#Open Source Software

[river-taxbird]

Have YOU got an old Windows PC Microsoft has told you can't run Windows 11? It's time to give it a new life!

How to install Windows 11 on unsupported PC Hardware using Rufus. You can also disable some other Windows 11 bullshit like data harvesting and needing a Microsoft account.

It has been in the news a lot lately that Windows 11 isn't allowed to be installed on PCs without certain requirements, including the TPM 2.0, a chip that was only included in PCs made in 2018 or later. This means that once Windows 10 stops receiving security updates, those PCs will not be able to (officially) run a safe, updated version of Windows anymore. This has led to an estimated 240 million PCs bound for the landfill. Thanks Microsoft! I get you don't want to be seen as the insecure one, but creating this much waste can't be the solution.

(I know nerds, Linux is a thing. I love you but we are not having that conversation. If you want to use Linux on an old PC you are already doing it and you don't need to tell me about it. People need Windows for all sorts of reasons that Linux won't cut.)

So lately I have been helping some under privileged teens get set up with PCs. Their school was giving away their old lab computers, and these kids would usually have no chance to afford even a basic computer. They had their hard drives pulled so I have been setting them up with SSDs, but the question was, what to do about the operating system? So I looked into it and I found out there IS actually a way to bypass Microsoft's system requirement and put Windows 11 on PCs as old as 2010.

You will need: Rufus: An open source ISO burning tool.

A Windows 11 ISO: Available from Microsoft.

A USB Flash Drive, at least 16GB.

A working PC to make the ISO, and a PC from 2018 or older you want to install Windows 11 on.

Here is the guide I used, but I will put it in my own words as well.

Download your Windows 11 ISO, and plug in your USB drive. It will be erased, so don't have anything valuable on it. Run Rufus, select your USB drive in the Device window, and select your Windows 11 ISO with the Select button. (There is supposed to be a feature in Rufus to download your ISO but I couldn't get it to work.?

Choose standard windows installation, and follow the screenshot for your settings. Once you are done that, press Start, and then the magic happens. Another window pops up allowing you to remove the system requirements, the need for a microsoft account, and turn off data collecting. Just click the options you want, and press ok to write your iso to a drive.

From there you just need to use the USB drive to install windows. I won't go into details here, but here are some resources if you don't know how to do it.

Boot your PC from a USB Drive

Install Windows 11 from USB Drive

If you had a licensed copy of Windows 10, Windows 11 will already be licensed. If you don't, then perhaps you can use some kind of... Activation Scripts for Microsoft software, that will allow you to activate them. Of course I cannot link such tools here. So there you go, now you can save a PC made from before 2018 from the landfill, and maybe give it to a deserving teen in the process. The more we can extend the lives of technology and keep it out of the trash, the better.

Additional note: This removes the requirement for having 4GB Minimum of RAM, but I think that requirement should honestly be higher. Windows 11 will be unusable slow on any system with below 8GB of RAM. 8GB is the minimum I think you should have before trying this but it still really not enough for modern use outside of light web and office work. I wouldn't recommend trying this on anything with 4GB or less. I am honestly shocked they are still selling brand new Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of ram. If you're not sure how much RAM you have, you can find out in the performance tab of Task Manager in Windows, if you click the More Details icon on the bottom right. If you don't have enough, RAM for old systems is super cheap and widely available so it would definitely be worth upgrading if you have a ram starved machine you'd like to give a new life.

[cyle]

still confused how to make any of these LLMs useful to me.

while my daughter was napping, i downloaded lm studio and got a dozen of the most popular open source LLMs running on my PC, and they work great with very low latency, but i can't come up with anything to do with them but make boring toy scripts to do stupid shit.

as a test, i fed deepseek r1, llama 3.2, and mistral-small a big spreadsheet of data we've been collecting about my newborn daughter (all of this locally, not transmitting anything off my computer, because i don't want anybody with that data except, y'know, doctors) to see how it compared with several real doctors' advice and prognoses. all of the LLMs suggestions were between generically correct and hilariously wrong. alarmingly wrong in some cases, but usually ending with the suggestion to "consult a medical professional" -- yeah, duh. pretty much no better than old school unreliable WebMD.

then i tried doing some prompt engineering to punch up some of my writing, and everything ended up sounding like it was written by an LLM. i don't get why anybody wants this. i can tell that LLM feel, and i think a lot of people can now, given the horrible sales emails i get every day that sound like they were "punched up" by an LLM. it's got a stink to it. maybe we'll all get used to it; i bet most non-tech people have no clue.

i may write a small script to try to tag some of my blogs' posts for me, because i'm really bad at doing so, but i have very little faith in the open source vision LLMs' ability to classify images. it'll probably not work how i hope. that still feels like something you gotta pay for to get good results.

all of this keeps making me think of ffmpeg. a super cool, tiny, useful program that is very extensible and great at performing a certain task: transcoding media. it used to be horribly annoying to transcode media, and then ffmpeg came along and made it all stupidly simple overnight, but nobody noticed. there was no industry bubble around it.

LLMs feel like they're competing for a space that ubiquitous and useful that we'll take for granted today like ffmpeg. they just haven't fully grasped and appreciated that smallness yet. there isn't money to be made here.

[bynux]

/* Filename: Discipline.scala */ for (i <- 1 to 1000) { println( f"$i%4d: I will not use code to cheat." ); } // >:3

[artemisblackwing]

If you hate capitalism, or just really like free stuff that's cool, check this out:

Have any of your gotten frustrated by Google's Play store? If so, check out F-Droid

It's a store that has open source apps which are described honestly by their creators because they're not trying to sell you something. It actually lists "anti-features" of apps right after the "features" list so you know all the flaws too.

I found the Saber notes app on it, which is actually also on Google Play but is drowned out there by all the other more annoying less functional apps.

[ezomind-the-other-one]

@rosewind2007 here's the promised fanart for https://archiveofourown.org/works/47718772

@ everyone else, I can explain:

-> the fic linked above is about Murderbot discovering that people made fanfics of the documentary by Dr Bharadwaj, and they ship it with Gurathin

(Made with Gephi by desecrating the airports database provided in the examples. Layout algorithm is Force Atlas.)

[macmanx]

At long last, the first release of GIMP 3.0 is here! This is the end result of seven years of hard work by volunteer developers, designers, artists, and community members (for reference, GIMP 2.10 was first published in 2018 and the initial development version of GIMP 3.0 was released in 2020). With GIMP 3.0 you can do more than ever before, more easily, more quickly!

[kittycatherder]

time to be excited about FOSS projects once again!

have a cool program for e2ee file transfer inspired by thinking about two wizards opening up wormholes to transfer tomes to each other

Get things from one computer to another, safely. This package provides a library and a command-line tool named wormhole, which makes it possible to get arbitrary-sized files and directories (or short pieces of text) from one computer to another. The two endpoints are identified by using identical “wormhole codes”: in general, the sending machine generates and displays the code, which must then be typed into the receiving machine. The codes are short and human-pronounceable, using a phonetically-distinct wordlist. The receiving side offers tab-completion on the codewords, so usually only a few characters must be typed. Wormhole codes are single-use and do not need to be memorized.

it also has some different clients including a gui version here (note; it's also a program you gotta use with command line but once it opens it'll have a window and you can just pin that to your taskbar to not have to run the command line to get it up and running)

and a web app

and some android and ios versions

[pencil2d-software]

Pencil2D 0.7.0 is out!

📢Change is inevitable…and after 3.5+ years and more than 480+ changes…

🎉Pencil2D 0.7.0 has been officially released!🎉

This version brings many volunteered backlog features, improvements & needed critical fixes.

You can read all about it in our release blog post ⤵️

We know it's been long overdue, but this release was massive while laying out the foundation for better things moving forward.

Nightly builds already have new changes and improvements too, so check them side by side if you run into any issues w/ release.

[socialjusticefail]

This video talks about the current state of open source software world and how corporations are changing the model.

[malkoddith]

You know whats totally based and should exist more?

free and open source software

[gleefulsketch]

Am I crazy for wanting to switch from my main art and animation setup to a FOSS/Linux one in terms of software?

[frog707]

Please hold

The project to convert my buildscripts to Kotlin is on hold because I have an EXCITING NEW PROJECT.

Earlier this month (June 2024) Mazhar Akbar drew my attention to his performance comparison between JMonkeyEngine and Godot on a physics-intensive workload. The comparison favored Godot by a large margin. I was skeptical at first, but gradually I became convinced that, in order to level the field, JMonkeyEngine needs a new physics engine, one based on Jolt Physics instead of Bullet.

So now I'm coding all-new JVM bindings for Jolt. Jolt is an open-source software project of some complexity (about 100,000 lines of C++ code), so this could take awhile. Please hold. But not your breath.

I'm having a blast!

[bynux]

[forestal-ramblings]

Trying to learn about Linux and open source software because my 2014 MacBook air is struggling and I feel like I need a computer science degree to get a basic OS installed in this machine.

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

OpenStreetMap - An open source online street map

Google Maps is incredibly useful - but did you know there's an open source equivalent? OpenStreetMap has been running for quite some time, and is a community driven replacement for Google, Bing and Apple maps. https://www.openstreetmap.org/

It's accessible via website, but there's also an app version which you can get for your phone which can be used similarly to Google Maps. The sat-nav functions aren't as good as other company-based products, but it does contain very good local-level information.

I've personally used it when hiking, visiting foreign cities in Europe and to create personal maps for tourist attractions, bookshops and good rock collecting spots. You can also download map data which can be used offline even if you don't have mobile signal.

They also have a community stories part of their website dedicated to the people who have used the project: https://www.openstreetmap.org/diary

If you want to support community led, open source, mapping software - do take a look at the funding page at: https://supporting.openstreetmap.org/