Linux

After doing some google-fu, I've been puzzled further as to how the finnish man has done it.

What I mean is, Linux is widely known and praised for being more efficient and lighter on resources than the greasy obese N.T. slog that is Windows 10/11

To the big brained ones out there, was this because the Linux Kernel more "stripped down" than a Windows bases kernel? Removing bits of bloated code that could affect speed and operations?

I'm no OS expert or comp sci graduate, but I'm guessing it has a better handle of processes, the CPU tasks it gets given and "more refined programming" under the hood?

If I remember rightly, Linux was more a server/enterprise OS first than before shipping with desktop approaches hence it's used in a lot of institutions and educational sectors due to it being efficient as a server OS.

Hell, despite GNOME and Ubuntu getting flak for being chubby RAM hog bois, they're still snappier than Windows 11.

MacOS? I mean, it's snappy because it's a descendant of UNIX which sorta bled to Linux.

Maybe that's why? All of the snappiness and concepts were taken out of the UNIX playbook in designing a kernel and OS that isn't a fat RAM hog that gobbles your system resources the minute you wake it up.

I apologise in advance for any possible techno gibberish but I would really like to know the "Linux is faster than a speeding bullet" phenomenon.

Cheers!

DroidCam is a freemium application which allows you to use your phone as a web camera (thus getting a better picture quality for meetings than ordinary webcams)

So, needless to say, it's very helpful.

Now, I have been facing a number of issues with this application for a few days and I felt it would be best if I just share stuff regarding how I make it work seamlessly, it won't look good when you are late for a meeting because you are troubleshooting droidcam, so here's how I use it.

1. v4l2loopback package can cause a lot of problems, so, I would suggest you to download it from source, you can do that using this script given below (this also installs droidcam on your linux computer)

This isn't the most efficient script there is, but it works.

First, run the command

vim installation_droidcam.sh && chmod +x installation_droidcam.sh

(you might have vi editor installed by default, so if you don't have vim, just replace vim with vi, if neither are available, run sudo apt install vim, I personally use featherpad)

Now, paste the below script into your text editor (this doubles as a reinstallation script too, but if you want the latest and greatest, you would have to replace the installation commands of droidcam given below with whatever is available here on the official website

#!/bin/bash

cd ~

pkill droidcam

sudo /opt/droidcam-uninstall

# installation script for droidcam
# if you want the latest version, go to
# https://www.dev47apps.com/droidcam/linux/
cd /tmp/
wget -O droidcam_latest.zip https://files.dev47apps.net/linux/droidcam_2.1.3.zip
# sha1sum: 2646edd5ad2cfb046c9c695fa6d564d33be0f38b
unzip droidcam_latest.zip -d droidcam
cd droidcam && sudo ./install-client
# end of installation script


cd ~

sudo rm -r v4l2loopback

pkill droidcam


gh repo clone umlaeute/v4l2loopback

cd v4l2loopback

make && sudo make install $ sudo depmod -a

cd ~

sudo modprobe v4l2loopback

Now, save the script and exit it.

Everything required for droidcam to work has been installed on your laptop (you would still have to install Droidcam (green) on your android device and set it up over there tho, I am not gonna guide with that)

Here's a video for that by Mental Outlaw

Now, you would have to edit the desktop entry for droicam on your laptop to include sudo modprobe v4l2loopback command, because this needs to be running for droidcam to work. So, to do that, we will create another script

run vim /home/$USER/droidcam_start_menu_libre_desktop_file.sh && chmod +x /home/$USER/droidcam_start_menu_libre_desktop_file.sh and paste the below script and save it

#!/bin/bash

sudo modprobe v4l2loopback

/usr/local/bin/droidcam

After this, menulibre if you don't have it already by doing sudo apt install menulibre and edit the desktop file entry for droicam such that it looks like the image below (make sure you Tick Run in Terminal) as you need to have v4l2loopback running in the background for droidcam to work.

In the command text box, you much have /home/$USER/droidcam_start_menu_libre_desktop_file.sh (location of the script we just created) and now save it.

And that's it!

From now on, you would be able to start droidcam (while keeping droicam on on your android device) The terminal would open, enter your password and you can now connect and use your phone as a second camera (a much better second camera)

I haven't been very articulate, so doubts are welcome

CVE-2017-5226 is a issue with bubblewrap that allows a program running in a sandbox to excape and get the same privileges as a the parent process. I recently discovered this by mistake and it is fairly concerning to me. ~~I believe it applies to Flatpak as Flatpak uses bubblewrap under the hood.~~

~~Many people like to boast about how secure and private flatpak and some even run untrusted software in it. However, the reality is that there hasn't been a lot of testing and the fact that this CVE still exists but isn't well known is concerning.~~

The reason it wasn't patched is that it is really hard to properly fix. The work around is to call bubblewrap with the --new-session flag as this effectively prevents the excape. However, this breaks interactive programs such as htop. Also the bubblewrap team believes this is a issue that should be solved downstream as this CVE is technically not a CVE in the traditional sense.

I think it is still better to run flatpak over non flatpak but it is something to be aware of

Edit:

It doesn't apply to flatpak as it is patched in 1.3.1and higher https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/security/advisories/GHSA-7gfv-rvfx-h87x

Basically this is a communication and people problem not a technical one

Edit2:

This isn't exploitable on modern systems with 6.1 or newer with the way most distros compile the kernel

As I understand it, X11 has many inherent security concerns, including programs being able to read the contents of other windows and intercept keystrokes. Wayland addresses these concerns but at the moment breaks certain functions like screen readers, cursor warping, and the ability of a program to resize its own window.

I am curious as to how the display protocols of MacOS and Windows handle these situations differently. How does a program in those operating systems gain permission to read the contents of other windows, if at all? What is to be done in Wayland for these functions to be more seamless or are there inherent obstacles?

A new CachyOS snapshot for July 2024 is out today with various improvements and some exciting new features, especially for AMD users, as well as the usual bug fixes and other changes to improve your experience.

Starting with this release, CachyOS will automatically enable a software repository on new installations that will be used to provide the best performance for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 machines. In addition, the ISO now features automatic architecture checks for the Zen 4/Zen 5 repository and CachyOS’s hardware detection tool (chwd) received support for AMD GPUs for better detection of official ROCm-supported GPUs.

I'm trying to extract the frames of a video as individual images but it's really slow, except when I'm using jpeg. The obvious issue with jpegs is the data loss from the compression, I want the images to be lossless. Extracting them as jpegs manages about 50-70 fps but as pngs it's only 4 fps and it seems to continue getting slower, after 1 minute of the 11 minute video it's only 3.5 fps.

I suspect it's because I'm doing this on an external 5tb hard drive, connected over USB 3.0 and the write speed can't keep up. So my idea was to use a different image format. I tried lossless jpeg xl and lossless webp but both of them are even slower, only managing to extract at about 0.5 fps or something. I have no idea why that's so slow, the files are a lot smaller than png, so it can't be because of the write speed.

I would appreciate it if anyone could help me with this.

Shameless plug: I am the author.

https://canvas.fediverse.events/#x=553&y=238&zoom=22&tu=https%3A%2F%2Ffeddit.org%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F074f6617-b17c-4c99-8a26-7e3fec195247.png&tw=30&tx=532&ty=218&ts=ONE_TO_ONE

I know that GUI does not cover most of functionalities, for good reasons - being specialized to task (like files app), it provides more fine-grained experience.

Yet, I find that there are common commands which is terminal-only, or not faithfully implemented. for instance,

• Commands like apt update/apt upgrade might be needed, as GUI may not allow enough interactions with it.
• I heard some immutable distros require running commands for rollbacks.

These could cause some annoyance for those who want to avoid terminal unless necessary (including me). Hence, I bet there are terminal emulators which restricts what commands you could run, and above all, present them as buttons. This will make you recall the commonly used commands, and run them accordingly. Is there projects similar to what I describe? Thanks!

Interesting workflow.

Of course the fact that Nate uses Thunderbird instead of KMail explains a lot. One day I hope KMail/Akonadi get the attention/work they need to become viable options.

Interesting workflow.

Of course the fact that Nate uses Thunderbird instead of KMail explains a lot. One day I hope KMail/Akonadi get the attention/work they need to become viable options.

Zoom is vital to my job this month and prior to an update last week I had the openSUSE version of Zoom's RPM installed and working fine.

I updated my Tumbleweed installation to openSUSE-20240704-0 last week, after which Zoom started crashing when sharing a screen. There was a message in the logs about the library libqt5qml.so and I thought I could fix this by backing out either the update for the libQtQuick5 package in particular, or just booting from the pre-update snapshot.

To make a long story short, I ultimately installed the Zoom Flatpak and resolved to get back to this when I had a bit more time.

My question - Can people suggest the right way in openSUSE Tumbleweed to handle the situation where an update breaks something on the system?

Assuming libQtQuick5 was the updated package that was at fault here, is there a way I could have downgraded just that package? Would booting from the pre-update snapshot and then just carrying on with my week have been a reasonable way to proceed?

To be clear - I'm not so much concerned about Zoom, I'm more curious about how to use the openSUSE Tumbleweed tools to recover from updates that cause problems.

Thank you!

I have Fedora and Windows installed in the same drive in my laptop. The drive has 512GB and it's divided so that each OS has 256GB. Fedora's partition is encrypted using the option it shows in its installer.

Problem is I'm running out of space. I'm considering getting a 1TB drive on which I would move Fedora and then giving Windows the other drive, so on the whole the laptop would run Windows on the 512GB drive and Fedora on the 1TB one. I've already read lots of forums but am still unsure on how to do this without losing any data and messing with Grub (I've had some bad experiences previously). So any help would be appreciated.

GNOME announced an interim director of Richard Littauer, who joined last week.

Holly's resignation appears to be personal, as she intends to pursue a PhD in Psychology.

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If we take stability as a parameter, is it safe to match them like this?

• Fedora --> Ubuntu
• CentOS Stream --> Ubuntu LTS
• RHEL --> Debian

I know that CentOS stream is more kind of a rolling release but... feels like an LTS distro in practice... or it is just me?

Edit: adding some context. I am planning to setup a dev machine that I will connect to remotely and would like to babysit very little while having stable and fresh packages. In the Ubuntu world we would go to an LTS release but on the RPM/Dnf world is there any other distro apart from CentOS Stream? And also is CentOS Stream comparable to an LTS release at all considering that they do not have release number?