libre
blog.freecad.org
After 21 years of development, FreeCAD 1.0 is rapidly approaching. The project has entered a release-candidate phase, where testing versions are released for last-minute evaluation and bug discovery before finalization. This post links to the RC1 announcement (the big news), but a [second  ](https://blog.freecad.org/2024/09/24/the-second-release-candidate-of-freecad-1-0-is-out/) release candidate has been published since then.
dispatchesmag.com
The libre spirit applied to woodworking & household furniture! >Rather than adopting an IKEA-like prescriptive approach to DIY, Autoprogettazione expressly encourages its participants to experiment freely with techniques and materials either by introducing formal variations to the designs or by realising different items altogether. Playful tinkering of this sort is the way in which human beings, since time immemorial, have developed what curator Glenn Adamson calls “material intelligence,” namely, the ability to understand deeply and give shape to the material world around us. A faculty which relies not so much on rational thought as on trial-and-error experimentation, resourcefulness, curiosity, intuition, and skill.
If you've been running Linux for a while, you may have seen `libcaca` get pulled in as a dependency here or there and thought it had a funny name. It is a library for manipulating text graphics ("ASCII Art," though it has full UTF-8 support). I visited their website this morning and thought it was remarkably quaint. Also got a big laugh out of ["Terror on the Desktop."](http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/hot-babe) ::: spoiler spoiler `hot-babe` was a CPU usage monitor for X11 displays which embedded in your desktop in a similar fashion to `conkey`. It featured an anime waifu who would get increasingly naked the more busy your computer was. A utility which now lives in the trash heap of computer history. :::
release.gnome.org
Now, I have always loved GNOME, but I spent the last few months in KDE. That was until I switched back to GNOME a couple of weeks ago. I know it's disliked by a lot of people, but some of these changes, like accent colors and the libadwita file save/open interface, really solidify *this* desktop my favorite.
Computer science students can't be taught to install anything more obscure than the most popular app, I guess.
I spun up an instance of paperless-ngx on my Docker host a couple days ago, and just yesterday got my document scanner configured to send things to its Consume folder. So far I'm beyond impressed and I wish I'd learned about it much sooner! I run a FreeNAS server which has collected a lot of important documents in its 10 years of life... all of them arranged in folders as best as I could. Fuck folders, tags are the way. It was easier than I expected to get the container running and tell it to watch a folder on the FreeNAS share. So I have a decade of pseudo-organized archives to import? Click and drag the folder, and it's done. Amazing. The automatic tagging seems OK so far. If I'm working on several documents of a similar provenance it starts suggesting appropriate tags after I manually tag about 10 or so. I'll be interested to see how it does as I train it more. I was never going to pay for a service like this, even though I really needed it. Finding out about paperless has been a revelation for me, haha. And on top of that it's the most "just works" of anything I've tried self-hosting so far. Easy to set up, and it seems feature-rich with a good UI. What's not to love?  Anyone else out there using paperless-ngx and have any tips or tricks to share? Things you wish you knew before? https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5444872 > I watched the "Robert Elder's Favourite Linux Command" YouTube playlist and learned a lot of ways to improve upon my scripts in Linux.
It all started because he was shitting on the NY Times for being an ad-ridden mess where you have to call a human in order to cancel your subscription. Someone called NY Times woke communist propaganda and Linus went nerd rage on them. [original post](https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm) 
[Announcement on the official release of deepin V23](https://bbs.deepin.org/en/post/276606) AI integrated but it's an interface requiring API key from OpenAI/Google/...
> An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media. We are pursuing this in two ways: TL;DR this is an EU petition aimed at making sure that companies are obligated to distribute binaries of the server code of their multiplayer and live service games. Currently, video game companies of online/live service games use a form of SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute) model where the "game" someone has purchased is simply a license to run the game in only the way the company sees fit (their servers, their platform, their rules). If a company were to go under or simply not run the servers required for the full game to function, then the user is out of luck as they've effectively had the game taken away from them. This is just another example of why *ALL* leftists must strive to fight for free software. If we don't consider software which respects your freedom an important endeavor to uphold, then we make ourselves vulnerable for further and further exploitation. If you're reading this, this includes *you* as well.
We first need to obtain a blocklist of all possible Israeli ip addresses. This can be obtained from two sources. 1. https://www.ip2location.com/free/visitor-blocker (choose peer guardian format) 2. https://www.iblocklist.com/ Due to the nature of how IP addresses are distributed, these blocklists have to be updated, but that isn't a huge concern for us right now. When you downloaded the file for Israel from either site, it should look something like this: ``` Israel:2.16.36.0-2.16.36.255 Israel:2.22.233.0-2.22.233.255 Israel:2.52.0.0-2.55.255.255 Israel:2.57.228.0-2.57.231.255 Israel:2.58.33.0-2.58.33.255 Israel:3.2.42.0-3.2.42.63 Israel:3.5.56.0-3.5.59.255 Israel:5.22.128.0-5.22.135.255 Israel:5.28.128.0-5.28.191.255 Israel:5.29.0.0-5.29.255.255 Israel:5.100.248.0-5.100.255.255 ``` If you wish to add more nations to the list such as TERF island or the 4th Reich, then you can append the files on top of each other into one file. Once you have the file, rename it with the `.p2p` extension so that qbittorrent will use it. Then, in your qbittorrent client, go to `Preferences -> Connection`. At the very bottom you should see a section labeled `IP Filtering`. In the Filter Path checkbox, select your .p2p file. You may also check the box to block trackers as well. In other bittorrent software (hopefully you're using one that's libre) there should be a similar option for ip filtering. There you go! You have effectively banned Israel from being your peer while you're doing p2p transfers. This won't stop Zionists from peering with you using a VPN or other undetected server, but this has done wonders for my mood. Always remember to port forward and seed when torrenting (A non-Zionist VPN like AirVPN or ProtonVPN can allow you to do that). Only a Zionist does a download and run. Resources 1. https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/discussions/17457 From the discussion post: > I was talking on my part, don't know about others. I'm a constant seeder (7+ years) and monitor peers from time to time or when downloading something. > During these years I've never seen a single Israeli seed on a rare torrent, or high download traffic from them. I'm being completely honest, the only time I see them is when they are downloading something from me.
Desktop state is neatly organized using freedesktop standards. Since components are so modular, it's trivial to replace or modify any of them using any client program you wish.   This is peak "Year of the Linux Desktop" behavior   
COSMIC by System76 and POP!_OS 24.04 just reached its alpha stage. You can try it out by downloading the POP!_OS 24.04 ISO from the posted link. Previous COSMIC posts here: - https://hexbear.net/post/3111581 - https://hexbear.net/post/2506169 - https://hexbear.net/post/2499316
pointieststick.com
# Abridged Version > Wayland is a set of protocols that govern how a compositor draws stuff on the screen, and how apps interact with the compositor’s drawing-stuff-on-the-screen infrastructure. It’s similar to the HTTP and SMTP protocols that govern how web browsers and email clients send and receive web pages and data. > # Why does Wayland exist? > > In a nutshell, because X11–the thing it’s replacing–is dead > The fundamental X11 development model was to have a heavyweight window server–called Xorg–which would handle everything, and everyone would use it. Well, in theory there could be others, and at various points in time there were, but in practice writing a new one that isn’t a fork of an old one is nearly impossible. Everyone strongly preferred to standardize on a single X server and migrated in unison from one to another when a better fork became available, because it was convenient. And it was convenient because because it centralized limited development resources, and when a feature was added to the X server, everyone gained access to it automatically. > > In essence, Xorg became too large, too complicated, and too fragile to touch without risking breaking the entire Linux ecosystem. It’s stable today because it’s been essentially frozen for years. But that stability has come hand-in-hand with stagnation. As we all know in the tech world, projects that can’t adapt die. Projects that depend on them then die as well. > The fact that Wayland’s minimal core protocol made it unable to fully replace the thing it aimed to replace was a bad architectural design decision on the part of its authors that crippled the prospect of its rapid adoption when it was released in 2008. We didn’t see the same problem with other newer projects like Systemd and PipeWire which were adopted much faster. > A lot of app developers became accustomed to tuning out Wayland news while it was still a toy, and didn’t do the porting work. Well, it’s not a toy anymore, and now many are now feeling blindsided by the sudden urgency to port their apps to use Wayland. That’s understandable. But this time it’s for real, and the time to port is now. For any protocols that still aren’t good enough and need revision, app developers’ input is needed to revise them or even propose new ones. This process takes a long time, so better to start sooner rather than later. But it’s not just gonna go away. > # Putting it all together > > Wayland is a replacement for X11, which is dead. Despite a rocky development process, it’s ready enough for Plasma and KDE apps that Fedora KDE is pushing it pretty hard. Many 3rd-party apps are already Wayland-native, but many are not, and they need to put in the work to port to Wayland. If anything they need is still missing, they need to step up to be part of the process of adding it. This process is happening, and isn’t going to stop happening. We need to work together to make it happen faster and more smoothly.
I don't know? Is it? (yes) 6 quick steps to enter a live Linux Mint environment (a try before you buy option) 1. [Grab the Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" ISO](https://linuxmint.com/) 2. Grab a USB flash drive that is at least 4GB large or more 3. Download a bootable usb flasher [MacOS, Windows (balenaEtcher) ](https://etcher.balena.io/) | [Windows (Rufus)](https://rufus.ie/en/) 4. Flash that Mint ISO onto the stick 5. Power off your machine, when you turn it back on, enter the system's boot menu by hitting a special key (you might have to set the boot order in your BIOS) [(this is a guide on accessing your firmware)](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bios-keys-to-access-your-firmware,5732.html) this is likely the hardest step. 6. Boot into Linux Mint by clicking on the first entry on the Mint boot menu, wait for it to fully load. Success, you're now in a Linux Mint live environment, you don't have to install it and it has done nothing with your existing operating system. You can play around in this environment for as long as you want. When you're ready to make the switch, back up your important data on your existing OS first and then go through the Linux Mint install. [More info here on installing by a fellow hexbear](https://hexbear.net/post/2720264)
blog.system76.com
Some previews: "Frost Giant"  "Early sunset"  "COSMIC DOOM"  "COSMIC 95"  First alpha release is on August 8th along with the alpha of POP!_OS 24.04.
New Linux Mint dropped, it's time to dump your toxic relationship with Windows in search of greener pastures. [@AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net](https://hexbear.net/u/AssortedBiscuits) Made a [guide on installing Linux Mint](https://hexbear.net/post/2720264), the steps are virtually identical to this new release. One change is that in order to see all flatpak apps on Flathub you have to toggle seeing unverified flatpaks. If there's any miss from this release it would be this, but it can always be reverted in the future or Flathub themselves can make this a non-issue with more manual verification. Steps to upgrade from Mint 21.3 are coming in the following days. --- "With Freedom Came Elegance" - Linux Mint motto.
> The platforms have rigged things so that you must have an account with them in order to function, but they also want to have the unilateral right to kick people off their systems. The combination of these demands represents more power than any company should have, and Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated its unfitness to wield this kind of power.
I have to fill in some forms and email it but the forms are a xerox of a file, saved as a PDF. So, most PDF reader and fillers are unable to recognize I'm trying to type on the document. I also need to provide a signature on the document but it's doesn't have to be a certified signature( I ran into this with adobe). Anyone know of any good software to use? I had some luck with master pdf editor 5 but it gave the file a watermark that I had remove with libre office, and I still couldn't sign it.
What's the lowest ram consumption i can expect on Arch ? im using Arch with the stock kernel + dwm/st + pure alsa + ~700 packages(~250mb on idle, dwm activated).
So i was thinking about to give OpenBSD a try to see if it could fit a minimalist user like me. I know it's not made for desktop users, which is not my case(i use Dwm, a limited amount of packages and tweaking my system dosn't scare me).
Is there like an IRC room or forum for help with nonlibre guix? More specifically I installed guix on my laptop and it can't detect my bluetooth device or sound card. Probably some other stuff too, but I don't know how to troubleshoot, what to google much less where to begin a solution. But I can't ask in the official chat because I installed nonguix, and I think the drivers aren't libre or at least it's related to the nonlibre linux kernel I installed.
mastodon.social
Seriously stop polluting my $HOME! `.pki .mozilla .java .gnupg .emacs.d .cargo .thunderbird .steam` dotfiles and their consequences were a disaster for the penguin race.  This is a very petty issue but I'm still PISSED. 
Source: https://akko.isabelroses.com/notice/AjV6vmHrvDp6k3V2pc
Linux Mint 22 BETA is out based on the most recent Ubuntu LTS 24.04. Important Changes: - Linux Mint currently ships with the Linux 6.8 kernel. More importantly, Mint will now follow Ubuntu's Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel series so Mint can work on the latest machines. This also removes the confusion of the "Edge ISO" as this affects all Mint 22 users. - Linux Mint uses Pipewire as its audio stack. - The Linux Mint team along with other communities in the "we forked off of GNOME when it became GNOME 3" have started the Xapp project which plans to continue GTK desktop app development sans libadwaita and GNOME specific technologies. - Mint now uses Matrix for community coordination and includes the Element webapp client preinstalled. - Cinnamon 6.2 and various UX improvements.  --- Windows 10 goes End of Life in October 2025.
Are there any distributions that offer benefits post-installation? I am aware of Arch (and some other relevant distributions) having access to the AUR, and would like to know if other distributions can offer anything other than a quicker set-up.
Dropping this recommendation because I’ve been looking for a reasonably good iOS Lemmy app for a year. They’ve all been bad (IMO), but this is so far the closest to how good Apollo for Reddit was, in terms of features and polish. It is also FOSS which is great. I haven’t tried the Android version, but since the apps seem to just be containers for the web app ([vger.app](http://vger.app)), I imagine it’s just as good over there. The one feature I noticed missing is user avatars. I don’t know the developer or anything. Just glad to not have to use the browser to use Hexbear.
This thing just keeps on trucking. Closes in three hours. Of course I'm already drowning in technical books & manuals but setting up my own email server is like the ultimate federated social media thing to do, especially in conjunction with open source development using git. Included books: * Run Your Own Mail Server, in your chosen format * Networking for Systems Administrators * Ed Mastery * $ git commit murder (fiction novel) * PAM Mastery * Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition * SSH Mastery If it reaches $85k (unlikely) then Tarsnap Mastery will be included.
NixOS is a GNU/Linux distribution based on declarative builds using the functional Nix package manager. It boasts the most amount of available software on any Linux distribution as well as configuration options for various programs. There are more than 100,000 packages on `nixpkgs` as well as more than 10,000 options for system configuration. Nix resources: - [Vimjoyer's video series on Nix hosted on YouTube](https://redirect.invidious.io/playlist?list=PLko9chwSoP-15ZtZxu64k_CuTzXrFpxPE) (invidious proxy) - [No Boilerplate on NixOS](https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=CwfKlX3rA6E&t=75) (invidious proxy) NixOS is a great way to learn how GNU/Linux works as well as to build a system configuration that you can take anywhere, anytime.
social.jvns.ca
Not affiliated with her or anything I just absolutely love these zines, they are the single greatest learning resource for all skill levels I've come across in tech. Her reputation is well deserved. Having great git skills (more than just clone/commit/push/pull) is critically important for participating in FOSS so I'll be picking this one up.
I just tried out the COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) created and engineered by System76 (people who are behind POP!_OS). It was an incredible experience even though it was just a pre-alpha. COSMIC was engineered virtually from the ground-up to be System76's solution to move away from GNOME and onto their own tech stack. The entire DE is written in the Rust programming language utilizing the iced application framework with their in-house application library libcosmic (similar to how KDE uses Qt+Breeze+Frameworks or GNOME uses GTK + Libadwaita). ### Impressions If you're familiar with POP!_OS 22.04's take on GNOME, then the workflow is no different here with emphasis on features such as tiling, application dock, application launcher, universal search launcher and of course: auto-tiling. One of the exclusive features of COSMIC is its 1st class support for custom theming on the fly. You're allowed to theme the desktop in almost any way you can (even with nauseating colors) and the DE will adapt to your preferences.  It can even theme gnome apps! (I read other books dw)  Auto-tiling is also great to use, you can toggle specific windows to be floating or tiled.  Theme integration with Qt apps are a work in progress + some quirks of running COSMIC in a container with KDE. So far, I really enjoy how buttery smooth everything is (besides some pre-alpha stuttering), the entire desktop feels like a really cohesive experience. It has the efficiency of a tiling window manager but the convenience of a DE. It has an overview!!! (super+w)  You can also stack windows on top of each other  Not everything is implemented (obviously) but just the promise of a DE that does tiling and window management like this has me sold. ### How to try out COSMIC? #### NixOS There's a [flake](https://github.com/lilyinstarlight/nixos-cosmic) #### Fedora Atomic Desktop You can use a [universal blue image](https://github.com/ublue-os/cosmic) and rebase to that, it even includes options for having a fallback desktop environment of either GNOME or KDE as well. #### Other - Arch has an [AUR package](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cosmic-epoch-git) - Fedora has a [COPR repository](https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ryanabx/cosmic-epoch/) - Compile from source ([instructions](https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch)) *Note that this cannot be used in production: cosmic is pre-alpha software as well as needing to turn off SELinux.* Or wait until POP!_OS 24.04 is released with a stable version of COSMIC this summer. This has been my first time running COSMIC but when the stable version drops you bet I'm switching over (though no one can take away my Fedora atomic distro). --- Switch to GNU/Linux or pay the ultimate price 
Death to Amerikkka
blog.system76.com
TL;DR: System76's COSMIC first alpha is going to be in late May with new COSMIC desktop apps. The planned stable release will still be in late summer with POP!_OS 24.04. I've been following this since it started like 2 years ago so it's unbelievable that an alpha is going to be upon us so soon. This is largely the most ambitious undertaking that any libre software group has taken in a long while (apart from Asahi Linux and graphics work).
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2006806 > In response to a [post](https://programming.dev/post/9096182) made by [@actual_patience@programming.dev](https://programming.dev/u/actual_patience) about a month ago, asking if anybody has tried Bcachefs. > > I recently got around to giving Bcachefs a shot. I am currently running a Gentoo system with Bcachefs as the root filesystem. The filesystem consists of a 1.5TB NVMe volume backed by a conventional 6TB hard disk drive. > > Getting it set up was no picnic. I might be missing something, but as far as I can tell a lot of standard tooling lacks support for filesystems spanning multiple block devices (single-partition Bcachefs seems to work like any other FS, but that defeats the point of using Bcachefs). It seems most of them assume you are going to use LVM for a use case like this, while Bcachefs sidesteps the device-mapper interface (and everything built on top, like LUKS and LVM) completely. > > At the moment, Bcachefs uses a colon-separated list to specify these block devices. From things like the initramfs generated by dracut or mkinitcpio to utilities included in util-linux, this syntax is not widely supported. A multi-device Bcachefs filesystem can be mounted with `mount`. The command looks something along the lines of `mount -t bcachefs /dev/nvme0n1p1:/dev/sda1 /mnt`. These multi-device lists only work if you specify the filesystem type explicitly, and I had to roll my own initramfs [from scratch](https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/stable/postlfs/initramfs.html) in order to take this input from the kernel command line and handle it specially. Though `mount` works, libraries like libblkid (and probably others) report suspicious results about the volume / constituent partitions (i.e. that only one of the constituent partitons is mounted). That said, I am not running *bleeding* versions of Linux, util-linux, or bcachefs. Unstable maybe, but provided by versioned ebuilds in Gentoo. It is also worth noting, it is not currently possible to *mount* Bcachefs subvolumes the way you can Btrfs subvolumes. The only way this can be done currently is via bind mounts. There is an issue open to implement this feature, but it is not currently a high priority. > > The filesystem itself appears to be working smoothly, though there are several rough edges (for instance, I don't think you can currently change a filesystem label after formatting it. Also it struggles when there is not enough space available to reach the `replicas_required` target. I didn't get an error, it just got super slow). > > Before trying this out, I used to run Btrfs in a multi-disk LVM which performed ssd caching at the block layer. Performance on Bcachefs isn't noticeably worse or better IMO, but I haven't done any remotely empirical side-by-side benchmarks. I just got this running yesterday and will need more time to assess performance. I will need to put a lot more data into this filesystem before it starts missing cache on the hot drive, for instance. > > Bcachefs is *certainly* in an experimental state (as the Linux menuconfig tool will remind you), but it aims to do exactly what I am looking for in a filesystem so I had to try it out. I plan on sticking with it unless a catastrophe occurs.