Linux

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20962151

Hello Linux folks, i would like to share one little hack which i have found.

On fedora, zram-generator comes installed and configured by default with lz4 algorithm i believe, and no disk swap, if you have 8gb of ram or more, that is fine, but if you have 4gb or less, systemd-oomd either kills you games when they use too much memory, or you face an OOMD and get your system frozen.

When configuring fedora, normally i would create an in-disk swap, so that my computer wouldn't freeze but face a MASSIVE slowdown when on way too high memory usage, i also set zram-generator to use the zstd algorithm so that zram compression rate is higher but slightly slower, like that i can use my low memory more efficiently with a lower risk of OOMD.

I was watching a bringus studios video once, where he tried to run counter-strike 2 on a ps4 using linux and proton; the game would always use too much memory and that would freeze the system before it got a change to actually launch, the strange ps4 linux was using in-disk swap, and so, increasing swapiness to 100 bringus tried to leverage that to make the game run. He was sucessful. In disk swap is very slow, so the performance was crap, but that does not matter...

So i saw that, and had the idea to combine it with zram-swap to avoid the in-disk swap penalty, also using zstd as the algorithm to make the most out of the memory, and it was a massive sucess! Some games which would make my system very unstable or straight up freeze on certain launch attempts started launching and working just fine! and without dumb in-disk swap slowdowns!

While running modded Victoria 2 i have noticed my system is using about 3.3 to 3.4GB of swap, and about 3.5 gb of ram, so about 100 to 200MB of real uncompressed memory usage, assuming zstd is running at level 1 of compression, and achieving at least 3.0 as compression rate, in thesis, my system has now the equivalent to 10GB of ram, well about it's weight! even more impressing considering how low are the numbers we are working here!

tldr: setting your swapiness=100 while using zstd as your zram-generator compression algorithm, and no in-disk swap will help your system use the most out of your ram with negligible performance penalty

Games are technically run inside a virtual machine because of differences in how Apple Silicon and x86 systems address memory—Apple's systems use 16 KB memory pages, while x86 systems use 4 KB pages, something that causes issues for Asahi and some other Arm Linux distros on a regular basis and a gap that the VM bridges.

Rosenzweig's post shows off screenshots of Control, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Ghostrunner, Cyberpunk 2077, Portal 2, and Hollow Knight, though as she notes, most of these games won't run at anywhere near 60 frames per second yet.

"Correctness comes first. Performance improves next," she writes.

From the Creator of HeliumOS, a distro based off AlmaLinux or CentOS Stream on top of the technology of Fedora Atomic Desktops, Bazzite, Fedora coreOS and RHEL Image Mode.

This is a pretty big thing, as extreme stability + stable packages makes the perfect workhorse for an install-and-forget PC.

Together with KDE or other Desktop Environments (CentOS 10 will have Plasma 6 in the external "EPEL" repos) this will be more than a great Windows 10 replacement.

Have all your apps as Flatpak or with a Fedora Distrobox, no problems.

Maybe even an image using packages of the "CentOS Stream Hyperscale SIG" that backports newer Fedora kernel, systemd, mesa and others for improved hardware support, GPU tasks, drivers etc.

After getting this setup for work for a few clunky applications I was curious if anyone has any knowledge of a similar solution hosted on Linux?

Here is the link to the resource I used. Remote Desktop Service

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20819143

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/animatrix

This program written in C will create some basic animation of ascii-art loaded from a txt file, while rendering the matrix effect in the terminal window.

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cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/23486789

This full packed release comes with three new staging protocols:

• system bell - allowing e.g. terminal emulators to hand off system bell alerts to the compositor for among other things accessibility purposes

• fifo - for implementing first in first out surface content update behavior

• commit timing - for adding time constraints to surface content update

Other than this, the presentation timing protocol protocol got a version minor bump describing how to deal with variable refresh rate.

Other protocols saw the regular clarifications and bug fixes, and some deprecated events is now properly indicated as such in the XML. Please see individual commits for details.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/23483164

On Thursday, the Bundestag's Budget Committee decided to increase the funding for the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) with the majority of the parliamentary groups in the traffic light coalition. A total of almost 29 million euros is now available for 2025. This is around 4 million euros or 15 per cent more than initially planned by the Federal Cabinet. Almost 3.4 million euros of this is directly attributable to the STF, whose budget for 2025 was initially set at 15 million euros.

590,000 more than planned will also flow into the ‘Bug Resilience Programme’ coordinated by the STF, for which a total of 2 million euros will now be available in 2025. It is intended to ensure that security vulnerabilities in software are not only found, but also actually fixed. In total, the STF will end up with around 19 million euros, compared to just 17 million in 2024.

The SFT plays a central role in the development of open source software as a basic digital technology. Among other things, the STF managers organised competitions to promote active collaboration on open source infrastructures. The government has so far disappointed free software advocates

‘These investments make us less dependent on large providers, more resilient to digital crises and promote Germany's digital sovereignty,’ emphasised Anna Kassautzki, digital policy rapporteur for the SPD parliamentary group. Maik Außendorf, digital policy spokesperson for the Greens, emphasised that Germany is thus taking on a ‘pioneering role in open source’

The Open Source Business Alliance (OSB) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) had expressed their disappointment with the course taken by the Ampel in 2022. In its coalition agreement, the government had explicitly emphasised the importance of open standards and interfaces as well as open source for digital sovereignty. However, there are no concrete plans for an alternative hyperscaler, especially for cloud projects.

Instead, dependencies on Microsoft, for example, would be further cemented. The federal government's licence costs for proprietary software providers have recently reached a high level in the billions. The OSB Alliance has just called for the administration to switch its IT completely to open source.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3679507

What has your experience with Linux been like so far? How long has been your Linux journey? Mine began while I was studying computer science, and I've been in love with Linux since.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20783411

The Clipboard Project is a clipboard manager that works entirely in your terminal. It has tons of swanky features including this new one in 0.9.1 that lets you securely ignore copying passwords and other things like that!

Link to the code: https://github.com/Slackadays/Clipboard

I know of CryFS and encFS which both failed an Audit.

I know LUKS and veracrypt which work but are both tedious and not useful for my use case.

I want to encrypt folders on Linux and then sync them with a cloud or just store them locally.

There is goCryptFS which is in Go, i.e. memorysafe which is good. It also failed the audit when it comes to cloud sync.

The issue: if an attacker has access to the encrypted files over time, if you always upload changes, they can crack you.

This would not be relevant for local file stores, but for synced ones it is.

There I used Cryptomator, which has many downsides though

• the app is GUI only, the CLI variant is last released 2021, which I dont consider maintained when it comes to security? Or is it?
• the GUI App is in electron, no Wayland support
• the app devs dont care about flatpak rules and store secrets outside the app container, meaning the app is unconfined by default, you need to manually add an override and it is still pretty insecure in the case that all untrusted apps are flatpaks

KDE KVaults only supports insecure algorithms, goCryptFS would be the most secure for local only stuff, but that was abandoned as a Fedora package and is only available from COPR, currently. (I should learn RPM packaging once again).

Cryptomator seems to be the only one 1. Suitable for cloud sync (not encrypting everything always again) 2. That passed an audit.

The CLI may be fine if it just interacts with the GUI app? I wonder how that would work with the Flatpak.

Do you know any alternatives?

I hear that a lot but, how bad is it really? Does it affect you (if you use Debian)? Aren't there ways to install newer versions of most things that actually matter?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21244508

The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 24.10 has been released, featuring the new and beautiful KDE Plasma 6.1 simple by default, powerful when needed.

Codenamed “Oracular Oriole”, Kubuntu 24.10 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 6.11 based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.116 and 6.6.0, KDE Plasma 6.1 and many updated KDE gear applications.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21161182

Plasma 6 has come into its own over the last two releases. The wrinkles that always come with a major migration have been ironed out, and it’s time to start delivering on the promises of the new Qt 6 and Wayland technology platforms that Plasma is built on top of.

Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. It implements more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol, and enables it by default. There is also improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles, as well as HDR performance. A new tone mapping feature built into Plasma’s KWin compositor will help improve the look of images with a brightness or set of colors greater than what the screen can display, thus reducing the “blown out” look such images can otherwise exhibit.

When it comes to power management You can now override misbehaving applications that block the system from going to sleep or locking the screen (and thus prevent saving power), and you can also adjust the brightness of each connected monitor machine separately.

Plasma’s built-in app store and software management tool, Discover, now supports PostmarketOS packages for your mobile devices, helps you write better reviews of apps, and presents apps’ license information more accurately.

In Plasma 6.2, KDE have overhauled System Settings’ Accessibility page and added colorblindness filters. They've also added support for the full “sticky keys” feature on Wayland.

This and more in full anounncement and changelog.

I want to create a collage of 20 screenshots from a video, arranged in a 5x4 grid, regardless of the video’s length. How can I do this efficiently on a Linux system?

Specifically, I’d like a way to automatically generate this collage of 20 thumbnails from the video, without having to manually select and arrange the screenshots. The number of thumbnails should always be 20, even if the video is longer or shorter.

Can you suggest a command-line tool or script that can handle this task efficiently on Linux? I’m looking for a solution that is automated and doesn’t require a lot of manual work.

Here's what I've tried but I only get 20 black boxes:

#!/bin/bash

# Check if input video exists
if [ ! -f "$1" ]; then
    echo "Error: Input video file not found."
    exit 1
fi

# Get video duration
duration=$(ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$1")

# Calculate interval between frames
interval=$((duration / 20))

# Extract 20 frames from the video
for i in {1..20}; do
    ffmpeg -ss $((interval * ($i - 1))) -i "$1" -vf scale=200:-1 -q:v 2 "${1%.*}_frame$i.jpg"
done

# Create collage
montage -mode concatenate -tile 5x4 -geometry +2+2 "${1%.*}_frame*.jpg" output_collage.jpg

# Clean up temporary files
rm "${1%.*}_frame*.jpg"

echo "Collage created: output_collage.jpg"

• Many Porcelain commands that internally use the merge machinery were taught to consistently honor the diff.algorithm configuration.

• A few descriptions in "git show-ref -h" have been clarified.

• A 'P' command to "git add -p" that passes the patch hunk to the pager has been added.

• "git grep -W" omits blank lines that follow the found function at the end of the file, just like it omits blank lines before the next function.

• The value of http.proxy can have "path" at the end for a socks proxy that listens to a unix-domain socket, but we started to discard it when we taught proxy auth code path to use the credential helpers, which has been corrected.

• The code paths to compact multiple reftable files have been updated to correctly deal with multiple compaction triggering at the same time.

• Support to specify ref backend for submodules has been enhanced.

• "git svn" has been taught about svn:global-ignores property recent versions of Subversion has.

• The default object hash and ref backend format used to be settable only with explicit command line option to "git init" and environment variables, but now they can be configured in the user's global and system wide configuration.

• "git send-email" learned "--translate-aliases" option that reads addresses from the standard input and emits the result of applying aliases on them to the standard output.

• 'git for-each-ref' learned a new "--format" atom to find the branch that the history leading to a given commit "%(is-base:)" is likely based on.

• The command line prompt support used to be littered with bash-isms, which has been corrected to work with more shells.

• Support for the RUNTIME_PREFIX feature has been added to z/OS port.

• "git send-email" learned "--mailmap" option to allow rewriting the recipient addresses.

• "git mergetool" learned to use VSCode as a merge backend.

• "git pack-redundant" has been marked for removal in Git 3.0.

• One-line messages to "die" and other helper functions will get LF added by these helper functions, but many existing messages had an unnecessary LF at the end, which have been corrected.

• The "scalar clone" command learned the "--no-tags" option.

• The environment GIT_ADVICE has been intentionally kept undocumented to discourage its use by interactive users. Add documentation to help tool writers.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/15137443

Hello everyone!

I'd like to announce the start of development and the public availability of what we currently refer to as Leap 16.0 pre-Alpha. Since this is a pre-Alpha version, significant changes may occur, and the final product may look very different in the Alpha, Beta, Release Candidate, or General Availability stages. The installer will currently offer you Base, GNOME, and KDE.

Users can get our new Agama install images from get.opensuse.org/leap/16.0. The installer will currently offer you Base, GNOME, and KDE installation.

Leap 16.0 is a traditional distribution and a successor to Leap 15.6 with expected General Availability arriving in the Fall of 2025.

We intend to provide users with sufficient overlap so that 15.6 users can have a smooth migration, just like they're used to from previous releases.

Further details are available on our roadmap. The roadmap is subject to change since we have to respond to any SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 schedule changes.

Users can expect a traditional distribution in a brand new form based on binaries from the latest SLES 16 and community packages from our Factory development codebase.

There is no plan to make a Leap 15.7, however, we still need to deliver previously released community packages from Leap 15 via Package HUB for the upcoming SLES 15 SP7. This is why there are openSUSE:Backports:SLE-15-SP7 project and 15.7 repos in OBS.

The target audience for pre-Alpha are early adopters and contributors who would like to actively be part of this large effort. Adopters should consider booting Agama Media from time to time just to check compatibility with their hardware.

For non-contributor users, I highly recommend waiting until we have a Beta, which is expected in the late Spring of 2025.

Specifically for Agama I highly recommend using github.com/agama-project and collaborating with the YaST team on suggestions and incorporating any changes.

For the rest of the components, the workflow isn't changing; just select version 16.0 for bug submissions.

Feature requests will be reviewed every Monday at a feature review meeting where we'll convert code-o-o requests into JIRA requests used by SUSE Engineering where applicable.

The factory-auto bot will reject all code submit requests against SLES packages with a pointer to code-o-o. You can get a list of all SLFO/SLES packages simply by running osc ls SUSE:SLFO:1.1:Build.

Just for clarification SLFO, SUSE Linux Framework One, is the source pool for SLES 16 and SL Micro 6.X.

I highly recommend using code-o-o to co-ordinate larger community efforts such as Xfce enablement, where will likely need to update some of SLES dependencies. This allows us to share the larger story and better reasoning for related SLES update requests. The list of features is also extremely valuable for the Release article.

For quality control, we have basic test suites based on Agama installations in Leap 16.0 job group. Later, we plan to rework the existing Leap 16.0 Images job group for testing the remaining appliance images.

The project where we maintain community packages is subject to change as we have not fully finalized yet how to make Package HUB; we may use a similar structure with Backports as in 15.3+).

Further test suite enablement is one of the areas where we currently need the most help. Related progress.opensuse.org trackers poo#164141 Leap 16.0 enablement and poo#166562 upgrade from 15.6.

Another area where you can help is new package submissions and related maintainer review of package submissions to Leap 16.0. These reviews make sense as we'd like to check with maintainers whether that software in a given version makes sense for inclusion into Leap 16.0, rather than blindly copying all packages over.

Do you want to help us on this front? Spread the news and feel free to join the #openSUSE_Marketing Telegram channel(https://t.me/openSUSE_Marketing)! https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Marketing_team

Many thanks to all who helped us to reach this point.

Lubos Kocman on behalf of the openSUSE Release team

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20535629

ZLUDA is a compatibility layer for Nividia’s CUDA on other processors

Hey guys! Remember that survey we took quite a while back?

Well, I didnt find the time to do the results earlier, so... here are they!

For those who didn't take part, here was the survey. You can still write silly stuff there! But I will probably not read it.

I still have no idea how to share the results, so here is the HTML bundle downloaded with SingleFile..

This Table, which should also be on Github as .csv, offers all answers of every user which you can play with. All users are completely anonymized.

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Results

I will pick some random funny things.

Usage & Experience

The majority uses Linux since over 3 years. Most have used a few distros.

A lot of people give unpaid support for friends and family, which is great! Thats... what we are here for, right?

Most of you devs are not engineering systems, which makes sense, but I guess contributions from your companies could help?

We have quite some admins and people working with Linux, which is cool! Let me hear your experiences and coolest moments in your job?

Gender & Representation

Well, that is crazy! Interesting for sure. We are a huge majority male, together with about 5% women, 5% nonbinary people, a few agender people or some that dont feel in these categories.

The question about representation didnt resonate a lot with most, so there is low participation and many wrote it made no sense.

I dont think so, cough hyprland, but well, the majority feels represented, which specifically for this question is worth nothing XD

We have 25 people in the survey that dont feel represented! I think we should work on that, and of course feel free to post ideas on this.

Improvements to the Linux community

1. We need to be friendly, inclusive and welcoming to newbies and each other. No elietism and separation among each other. Our goal is to free the world together, isn't it?
2. Again, working together.
3. Help very early newbies with onboarding, easy docs and tools
4. More specialists on software, less duplicated efforts
5. Use open platforms, not Discord

\1. and 3. got a ton of votes. So yes, if our goal is to spread the word, the first steps to the bright side need to be as easy and welcoming as possible!

Origin

We have more europeans than nothern americans!

poorly, veery few from all the rest, especially low in India, which was unexpected.

I dont know how, but I think this could be improved. The english-only communities may be an issue?

Age

That one surprised be a ton, as I am way below average.

Income

Linux is free software, so our goal should be to empower poor people.

We seem to kinda be able to do that?

Neurodivergence

I have ADHD and I have the feeling a ton of y'all cat ears are neurodivergent too.

Seems like I was right, ADHD and Autism are pretty common here.

Why did you start using Linux?

• Windows annoyed me
• privacy
• tweaking the system

very few switched from macOS or ChromeOS, which is interesting but probably expected.

Contributions

Well... everyone can translate, support others on dedicated forums (or here) and donate a few cents! Come on guys! We can improve here.

Multiple systems

Way more people use multiple Linux systems than I thought.

A lot run Windows and macOS in parallel too, we even have some ChromeOS users! Only very few use Linux (as in "not Android" only!)

For the reasons, companies, schools, unis are just as much at fault as... gaming.

I had no idea this was such a big deal!

Also, not many use multiple systems for testing stuff (like me), but actually daily drive them!

Why do you use Linux?

1. Freedom
2. Privacy
3. Fun
4. No costs

Hardware

Most of you have hardware supported by Windows 11, which is interesting. The "pile of awesome Linux machines" didnt arrive yet!

Security

More people have unencrypted disks than encrypted ones. A few people dont even know what disk encryption is!

Of course I highly advise those people to learn a bit about that, I wouldnt want an unencrypted laptop.

For the reasons for encrypted systems

• security
• privacy

quite a few also have it as a school/uni/work requirement, which is great! Having an unencrypted company laptop... well no.

Distros

Well, Arch.

A ton of people use Debian too, then come Ubuntu and Fedora as base. 2 Slackers too!

And... the NixOS community here is bigger than OpenSUSE.

So, what distro did you use first?

• Ubuntu
• Debian

Obvious, but still worth asking.

Switching distros

Nobody switched away from NixOS, that one person starting on it is still rocking!

Many switched from OpenSUSE because they found something better.

From Arch, because... other? And for some it broke.

RedHat is the biggest reason why people switched from Fedora... which is a bit silly... but again "other" is the biggest reason, what happened guys??

Debian had too old packages, I feel you. "other" again huge, just as with Ubuntu, which scared people away with Snaps, GNOME, privacy issues and a whole lot of "other"!

Distro type

A third of you use small distros, most dont.

Not many use a small variant from a bigger distro (like Fedora Kinoite etc), which surprised me.

Distro optimizations

Many people simply want a better user experience. Again, gaming is a huge factor too, while privacy and security hardening is significant but not for many.

Modifications

People uninstall way less than they add additional stuff. Theming is less important than I thought.

Privacy and security tweaks are again pretty low, I encourage you to take a look!

Hardware

Even, which is again really surprising.

It may correlate with the quite old user base?

Only a few of you got that Android runs Linux ;D Or those all run PostmarketOS or something.

We have quite a few running hardware with official Linux support, which is cool!

And even though most is not officially supported, you still dont really have big issues, or none at all.

Coreboot

Only a tiny fraction you uses coreboot! While a huuuge majority trusts some random proprietary code running at highest priority.

I can encourage you to look into coreboot!

Of the ones using coreboot, a majority bought hardware with it.

For the ones looking, here a small list:

• System76
• Starlabs
• 3mdeb, Novacustom
• Nitrokey
• A ton of Chromebooks with MrChromeBox coreboot
• A few pretty old Thinkpads

And... nobody uses the Heads firmware! Which is a shame, as it is really cool and the only good measured boot implementation, outside of Google Pixels with GrapheneOS.

DE or Window Manager

A big majority uses KDE, followed by GNOME and then the Window Manager guys.

Cinnamon also has a reasonable user base.

Users of smaller desktops often didnt switch because they didnt like the direction of others (mostly GNOME) but simply because they are easy to use, lightweight... and then there are the Mint users.

34 Window Manager users have no hobbies, I feel you.

The main reason pro KDE is customization, while the traditional UI is also very important. A ton of users switched from GNOME to KDE, which should be a hint for Fedora and others.

Virtual Desktops

A majority uses them, which is crazy!

Wayland or X11

Many dont even know what they use, while Wayland is luckily the majority.

Reasons to stay on X11 are

• missing features
• software issues
• the Mint users

Many people have considered changing the WM to a wayland-native one. A lot say they will probably switch soon, while there are a few that dont consider this.

Packages, Source, Flatpaks, ...

Most get their apps from the system repos, followed by native packages from 3rd party repos.

Flatpak is even below those 3rd party native packages, which have full control over your system! But they are close.

Appimages are used more than native packages that dont come from a repo, while both methods are pretty insecure and I hope you are careful with them!

Snaps have not many friends, which I can understand.

Immutable or not?

SteamOS has a ton of fans here, and more use NixOS than Fedora Atomic.

Android stays the most used immutable/composed/atomic system out there.

Not many are using new distros like VanillaOS, BlendOS etc.

Proprietary software

Beware, a rant. A ton of people runs whatever they need or want, even if it is proprietary!

Also a lot more people use non-flatpakked proprietary software, which can be a pretty big security risk, as those can do whatever they want.

Flatpaks

A lot of people like official maintenance of packages, the store and ease of use. Security through bubblewrap sandboxing is a high point too.

Many tell that sandboxing breaks their use case, which I would respond to with: This is not the intended behavior, they should work by default, please file bug reports!

Desktop integration is also an issue, which must be theming as other things normally just work.

Many people prefer distro packages and fear bloat through extra libraries.

Snaps are also a big cause for not liking them, which is a shame really.

Very few have actual hardware limitations to run the apps like that.

I dont know what to say to this, the result surprised me a lot. There seems to be huge emotional bias towards Flatpaks, or ignorance towards the security mess that running proprietary unsandboxed software is.

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Anyways, those where not all answers, have a read through them!

Here is the link to the survey results if you have troubles with cut-off questions.