leopold

joined 10 months ago
[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 5 points 2 days ago

Uh, no. Not the majority. Not by a long shot.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 26 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Kinda insane how many people in a nominally open source community are defending this guy for switching to a proprietary license. If DuckStation gets shut down then I say good riddance. It is not the only PS1 emulator in town and I will not miss the endless flow of Stenzek-related drama.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 34 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Well, Steam and Proton both already run on top of FEX or Box64 on ARM Linux, but it's nice to see an official effort from Valve.

Also, does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86? That adds a not insubstantial amount of CPU overhead, which does hurt battery life.

And perhaps most importantly, is there any ARM chipset out there that can deliver performance on par with the Steam Deck's CPU (even after factoring in the overhead of the x86 JIT) at a viable price for a Steam Deck successor?

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Unless they changed it, mobile Firefox is locked to a limited set of extensions unless you:

  1. Use Nightly.
  2. Create a Mozilla account.
  3. Log in to that account on the Add-Ons site and create an add-on collection with all the extensions you want to install.
  4. Set that collection as your source of add-ons in the Firefox settings.

You're also unable to use about:config unless you're using Nightly (or maybe Beta). So Nightly is really the only version worth using since it doesn't have nearly as many artificial restrictions as the stable version does. This is also true to a lesser extent on desktop where you have to use Nightly to install unsigned extensions.

You also can't open any offline HTML files for whatever reason and on devices with very little RAM (like 2GB) Firefox isn't viable, but Chrome-based browsers work mostly fine. Firefox is still the best mobile browser though, mostly because it supports extensions at all.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Qt1 came with two default themes. One of them mimicked Win95 and the other mimicked Motif. KDE1 defaulted to the former in order to look more familiar. To this day, the "Windows 9x" theme still ships with Qt and can be selected on any Plasma 6 install. Starting with KDE2 they started using their own custom themes for everything, tho.

GNOME 1 actually looked very similar, which isn't surprising because its main goal at that point was to offer a replacement for KDE that didn't depend on then-proprietary Qt. GNOME 2 and KDE 2 is when they really started building a distinct identity.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Is this really useful? Like, is this something people ever need to do? I don't do lucid dreams very often, but the rare times a dream has lead me to the thought of "hold on, am I dreaming?" were basically immediately answered by just, uh, vibes, I guess? Like, it's always just been instantly obvious that I'm dreaming the moment I'd start questioning it, no tests necessary. At worst I might have to try to remember what I did the day before and what I was supposed to be doing that day and see if that is at all compatible with the scenario I'm dreaming about, which it usually isn't.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Esperanto has grammatical gender.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 12 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (4 children)

Do you... not know how multi-licensing works? You can use the project's code under the terms of whichever license you prefer, you don't use all three at once. Simply putting the AGPLv3 does remove unfair restrictions, because it means you don't have to use either of the proprietary licenses the project was previously only available under.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 8 points 4 weeks ago (6 children)

I don't follow. ElasticSearch was only available under proprietary source-available licenses. Now, it's also available under the AGPL, which is open source, meaning ElasticSearch is now open source software. What part of this is deceptive or contradictory?

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Uh, Cinnamon does not need a compatibility app to run Qt apps. No desktop environment does. You mostly just need to be X11 or Wayland compliant. The same is true with GTK.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Dunno. Regardless of the method used by the extension, I think any extension called "Bypass Paywalls" that does what it says on the tin can pretty unambiguously be said to be designed to circumvent "technological protection measures". In this case, it circumvents the need to login entirely and obviously it circumvents the paywall.

Though as you said, these guys should probably be sending DMCAs to the Internet Archive if they actually want to stop their paywalls from being bypassed. I know they do honor takedown requests. Maybe archive.today is the problem? Maybe they don't honor DMCA requests. I very often see them used on Hacker News whenever someone wants share a paywall-free link to an article.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 1 points 1 month ago

You can do that with permissively licensed software too. Except with those, the party distributing their repackaged version doesn't have to distribute source code alongside it. A lot of companies avoid copyleft software because they don't want to or cannot deal with stricter licensing terms. If you're a company creating commercial software which you intend to sell, you don't want to use any GPL code, because you want to keep your software closed source to avoid exactly what you described from happening.

This can be exploited by primarily licensing your open source code using strong copyleft (like the AGPLv3) while selling commercial licenses to businesses that don't want to comply with the AGPL and are willing to pay up. Qt is able to successfully use this even with weaker copyleft (LGPLv3) because it's used a lot in embedded systems (like smart cars) which cannot comply with the LGPLv3's anti-tivoization clause.

This means copyleft licenses can make it easier to profit if you're the author of the code, but of course third parties can more easily profit from permissive licenses.

72
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by leopold@lemmy.kde.social to c/kde@lemmy.kde.social
 

Amarok was KDE's flagship music player during the KDE3 and Plasma 4 days. For Plasma 5, a new music player called Elisa was created with Kirigami which is the current KDE flagship music player. The last full release of Amarok was 2.9.0 in 2018, still targeting Qt4. A Plasma 5 port was started with the intention of being released as Amarok 3.0, but despite a usable alpha 2.9.71 release in 2021, the full 3.0 release was never completed. Outside of the occasional odd pull request, the project was essentially dead and was listed as unmaintained by apps.kde.org.

Two weeks ago, occasional contributor Tuomas Nurmi, author of over a third of these pull requests, made a push to become an Amarok maintainer, starting this thread in the mailing list: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/2024-March/014748.html

In the thread, Tuomas expresses his desire to revive Amarok. He believes a second alpha for 3.0 can be released in mid-April and a full Plasma 6 port could be completed within 2024 after the release of 3.0. Tuomas has since created a fair amount of merges and fixes in preparation for 3.0 and has shown no sign of stopping.

This is very exciting news. For many, Elisa isn't a satisfying replacement for Amarok. It simply doesn't come close to matching Amarok's power and features. It also has the drawback of being a convergent application, meaning compromises have to be made to make the interface work well on smartphones.

It's also victim to the many drawbacks of Kirigami. Theming is worse since Plasma has to convert QtWidget themes to QtQuick themes, which works great for Breeze, but meh for everything else. There is no good equivalent for KStandardAction/QAction, KHamburgerMenu or KStandardShortcut. Any Kirigami app that wants customizable toolbars and shortcuts need to go out of their way to implement them, while QtWidgets apps just get them for free. You also don't have a good QDockWidget equivalent that I know of. Apps that do bother to reimplement some of these features (Haruna is the only one I know of) still don't have toolbar customization to nearly the same extent QtWidgets apps do. Most Kirigami apps don't bother with this at all and lose a lot of customizability in the process. Elisa is not Haruna, tho. There is no shortcut customization, there is no toolbar to customize and that hamburger menu can't be turned into a menubar.

For years, the solution was Strawberry, a fork of Amarok still under active development. Thing is, Strawberry is a fork of Clementine, itself a fork of Amarok 1.4. That's old. That's 2008 Amarok, not 2018 Amarok. Clementine had its first release in 2010, when Amarok was still going strong. It was for good reason, Amarok 2.0 introduced a very divisive redesign of the interface, which prompted a fork. But this means 2.0+ Amarok and Strawberry are actually very different beasts. For those who were using Amarok 2.9, switching to Strawberry meant switching to a new music player, making it far from an ideal successor. So I'm very much excited for the return of Amarok, the best music player KDE has had.

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