Quoting: Mountain ManBut here is something to think about: countless works of art have been lost throughout human history, and will continue to be lost. Are we worse off as a species because of it? No, I don't think so. It's just stuff, and there are more important things in life.

I think it's sad that the same laws meant to protect a copyright holder's works are the same laws which prevented archival of many 20th century films where the studio went bankrupt, the copyright holders disappeared, and the orphaned films were thus damned them to the ether. Copyright lasted just long enough for nobody to be able to archive the film stock, and by the time they were in the public domain (back when we had reasonable copyright periods), the film stock had faded away.

On the subject of video games, I found this documentary from Noclip about GOG's archival of old games very interesting. There are some games where it's completely unclear who holds the copyright anymore, so even though the studios which helped create the game would love to publish it again, they can't because they don't know who owns it, really. GOG goes through weeks and months of investigation for some of these games, where everyone thinks someone else owns it, and in the end they might find out for sure...or they may not.

While we can argue about the value of art and its loss, I would say copyright is doing a bad job protecting these works and a great job lowering the value of our public domain. One way to fix this is to go back to reasonable copyright terms. Even though there is some support for this among publishers and copyright lawyers, it's doubtful this will happen.

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In the interest of law, I'd like to draw everyone's attention back to the '80s, where Universal (and Disney, in the background) tried to outlaw Betamax (and by extension VHS) by suing Sony in court for contributory copyright infringement. The idea was that "most" people were using Betamax to infringe on copyright. In the end, the court ruled in favor of Sony because Betamax and VHS have substantial non-infringing use-cases.

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Quoting: liamdWant help managing Wine on Linux? You can try Bottles, Lutris and the Heroic Launcher.

What do you think of CrossOver for managing WINE? It got a recent facelift. I think macOS users benefit from it a lot more, because they have far fewer options. The proprietary part of it is the UI, but all changes to WINE and other libraries are released freely, I believe. And naturally, CodeWeavers contribute significantly to WINE, so some money to them for CrossOver is going back to WINE, benefiting the whole community.

I wouldn't normally recommend proprietary software outside of games, but I feel there are exceptional circumstances here.

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Quoting: SamsaiIt all comes back to non-free codecs, which Fedora won't ship because of patents and license fees.

Eventually the codec problem will solve itself as platforms abandon H.264/H.265 and move to AV1.

I honestly believe H.264 patents will expire (2028) before platforms abandon H.264. I suppose Windows 11 is helping in that department by obsoleting fairly recent hardware and Windows 10 being 2 years from EOL, forcing people to buy newer hardware that likely has AV1 support, but I think platforms will be hanging onto H.264 for a long time. It's the most widely-used video codec in the world, after all. mp3 still won't die and it's 32 years old! Even though Opus does its job better in every way, because companies like Apple still don't support it.

One would hope Apple being a part of AOM would mean they adopt AV1 more quickly, but time will tell. Another point is iPhones are supported for an average of 6 years, and iOS 16 has no support for decoding AV1 (let alone hardware)...and that's a large portion of web traffic these days. I don't think AV1 adoption will beat H.264 patent expiry. Amazingly, Safari still doesn't support AV1, though Chrome and Firefox have supported it since 2018. So macOS is failing in the AV1 decoding department, too.

H.265 was not supported in major web browsers until about half a year ago (why now?), and adoption of this codec otherwise was low anyway, so I would declare it deceased. Windows 10 doesn't support it in its default video player, after all, asking users to purchase the codec. If that's not a stamp of irrelevance, I don't know what is. I seriously doubt H.266 will get anywhere on most platforms, either. The patent pool situation is the same. Well...I certainly hope it won't get anywhere.

Oh, and do you know anything about AAC? I can't find much information on the patents for this codec or the expiry dates, but I would like to know. I really, really hope AV1 gets wide adoption soon so I don't have to care about either of these codecs ever again, but it looks like Apple will be holding us back for a few years yet. DaVinci Resolve already supports AV1 encode/decode with NVIDIA on CentOS.

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIs this different from including Firefox as an overlay?

Alright, long post incoming as I try to explain everything:

You can use overlay, but when I tried to do `rpm-ostree install --dry-run` in my Kinoite image to test things, whenever there's an already installed package, it will exit saying the package is already installed, instead of continuing with installing the other packages I listed in the comment.

By contrast, the ublue builder seems to take care of duplicates easily, unless you have a version conflict due to trying to install something using COPR (tried to install steam but I think the Nobara COPR and packages I enabled caused a conflict of mesa version). Also, they automatically build things in a single layer, I think, which prevents the issue of having too many overlays due to not doing a single `rpm-ostree install`.

In addition, when I asked around, having overlays may make it hard if you want to switch base to a different system image (say, Silverblue to Kinoite, or Kinoite to Onyx, or Kinoite to Kinoite-Nvidia).

If your worry are Firefox and codecs, I believe that uBlue base images currently have firefox and the freeworld codecs installed. I think they only added the firefox and firefox-langpacks on remove list of recipe.yml as an example of how to remove package from the image and probably under the assumption people be installing Firefox through Flatpak via the yafti flatpak installer. But if anyone worries about upstream removing firefox eventually, they can just add it to the install list to make sure it remains installed.

This is the list of the packages they overlay by default on their images which you can use as your base image, this is the template recipe.yml which is applied based on the base image you chose, and this is my recipe.yml and yafti.yml for an example of how I'm doing things (sorry about the mess though, still experimenting here -- check Actions if you want to see how messy installing Teamviewer is).

I still don't know everything yet, I've only been using it for a week, but it was easy enough to understand due to the playbook-like format. Getting started was surprisingly easy, with the automated setup.

Thanks for that explanation! I'm somewhat familiar with Ansible, so that shouldn't be a problem.

I think it'll be some time until I install Sericea on that system to test it out, but I'll keep this in mind for that occasion.

For anyone interested, I found this to be a very informative guide for Fedora's immutable operating systems: https://www.dvlv.co.uk/pages/a-beginners-guide-to-fedora-silverblue.html

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Quoting: fenglengshunIf you don't like it, you can use ublue to just explicitly add it in the recipe.yml install list, so that there is always built-in firefox package installed in your image regardless of what upstream does. By default, they have firefox and firefox-langpacks in remove list, so it is literally just a copy-paste away.

It isn't as hard as you may think it is, I was a GitHub noob who didn't even know how PR works when I installed it, and now I'm slowly building up into the mix of kinoite and Nobara that I want (since Bazzite, the ublue image with SteamOS and Nobara packages which GE seems to contribute to, is still in alpha).

Is this different from including Firefox as an overlay?

Part of the reason I want to run Fedora is because I believe it has sane defaults. It's the only desktop distribution that both enables SELinux and includes profiles by default (well, Ubuntu does this with AppArmor). It also does a bunch of other stuff I frankly don't understand, because I'm not a security researcher. To replicate everything in Arch Linux would take a lot of work and I probably wouldn't do it correctly.

So, when they make decisions like this based on usability and security...I start to wonder. What else have they compromised on? They don't even seem to realize the compromise they're making, and they don't explain it anywhere. The reason I want to install Fedora Sericea is because I don't want to keep tinkering with a work computer. The rollback functionality is particularly useful in this instance, as-is the fact user software is updated independently of system packages.

Ahhh...I can't wait for 2028 when these H.264 patents expire so distributions don't need to do stupid stuff like this.

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Quoting: t3gThat’s an interesting take as Firefox in Flatpak or Snap is supposed to add another layer of sandboxing security.

This is true for most software, but Firefox already sandboxes web content. While Firefox's sandbox is weaker than Chromium-based browsers, it is still more robust than Flatpak's sandbox. As you can understand, they've had a lot of practice over the past 28 years...

As Seirdy's note explains, you can't have sandboxes inside of sandboxes:

QuoteWeb browsers are an alternative to Flatpak; they have their own sandboxing and updating mechanisms.

Most distributions build Firefox without auto-update support, of course, but TOR Browser Bundle does have this.

So, in most cases, Flatpak is better than no sandbox, but not in this case.

My information only comes from Seirdy, though, so don't assume I know anything more.

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Quoting: DesumI thought Wayland's security made running Wine without xWayland a technical nightmare because of all the unsafe things Windows allows programs to do?

Isn't this true of X, too? I guess sandboxing X.org in Wayland helps some of this, but WINE is meant to be able to run viruses just as well as normal programs.

I doubt sandboxing it will help much if you're running malicious software. Especially since most Wayland compositors don't implement any extra security features aside from the basic stuff the protocol asks for. GNOME seems to be the compositor most ahead in this, because it actually asks you before a program tries to look at your screen (much to the chagrin of some users in its implementation). Though KDE/Wlroots compositors might have implemented this now.

Quoting: ShmerlAnd as I also added above, one of the factors is the GPU. Nvidia blob is the drag on Wayland usage due to it causing poor experience on it. But the trend for Nvidia is negative as you can see on the same page, so that will speed things up for Wayland adoption.

Yes, NVIDIA with Wayland compositors is pretty bad. Sway doesn't support NVIDIA at all, so you end up with black flashes every few seconds. On KDE, display scaling is broken and everything looks wrong. Among a bunch of other issues I can't name because I ran away quickly. GNOME is the best compositor, but wake from suspend is hilariously broken, too, and it has difficulty fullscreening some programs. GNOME is at least smoother than X.org for me and I don't get black flashes. When I run GNOME on X.org, the top half of my screen flashes black occasionally. Yes, X.org. Shrug.

I've decided to just run KDE on X.org now because it doesn't flash black at all. If I have problems with this, I guess I can try i3...

I'm buying an AMD card next time...

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I've been thinking about switching to Fedora Silverblue/Sericea soon, but the only problem with these distributions is their plan to remove Firefox from the base image and install it as a Flatpak. It's not a good idea to install browsers with Flatpaks, because it weakens the sandbox and makes you more vulnerable to attacks. I really don't want to play with my browser like that.

On the other hand, the project is kind of forced to pick the Flatpak because they can't legally distribute H.264/AAC and other codecs with a native Firefox package (I don't know why Flatpaks that come with the ISO are any different, buy anyway), so that results in significant usability compromises.

But I do love how you can have different versions of the same program installed with Toolbox. Really, that's game-changing. And I don't even need to install Gentoo to mess with slots...

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Quoting: ElectricPrismIt's a great time to be a professional using Linux in many aspects.

Now we just need an image manipulation program that supports non-destructive editing, and Natron to port to Qt5/Python 3, but at least Nuke supports GNU/Linux anyway (not really a consumer/prosumer tool, though). Finding a viable replacement to After Effects on GNU/Linux is hard...I guess there's DaVinci Resolve Fusion, too.

On the other hand, GIMP's GTK3 port is done, they're working on properly supporting Wayland, and then they can work on the interesting fundamental stuff like vector shapes and other non-destructive editing features like smart objects and non-destructive effects. And previews for effects! A few more years and I can see GIMP being workable for professional use.

On the NLE side, Kdenlive is getting some big changes soon which will make quick adjustments much easier. There's still Lightworks for users who want a professional NLE.

I really want color accuracy for working with Darktable, which is a fantastic RAW processing program.

Audacity is being ported to a more modern toolkit, overall UX makeover, and is getting great new features, after Muse Group acquired the Audacity trademark and employed the Audacity team.

Running Affinity Creative Suite through WINE is finally starting to seem like a viable option, at least until GIMP gets those non-destructive editing features.

So, not too bad at all. Finding a good After Effects replacement has been tough for me, though. I recently stumbled across Enve, though I'm not sure this software will work either. It doesn't seem to be under active development anymore.

Work on high-level stuff in the compositor and kernel is important...but having great creative software for users to use seems like the bigger challenge currently.

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