Free and Open Source Software

Even though the polygons don't exactly merit much of a second look, I'm shocked by how smoothly it runs and just generally how well-implemented the engine is. Especially with the incredible diversity of the different factions, it sort of feels like a more relaxed but still tactical WarCraft 3-like RTS. You have gold, wood, stone, and a food quota to manage, but some factions function so differently; one sort of copies StarCraft's Zerg or Protoss in the way that it has existing units irreversibly upgrade and specialize in specific forms, and another summons some units on the fly instead of at a base building.

I also see that it's extremely moddable and some people tried to make sci-fi total conversions, but I unfortunately see none that have had any recent work (sci-fi's really my jam).

Has anyone else tried this cross-platform FOSS game? It's great!

I have been looking for alternative to Google products, including Google Maps and Waze. The best I've found is Organic Maps and OsmAnd. But I'm missing two features: public transport routes and live trafic.

For the latter point, I have used Magic Earth which uses OSM. But the app itself is not FOSS.

Does anyone know what their business model is? They don't charge for the app or service and the privacy policy does not seem like they commercialize data... What is their deal as a company?

I spent the morning trying to work out why all the Electron applications on my desktop (vscodium, the Signal client …) were once-a-fuc•ing-gain showing me clunky, foreign file-open and file-save dialogues (presumably from gtk) instead of correctly showing KDE's dialogues via the very-cursed XDG-desktop-portal mechanism.

I'm on Gentoo. Had I, perhaps, broken something?

Nope. It's just yet another regression up-stream, in Electron:

• https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/231173#issuecomment-2410885232
• https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/43819#issuecomment-2379445244
• https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/1445#issuecomment-2379375660
• https://github.com/flathub/org.signal.Signal/issues/719

Once again, despite knowing that nobody has support for something because that thing has not been released as stable at all, yet, the whole Electron stack follows the belief that it's perfectly OK to release a change that depends on that thing and, without it, breaks every KDE user's desktop integration.

Then they blame it on xdg-desktop-portal not having released, yet. And won't roll the change back because December is their "quiet month" – neither will they fix it nor make a work-around, seemingly.

Anyway. Writing this post has served to exhaust my ire. One day, we'll see the back of Electron for good – I can only hope!

Let it also serve as a PSA: don't bother trying to work out if you've accidentally broken something on your Linux desktop – particularly if you're on Gentoo, Arch, Slackware or other hacker-friendly distribution. It's not you. It's not your system. It's just fuc•ing Electron – again!

I'm looking for an FOSS alternative to google forms that doesn't require people to sign in. If anybody has a suggestion that would be much appreciated

Well I just replaced my aging LG G6 with a new Google Pixel 8a running GrapheneOS. The G6 was based on Android 9 which was initially released in August 2018, and my last update was January 2019. The big issue, after 6 years since OS initial release, apps are starting to not support Android 9. Add to that, my USB-C plug was getting questionable in terms of retaining charging cables and my fingerprint reader has not worked for years.

So how to replace the G6? Well I choose a new Google Pixel 8a and GrapheneOS. The Google Pixel is one of the better supported hardware devices in the after market ROM landscape and GrapheneOS seems to be one of the most popular ROMs.

It took me about a week to do the transition. Lot of that was just normal when moving everything to a new phone and not using the vendors automatic tools. The actual initial setup and flashing though was pretty straight forward. It was a bit emotionally difficult to take new $400 hardware and then just simply re-flash it risking say bricking. This turned out to be a non-issue.

Benefits I see from doing this:

• Lack of Cruft. The lack of all the vendor loaded cruft was very nice. My old G6 has about 17 apps that I could never really delete because they were flashed into the ROM. Many of them fairly large Google suite apps.
• Profiles. The new phone can fully use user and work profiles, plus with Android 15 it has the Private Space feature. GrapheneOS also supports up to 31 user profiles, not the 4 supported by most distributions. I actually use the Private Space to contain my Google Play Services and Google Play Apps and otherwise just the owner profile. Might have been better to look at some of the other options, not sure.
• Storage Scopes are really useful. One can restrict App access to only certain folders. I have already used that a few times, probably more in the future.
• Backup. GrapheneOS allows one to do App backups to your own media or cloud storage. For stock systems normally only Google Drive is allowed, which I would never use.
• Sandboxed Google Play. I like the idea of sandboxing Google play. Presumably it should be more compatible then MicroG and some Apps require Google play. Interestingly the number that do seems fairly small. I actually further placed all my Play Services related stuff in a Private Space so I know what apps can actually use it.
• Device Integrity Check. Verified boot and some other device integrity checks are properly supported and so many apps that required them should run, though not all. This is not always the case with third party ROMs.
• Wifi Calling and Messaging seems more stable then my old G6. Maybe just the difference between Android 9 and 15.
• Updates should be supported for a full 7 years from initial device release which as of late 2024 is about another 6.5 years. My original G6 had about 1 year of updates.
• Hardening. Graphene has a bunch of hardening features not in typical distributions. Storage Scopes and really good Profile support are a couple I've mentioned, but there are many others.

One question that took me a while to consider is where to get Apps from. There are pros and cons and a lot of discussions about this. In the end, I used the GrapheneOS App Store, F-Droid, Accrescent, Obtanium, and the Aurora Store in that order for my owner profile, then installed sandboxed Google Play Services and the Google Play app in my Private Space.

As of now my limited experience with GrapheneOS has all been positive. The one App that I have had issues with is the UPS app for some reason. For that I'll just use their website for now. Not sure if the UPS app can be made to run or not. My understanding too is that Google Wallet may not fully function though I have not tried it and have never used it before anyway.

If your interested in GraphneneOS and have any specific questions, feel free to ask. All the best.

In preparation for the new year, I've been looking for a "better" way to manage what I'm "doing" and looking for a better task-board / ticket manager / project management solution to replace my current unholy and very-cursed mess involving paper notes on a whiteboard (magnets FTW), issues in Gitea (self-hosted) and a whole bunch of .md files in a git repository.

I tried out self-hosting Leantime in my development Docker environment. That was a waste of effort. It's crowded chock-full of "premium" links that just take you to the paid plugin store. I fully expect artificial limits and nerfs to be enforced, too, if one doesn't pay. (Their "pricing" page even alludes to this, stating that "self-hosted" includes the same as their cloud's "free" tier. That would be 150 tasks. That's borderline useless!)

Why ever would I self-host that? Even if I did, how could I trust it to remain free for the features I need, if it paywalls features in the self-hosted scenario? If I self-host it, I'd also want to be free to hack on it and potentially push merge-requests to an open-source project – why would I ever do that for a paywalled app I don't get paid to work on?

My Docker dev. environment runs off a tmpfs so the daemon got stopped, umount /var/tmp/docker, and that shall be the last I ever see of Leantime. Good riddance.

The search continues. I'm open to suggestions of what's worth trying, though. Lemmy, what would YOU actually trust?

Xfce 4.20 has been released with experimental Wayland support for most of the critical components, whilst a few pieces of functionality aren't working or at least not fully, it can be used by 'advanced' users, but expect bugs and some functionality missing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23494331

Today KDE community are releasing KDE ⚙️ Gear 24.12 with new versions of classics such as Dolphin, our feature-rich file manager and explorer; Kate, the developer-friendly text editor; Itinerary, a travel assistant that will get you safely to your destination. …and much, much more!

These apps exist thanks to KDE's volunteers and donors. You too can contribute and express support for your favorite apps by adopting them!

Let's take a look at just a few of the applications — some updated and some brand new — which will be landing on your desktop in just a few days.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/49505707

Izzy

PhotonCamera uses advanced algorithms for capturing and processing raw images which give unmatched HDR outputs. PhotonCamera is currently in beta stage and is having rapid development.

Features:

HDRX - This functionality enables advanced stacking of many underexposed images and creates beautiful outputs.

Utilize each camera lens, by the main, wide, macro, telephoto or even IR, a functionality not available in other open source apps.

Manual Control - Easy to use knobs to control Focus, Shutter Speed and ISO on the go.

Configurable Settings :

Number of frames(maximum)

Sharpness

Saturation

Shadow Strength

Interactive viewfinder

Enabling the grid

Enabling viewfinder rounding

Advanced mode settings

Save separate settings for each camera lens

Wide range of supported devices.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/49343322

Widelands is a free, open source real-time strategy game with singleplayer campaigns and a multiplayer mode. The game was inspired by Settlers II™ (© Bluebyte) but has significantly more variety and depth to it.

Source - Website

You have seen them, video clips grabbed off Instagram or TikTok have this EXTREMELY annoying logo and sound at the end (specially Instagram lately, doubly so with headphones). I'd like to just throw a script/command/Bash alias at any of these and have a resulting video without them, and ffmpeg IS the Swiss army knife of video processing, but it's syntax is NOT what you'd call simple. Does anyone have a recipe for this already?

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/48734056

With Elisa by KDE, you can browse your local music collection by genre, artist, album, or track, listen to online radio, create and manage playlists, display lyrics, and more.

Screenshots:

• Android

• Desktop

Kia ora 😊 We are replacing the software for our community library of things are looking for options. We live in a village so it would be a max of 300 accounts and probably 2000-3000 items in the inventory. I'm having a hard time finding anything open source.

I know it's very niche so no worries if nobody knows of anything 😊

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/48471069

Github: https://github.com/MediaHarbor/mediaharbor

Wow. I've only just started testing it against GP, but it's really slick and works really well. Lots more fine control than GP, and the only thing that isn't quite as good is the photo editing on the app and web site, and that is on the roadmap. Oh, and I can't see how to set up TLS but I might just be missing something.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/48062206