#Linux Software

[q4os-tde-official]

anybody know any fun, useful, or just plain cool software i should check out?

i want some stuff to mess about with once i have my new PC

doesn't have to serve a functional purpose either :3

[ms2253]

Highlights

Need to tweak a filter you applied hours ago? New in GIMP 3.0 is non-destructive editing for most commonly-used filters. See the changes in real time with on-canvas preview.

Exchange files with more applications, including BC7 DDS files as well as better PSD export and many new formats.

Don’t know how big to make your drawing? Simply set your paint tool to expand layers automatically as needed.

Making pro-quality text got easier, too. Style your text, apply outlines, shadows, bevels, and more, and you can still edit your text, change font and size, and even tweak the style settings.

Organizing your layers has become much easier with the ability to select multiple items at once, move them or transform them all together!

Color Management was again improved, as our long-term project to make GIMP an advanced image editor for all usages.

Updated graphical toolkit (GTK3) for modern desktop usage.

New Wilber logo!

[never-obsolete]

screenshot from the Wine website, 2003

[wojakgallery]

Title/Name: Average Linux Basement Dwellers Wojak Series: Soyjak (Variant) Image by: Unknown, found on Reddit [Here] Main Tag: Soyjak Wojak

[lesbian-moon-gf]

i think girls who know linux should be treated like sugar babies

[wayfire-official]

Tonight I woke up at 4am due to considerable stomach pain, and in my half-sleep I was very convinced that it was because of a bug in a script my belly was running, and I spent half an hour dream-debugging it to no avail until I finally realised that my belly doesn't run scripts

[youve-always-had-me-cas]

On a semi related note the more I am subjected to Microsoft products the more I become convinced that the reason so many people these days believe themselves to be “bad with computers” is that the programs they are forced to use in their professional life are utterly incomprehensible to ANY rational human being and they are (rightfully enough) extrapolating out that this is just how computers are. They aren't!!! In their quest to remove all the “scary” details from their poor fragile end users Microsoft have created an ecosystem that behaves completely erratically and unpredictably and is by definition unknowable. Things just happen. Then they stop happening. Nothing ever announces why or how. Just a thousand vague and useless popups that may or may not be there tomorrow. I PROMISE computers are actually extremely simple and logical beasts.

[nixcraft]

me_irl

[heart-ghost-studyblr]

Getting old is interesting. I've always been a middle ground between sports (skateboarding, surfing, jiu-jitsu) and an avid student. Over time, it's clear that you can't keep trying the same tricks, just as you can't study the same way.

Today, as I'm writing an article about event-driven architectures, I realize that final exams in college were much easier, just like it's not as easy to jump the same stairs on a skateboard as I did when I was 18. In the image, you can see my favorite note-taking app, Obsidian, and my Neovim terminal. I'm diving deep into Java, and for that, I'm taking a Spring Boot bootcamp offered by Claro through the DIO Innovation One platform.

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[sofie-gold]

Good news!

[adafruit]

Testing Dark Castle with audio on the RP2350 Fruit Jam 🕹️🏰

Jepler spent a bunch of time this week working on getting audio working on the pico-umac port https://github.com/jepler/pico-mac/tree/rp2350-fruitjam to Fruit Jam

. Audio on the hardware we're emulating is pretty straightforward: every scanline of the video generator also pops out one byte of PWM data. We have 370 horizontal lines—352 visible and 18 during the vsync—and a 60.15 Hz refresh rate for 22.255 KHz audio approximately. That data is written to $1FD00 http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/devel/plushw.php . That data is being piped over I2S to the MAX98357

and to a speaker for now.

So, of course, the first thing we have to try out is Dark Castle

: famous for great audio and being a surprisingly hard game to play! The audio sounds really good though :)

[never-obsolete]

Wubi (2008-2012) - a tool that installs Linux from inside Windows

[mallory-likes-whales]

Old software design: We released eleven versions in three years and haven't changed anything in forty years. We are the standard protocol for windowing on virtually all Unix-like systems.

Modern software design: Here's more ads, also, have you considered giving us more money? Also, what do you think of a total UI rewor- nvm we did it. Perish.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Free software is an example of a Luddite technology: an innovation in the interest of the preservation of practitioners’ autonomy against the imposition of control over the labor process by capitalists. By “breaking” software copyright and challenging closed and proprietary business models connected to it, free and open-source software has helped preserve independent and craft-like working conditions for programmers for decades. In addition to launching important software projects, like the operating system Linux, the free software movement was instrumental in establishing nonproprietary coding languages as standard in the industry, which meant that skill development, rather than being controlled exclusively by large corporations, could be done through open community involvement.

Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work

[forever-stuck-on-java-8]

The Windows security team at work decided to take away the local admin rights away from all the developers last night. A unlucky few were very not happy to find that their machine had bricked this morning due to the change. A revolution is brewing. By the end of the week we might be all on @fedora-official workstations.