I love t-shirts, especially those that you’d call logowear. But it’s not the kind of big name fashion logos that I’m referring to. Rather, it’s logowear from my favorite IT companies. I have well over a hundred of these t-shirts, and except when I’m preparing for a special event, I pull a random t-shirt from my collection. Yesterday I happened to wear a power.org t-shirt, while today I’m wearing an OpenPOWER t-shirt, two POWER t-shirts in two days :-) Both of these brought back some nice memories.
power.org t-shirt
The first t-shirt is really old, I got it probably around 2008, while working for Genesi. One of my tasks was moderating the forums on the power.org website. It was a website focusing on IBM POWER server products, but it also included some generic POWER information. Besides sharing information, it also provided a meeting point for like-minded engineers, where they could discuss anything related to POWER. You can read my history with POWER-based computers in one of my opensource.com articles at https://opensource.com/article/20/10/power-architecture.
OpenPOWER t-shirt
The t-shirt I had on today is a lot more recent, but still cannot be called new. It is a t-shirt by the OpenPOWER Foundation from the golden era of open source on POWER: the POWER9 years. Those years have seen the most active open source development on POWER ever since the Pegasos / PowerMac years. Many applications were ported to POWER, both for the server and the desktop. Hopefully there will be another wave of open source activity on POWER soon, fingers crossed :-)
Do you have any interesting POWER t-shirts? Share with me on your preferred social network! My accounts are listed in the top right corner of this page.
Happy October folks! In this post you’ll find some information on our F41 and F42 releases, plus a few lines on a couple of topics happening around the project lately. Read on to find out more!
Fedora Linux 41
We are nearing the end of the Fedora Linux 41 release cycle! Our Go/No-Go meeting will happen next Thursday 17th October @ 1700 UTC. To join, you can find the information on the fedocal calendar entry.
There are still some proposed blockers for F41 too, so if you can help resolve some of these bus, please check out our blocker bugs app, or for a more condensed summary, please read out blocker bug report email.
Fedora Linux 42
Fedora Linux 42 is currently in development, and for the most recent set of changes planned in this rel;ease, please refer to our change set page. Our release schedule is also live, and a reminder of some key dates are below:
December 18th – Changes requiring infrastructure changes
December 24th – Changes requiring mass rebuild
December 24th – System Wide changes
January 14th – Self Contained changes
February 4th – Changes need to be Testable
February 4th – Branching
February 18th – Changes need to be Complete
The changes that are currently in our community feedback period are :
For all the latest on boot-c, check out the bootc post on discourse!
Our Git Forge evaluation is taking shape. We have an instance of both Forgejo and GitLab CE available to try out in the Communshift app. Details of how to get access can be found on this discussion thread, and we are encouraging folks to try out each instance and report their feedback, preferably against the user stories collected, on this discussion thread. Directly linked to the git forge evaluation, following Wednesdays council meeting, we have decided to extend the report comparing both Forgejo and GitLab CE to be due by December 5th to allow our QA team, and other teams impacted by the F41 release, time to properly validate their use cases against each forge option. This means the council decision may not happen until early January, but we do hope to proceed with a decision as early as possible so the CPE team can help create a migration plan for affected workflows that can be shared and agreed to in good time to allow minimal disruption to the project as a whole as possible.
There is still time to share feedback on the proposal to amend the Editions Promotion policy. You can read the current policy, and what the council would like to change, in this discussion thread.
FOSDEM 2025 returns on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd February! The call for devrooms has passed, but the call for stands is still open until November 7th.
A new episode of The Fedora Podcast is now available! Details of episode 38 and how to listen can be found on the discussion post and by visiting the audio post for the latest, and all episodes.
We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.
Week: 7th October – 10th October 2024
Infrastructure & Release Engineering
The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on matrix.
NOTE: There are currently internal changes happening in CPE Team (we will see if the name even remains), which caused that the last week update didn’t came out (it was also caused by the login issue in community blog, but that was just a coincidence) and caused change in the content (some sections are currently missing). We apologize for that and we see how the format will look in the future.
Release Candidate versions are available in the testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, the perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
RPMs of PHP version 8.3.13RC1 are available
as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 39-41 and Enterprise Linux≥ 8
as SCL in remi-test repository
RPMs of PHP version 8.2.25RC1 are available
as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 39-41 and Enterprise Linux≥ 8
as SCL in remi-test repository
The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.
PHP version 8.1 is now in security mode only, so no more RC will be released.
Just a quick post about a small side-project. For a few years now, I’ve
been maintaining a Jekyll Container image. Mostly for my own
convenience—whether I’m working on posts for this blog or writing
documentation for Mock (or other). I thought I’d share a few
words about it now.
Keep My Box Clean! (and DRY)
The motivation was simple: to be able to debug Jekyll/GitHub Pages posts
locally before pushing them to GitHub. I wanted to do this consistently
across multiple pages, and I didn’t want to repeat myself in the future
(following the DRY principle).
Back then, I realized that running Jekyll locally wasn’t a trivial task—at
least not on Fedora, if, like me, you prefer staying on a “pure” Fedora
system (meaning you only install software distributed through Fedora
repositories). Notably, installing the GitHub Pages additions from gems
wasn’t easy either, and it still isn’t (as of autumn 2024).
Building your own container can also cause some headaches.
Jekyll made easy
So here we are—assuming you have a blog post or any documentation root
directory, you can run the Jekyll server in a container, and available on
http://localhost:4000/, using just:
$ jekyll-host ./your-jekyll-root
Installing deps, may take several minutes
=========================================
Server listens on http://127.0.0.1:4000
Jekyll Log: /tmp/jekyll-server.log (in container)
Install logs: /tmp/bundler-install.log (in container)
=========================================
The jekyll-host script (which must be in your $PATH) is just a one-line
wrapper around a podman run command that uses a pre-built
container image hosted and built by https://quay.io/.
I prefer to stay 100% focused on writing, not on the infrastructure.
After a quick chat with my colleagues, it seems this setup could be
helpful to others as well. If that’s the case, enjoy!
Fedora Asahi Remix is developed in close collaboration with the Fedora Asahi SIG and the Asahi Linux project. As part of our work on the Remix, we’ve also been working on a Change to integrate the FEX emulator into Fedora Linux 42. The goal is to provide a delightful out-of-box experience for users that want to run x86_32 and x86_64 binaries on their AArch64 systems. Today’s release provides a preview of this work. It allows us to perfect the integration and improve the experience on Apple Silicon systems. The aim is for Fedora KDE systems, on AArch64, to offer this functionality out of the box for all supported Fedora ARM desktop systems.
Please report any Remix-specific issues in our tracker. You may also reach out in our Discourse forum or our Matrix room for user support.
Version 4.8.1 of syslog-ng was released last week. It is a bugfix release, and it contains fixes for problems also reported by members of the Fedora community. The Fedora 41 release is near, so package updates now need some additional testing, and “karma” in Bodhi. You can find information on how to install syslog-ng 4.8.1 from a testing repo on Fedora 41 beta at https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2024-4e812b8a23. This is also the place where you can provide feedback and karma. Thanks for your help!
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Ian Malcolm, “Jurassic Park”
ScanOSS gave an accidental lesson about this recently when, apparently, an “experiment” resulted in filing issues about profanity in open source project code. According to a comment from ScanOSS’s CTO, this was a “brief experiment involving contributions to a small set of repositories” with the intention “to gather insights.” It’s not clear what insights the experiment wanted to produce. What is clear is that they didn’t work with project maintainers before conducting this experiment.
CTO Julian Coccia made it worse with this comment:
The terms of service of Github (and the Open Source license of your choice under which your contribution was released), openly allow contributions from other users. Therefore, people looking at contributing to your project don’t really need your consent before issuing a PR. You always have the right to accept or reject contributions at your discretion.
[…]
If you are not willing to receive contributions from the community, if you are not interested in your Open Source contribution gaining adoption, or if you prefer people to sign special agreements to make contributions, perhaps you are better off closing down your repository, making it private.
If you’ll pardon my language, I think the fuck not! Maintainers are overworked. They don’t need to deal with spam. If you are making a contribution, whether individually or on behalf of a company, it is your responsibility to make sure it’s meaningful. Yes, you’ll get it wrong sometime, but you have to make a good faith effort.
Typically, making a non-trivial contribution involves spending some time learning about the community. At a minimum, reading the contribution guide (if it exists). It does not mean you’re allowed to lob automated issues at projects and then get indignant when the maintainers are mad about it.
With open source licenses, you can do whatever you want with the code you download. Run any experiments your heart desires on it. But once you’re writing instead of reading, you need to be a good participant. No amount of good intention changes that.
Fedora test days are events where anyone can help make certain that changes in Fedora Linux work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed to Fedora before, this is a perfect way to get started.
There are two test periods occurring in the coming days:
Friday October 11 through October 15 , is to test the Fedora Upgrade
Friday October 11 through October 13 , is to test Virtualization
Come and test with us to make Fedora 41 even better. Read more below on how to do it.
Upgrade test day
As we approach the Fedora Linux 41 release date, it’s time to test upgrades. This release has many changes, and it becomes essential that we test the graphical upgrade methods as well as the command-line methods.
This test period will start on Friday, October 11. It will test upgrading from a fully updated F39 or F40 to F41 for all architectures (x86_64, ARM, aarch64) and variants (WS, cloud, server, silverblue, IoT). See this wiki page for information and details. For this test period, we also want to test DNF5 Plugins before and after upgrade. Recently noted regressions resulted in a Blocker Bug. The DNF5 Plugin details are available here.
Virtualization test day
This test period will start on Friday, October 11 and will test all forms of virtualization possible in Fedora 41. The test period will focus on testing Fedora Linux, or your favorite distro, inside a bare metal implementation of Fedora Linux running Boxes, KVM, VirtualBox and whatever you have. The test cases outline the general features of installing the OS and working with it. These cases are available on the results page.
How do test days work?
A test period is an event where anyone can help make certain that changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. Test days are the perfect way to start contributing if you not in the past.
The only requirement to get started is the ability to download test materials (which include some large files) and then read and follow directions step by step.
Detailed information about all the test days are on the wiki page links provided above. If you are available on or around the days of the events, please do some testing and report your results
We will be reinstalling some openqa virthost and database hosts as well as
reinstalling workers to use a common partitioning and networking setup.
This outage impacts
openqa and openqa-labs. During the
outage, updates may not go stable; waiting for testing. After the outage is
over, openqa will test all pending …
This weekend I visited the first Audio Expo in Budapest. It was the first music event I truly enjoyed in years. Even if corridors and rooms were packed, there was enough fresh air. What sets this event apart from other events is the focus on listening to music on the vendors’ products rather than just the speeds and feeds on why you should buy their products. While, of course, the expected outcome is the same, with the emphasis on listening to live systems, I found the event much more comfortable to walk around.
Key takeaway
Do not judge quickly! Go back to a place multiple times! If you are lucky, there will be less people in the room, and you can sit at a better spot. You can also listen to a different music, or listen to the same speakers with a different amplifier. Actually, both of these happened to me this weekend, and brought drastic changes to the experience.
Best of Audio Expo
Everyone is asking me what I liked the most. I am not an engineer when it comes to listening to music. I just listen to my ears and do not care much about the technical details. At home I listen to a pair of Heed Enigma 5 speakers, which are omnidirectional. At the expo the best listening experience was another omnidirectional speaker: the MBL speakers at Core Audio. This was also probably the most expensive setup at the expo.
According to my ears the best value award should go to NCS Audio Reference One PREMIUM. I visited all rooms on all floors and listened to many different speakers along the way. Some were close to or matching the sound quality of the NCS Audio speakers, however for a lot higher price. I only felt with the MBL speakers that they sounded better, however from the price difference you can buy a luxury car :-)
Exhibitors
I had various programs in the neighborhood, so instead of a long block at the Audio Expo, I spent three times a few hours there. Some places I visited multiple times, just to ensure that my first judgment was not too quick. Let me share here my experiences with some of the exhibitors, in alphabetical order.
Allegro Audio
As usual, the system exhibited at Audio Expo sounded really nice. Allegro Audio not only distributes some quality components, but also has its own amplifier: Flow. I really love listening to their Franco Serblin Accordo monitor speakers, but Ktema was not bad either :-)
Core Audio
Probably the most expensive setup of the expo was exhibited by Core Audio. However, the first time I visited them, they played some terrible (at least to me) music. With that music, the whole setup sounded like a pair of $100 computer speakers. So, I started to wonder what is all the hype about MBL speakers… Fortunately, I returned to the show the next day and with a different selection of music, the system really shined, and became the best sounding system of the whole Expo. However, price is prohibitively expensive for most people…
Heed
I listen to various Heed components at home: DAC, amp and speakers. So, I was very happy to see the founder talking about the latest Heed products, and also having the opportunity to listen to them. I love Heed speakers, especially the omnidirectional variants, however for the demo they used GoldenEar speakers with the Heed amplifiers at the Expo. Not bad at all, but different.
Heed
NCS Audio
I already listened to Reference One a few times, and I was amazed. Rock, classical, jazz and others, all sounded perfectly on these speakers, no matter the room size. This time Reference One Premium was on stage, using cables from Bonsai Audio. This pair sounded even better than speakers costing many times more.
NCS Audio
Popori Acoustics
I have been reading about Popori Acoustics for years. Finally I had a chance to listen to these electrostatic speakers made in Hungary for the first time. And I must admit that my first listening experience was not that good. Hearing a woman singing was fantastic. However, even if the sound of bass guitar was very detailed, it still sounded a kind of meh. Luckily I went back on the second day of the expo again. The amplifier was replaced, and suddenly not just human voice, but everything sounded perfectly.
Popori Acoustics
Closing words
Of course there were many more exhibitors. In some cases I loved the sound I heard, but did not have enough time to go back, ask questions, take photos. Some examples are 72audio and Sabo Audio. And there were many more, where the sound was not bad, but did not impress me too much either.
I really hope that next year we will have a similarly good Audio Expo in Budapest!
Networking gear at the datacenter that hosts pagure.io will be upgraded.
Network may be up or down during the outage window as routers and switches
are rebooted.
It has been a long time, with out sharing some words here, but there is something that may work doing it.
At the end of last year Luis Bazan (from Fedora Panama) invite me to share some words with the attendees to Hackathon Copa 2023, it was a fun time sharing with organizers, students and teachers. That lead to been invited to become part of the organizers team for this year hackathon.
The subjec of this year HackathonCopa was Linux, therefore it was really fan and interesting, with the lead of Hugo Aquino from Copa Airlines (the main sponsor) and the Fedora Panama team and Floss-pa we help providing workshops and talks about Linux. Many other sponsors join us including Red Hat team from our area, so it was a great time to meet and share experience and activities.
A full year of work meetings and planning came to the end at October 4 and 5, were sponsors, volunteers and mentors work with over 500 students on talks on the first day.
First day was over and we share with hundred of students about Fedora, Alma Linux and risc-v, showing a risc-v board that got from http://risc-v.org many stickers and tshirts were shared at our stand.
Second day was the challenges, 115 teams of 4 members accepted the challenge, our group from Fedora Panama, Flosspa serve as part of the mentors we have the task to guide with out helping and grade the teams it was a long day but at the end the teams won this edition:
"Los Reales" - primer lugar
"ZeroTrust" - segundo lugar
"Tux Team" - tercer lugar
"Pingüinos Pioneros" - cuarto lugar
"KernelKnights" - quinto lugar
"Sudo rm-rf" - sexto lugar
Winner team photos are not in order
It was fun to share and meet the new Linux talent in our country. Some of the are wiling to learn and contribute to our beloved Fedora distro so you may ear from them.
As we all experience we learn some new tricks. Thanks to Fedora Project and Alma Linux for sponsoring this event.
I have to add special thanks to all members of Fedora Panama and Flosspa who become a sponsor in this event
Many thanks to all you to be willing to share knowledge and time with us on this kind of events
Fedora test days are events where anyone can help make certain that changes in Fedora Linux work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed to Fedora Linux before, this is a perfect way to get started.
There are two overlapping test periods in the coming week.
Monday 07 October through Friday October 11, focuses on testing Fedora CoreOS .
Monday 07 October through Friday October 11, focuses on testing Fedora IoT.
Fedora IoT
For this test week, the focus is all-around; test all the bits that come in a Fedora IoT release as well as validate different hardware. This includes:
Basic installation to different media
Installing in a VM
rpm-ostree upgrades, layering, rebasing
Basic container manipulation with Podman.
We welcome all different types of hardware, but have a specific list of target hardware for convenience. This test week will occur Monday 07 October through Friday 11 October.
Fedora 41 CoreOS Test Week
The Fedora 41 CoreOS Test Week focuses on testing FCOS based on Fedora 41. The FCOS next stream is already rebased on Fedora 41 content, which will be coming soon to testing and stable. To prepare for the content being promoted to other streams the Fedora CoreOS and QA teams have organized test days from Monday, 07 October through 11 October. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test cases and materials you’ll need to participate. The FCOS and QA team will meet and communicate with the community asynchronously over multiple matrix/element channels. The announcements will be made 48 hours prior to the start of test week. Stay tuned to official Fedora channels for more info.
How do test days work?
Test days or weeks are an event where anyone can help make certain that changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. Test days are the perfect way to start contributing if you not in the past.
The only requirement to get started is the ability to download test materials (which include some large files) and then read and follow directions step by step.
Detailed information about all the test days are on the wiki page links provided above. If you are available on or around the days of the events, please do some testing and report your results.
Two weeks ago, I was at EuroBSDcon and received a feature request for syslog-ng. The user wanted to collect FreeBSD audit logs together with other logs using syslog-ng. Writing a native driver in C is time consuming. However, creating an integration based on the program() source of syslog-ng is not that difficult.
This blog shows you the current state of the FreeBSD audit source, how it works, and its limitations. It is also a request for feedback. Please share your experiences at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/discussions/5150!
I'm happy to announce that the last tweaks have landed and that the fully FOSS libcamera software ISP based IPU6 camera support in Fedora 41 now has no known bugs left. See the Changes page for testing instructions.
Supported hardware
Unlike USB UVC cameras where all cameras work with a single kernel driver, MIPI cameras like the Intel IPU6 cameras require multiple drivers. The IPU6 input-system CSI receiver driver is common to all laptops with an IPU6 camera, but different laptops use different camera sensors and each sensor needs its own driver and then there are glue ICs like the LJCA USB IO-expander and the iVSC (Intel Visual Sensing Controller) and there also is the ipu-bridge code which translates Windows oriented ACPI tables with sensor info into the fwnodes which the Linux drivers expect.
This means that even though IPU6 support has landed in Fedora 41 not all laptops with an IPU6 camera will work. Currently the IPU6 integrated in the following CPU models works if the sensor + glue hw/sw is also supported:
Tiger Lake
Alder Lake
Raptor Lake
Jasper Lake and Meteor Lake also have an IPU6 but there is some more integration work necessary to get things to work there. Getting Meteor Lake IPU6 cameras to work is high on my TODO list.
The mainline kernel IPU6 CSI receiver + libcamera software ISP has been successfully tested on the following models:
Various Lenovo ThinkPad models with ov2740 (INT3474) sensor (1)
Various Dell models with ov01a10 (OVTI01A0) sensor
Dell XPS 13 PLus with ov13b10 (OVTIDB10/OVTI13B1)
Some HP laptops with hi556 sensor (INT3537)
To see which sensor your laptop has run: "ls /sys/bus/i2c/devices" this will show e.g. "i2c-INT3474:00" if you have an ov2740, with INT3474 being the ACPI Hardware ID (HID) for the sensor. See here for a list of currently known HID to sensor mappings. Note not all of these have upstream drivers yet. In that cases chances are that there might be a sensor driver for your sensor here.
We could really use help with people submitting drivers from there upstream. So if you have a laptop with a sensor which is not in the mainline but is available there, you know a bit of C-programming and you are willing to help, then please drop me an email so that we can work together to get the driver upstream.
1) on some ThinkPads the ov2740 sensor fails to start streaming most of the time. I plan to look into this next week and hopefully I can come up with a fix.
MIPI camera Integration work done for Fedora 41
After landing the kernel IPU6 CSI receiver and libcamera software ISP support upstream early in the Fedora 41 cycle, there still was a lot of work to do with regards to integrating this into the rest of the stack so that the cameras can actually be used outside of the qcam test app.
The whole stack looks like this "kernel → libcamera → pipewire | pipewire-camera-consuming-app". Where the 2 currently supported pipewire-camera consuming apps are Firefox and GNOME Snapshot.
Once this was all up and running testing found quite a few bugs which have all been fixed now:
Firefox showing 13 different cameras in its camera selection pulldown for a single IPU6 camera (fix).
Installing pipewire-plugin-libcamera leads to UVC cameras being powered on all the time causing significant battery drain (bug, bug, discussion, fix).
Pipewire does not always recognizes cameras on login (bug, bug, bug, fix).
Pipewire fails to show cameras with relative controls (fix).
spa_libcamera_buffer_recycle sometimes fails, causing stream to freeze on first frame (bug, fix)
Firefox chooses bad default resolution of 640x480. I worked with Jan Grulich to get this fixed and this is fixed as of firefox-130.0.1-3.fc41. Thank you Jan!
Snapshot prefers 4:3 mode, e.g. 1280x1080 on 16:9 camera sensors capable of 1920x1080 (pending fix)
Added intel-vsc-firmware, pipewire-plugin-libcamera, libcamera-ipa to the Fedora 41 Workstation default package-set (pull, pull, pull)
As I upload photos to various services, I generally resize them as required
based on portrait or landscape mode. I used to do that for all the photos in a
directory and then pick which ones to use. But, I wanted to do it selectively,
open the photos in Gnome Nautilus (Files) application and right click and
resize the ones I want.
This week I noticed that I can do that with scripts. Those can be in any given
language, the selected files will be passed as command line arguments, or full
paths will be there in an environment variable
NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS joined via newline character.
To add any script to the right click menu, you just need to place them in
~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/ directory. They will show up in the right click menu for scripts.
Below is the script I am using to reduce image sizes:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import os
import sys
import subprocess
from PIL import Image
# paths = os.environ.get("NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS", "").split("\n")
paths = sys.argv[1:]
for fpath in paths:
if fpath.endswith(".jpg") or fpath.endswith(".jpeg"):
# Assume that is a photo
try:
img = Image.open(fpath)
# basename = os.path.basename(fpath)
basename = fpath
name, extension = os.path.splitext(basename)
new_name = f"{name}_ac{extension}"
w, h = img.size
# If w > h then it is a landscape photo
if w > h:
subprocess.check_call(["/usr/bin/magick", basename, "-resize", "1024x686", new_name])
else: # It is a portrait photo
subprocess.check_call(["/usr/bin/magick", basename, "-resize", "686x1024", new_name])
except:
# Don't care, continue
pass
You can see it in action (I selected the photos and right clicked, but the recording missed that part):
I wrote “to grow an open source project, give up control” with open source projects in mind (duh), but it applies to other communities as well. I thought of this topic again yesterday when I read about Reddit’s new policy that takes more control away from volunteer moderators. Reddit’s leadership is not willing to embrace the consequences of giving up control.
I understand the business motivations. Reddit is a publicly-traded company that relies on selling data and eyeballs in order to make money. They’ve yet to turn a profit, so they need to protect their revenue streams. Letting Internet randos arbitrarily choose to shut off — or at least severely restrict — the flow of data and eyeballs is a significant business risk.
But I also understand the concerns of the moderators. Reddit user bellisaurius said the change “removes moderators from any position of central responsibility and demotes us all to janitors.” Reddit, once a relatively ungoverned space, has centralized power over the last year or so. This takes power away from the moderators. But this presents a long term risk. The reason that Reddit has data and eyeballs to sell is because the users are there. The users stick around, in no small part, because the moderators keep each subreddit a place where people want to be. Drive away or disengage the moderators, and the community’s infrastructure collapses.
It reminds me of how Twitter started as a platform that the community innovated on. Then Twitter slowly decided to take control, icing out the third-party app developers that made it a place people wanted to be. It managed to hold on pretty well, at least until new ownership arrived, but it lost the vibrancy over time. No doubt there are many other examples, and countless more yet to come.
It’s far too common of a pattern: a company fosters a community, lets it grow into something special, and then squeezes it when it’s time to extract value. The “community” is no longer a community, it’s a free labor pool. It should come as no surprise when people are less interested in that proposition.
The grow-and-squeeze model works for extracting short-term value. But what if we took a long-term approach? Create more value in the community than you extract. This leads to sustainable growth.
This article introduces projects available in Flathub with installation instructions.
Flathub is the place to get and distribute apps for all of Linux. It is powered by Flatpak, allowing Flathub apps to run on almost any Linux distribution.
In the Productivity section we have Wildcard. This is a small app that will help you test your regular expressions. It is part of the GNOME project. Usually this best suits developers, but may also be useful for sysadmins who use regular expressions on the command line to find things in logs and more.
You can install “Wildcard” by clicking the install button on the web site or manually using this command:
Wildcard is also available as an rpm in the Fedora Linux repositories
X-Moto
In the Games section we have X-Moto. This is an oldie, but a very fun game.
Before you start complaining, yes it says it is unverified, and yes the latest release is from 2023, but this is one of the games that set the idea of gaming on Linux as possible. It’s a simple platform moto challenger where you need to drive your motorcycle until the end of the circuit. With thousands of circuits and very difficult records to break, X-Moto will let you pass a lot of time in front of your computer. I recommend using the “Quick start” button and setting a random level!
You can install “X-Moto” by clicking the install button on the web site or manually using this command:
flatpak install flathub org.tuxfamily.XMoto
X-Moto of course is also available as an rpm in the Fedora Linux repositories
Speech Note
In the Miscellaneous section we have Speech Note. Speech Note lets you take, read, and translate notes in multiple languages. It uses Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation to do so. Text and voice processing take place entirely offline, locally on your computer, without using a network connection.
This is a huge app, the download is almost 1 GB, and installed it took almost 3 GB, but it’s a great app to test and improve.
You can install “SpeechNote” by clicking the install button on the web site or manually using this command:
In the Creativity section we have Easy Effects. This is an advanced audio manipulation tool. It includes an equalizer, limiter, compressor and a reverberation tool, just to mention a few. To complement this there is also a built-in spectrum analyzer. Easy Effects is the successor to PulseEffects and only supports PipeWire’s audio server. Besides manipulating sound output, Easy Effects is able to apply effects to an input device, such as a microphone. This is, for example, useful in audio recording, but also works well during voice conversations.
You can install “EasyEffects” by clicking the install button on the web site or manually using this command:
The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.
