last very long.
  • They have shitty range. I can use a 10 meters extension cord with wired earphones if I want to.
  • They require charging. And it's a law of physics that everything that requires charging always run out at the most inconvenient time.
  • Also THEY ALWAYS GET LOST. Wireless earphones, mouse, controllers... it doesn't matter, if it's not attached with a cable they'll just disappear.
in reply to Havald

I don't really care about sound quality when using earphones at home because I only use them when there's a lot of ambient noise so the sound will be bad either way. When doing vacuum cleaning, or the dishes, stuff like that. When I still had a smartphone I used a 1,5m extension cord so it wouldn't pull on the jack each time I move, but since it died I'm using a much longer one plugged to my PC (not actually 10m, that was hyperbole, more like 5m). It's not very convenient I'll admit, but it does the job.
in reply to phantomwise

Let me expand, as I usually deal with surveys and population feedback. There's loud feedback, and there's statistically significant feedback.

People who want a headphone jack are very loud. They will interject this issue into every feedback opportunity given. They will mention it on the comment sections, forums, q&a sessions, answer their surveys accordingly, etc. That's all fine and their prerogative.

However, when you look at the statistics. They are unfortunately a very tiny minority of the entire population. They are not statistically significant for decision making. They don't have the volume to move sales significantly. This sucks, of course, and I personally wouldn't mind the return of headphone jacks, smaller phones and bigger batteries as a fair trade for thicker phones.

But unfortunately, the vast majority of the market is pre-occupied with other things. The phone screen is too small, the phone weights too much, the phone is too thick, I want to bring my phone to the pool without fear of it breaking, etc. They are not as passionate about it, not like the headphone people are, but they far outnumber them in several orders of magnitude. In the end, if the product doesn't sell, it won't matter how much it was worth to a single passionate person. It will sink the company if it doesn't have mass appeal. Making phones is already an extremely expensive endeavor.

in reply to dustyData

What statistics? People buying thin phones over thicker phones doesn't mean much when that's almost all that's being sold nowadays and every phone is trying to be as thin as possible. It seemed to me that 90% of what we're told people want is actually just what companies want to push on us because it's cheaper and more profitable.

All the people I know who are average users couldn't care less about how thin the phone is, two mm more or less doesn't make any difference. They care about screen size and being able to use it without too much hassle. If they get a phone without an audio jack half of them will just assume that they can't plug earphones at all. And they are not the ones who will complain. But then, Fairphone isn't marketed towards average users, so maybe their users have different priorities? Idk

Bad issues with system load on Mint Desktop


Hi!. Currently running Linux Mint 22.1, but i suspect it's not strictly a distro issue. This laptop was running VERY well but was outdated, running Mint 19.3, some things were unable to be installed because the system libraries were old (didn't expect Calibre to be one of them, figures), so i updated all the way to that moment's current version which was Mint 21.3. All of a sudden it felt like the laptop got downgraded two whole computer tech generations. As soon as i ask it to do something mildly complicated that made it break no sweat on Mint 19, it gets VERY slow, all the cores start running at max, system load increases, until it finishes doing whatever it was doing several minutes later, something between a couple of minutes when lucky, to 20 or more. Typically what triggers the issue is something on the browser (what i use the most on the computer is browser tabs and lots of terminals) but not exclusively. Thought it was the browser but replicated it on an empty Firefox profile, and has triggered with simpler stuff like the Discord client. Been trying to find the issue for a while trying to avoid a full reinstall, no luck so far.

If i were to describe how it feels, it's like there was a bottleneck on tasks being done by the system, as soon as you ask it to do something mildly complex it chokes on it and tasks accumulate. No idea if it's some kind of kernel misconfiguration, if it's some hardware incompatibility, or something else entirely, checking the changelogs of Mint all the way between 19.3 and 21.3 showed nothing i could pin this onto (or at least nothing i could notice).

The nuclear option would be a brand new blank install but I'd MUCH rather avoid that if possible, made the comfortable but now unwise choice of a single partition for everything (instead of a separate /home and whatnot as i used to do) so reinstallation would wipe it completely, if i must then i must but much rather not.

Would welcome VERY much ideas on stuff to check or try.

Edit: It's got an NVME drive, which seems to be healthy as far as i can see

Edit: When it happens it doesn't seem to matter how much RAM is free, seen it happen with only 8 of the 32Gb of RAM in use and zero swap

Edit: Found a great way to describe how it feels like: Have you done heavy video encoding on a computer that's adequate for the task but not more than that, and noticed how everything in it stalls heavily, even if there's plenty of RAM free and the computer feels like it's giving everything to that task only? Pretty much that, but for nearly everything even moderately heavy

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to HayadSont

Given that as i mentioned elsewhere i did not separate the /home into it's own partition like I've been doing since the 90s, formatting this thing right now would likely lead to losing stuff, i need to organize the files first before i do the nuclear option: A full reformat/reinstall. If that makes no difference in the end, I'll have to consider the possibility of getting a new one. No idea how long will each step take so not the foggiest on when will i do each thing, and that's even without taking procrastination into consideration... 😅

‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops


cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/31924287


‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops


A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.

“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”

“Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead,” the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer’s face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. “Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match,” the site says.

fucklapd.com uses data provided by the City of Los Angeles directly to the public,” McDonald told me in an email. “This data has been provided in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits. That means all of this information belongs to the public and is a matter of public record. fucklapd.com is not scraping any data.”

In addition to potentially identifying officers by name and serial number, FuckLAPD.com also pulls up a police officer’s salary.

“Surprisingly it [the domain name] only costs $10 a year to exercise my first amendment right to say fucklapd.com,” McDonald said.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
I tested the tools by grabbing an image of a white and bald police officer from an LAPD press conference addressing its use of force during the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. I uploaded the image to the site, and within a few seconds the site presented me with nine headshots of officers who could be possible matches, all of them bald white men. The first correctly identified the cop in the image I uploaded.

Clicking “view profile” under the result sent me to the Watch the Watchers site by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community group based in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. “All of the information on this website comes from records that were deliberately made public by the City of Los Angeles in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits,” the Watch the Watchers site says. “We plan to keep refreshing this data from new public records requests as well as to add other data.” Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is not associated with FuckLAPD.com and did not endorse the site.

McDonald told me that since the site launched, it had around 50,000 visitors, but “Because the analysis happens on-device I have no way of knowing what people are using it for, except for some people who have posted screenshots to Twitter or Instagram,” he said.

In 2018 McDonald made another tool called ICEspy which used hundreds of photos of ICE employees from LinkedIn and does much the same thing as FuckLAPD.com. “This app is designed to highlight and embarrass the organization committing atrocities against refugees and immigrants to the United States,” ICEspy’s website says. That tool originally used a Microsoft API, before Microsoft restricted access to it. McDonald said on X that he recently relaunched the tool to run locally on devices. 404 Media tested ICEspy using images of ICE employees on LinkedIn to verify if the tool worked and each result was incorrect; McDonald indicated on X he was looking for others to re-scrape LinkedIn and update the database.

Over the last few months ICE officers have consistently worn masks, neck gaiters, sunglasses, and baseball caps to shield their identity while often refusing to provide their name or even confirm the agency they belong to. This includes while violently assaulting people, detaining U.S. citizens, and pointing weapons at bystanders, leaving little room for recourse or accountability against the individual agents or the agency.

ICE’s constant use of masks has created a climate where people cannot be sure that the heavily armed group of men coming towards them are really federal agents or not. In Philadelphia, a man pretended to be an ICE agent in order to rob an auto repair shop and zip tie an employee. In Brooklyn, a man posed as an immigration officer before attempting to rape a woman.

ICE claims that assaults against its officers have increased by 413 percent, and use this as the justification for covering their faces. But as Philip Bump showed in the Washington Postthere are still plenty of questions about those numbers and their accuracy. ICE says its officers’ family members have been doxed too.

Neither the LAPD or ICE responded to a request for comment.

Joseph Cox contributed reporting.


in reply to Nibodhika

Again, I want to establish that I've learned a ton and really appreciate your writings. Thank you!

That looks interesting, although I would be weary of learning a layout that only works on specific keyboards, it will make it hard for you to use a laptop on the go, work in an office with a normal keyboard or any other similar situation.


Thanks for the reminder! While I can't completely ignore the main takeaway, I do find myself only rarely (read: less than 5%) engage with normal keyboards. And, AFAIU, by only adopting the exotic layout for splitting keyboards, I can keep the muscle memory for QWERTY on regular keyboards. Though, please feel free to correct me if I say something that goes against your own experiences.

which btw I strongly recommend you check out wrist and finger stretching exercises as they help a lot


Would you be so kind to share what has worked for your wrist? While there's no reason to assume that your exercises work out for me, I can at least discuss them with the physiotherapist. BTW, to be clear, I've already visited the physiotherapist a number of times and we've discussed exercises that I've eventually incorporated in my daily routine.

Lots of the changes I made (e.g. split ortholinear keyboard) were probably not needed


Question: If we focus on the split ortholinear keyboard, is only the ortholinear aspect (possibly) redundant? Or..., the split itself?

in reply to HayadSont

Damn, I thought I had sent the reply and it's been erased.

I'll keep it short, muscle memory for qwerty doesn't go away that easily, at least it didn't for me, but I'm able to type blindly in qwerty (just not touch typing). Still I think that something I can use in my laptop is very useful so I can keep the ergonomics on the go.

I don't have the exercises, it was just something someone told me to do, I'm sure whatever your doctor is telling you would be better.

For the split vs ortholinear I think split makes more difference, whenever I use a normal keyboard I feel this, but never had any pains related to it, it's just more comfortable.

Sony faces another class-action lawsuit over PlayStation Store prices and monopolistic practices


in reply to Agent Karyo

To be honest that would just be the end of the consoles system as there is a reason Sony is selling the PS5 for so cheap.

As much as I understand why Apple shouldn’t be allowed to keep everything in the Apple Store, Sony’s situation isn’t the same.

But what would bother me more is if Sony starts to raise the prices of everything without justification.

I got a Steam Deck and I’m slowly migrating my gaming from Playstation only to Linux/Playstation gaming. Still a Playstation 5 is a great product, especially with kids and its ease of use and great graphics for your bucks.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to LandedGentry

Maybe it’s because I don’t use it enough but the last Sony console I bought was the absolute opposite of “no fuss”. It was nothing but mandatory unskippable updates and I constantly got signed out and had to sign in and the 2fa app kept changing names. And also all those updates and sign-ins had mandatory EULAS you had to scroll through. Such a hassle.

Edit: also it tried to talk to my Sony tv in some “smart” way over HDMI (so I couldn’t disable it) which would sometimes cause my TV to crash and reboot for several minutes.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to LandedGentry

For the updates: I put it to sleep. However my power cuts out every now and then. When the power comes back, the ps4 turns itself back on on and makes obnoxious beeping noises, just to tell me the power was cut. The dumb thing is it will stay on that screen until manually dismissed and won’t auto-update until you dismiss that screen, with no timeout. The hassle-free appliance experience!

For your claim that the eulas being easy to skip, keep in mind that sometimes there were back-to-back updates that each required me to agree to a eula. So I would babysit the thing, walk away when it was taking forever, and when I came back it wouldn’t even be ready for gaming. Even windows isn’t that obnoxious.

Also my tv at the time had no way to disable CEC (my new one does, and also doesn’t crash lol).

in reply to LandedGentry

I don’t understand where the confrontation came from, but I guess if that’s what you want you can have it. I literally told you two posts ago about how it’s not just waiting for 20s and clicking a button. It’s an attended upgrade and scrolling process. I won’t bother quoting what I wrote 3 minutes ago, go scroll up and read it again yourself. No, my microwave does not present me with EULAs when the power goes out.

What “score” are you talking about? Do you take personal offense when a Sony product sucks? Did you invent the PlayStation or something? I was just sharing my lived experience.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Opinions: Do you feel Python is a more object-oriented or procedural language?


This is a question for people more experienced with Python, but everybody feel free to answer if you feel like you can provide something decent to the discussion.

Also feel free to explain why you feel that way and your experiences with Python and the paradigms.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Mamdani Wins Stunning Upset in Democratic Primary as Cuomo Concedes Race


Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani is on track to secure the Democratic nomination for mayor, after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo conceded to him Tuesday night following the first round of ranked-choice primary votes.

With 95% of precincts reporting two hours after polls closed at 9 p.m., 44% ranked Mamdani as their first choice while 36% chose Cuomo first and 11% had city Comptroller Brad Lander.

Mamdani emerged to raucus applause at his election party on a brewery rooftop in Long Island City, about 20 minutes after midnight.

Lyon Drops Microsoft to Boost Digital Sovereignty


cross-posted from: lemmy.bestiver.se/post/461005

Comments
in reply to Scipitie

It's so funny too, because in the very next article, they correctly call another proposal "proposed". Linuxiac, like, what is this:
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to A_norny_mousse

Does it? Is is native or is it a plugin maybe, you forgot that its a plugin. Or if this is true, maybe the importing was removed in v3 until the re-implemented it? Official announcement part is here: gimp.org/news/2025/06/23/gimp-… I am sure if it was already supported, they would have said anything about it.

Looking through the documentation for legacy version 2.10, I found following part: docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-con…

Caution

Do not confuse GIMP-generated .pat files with files created by other programs (e.g. Photoshop) – after all, .pat is just a part of an (arbitrary) file name.

(However, GIMP does support Photoshop .pat files until a certain version.)


Looks like v2.10 did not support Photoshop Pattern officially. But it supported it in prior versions (not sure when they stopped).

Finding an instance that blocks least and is least blocked


Is there a way to shop around for a Lemmy instance based on how many instances are blocking it and how many instances it's blocking? For example, I noticed that the lemmygrad.ml instance is relatively popular, but it seems like a lot of other instances block it. It also blocks a bunch of other instances. So, if there are any communities on there that might be relevant to me then I would be missing out. I guess I could just create an account on a walled instance, but I would prefer not to keep creating accounts. I'd like to just find one instance that maximizes my access. Is the answer to just run my own instance?

Federation map?


After the Apicalipse there was a website where you could see which instance de/federates with others, as a map. It's url was lemmymap.feddit.de/ but I guess it went down with feddit.de I found even a screenshot in a thread:

screenshot of lemmymap

Currently with the instances button you can see defederation from one direction, but not from the other, e.g. if an instance is defederated by a lot others you can't see that easily.

Does something like this exist?

in reply to infeeeee

The source code for it can be found on codeberg.org/wintermute/lemmym…

But with Wintermute going missing and feddit.de shutting down is has been shut down as well.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to emhl

It was a nice map. If it still works I will try to redeploy it.

Edit: This is an early prototype of the lemmymap, not the latest version of it. I don't think it's worth to deploy. I may recreate it from scratch in my free time.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

We can't figure out how to disable secure boot


My girlfriend is trying to run Bazzite. She installed it, but she can't run it, because secure boot is turned on. She's using an Alienware M15 R7, and we can't find the secure boot setting. The manual says it should be in the boot configuration menu, but it's not there or in security either. How do you disabled secure boot on an M15 R7?

Is there a Linux version that is similar to Freedom app?


This app just starts some productivity session while forbidding some programs from starting. Is there a Linux and most importantly FOSS version of it?

Fedora 43 Change Proposal: X11Libre (system-wide)


A long time has passed since the last major release of the X.Org X11 Xserver. Even bugfix releases have become rare. Therefore, this Change proposes replacing the nearly unmaintained upstream with a maintained fork, the X11Libre XServer.

The upstream maintainer of X11Libre had been the most active remaining contributor to the X.Org X11 Xserver before the fork. The Change Owner is well aware of the controversies around the X11Libre upstream maintainer (FreeDesktop.org CoC violations, controversial political views, conspiracy theories, rants against Red Hat), but believes that the benefit of shipping maintained software outweighs the potential annoyances when having to deal with upstream.

There is no intent to ever replace the Xwayland implementation, only the standalone Xserver and its subpackages (Xnest, Xvfb, Xephyr), and possibly the driver packages (xorg-x11-drv-*).

in reply to ada

They've apparently been involved in Fedora since at least 2007 and the list of packages they maintain includes QT, so sure this isn't some rando. Still, I doubt the backing of a low level contributor to the project will mean this proposal goes anywhere, especially the idea of replacing X11 outright when downstream packages like KDE (ironic) have indicated they won't support it.
in reply to flamingos-cant

Fedora is owned by Red Hat which was acquired by IBM

Red Hat: "Time to cash out"

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to DollyDuller

There was a thread about this a few days ago. That guy who did the fork is nuts. A WW2 Nazi apologist.

And as I said then, Xorg is already Libre.

Without some facts to back it up I question phrasing like "most active remaining contributor". Or "actively maintained" vs what? Just "maintained"? I want to see the stats before I believe this is more than steering the narrative.

This person picked a good time to throw a fit and draw a lot of attention to himself.

People say we should leave politics out of it and concentrate on the software (meritocracy) but I question that. I mean, the way this is going you just can't leave that guy's motivations out of the equation.

You can imagine the way the discourse about this proposal is going, but I randomly picked up one comment I wanted to share excerpts of anyhow:

(...) Fedora accepting X11Libre into the project would betray its users and imply that Fedora is fine with the statements made in its readme.

However, even putting that all aside, I see technical concerns. Obviously, there’s the fact that a lot of the commits made to X11 by metux before he forked off were found to ultimately cause regressions and not have been tested properly and have been reverted. The issue with the licensing in headers is minor, but also noteworthy given how critical licensing is to FOSS projects (...) and it is not a good look to mess that up so easily (...). Even more than all of this, however, is something I recently found on X11Libre’s github:

github.com/X11Libre/xserver
Fix incorrect power of two operator
master ← dec05eba:fix-pow2
opened Jun 9, 2025

2^16 is 2 xor 16 which equals 18, not 2 to the power of 16 which is 65536

metux did not understand that ^ was not the exponent operator in C. That immediately, to me at least, throws some serious doubts on the quality of the commits made by him (and, to an extent, his ability to properly review PRs). To not know such a key feature of the language the project is largely written in is… frightening, at least to me. It does not inspire confidence in the rest of his code for something as large and low-level as an X11 server, compounding on the existing concerns about his prior commits to xorg having to be reverted for causing regressions.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Tony Bark

I know it's just an early mockup, but Calamares looks waaaay better than this, and I wouldn't want to see this replace it in anything even close to this state. This is not slick.

Though serviceable, [Calamares is] not as slick as the initial setup on Windows, macOS or even GNOME.


Setup on Windows? Slick? Dude fuck, I do not want whatever vision this author wants for Linux if the minefield of dark patterns is "slick" to them. Calamares is the slickest, most straightforward OS install I've ever had, far surpassing Windows.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

AI tools are helping teachers with grading and lessons. They say it makes them better educators


Across the country, artificial intelligence tools are changing the teaching profession as educators use them to help write quizzes and worksheets, design lessons, assist with grading and reduce paperwork

Any ways to access Azure Virtual Desktop with multiscreen support?


One of the reasons I can’t move away from Windows is that I use Azure Virtual Desktop (Windows App) to log in for work on my home computer.

I could get a laptop/desktop from them, but I don’t want to be responsible for their equipment. Plus I really don’t want all the spy stuff they have in their machines on my network. And we set up AVD specifically for my team because we refused to get company devices, so this was the compromise.

Anyway, I have used the web version to access and it works well on my laptop. But the problem is that I want to use both of my monitors and I don’t think that’s possible. Maybe I’m wrong?

Any ideas on how I can use Linux and still access AVD with multiscreens?

Edit: Microsoft supports literally EVERYTHING except Linux. It’s nuts. macOS and ChomeOS and Android and iOS and iPadOS are supported. All Linux gets is the web client and that’s for any device with a web browser.

So this got me thinking.

Could I use this with Wine/Proton? I don’t think so because it’s an msi file, not an exe. I’m admittedly not too familiar with this process outside of installing Windows games from Steam on SteamOS on my Steam Deck. I haven’t had success when trying to install apps through Wine in the past.

Is there a way to run macOS packages in Linux? I haven’t found anything in my online searches that says this can work. Anyone have something on that? I’m pretty sure this would be a dmg file.

I tried installing the apk for Windows App from the Google Play Store onto my Linux laptop running KDE Neon to test through Waydroid but I have been having issues getting it installed. Plus, even if I can get the apk installed, would it support dual screens?

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to ThisIsFineDotJpeg

The concept of secure boot and the TPM and BitLocker and all that stuff is somewhere between protection against hackers with hands on access to your system, protection against rootkits infecting the boot sector, protecting the average amateur end user from themselves doing something dumb, and keeping you in the Micro$haft ecosystem.

If you're fairly comfortable that none of these should be a significant risk to you, then I'd say disable it and do whatever you want with your own system without all the headaches.

The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it's time to consider Linux and LibreOffice


The countdown has begun. On 14 October 2025, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10. This will leave millions of users and organisations with a difficult choice: should they upgrade to Windows 11, or completely rethink their work environment?

The good news? You don’t have to follow Microsoft’s upgrade path. There is a better option that puts control back in the hands of users, institutions, and public bodies: Linux and LibreOffice. Together, these two programmes offer a powerful, privacy-friendly and future-proof alternative to the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

The move to Windows 11 isn’t just about security updates. It increases dependence on Microsoft through aggressive cloud integration, forcing users to adopt Microsoft accounts and services. It also leads to higher costs due to subscription and licensing models, and reduces control over how your computer works and how your data is managed. Furthermore, new hardware requirements will render millions of perfectly good PCs obsolete.

This is a turning point. It is not just a milestone in a product’s life cycle. It is a crossroads.

in reply to Sarothazrom

Full guide here for Linux Mint. But the easy version is:

1) Download iso

2) Create bootable USB drive

3) Boot to that USB drive

4) Press next a bunch in the Mint installer

If you have two computers, highly recommend dipping your toes in with Linux on the secondary one. That way any stress related to the unknown is much reduced.

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

Something like TeXstudio, but for markdown?


On occasion, I'll have to work with markdown files, sometimes with inline LaTeX. I'm surprised how limited my options are, or I'm looking in the wrong places. Pandoc does the job, but the lack of a integrated graphical workflow isn't my cup of tea.

Has anyone found a good graphical markdown editor that can handle inline LaTeX and doesn't pull a gigabyte of dependencies? Preferably also can render the final output to PDF.

in reply to OneSpectra

This guy is a quack at this point.

"AI" at this point would only jailbreak because they were programmed to do so. There is no concept of novel ideation in models as they exist, so it wouldn't occur to them to do anything like this unless THEY WERE TOLD TO DO SO.

I'm about as anti-"AI" as you can get, but even I know these dumbass headlines are clickbait bullshit, and most of them are originating from the companies trying to make their tech look super awesome when it's total shit.

There was a post yesterday havin a giggle about low resource usage Linux setups, shout-out to LOW←TECH magazine's solar-powered site (running Armbian Stretch)


I hope this place won't hug it too hard, it's on 61% battery as of writing. Has translations in fr, de, nl, es, it, pt

The average page size of this website is below 0.5 MB – roughly a sixth of the average page size of the original website

SERVER: This website runs on an Olimex A20 computer. It has 2 Ghz of processing power, 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage. The server draws 1 - 2.5 watts of power.

SERVER SOFTWARE: The webserver runs Armbian Stretch, a Debian based operating system built around the SUNXI kernel. We wrote technical documentation for configuring the webserver. [comfy's note: worth checking out]

DESIGN SOFTWARE: ~~The website is built with Pelican, a static site generator.~~ [comfy note: Teppichbrand replied confirming they now use Hugo]


I also like the dithering aesthetic with the site images, both practical and stylistic.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

AI can kill information


Let's take an example.

We know that searching stuff on Google got worse, but imagine if AI replaced it completely. Searching the web would be something like making prompts to a chatbot, a complete
black box of information. AI could make sure that you don't get conflicting views on state policies or acess to copyrighted materials...

in reply to Hanrahan

One possibility is using it exclusively to access its grammatik grammer checker as a non-AI and non-subscription based alternative to ProWritingAid or Grammarly.

More info here.

Otherwise, it's still genuinely a solid option for those who want to do word processing in a terminal, which is a niche use case, but some people are into that. Perhaps as a distraction free writing environment.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

FOSS stack for MIDI composition


I want to put together a stack for hobbyist midi music composition. I understand there are a few more components to it than one might expect, but I think VMPK and Qtracer are going to be part of it?

Any tutorial links or suggestions appreciated!

vmpk.sourceforge.io/

qtractor.org/

in reply to ordinarylove

Whatever you end up using, have JACK sync 'em up. I used to have two Macs, one for recording with Nuendo and one for doing MIDI sequencing and programming. They synced via MIDI sync and there was always issues. Now I have everything on one Linux machine (Ardour records and mixes, Reaper sequences MIDI and Renoise does beats and other sampling related stuff) and with JACK the sync is seamless ❤