Here's a neat exploration of the curb cut effect for accessibility in @gnome - using accessibility tools to aid in testing automation! Has pros and cons identified in the article, but interesting nonetheless.

➡️ https://fedoramagazine.org/automation-through-accessibility/

#Fedora #Gnome #accessibility #a11y #Linux #OpenSource

Automation through Accessibility - Fedora Magazine

Using Accessibility as an automation testing tool. Learn about DesktopQE's automation stack to test Desktop Applications.

^{Michal Odehnal (Fedora Project)}

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an audio format, data is compressed with no loss of information or quality.

FLAC is a format option for archiving audio collections such as CDs.

Ripping a CD to FLAC allows an exact copy of an audio CD to be created if the original is lost or damaged.

Supported devices: https://xiph.org/flac/links.html#hardware
Supported software: https://xiph.org/flac/links.html#software
FLAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

Website: https://xiph.org/flac

#FLAC #Audio #AudioCD #Archive #Linux #Backup #DataBackup

they forgot the last step

credit: https://twitter.com/crackticker/status/1778852314935140370/#ultramarinelinux #foss #linux #trans #fedora

I made a free wallpaper of #Konqi :3

You can download the 4k .png file on my ko-fi shop uwu
https://ko-fi.com/s/fccbedf941

Hope I'll be able to do more :3

.

#kde #konqiart #linux #plasma

Retro; the customizable clock widget is now available on Flathub in v2

What's new:

• 24/12h support (follows GNOME Settings)
• Energy usage optimizations
• Better support for round clocks
• Controls moved out of the way

What do you think of the floating header bar?

https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Retro

#GNOME #GTK #CSS #Flathub #Flatpak #Linux

@NVAccess it would be great to be able to run #NVDA on #Linux. As a developer this would help a lot to test pages for NVDA. I have tested with #wine to a small extent it works, so maybe is possible to make it work on wine.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=41719

Dass in den Schulen immer noch überwiegend mit Windows gearbeitet wird, obwohl die Schülerinnen und Schüler mit GNU/Linux bestens zurechtkämen, verbuche ich inzwischen unter dem Stichwort »nationales Bildungsversagen«.

#linux #microsoft #schule #bildung #lehrer #eltern #FediLZ #medienkompetenz #kultusminister #kultusministerium

What is stopping a desktop environment from being packaged as a #flatpak? I only ever see apps and libraries packaged, but never desktops. Is it just impossible or does it just not make sense for desktop environments to be sandboxed?

#Linux

Thanks to all you developers out there adding brand colors to your apps over the past months we're almost ready to launch featured banners ✨

If you're an app maintainer and haven't done this yet for your app, here are the docs: https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/appdata-guidelines/quality-guidelines

To make it more interesting we're setting a deadline! We will be launching the new banners on April 20th, so for the possibility to be featured during the first week, update your apps today :)

#flathub #flatpak #gnome #kde #linux

TIL: UUIDs aren’t as persistent if the file system gets reformatted a bunch, e.g. on every boot as you’d do with an encrypted swap partition so it’s a better solution to go for the GPT partition PARTUUID instead

#linux #archlinux

Want to build your own lock screen widget or quick setting in #phosh? @arunmani explains how that works in https://phosh.mobi/posts/custom-plugins-dev/ 🛠️

#phosh #gtk #LinuxMobile #linux #mobile

Build Your Own Quick-Setting or Lock-Screen Widget

Phosh has support for plugins which can be used to customize and extend certain aspects as per your liking without touching the internal source code. Currently Phosh supports plugins for lock-screen and quick-settings.

^{Arun Mani J (phosh.mobi)}

Just bought a #DELL 3190 laptop, new for $150 (11.6" screen, 64GB eMMC). It's fully supported on #Linux, and even if it has a Celeron N4120 CPU and only 4 GB of RAM, it'll work fine with #Mint, or #XFCE (and #Gnome/ #KDE if you don't mind some minor lag). Not opening too many browser tabs will ensure that the swap file won't get used too often.

If you're on a tight budget this is a good option, as it also has great battery life too at 10 hours with Linux.

#linuxmint #ubuntu #opensource #foss

I love how on #macOS when you intend to move a bunch of files to a folder, and when one file with the same name already exists in the destination, you're only given the option to stop the entire thing, to replace the existing file, or move anyway under a different name. Not a single option that just... idk... skip moving that one (or however many affected) file maybe? The best thing is, that stop option, the dialog that asks you gives you a checkmark option to "Apply to all" (unchecked by default) - bcos of this, a user unfamiliar with #Finder's brilliance might assume that "stop" simply means "skip" commonly found on other OS-es including #Windows and #Linux for file operations such as moving/copying, 'cept not, "stop" literally just stops doing anything.

Oh, also, you can't even enjoy what you have found to be so common such as doing a shift-click selection on Finder... unless you happen to be in the right "view" mode. That simple thing couldn't even just... work. I honestly can go on and on about how slow that piece of shit is at performing searches or copying/moving files, or how modifying all the ridiculous preferences take forever bcos they hide in multiple, nonsensical places when on #Dolphin for example, you get one nice menu with sensible tabs and options where you could do wtv needs doing in ~1 minute. Heck, even setting the default app to be used to open a certain file type requires a hidden shortcut that then opens up a stupid looking window at the edge of your screen with tiny af buttons and GOSH I CAN GO ON FOREVER.

Fuck Finder, honestly. I'd take that ugly ass #FileExplorer anyday of the week if it means I don't have to deal with Finder. Thank god I'm a Linux user, blessed with #KDE's Dolphin. I'm almost certain #Apple only hires interns for anything software over there.

Update: Found a fix! Just use the terminal ❤

I am pulling together photo files for the family that goes as far as 20 years back, so there are lots of files.

I'd like to set up a #photo file #server on a #Linux machine on my home network (i.e., not exposed to the wider Internet) so that the pictures can easily be accessed. Key is the ability for the others to be able to access them from Windows, so perhaps a browser/web-based implementation might be best.

Any ideas? Tnx

Increasing the default vm.max_map_count value

https://archlinux.org/news/increasing-the-default-vmmax_map_count-value/

#ArchLinux #Linux

Big kudos to the Schleswig-Holstein!

Another German administration is breaking Microsoft’s glass cage, and at a first read the scope of this initiative seems more ambitious than many I’ve witnessed in the past.

Both the ArsTechnica article and the original announcement don’t include a few details to make better estimate on the possible success of this initiative though.

The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

I hope that there’s a Web-based offering somewhere on the horizon. Fewer and fewer employees nowadays run Word/Excel directly on their machines. Most of them run Google Docs or use Microsoft’s office cloud. Giving them a stand-alone app which limits the possibilities for online collaboration may be met with resistance, especially now that many of them are already getting used to online AI assistants. I read that #NextCloud is involved - I hope there’s a plan to run #CollaboraOffice, which is more or less like running the LibreOffice engine as a service, #OnlyOffice or some equivalent alternative.

Due to the high hardware requirements of Windows 11, we would have a problem with older computers. With Linux we don’t have that

Very sensitive decision that will probably save taxpayers a lot of money. But it’d also be interested to know which #Linux distro has been selected. Hopefully the administration won’t repeat Munich’s past mistakes and it won’t try to build and maintain their own distro. Better get into talks with a popular distro (probably not Red Hat, but hey isn’t SuSE German?) and orchestrate a deal where the State funds its development, and in exchange it gets development support. It’s a win-win where a distro not managed by a giant like Red Hat or Canonical can get consistent direct funding from a public administration (that’s what many of us have been advocating for years anyway), and the local administration can enjoy the support of a well-documented distro like OpenSuSE, Mint, Pop_OS or Manjaro without having to reinvent the wheel and scramble for their own developers/packagers/maintainers, and minimizing the risk of going from one vendor lock-in (Microsoft) to another (IBM or Canonical).

The government will ditch Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange/Outlook in favor of open source offerings Nextcloud and Open-Xchange, and Mozilla Thunderbird

Same issue as with LibreOffice: folks today are used to webmail and mobile apps. Thunderbird definitely fills the gap on the stand-alone side, especially now that it’s getting more love and support than before. But it still lacks an official mobile app - K-9 is almost there, but not nearly there yet. And it doesn’t solve the “I’m used to the GMail/Outlook interface and set all of my filters and do my advanced search from a webview” problem. There’s actually a big gap there. What’s a decent open webmail UI that can compete with GMail/Outlook nowadays? RoundCube feels ancient and it has barely changed in 15 years. SnappyMail is a bit better, and it’s what a use as a selected webmail client too, but it’s still lightyears behind GMail/Outlook. NextCloud Mail is slowly getting there, but it only integrates with a NextCloud solution. Let’s admit that there’s a gap that needs to be filled fast if we don’t want employees who have years of email muscle memory trained in specific environments to doom the project.

Schleswig-Holstein is also developing an open source directory service to replace Microsoft’s Active Directory and an open source telephony offering.

Please, don’t. Just don’t. A local administration, no matter how well-intentioned and initially well-funded, just won’t have the resources necessary to invent such big wheels. And, even if it somehow manages to bake something together, it’ll eventually be a patchy solution that they’ll have to maintain themselves for years to come, and that is unlikely to find adoption outside of its initial borders.

Invest into #OpenLDAP to fill the gaps left by ActiveDirectory on the LDAP side instead. That project needs a lot more love. And leverage WebDAV for almost everything else. If you are already planning to use NextCloud, it’ll already do a lot of the heavylifting for you on that side, without having to write new software or come up with new protocols.

Same for telephony. Looking into iPXE and other open implementations of the PXE and SIP protocols. Telephony protocols are hard and well-established, reinventing the wheel should be avoided at all costs.

I think there’s a lot of potential in initiatives like these, but only a clear definition of their scope and a clear plan of execution with continuous user feedback can help preventing something like the failure of the early Munich experiments.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/german-state-gov-ditching-windows-for-linux-30k-workers-migrating/

German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating

Schleswig-Holstein looks to succeed where Munich failed.

^{Ars Technica}

Oh snap! Good news, Linux users: we're adding the Thunderbird Snap, previously maintained by the awesome Ubuntu desktop team, to our officially supported Linux packages! 📦 🐧

Learn all about why we made the change, what it means and what to expect, and where to report issues in our blog post.

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/04/thundersnap-why-were-helping-maintain-the-thunderbird-snap-on-linux/

#Thunderbird #Linux #Snap

ThunderSnap! Why We're Helping Maintain The Thunderbird Snap On Linux

In the spirit of free software, we want to support as many users as possible. That's why we're officially supporting the Thunderbird Snap.

^{Heather Ellsworth (The Thunderbird Blog)}

Schleswig-Holstein geht voran:

#LibreOffice statt M$ Office
#Linux statt Windows
#Thunderbird statt Outlook
#Nextcloud statt Sharepoint

Das Kabinett hat den Startschuss für den Umstieg auf freie Software gegeben - ein Gewinn für #IT-Sicherheit, #Datenschutz und die heimische Digitalwirtschaft.

Langfristiges Ziel ist die vollständige digitale Souveränität des Landes.

https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/_startseite/Artikel2024/II/240403_digitalsouveraene_verwaltung.html

Wir ziehen den Hut und wünschen eine erfolgreiche Umsetzung!🎩

#OpenSource #DigitaleSouveränität

Einstieg in den Umstieg

Schleswig-Holstein setzt künftig auf einen digital souveränen IT-Arbeitsplatz in der Landesverwaltung – das hat das Kabinett nun beschlossen.

^{schleswig-holstein.de}

Have you seen @nextcloud AI Assistant 2.0?

You can now chat about your own documents and data, use GPU acceleration, transcribe audio with Whisper, use your own LLMs, and a ton more integrations and new features.

All #open-source 😀

Boosts appreciated 🙏

https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-releases-assistant-2-0-and-pushes-ai-as-a-service/

#AI #mastodon #Linux #Foss #OSS

Hello fedi! I'm making my own immutable distro, and I've got some questions:

• what should I use to build? I was thinking bluebuild hut it might be more trouble than it saves, as I need to do stuff like add an extra btrfs subvolume on install, and I'd like a custom gtk4 installer.
• other than that, assuming I use bluebuild for now, would a structure like this work?
• core - has core system stuff, like kernel, bootloader, etc. Included in image, needs reboot to apply
• other/system - has other stuff like system flatpaks, config files, anything that doesn't need a reboot to change
  Each would be cached so only core or other would be rebuilt depending on the last value.
• other would use an overlay inside a btrfs sub volume. I was thinking I apply changes directly to the subvolume and rollback if they interrupt or an error occurs, but now I'm thinking a power cut or other force shutdown might mess that up.

Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks! You're helping to shape QuadOS! QuadOS currently has the following devs: Me, @Heliguy, and @winsdominoes. It aims to be like NixOS, but using flatpaks, and hopefully less janky.

#distro #linux #immutable #immutableOS #quadOS

A Windows user, a Mac user, and a Linux user walk into a bar.

➡️ The #Windows user orders a beer and gets into a fight over how bloated the selection is.

➡️ The #Mac user orders the most expensive single-origin craft cocktail and smugly admires its minimalist design.

➡️ The #Linux user installs a whole brewery in the corner and declares free drinks for everyone, but then spends the rest of the night explaining why their homemade brew is objectively superior.

I am working on a GTK/#Relm4 password manager already 😎
But it is a client for #BitWarden/#VaultWarden only.
You want to build a local one?

#GTK #Rust #rustlang #GNOME #Linux #Ubuntu #Linux #Fedora #OpenSUSE #Debian

Are you experienced with GTK and Rust ? ❤️

We are looking to contract someone to work on the new GNOME Password Manager 🔑

We want it to become a core/default app and help secure millions of users.

You'll be working with the GNOME Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to building emancipatory technologies for everyone.

Please send resume / portfolio to stf@gnome.org

Boosts welcome

#GTK #Rust #rustlang #GNOME #Linux #Ubuntu #Linux #Fedora #OpenSUSE #Debian

Junction 1.8 is out ✨

Junction pops up automatically when you open a file or link to let you choose which app to open with.

https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Junction

The highlight of this version is better mobile and touch support 📱

Plus, the app is now verified on Flathub and has a "High quality app data" rating.

#GNOME #GTK #Flatpak #Flathub #LinuxMobile #Linux

Witnessing @cas getting OnePlus 8 display working on Linux 📱

This is magic 🧙

#postmarketOS #Linux #hardwareEnablement #deGrowth

I am now a very responsible Linux app developer who verified their apps on @flathub

#theFutureIsNow #betterLateThanNever

😎

#Flathub #Flatpak #Linux #development

I think a LOT of people are missing the fact that we got LUCKY with this malicious backdoor.

The backdoor was created by an Insider Threat - by a developer / maintainer of various linux packages. The backdoor was apparently pushed back on March 8th (I believe) and MADE IT PAST all QA checks.

Let me state that again. Any quality assurance, security checks, etc., failed to catch this.

This was so far upstream, it had already gotten into the major Linux distributions. It made it into Debian pre-release, Fedora rolling, OpenSUSE rolling, Kali rolling, etc.

This is an example of Supply Chain Security that CISOs love to talk and freak out about. This is an example of an Insider Threat that is the boogey man of corporate infosec.

A couple more weeks, and it would have been in many major distributions without any of us knowing about it.

The ONLY reason we know about it is because @AndresFreundTec got curious about login issues and some benchmarking checks that had nothing to do with security and ran the issue down and stumbled upon a nasty mess that was trying to remain hidden.

It was luck.

That's it. We got lucky this time.

So this begs the question. Did the malicious insider backdoor anything else? Are they working with anyone else who might have access to other upstream packages? If the QA checks failed to find this specific backdoor by this specific malicious actor, what other intentional backdoors have they missed?

And before anyone goes and blames Linux (as a platform or as a concept), if this had happened (if it HAS happened!!!) in Windows, Apple, iOS, etc.... we would not (or will not) know about it. It was only because all these systems are open source that Andres was able to go back and look through the code himself.

Massive props and kudos and all the thank yours to Andres, those who helped him, to all the Linux teams jumping on this to fix it, and to all the folks on high alert just before this Easter weekend.

I imagine (hope) that once this gets cleaned up, there will be many fruitful discussions around why this passed all checks and what can be changed to prevent it from happening again.

(I also hope they run down any and all packages this person had the signing key for....)

#infosec #hacking #cve #cve20243094 #linux #FOSS

I learnt something important about Linux audio last night.

I noticed that I had no sound in X-Plane 12 (a flight simulator) while also being in a Discord call in Firefox. Apparently, certain FMOD applications check if PulseAudio is installed and fall back to ALSA if it isn't. Now, I have PipeWire installed to fix the mess that is Linux audio once and for all. So TECHNICALLY PulseAudio is not installed. And that's exactly what X-Plane detected, which then tried to gain complete control over the sound hardware through ALSA, which it couldn't.

The "fix" was to symlink `/bin/pulseaudio` to `/bin/true` to make it look like PulseAudio is available which tricked X-Plane into going through PulseAudio (and therefore through PipeWire) instead.

That was one of the weirdest problems I've ever encountered.

#linux #audio #xplane #xplane12 #discord #firefox #alsa #pulseaudio #pipewire #fmod #flightsim

https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

I have begun a post explaining this situation in a more detailed writeup. This is updating in realtime, and there is a lot still missing.

#security #xz #linux

Unfolding now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810

- https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4
- https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/commit/cf44e4b7f5dfdbf8c78aef377c10f71e274f63c0

An incredibly technically complex #backdoor in xz (potentially also in libarchive and elsewhere) was just discovered. This backdoor has been quietly implemented over years, with the assistance of a wide array of subtly interconnected accounts:

- https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/commit/ee44863ae88e377a5df10db007ba9bfadde3d314
- https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1067708
- https://github.com/jamespfennell/xz/pull/2

The timeline on this is going to take so long to unravel

#security #linux

feat: update vendored xz to 5.6.1 by jaredallard · Pull Request #2 · jamespfennell/xz

Updates the vendored version of xz to be 5.6.1. Also updates the vendor script to support the addition of SPDX-License-Identifier headers into some files.

^GitHub