samc

Its all about how an application goes from "I would like to display X on a screen" to how X actually gets displayed. Wayland is effectively a language (technically a protocol) that graphical applications can speak to describe how they would like to be drawn. It's then up to a different program more deeply embedded in your OS to listen to and act on those instructions (this program is called a Wayland compositor). There's a lot more to it (handling keyboard input monitor settings, etc), but that's the general idea.

Wayland is a (relatively) new way of thinking about this process, that tries to take into account the wide variety of input and output devices that exist today, and also tries to mitigate some of the security risks that were inherent to previous approaches (before Wayland, it was very easy for one application to "look at" what was being displayed in a completely different app, or even to listen to what keys were being typed even when the app isn't focussed).

Thing is, change is hard, doubly so in the consensus driven world of Linux/FOSS. So, until the last couple of years or so, adoption of Wayland was quite slow. Now we're at the point where most things work at least as well in Wayland, but there's still odd bits of software that either haven't been ported, or that still rely on some features that don't exist in Wayland, often because of the aforementioned security risks.

At the end there's a little jab towards Wayland:

Today, the Wayland enthusiasts like to talk about how they are modernizing the Linux graphics stack. But Linux is a Unix, and in Unix, everything is meant to be a file. So any Wayland evangelists out there, tell us: where in the file system can I find the files describing a window on the screen under the Wayland protocol? What file holds the coordinates of the window, its place in the Z-order, its colour depth, its contents?

As far as I'm aware nobody has even considered extending the file metaphor to the graphics stack, and it sounds a bit ridiculous to me.

It also reminds me of this talk that suggests maybe trying to express everything as a file might not be the best idea...

There's a common thread between a lot of the missteps listed here and Embeacer group's recent troubles. The idea that you could fund 230 Spiderman 2's for the same price as buying 1 Activision-Blizzard-King really drove the point home to me.

The problem (in my obviously uneducated opinion) is that when you spend so much money in acquisition, especially of established companies, you're neither funding nor rewarding innovation. You spend $70B on ABK and some randos in suits get a huge payout that they invest in oil or crypto or whatever. Spend $70B on talent and early career devs and you could unleash a tidal wave of creativity and experimentation.

I always thought that people using searx etc over duckduckgo were just gluttons for punishment. Having gone an entire morning without search, maybe now is the time to dive down that rabbit hole...

Eventually valve will probably push a SteamOS update out with plasma 6. But it'll be up to then when to do it.

By default, XWayland apps are now allowed to listen for non-alphanumeric keypresses, and shortcuts using modifier keys. This lets any global shortcut features they may have work with no user intervention required, while still not allowing arbitrary listening for alphanumeric keypresses which could potentially be used maliciously

This is... very smart actually. Any reason this is limited to Xwayland? (Is that XDG portal a thing yet?)

Whilst I've heard lots of talk that lunduke is getting increasingly politica, and I disagree quite strongly with his politics, I'll have to agree with him here. IA did something unnecessarily risky (redistributing unauthorised copies of print books), which has more jeopardised their mission of archiving the internet.

I also agree with everyone here saying that current copyright laws are ridiculous (and not just because they are "outdated", the Victorians had better copyright laws than we do). However, I think only the most radical overhaul of copyright law would condone what IA did, and that isn't coming any time soon (If ever).

I do wonder what percentage of Linux users reject the survey compared to Windows users. Not that it's changed much, but every little helps right?

Games.

Other than basic things like Tetris (Quadrapassel) and minesweeper, I've not yet found an open source game I've enjoyed nearly as much as the countless proprietary games I own and play.

So yeah, going 100% air-source heat pump if you're area regularly spends time around -30°C (-22F) might not be the best idea. Though even the last report you cited said it might be 1.5-2x as efficient as resistive heating. And that Site 1 with bad COPs was because they manually lowered the fan speed...

Underrated comment.

This seems like a false dichotomy. Maxwell's equations don't say anything about where the charge comes from, only how the electromagnetic field behaves if charge (be it electric or magnetic) is present.

And if you're talking about the standard model, well we've known that that's incomplete since its inception, but I'm not aware of any argument that says anything beyond the standard model must have either monopole or a fundamentally different conception of magnetic dipoles.

Its just the symbol The Register uses at the end of an article. Like how some papers use a filled in square.

I love the concept of organic maps, and do even use it occasionally, but for now I'm mostly sticking to OSMand.

The main feature missing for me is the ability to customise the map styles. I like using map apps for hiking and organic maps default (/only) style is ugly at best and unusable at worst for this.

Firstly, yes, lol Booty.

But I found the comments around Redfall interesting/concerning. Even if a studio gets promised independence in one of these giant mergers, they only have to fuck up once to get that taken away.

I'm not going to defend Redfall in any way, it actually does sound like a case of mismanagement. But I worry about the stifling of creativity that occurs when every studio is trying to play it safe to avoid becoming the next Bioware

Kotlin targets the JVM right? I think you'd need either a port of the runtime (dalvik?) Or an api translation later a la WINE.

But I don't actually know anything, so don't listen to me. Having a fully Foss phone with support for the android app ecosystem would be wonderful though

The point of Linux on phones isn't to have a phone that requires you to constantly fix it with CLI tools. The point is to have a free and open software platform for a device that is increasingly necessary for daily life.

As a side effect, developing Linux for phones would probably help us eliminate the need to reach for the terminal on desktop Linux as well. I believe snaps (which laid the groundwork for flatpaks) were originally developed for Linux on "smart" devices. The whole ecosystem improves when we try to bring Linux into a new domain.

P.S. I use termux (a terminal for android complete with its own tiny Linux environment) from time to time when I need to access my server over SSH. It's a bit clumsy, but super handy!

I guess the argument would be that software fixes need to be implemented for each ROM separately. Which also involves the pain of decompiling. Yes FPGAs are probably a pain, but they potentially offer perfect emulation of every game.

One thing I'm not sure about is how portable FPGA logic is. If I write a NES emulator in verilog for one FPGA, can that code be reused on a later model if, for example, my FPGA goes out of production?

I wish there was an option for an android style system where, when an application wants to use a permission for the first time, you get a pop up asking you to grant that permission.

Or, more generally, just some way to ensure that (a) a flatpak isn't granted the permissions it wants automatically and (b) I can then manually grant those permissions as conveniently as possible

Is this the one that was planning to be a full open world RPG originally? (Sui Generis IIRC) I'm guessing that's unlikely to happen by this point. Exanima still looks fun though

What's happening with The Escapist? I thought things had been going better over there recently

permission denied: /dev/display/3/349/1045

I've had to give up on KISS launcher recently because of this. 95% of the time it works fine, until it scrolls right to the end of the lost and won't allow you to scroll back. Swiping left and right then also breaks and the only thing to do is force stop quickstep.

EDIT: Just tried with Niagara and got the same issue almost immediately. (Seems to be triggered by opening recent apps from the launcher itself)

For reference, I'm on a Fairphone 5 using the stock ROM

Isn't production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?

Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.

I agree with your main point though, it's kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people's code to run on our machines.

Is that an issue if you need to login first?

That's at least somebody's idea of a good time...

How bloody dare you!

I've been having a lot of fun with scheme lately (specifically guile, but I don't think it matters much). It's a very stripped down language compared to common lisp, so I felt it was easier to get started with.

There is, they just don't publicise it. Actually one of my favourite features of the service tbf. Just load up a web page and all my messages are there, regardless of where they came from.

Best I've ever had was like 60mbps down. Might be a budget thing though, I refuse to pay more than £30/month for internet

I'd argue that ML is the more general term (that could even apply to computing a line of best fit, if you're an extremist). But yeah, it's just semantics at this point

Whilst I agree that that's a nice option to have (more options are usually better!) I've come to love the linux way of distribution via repositories. These days I barely use the cli too: GNOME software and KDE's Discover are great. Perhaps an official nightly flatpak would be best?

Thanks, fixed! (TIL you need the https:// bit on Lemmy)