Even if all High Profile patents in Europe expire next year, this means absolutely nothing for US-based companies/orgs or companies/orgs that trade in the US, which still has patents that won’t expire until 2027 according to this article. Even then, this means absolutely nothing because there is no such thing as a H.264 decoder/encoder that only supports the High Profile spec (aside from OpenH264, which already circumvents the patents for companies/orgs that want to use it, but is still lacking). x264 supports H.264 features from later specifications, and the patents for those things likely won’t expire until after 2030.

The irony being that some Linux users fear change (or at least fight it tooth and nail) more than any other computer user.

Autodesk Maya actually has a Linux version. I was surprised to learn this.

I don’t. I just like Linux.

Ubuntu is fine. Pop!_OS if you’re set on Flatpaks instead of Snaps.

Eh, X11 Forwarding, VNC, SSH, XRDP, Waypipe whatever, it’s all very similar

Wow, this is actually fairly technical unlike うぶんちゅ. SSH and X11 forwarding in the first chapter. By chapter 4 we’re already exiting Vim.

Now that’s a find! I’ve been looking for something similar to read after うぶんちゅ！

You can get the manga officially from here in its original form: https://www.aerialline.com/comics/ubunchu/

It’s licensed under CC-BY NC 3.0 and the author includes the original photoshop files if you want to edit them.

It’s pretty funny. I own a physical copy.

I didn’t say they were. Hence the second link.

That was my first thought upon finding it. It’s really hard to find though, even if you know the name of it.

For checksums: https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/1498#issuecomment-649098123

Flatpak does verify the integrity of files as it is downloading/installing them. For ostree remotes this is done using GPG signatures (which are better than mere checksums). If you want to see the commit ID (which is like a checksum) for something on flathub use e.g. flatpak remote-info -c flathub org.gnome.Builder and for the local copy flatpak info -c org.gnome.Builder. For OCI remotes we at least check SHA256 sums and there might be more integrity verification mechanisms I’m unaware of.

But for signatures: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak-builder/issues/435

There’s also Pied, which hasn’t gotten around to submitting to Flathub.

This has an empty ffmpeg folder but no binary

That’s strange. I downloaded it just now and converted a video. It’s not in /app/bin but in /usr/bin instead. I know for a fact it relies on the ffmpeg binary inside the code. You can even access it using flatpak run --command=ffmpeg org.gnome.gitlab.YaLTeR.VideoTrimmer.

The Arch repos are too small.

Eh, I’ve never felt that way. Even on my Arch system, I only have 15 packages from the AUR and 2134 packages installed from the repositories. But it’s probably smaller than you’re used to if you’re coming from Debian or Fedora.

Many projects use libffmpeg.so dont know if that could be used too.

That library is designed for development as far as I’m aware. I noped out very quickly when looking at the documentation for using ffmpeg libraries :) I think that’s why VideoTrimmer relies on the binary instead of the library too.

With the COPR I know who to trust, unlike the AUR, even though I now also setup yay.

I take a different view: I don’t trust anybody, but I read the PKGBUILDs and understand them. They’re often not complicated. I don’t particularly like the AUR much anymore though for this reason.

Everything nearly separated from my OS using the different distrobox homedirs which work flawlessly.

I did try this for a while but I couldn’t get used to it. And programs can bypass it anyway with /home/$USER if they’re feeling vindictive, though I haven’t run into any yet. It’d definitely be nice to have more complete isolation one day.

Also distrobox upgrade --all works awesome its just a wrapper but really valuable.

100% yes. Be nice to have that in Toolbox one day.

But unverified Flatpaks may be way better than distro packages. At least it is very transparent on Github (yeah, sucks) unlike strange distro build systems.

I’m with you there. I can understand PKGBUILDs but everything else is just far too complex for me. Or unfamiliar. The docs for packaging Fedora RPMs is scary as hell.

What, GNU utils? What makes it special, apart from apt? They have nala so that is dealt with.

To be honest, it’s mostly apt. I really hate apt. I am also not very familiar with how the system is configured. It’s very different from Arch, anyway. I can just never feel at home on an Ubuntu system even in a container, but I do run it on servers.

I’ve downgraded my “hate” to “it’s fiiine”.

Yeah this will be crazy. dnf has a lot more commands for querying etc, that will be useful.

It also sounded like they would reinvent the wheel a bit? Dont know

I really have no idea what to expect. But if I never need to use rpm for querying or whatever again I’ll be happy.

Never heard of that, I hope accessibility on Wayland improves.

Here’s a recent article: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/

So do I.

Neal Gompa mentioned that Flatpaks dont have the permission holes to allow screen readers? Thats crazy and may be possible to fix with a global override.

I think GNOME is working on a portal for that. After the Newton stack is in a good state.

Same here. I think it would be nice to create 2 or so base images on an individual host like Codeberg, but I am completely new to all that container stuff.

Codeberg is probably a good host for that.

Currently doing a bit of work, upstreaming some secureblue things (btw the admin blocked be because they… dont like annoying questions?).

Lol. How strange.

Matrix is also horrible for Dev work. People dont use threads so they just spam stuff in a single chat and it just bad…

I don’t much like Discord either. Issue tracker is the right place for this sort of discussion in my opinion. Or Sourcehut’s mailing lists are fine too.

Also, these change processes are damn slow, but hey, thats fine I guess?

I guess that’s kind of the point :)

I want to start doing some videos, no idea why OBS just has h264 hardware? I mean it doesnt matter but why no VP9? AV1 will come in 30.1 you know when that is stable?

I’m usually converting other people’s media, so I don’t have much experience with OBS. But as for VP9, the industry was gun-shy about it because MPEG-LA threatened to sue Google over patent infringement for it. Essentially the same sort of deal with Sisvel and AV1, except MPEG-LA never followed through on it. Hardware encoding for VP9 has apparently never taken off, but hardware decoding is all around.

Do you know what flatpaks (that are not VLC) have ffmpeg as a binary included?

There’s: https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.YaLTeR.VideoTrimmer

Browser benchmarking

Honestly, as long as I don’t notice it, it doesn’t bother me. I only noticed Flatpak Nautilus’ launch time because it was instant.

Toolbox: Is it considerably faster?

I think so. It at least seems more reliable. I got a bunch of weird bugs with Distrobox in the beginning but I guess I was pushing it pretty far.

I need to start learning some real language as my bash scripts start getting a pain.

I kind of hate Python but it’s at least more pleasant than Bash. I’ve no experience with Go, but it’s probably nice to write.

Well I hope you use an Ubuntu container because I bet these packages are also not “verified” on Arch ;)

Ah, well, I use Arch for all my other computers so I feel like I’m already trusting Arch’s devs for all my packages. What’s one more?

I use 90% verified

I make an exception for Anki and MakeMKV.

You could use Debian Testing which is rolling afaik.

I kind of hate Debian and Ubuntu’s userpsace :) It’s okay on servers.

Does Arch have Rstudio stuff?

It has it in the AUR, but not as an official package. In most cases the AUR is just as good anyway.

Or maybe dnf5 could solve this?

DNF5 will definitely shake things up. Because rpm-ostree is going away to be replaced by dnf again.

Looks like we frequent the same circles, then.

I thought a lot about tech resiliance in the last days, I am from germany and the people here are stupid. They literally elect people that will make a neofascist surveillance hell reality.

But hey, Germany was responsible for the Sovereign Tech Fund, which has made a big difference for GNOME and accessibility with the Newton stack. So it’s not all bad. Not that I live there.

But relying on Github is insane, it is owned by Microsoft and they dont give a damn about freedom. It is pretty scary, 90% of my Android apps are also on Github.

That’s the main reason I don’t use uBlue. The idea of booting my entire operating system from a container created on Github’s infrastructure is just…it scares me. Even though much of the free software I rely on is hosted on Github. And yes, most of my Android apps are also from Github.

I want to build my own variant, KDE and minimal only, maybe GNOME if contributors join. But no more, all the freedom is great but it is huge maintenance.

That’s a nice idea. I wonder if Sourcehut does container registries…I know people praise their CI.

I wonder how Tor, Tails and others handle their code stuff.

I know Tor uses Gitlab. Seirdy has an article series on “Resilient Git”.

I thought Ciscos trick could fix that? They are a huge company, pay the max amount of money already and can just share the software with their license to anyone.

Yes, however it only covers their implementation (which is lacking) and it only covers binaries they create.

Well… rpmfusion could do that? And act like a “3rd party auditor” ?

I’m thinking about Fedora including the build in their own repositories. It would be really nice if H.264 decoding was just default and you didn’t need to do anything.

doesn’t have support for High 10 Profile video which is fairly common off the web

Interestesting, never heard that.

See the following thread for all of the research I did: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/h-264-support-in-fedora-workstation-by-default/114521

Michael Cantazaro had a really helpful and enlightening response: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/h-264-support-in-fedora-workstation-by-default/114521/5

I use Celluloid Flatpak which is pretty great

So do I. But keep in mind there are two Celluloid Flatpaks you can install; one is from Fedora Flatpaks which disables H.264/H.265/VC-1 decoding and the other is from Flathub with all features enabled.

GNOME Software tends to select Fedora Flatpaks first. So users can end up really confused; see: https://github.com/flathub/io.github.celluloid_player.Celluloid/issues/140

Nautilus supports that via a Flatpak right? Thats cool.

File previews are supported via the Sushi extension, which is available as a Flatpak. Obviously, it doesn’t work on H.264/H.265/VC-1 media because it’s a Fedora Flatpak.

I really need ffmpeg because it’s a crucial part of my workflow because I convert so much media. But that’s fine; I just use it in a Toolbox.

But Nautilus works really well as a Flatpak. It even seems faster than non-Flatpak Nautilus and I have no idea why.

True, Flatpak is cool. Dolphin is also available as one, I need to test if it works with Flatpak ark and all that, udisks2, mounting stuff, MTP, maybe SMB.

KDE made a big push to make all of their programs available as Flatpaks. And Snaps. Which I think is great. But you end up in a weird situation where the Krita Flatpak is not officially supported by Krita because no one at Krita works on maintaining the Flatpak. Rather, they support only AppImage officially, probably because it’s easier to maintain their insane patchset than with Flatpak. Not having any experience with distribution systems aside from Flatpak, I really don’t know what niceties Snap or AppImage provides.

Interesting, why? I need to try it again.

Nothing much has changed since last you commented on that Toolbox thread I was reading :)

I think Toolbox is the right way to solve the problem. It’s using a real programming language (Go) instead of bash, it supports a small set of important container images, and those container images are only provided from quay.io, Red Hat’s own infrastructure, instead of Docker Hub.

But it lacks some features intentionally (and some just because they haven’t gotten around to it). Like distrobox export. Annoying to manually patch in but not hard. I use Toolbox for Signal and Steam because I don’t want to use Unverified Flatpaks.

Do you know btw how to upgrade a F39 distrobox to F40? Distrobox has some “assemble” function to rebuild it with a config file. But traditional dnf system-upgrade doesnt work.

I don’t think upgrading Distroboxes or Toolboxes is supported. They’re meant to be destroyed and re-created. Really inconvenient, but I guess the proper way of maintaining toolboxes/distroboxes is through Containerfiles.

So I don’t use Fedora containers. Or Ubuntu containers. Or Debian containers.

I use Arch because it’s a rolling release and you just keep updating it. No upgrade problems so far…aside from all the errors I ignore (everything seems to work fine). Also, I really like the Arch userland and it has Signal Desktop in the official repositories.

It really makes me feel at home on Fedora.

It’s probably the same reason you use KDE and I use GNOME (most of the time).

Why? Curious.

I think GNOME provides a more coherent and consistent experience for users. I’m okay with not having features like a system tray, desktop icons, or window buttons I never use. I really love GNOME. It’s changed the way I use computers and has made everything aside from KDE feel like a completely inferior experience in comparison.

But I use KDE for my multi-monitor system because frankly, GNOME is an awful experience if you have more than one monitor with different resolutions. KDE kind of sucks too, but it’s not completely broken. KDE is practical by solving problems we have now, like letting XWayland applications scale themselves. Because even if it’s a total hack that works inconsistently, it works very well for most of the software I use. I find parts of KDE overwhelming (especially the System Settings) but hey, it works.

I like both KDE and GNOME and think each has their own strengths. It’s nice to see KDE adopt one of GNOME’s killer features (partially), the Overview. It’d be nice to see GNOME adopt a KDE feature like CTRL+META+ESC so I can kill windows graphically even on Wayland.

But god GNOME is annoying when it comes to protocol standardization. At least they’re finally implementing DRM Leasing for VR users (not me).

Huh. I thought I was supposed to be sticking up for GNOME. Alright, I use GNOME everywhere else and it’s still my favorite desktop by far. They focus on a great experience with what works great now. There are very few hacks in GNOME land. I just think they need to catch up to KDE with Wayland and other areas like the multi-monitor stuff.

I heard of that one a while back. Not being someone who enjoys music often or has very demanding needs, I just use Amberol. But fooyin might be nice to look into for my KDE desktop.

I maintain a list of recommended Flatpak apps.

I’m very familiar with you, haha. You keep popping up wherever I go these days. You’re everywhere. Maybe not quite as omnipresent as Neal Gompa.

I can think of a few Flatpaks that could fit on that list.

They dont include that? I thought they would…

It’s the same old story with codecs. Fedora would love to support as many codecs as possible, but H.264 is patent-encumbered so they can’t. They had hardware decoding support through Mesa a few years ago but then they…changed it.

Fedora Atomic wants to include the OpenH264 enablement package for Firefox inside the Fedora Flatpak eventually which will solve most of the problem as that is where people are playing H.264 most often.

So this is an issue with reproducability? I dont think so? Cisco builds the binaries for Fedora and it gets installed. The packages are not from their repos, but the typical sync issues would not occur on Atomic.

My understanding is OpenH264 is provided in binary-only format to Fedora because otherwise the royalty-free license cannot apply (i.e. Fedora can’t build it from source). Fedora only ships free software. OpenH264 is free software. But it’s binary-only. So they need to trust Cisco has built the binary correctly. I assume the reason they don’t include it by default is because the only way to trust it’s built from the same sources is to reproduce the build. Otherwise, I really don’t see the issue.

OpenH264 is not a part of the base system so you need to layer it on. OpenH264 doesn’t have support for High 10 Profile video which is fairly common off the web and is generally inferior to x264, I’ve found, but at least it’s something.

And the reason I mention “5 years” is because by then, most of the patents on H.264 will have expired. With the exception of the new ones from just a few years ago that no one really uses. Maybe Fedora can enable x264 in their ffmpeg build then and we can stop talking about it. I am so sick of talking about H.264.

I use Fedora kinoite-main from uBlue which is very close to upstream but fixes many issues for me.

Call it a personal challenge or whatever but I’m sticking to Fedora Silverblue for the foreseeable future. uBlue is almost certainly a better experience for most people.

Yeah for sure, I think for Intel and AMD too, hardware h264 for example.

That’s not true if you’re using Flathub packages. Flathub ships userspace Mesa drivers which enable hardware decoding for Intel and AMD GPUs even with H.264 and H.265.

but their base images have a ton of stuff I dont agree with (toolbox, missing random packages, too simplistic installer…)

uBlue does solve the two big issues with Fedora, which is codecs and proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Any other issues are tiny in comparison. I will say I prefer Toolbox to Distrobox, despite using Distrobox first. I certainly understand that’s an unpopular opinion and not one a lot of people share. It’s probably the same reason you use KDE and I use GNOME (most of the time).

I’ve always hated the Fedora installer. Does uBlue do something different?

Hot take: If you claim to be against all the big tech abuses and value software and computing freedom, but a handful of PC games is enough to stop you from leaving an abusive proprietary OS, you weren’t very serious about it to begin with.

The guy in the video actually talked about how FL Studio isn’t on Linux, and that’s how he makes his living. He then goes on to say he has spent thousands of dollars on plugins and samples that only work on Windows. He then talks about how Asperite doesn’t work very well on Wayland compared to Windows. The first segment was about how not all mods work on Linux. The last segment was about how Foobar2000 doesn’t work on Linux and even through Wine some of the features are broken, and there’s no true replacement for it but “if you’re not as fussy as me, any of these native Linux software are great”.

He also runs Debian 12 on his laptop part-time and seems quite knowledgeable about how Linux works, and is willing to invest the time.

He makes a point about he “wants to make things better, not sacrifice things”.

It matters as the security rating is based on that, apps like KDE Systemsettings or Flatseal show that etc.

That’s a good point.

Linux has a tiny marketshare people dont care about security that much permissions on Linux are more complex than on the actively restricted Android. External media, devices, filesystems etc

That’s true.

I think my issue with the Flatpak sandbox is I understand how it works and what its limitations are (and I’m mostly fine with them), but the average user doesn’t. I was reluctant to try Flatpak before understanding how it worked, but now that I know how it works, I think it’s fantastic! But it’s also a work-in-progress. What we have now is good, but I think it could be better. Not entirely sure how it gets better though.

Thats why I like Fedora Atomic. The core is as small as possible, the apps are just base stuff or upstream stuff like the Desktop. Everything else is a Flatpak.

I’m still not really sure where I stand on Fedora Atomic. Lack of H.264 decoding by default is a damaging choice. They should just include openH264 in the base image, reproducibility be damned. Give it 5 more years and maybe this will be revisited…

Nova + Zink + NVK will solve some of the problem with NVIDIA (maybe even very soon), but not hardware decoding currently, which is a big one.

Gamescope doesn’t work great in a Toolbox. It works fine in Flatpak, but Bottles doesn’t let me use Gamescope options. I think Lutris does, but I haven’t tried it out yet.

And how am I supposed to install fonts without layering them on?? I’ve been copying them to ~/.local/share/fonts manually.

I think the idea is cool. But I think a few more parts of the ecosystem need to be in place first. I’ll keep using it for now.