Is there any overlap between already FLOSS applications, whether for mobile (F-Droid for example) or desktop/laptop (GNU+linux for example) and this catalog? Known to date FLOSS applications coming from everywhere, Jami sources for example comes from France and the application is peer-to-peer, XMMP standard protocol specification is governed by the IETF XMPP working group having members from different countries and servers/clients open sources from different people and servers actually all over the world or self hosted… In other words, I don’t know if having an European catalog is what really matters.

In my mind, no matter where you live, if you want your freedom[s] respected, you should prefer free/libre software, or at least open source, though in the later case it can be tweaked in ways ignored by you which might be dangerous or might not. If wanting privacy related applications, then the prior is a must but on top of that e2ee encryption is required, as minimal as possible personal information leakage, and hopefully using distributed applications mainly peer-to-peer though at least decentralized ones (hopefully self-hosting), and also security wise being externally audited if possible. I understand the EU requires the data to be stored and kept only within the EU, but that doesn’t guarantees privacy any ways, and we should learn that the best is not to trust our information to anyone, and better use peer-to-peer whenever possible or zero trust mechanisms with everything encrypted (protecting the user, not the spying mechanisms so called zero-trust, like falcon-sensor).

So I’m a bit confused by people trusting a state or supra-state backed catalogs, when FLOSS should be what conscious users should be looking for. Interoperability is what really resonates to me, but open standards (open document standard comes to mind for example) if used or for example a simple particular version of markdown (the pandoc one for example) and so on, should guarantee that…

Actually, FLOSS is more precise, given the “L” coming from “libre” in castilian (spanish now a days) referring explicitly to freedom. But it so happen open source != free/libre software, therefore open source usually disregard the philosophic aspect of freedom, which might turn against the users interest, which is what GNU guys were trying to prevent all along, because focusing in the practical aspects, without any concern on the principals behind, actually do have implications on the software itself and its usage.

I would jami except you want it web based. And next comes jitsi meet, but I then would suggest self-hosting to avoid people to be subscribed to a sever somewhere, though I don’t know if that limits the easy part of it. Jami is easy on PCs, and everyone needs to have it installed, and all be included into a single swarm group, and I believe that’s as easy as with google meet. The mobile solution is something I don’t recommend at this point, neither syncing devices, but PCs wise, absolutely

FLOSS used to include the ability to build software. Perhaps that’s not important anymore but now a days some developers don’t attend problems with their build recipes because they only consider what they release through binaries, whether on flatpak or whatever other binary repository they like. At least I dislike that, it’s ok to me some or most users would prefer to grab a bloated binary rather than building anything, but that doesn’t mean forgetting about those actually wanting to build from source, or wanting to use shared libraries and software from their distros, actually that’s a requirement for free/libre software repositories. Not sure if the tendency is to move the gnu+linux users into app stores like the ones on windows, now ubuntu snaps, android play store and the like. Sure there’s more security with sandboxing, but nothing one can’t get with firejail, and if wanting MAC as well then firejail + apparmor for example.

At any rate, just my little rant. And if you’re wondering, I use AUR on Artix, and I really hope I won’t have a need for a flatpak stuff.

Have you tried enabling webgl, which by default is disable on Librewolf? You can do that by overwriting the corresponding setting, as it can be done for any Librewolf setting, in particular the webgl override needed is:

defaultPref("webgl.disabled", false);

If you do, Librewolf recommend using the extension “CanvasBlocker” given the fingerprinting allowed by webgl. There’s a settings doc BTW…

If using wayland: wlsunset

Where did you get this idea?

I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the fsf either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.

I think you are confusing FSF with the Linux Foundation, and you can see MS as part of the platinum LF members. Was that it, or you really meant FSF?

Hey, sorry to take adantage of your answer, perhaps you can help me out though.

Is dbus actually necessary for xdg-desktop-portal? I understand from this flatpak post that xdg-desktop-portal is actually a bunch of d-bus interconnections, which of course make d-bus fundamental for xdg-desktop-portal, but wanted to confirm. xdg-desktop-portal is a must on wayland if one wants to share screen through webrtc, or electron apps like slack or teams-for-linux (probably zoom which is Qt as well). But I’ve read some people (this for example) start sway from console without d-bus, without logind/systemd, just seatd on the background (wlroots and sway support seatd). So perhaps those people are not interested on sharing screen, I don’t know. Or perhaps such d-bus plumbing is only required for flatpaks apps, which are sandboxed, thus requiring all that interconnection to access resources and such, and then I’m not sure about a thing…

Thanks !

Well, I think you already mentioned the key thing about encrypting disks. It’s not about protections when the block device is already decrypted and the filesystem already mount. At that point your disks are decrypted and anyone with or without physical access to your device, if gaining any access to it you’re toast. That’s true, but that’s not what disks encryption help you with, and you already mentioned. If you turn off your device, and someone steals it, or gains access to it, they can’t look at your contents, that’s it. That wouldn’t prevent malicious people, to instead plant something through UEFI for example, and you are right about that case. And if you never turn off your computer, and just do sleep to memory, then you depend on how strong your password is, or any other authentication mechanism you have…

Can you explain why if someone get access to your encrypted disk, they would have access to its contents?

Well it’s a bit confusing. On Guix’ wiki General features you can read:

Guix keeps track of these references automatically so that installed packages can be garbage collected when no other package depends on them - at the cost of greater storage requirements, all upgrades in Guix are guaranteed to be both atomic and can be rolled back.

The roll-back feature of Guix is inherited from the design of Nix and is rarely found in other operating systems, since it requires an unorthodox approach to how the system should function (see MicroOS).

And then on its wiki Guix System (operating system) Roll-back you can read:

This is accomplished by a combination of Guix’s functional package manager, which treats each package and system configuration as an immutable and reproducible entity,[58] and the generation system which maintains a history of system configurations as “generations.”

So the system configurations on a Guix system are actually immutable, as opposed to regular gnu+linux distributions, which can change the system configuration on the fly. What else is immutable on Guix, I can’t tell, but at least you can not change its system configs. What is atomic is the upgrades.

I’m not sure, but as Guix borrowed these properties from Nix, I’d think this applies to Nix as well.

In other words, at least the Guix system has immutable components. And further, the system config which is immutable, is also declarative. Combining those two things might be intimidating, since it’s not like on the fly one can go and change the system config, which might be required when debugging some misbehavior, and it’s what most distros document, then one needs to learn about guile, and a bit about functional programming I guess or at least their basics… Deploying systems might take advantage of such declarative configurations though…

Ups, I just got to enjoy piped and in particular pipeline on gnu+linux and libretube on AOSP.

Pipeline in particular allows to totally avoid electron (freetube), and in both cases the piped instance is the one communicating with youtube, not me, :) And both applications support sponsorblock (tubular does, but newpipe doesn’t). But not talking directly to youtube is a win. Did I mention dropping another electron app, :) ?

But… I installed pipeline from AUR, because I don’t like flatpak… Not sure if other user repos offer it as well…

What works for me is freetube on desktop, and tubular/newpipe on AOSP.

yes, but it’s mostly for open source apks, the beauty of apkupdater is that it allows installing/upgrading some apks from apkpure and other sources (it was true for apkmirror directing to the right place to download and install from the browser, but on apkmirror most apks now days don’t install/upgrade unless you install their own apkmirror app), avoiding google play and avoiding aurora store (which besides the issues with anonymous connections, it gets upgrades pretty late for some reason). That’s something I don’t see an alternative for. Yes, upkupdater also allowed to install/upgrade from github/gitlab/… but its major purpose to me, was to be able to install/upgrade some non open source stuff without the need to connect to google play, and using recognized and reputable mirrors like apkpure and when it was feasible apkmirror. For FLOSS I use f-droid (official repo, plus non official like “izzyondroid” and others). Unfortunately there are a few apps I’m forced to use, which are not open source…

First of all, it’s been a while since it’s no longer his code, and the contributions from whatever amount of people must be respected. That was used some time back as justification to never moving to GPL3 or latest.

Second, there’s now a huge foundation behind it. Although he has gating approval for whatever he wants, the money coming from big enterprises would cease. Remember now MS already claims it loves linux.

Third, although it’s pretty linked to second, the project is not an independent community project anymore. Even risc-v people took care not to create a so nation specific project (even though its origins are totally linked to the academy from a particular one), that it doesn’t matter which country imposes sanctions to others, no country can prevent another from using its open ISA to build their own stuff. Linux, and its linux foundation failed on this, and as it’s pretty dependent on the big tech and enterprise, now it has no options to be compliant. Which you could see recently from banning developers and the legal reasons involved (well done, as risc-v, that would have had minimal impact, or better yet, if a community project not linked to any country, then that would have gone differently).

All in all, linux’s success has lead it to be a non community driven, non independent project, and I would guess the enterprise and big tech, which is pretty reliant on linux now a days, wouldn’t let linux go away unless they already have an alternative.

Though never say never right? But my take on this is both, no single person owns linux, so no single person can take it away, and there’s too much reliance on it from big tech and enterprises as to let such important project, and key on their software supply chain (years back thinking on software supply chain was in no one’s mind) or so they say.

If ever getting to administrate non systemd boxes, and in need to deal with the system logging mechanism, then syslog-ng comes close to the most probable mechanism use. And no, non systemd gnu+linux distributions are not legacy, there are quite a few out there, just not the major or mainstream ones, like Artix, Void, Guix, and several others, not to count non gnu+linux OSs like BSDs…

I don’t get this comment. Again, the virtio-win is an ISO that’s easily mounted on a qemu (whether libvirt environment or not, which is not required, it just helps making the qemu configuration easier), which comes with several virtualized drivers that accelerate the windows experience quite a bit.

Changing the storage driver is complex on plain qemu (I don’t think it’s easier through libvirt just because the heck of it, the issue is the windows guest), first one need to run qemu with a dummy storage driver using virtualized driver, so that windows detects it. On the guest one needs to install the driver for the discovered storage from the ISO, then reboot and the dummy disk can go away and windows will find a driver for the main disk). Other drivers like the ethernet one, graphics cards, memory baloon, and other stuff need to change the corresponding driver manually, but no need for immediate reboots, but for sure several reboots are expecting while changing the windows drivers.

I no longer use a VM for windows, thankfully, but here it’s a command line meant not to use a GUI qemu front end, but rather a Spice backend (requires virtualized special serial driver and special graphics driver):

qemu-system-x86_64                                                                                                                                                                           \
        -name win-10                                                                                                                                                                     \
        -enable-kvm                                                                                                                                                                          \
        -machine type=q35,accel=kvm                                                                                                                                                          \
        -cpu host,hv_relaxed,hv_spinlocks=0x1fff,hv_vapic,hv_time                                                                                                                            \
        -smp cores=1,threads=2,sockets=1                                                                                                                                                     \
        -m 4G                                                                                                                                                                                \
        -device intel-iommu                                                                                                                                                                  \
        -device virtio-balloon                                                                                                                                                               \
        -drive file=/home/vasqueja/.qemu/imgs/win10-coe.qcow2,index=0,media=disk,if=virtio,aio=native,cache.direct=on,l2-cache-size=10M         \
        -drive file=/usr/share/virtio/virtio-win.iso,index=1,media=cdrom                                                                                                                     \
        -drive file=/usr/share/spice-guest-tools/spice-guest-tools.iso,index=2,media=cdrom                                                                                                   \
        -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0                                                                                                                                                   \
                -netdev tap,id=net0,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no,vhost=on                                                                                                             \
        -usb                                                                                                                                                                                 \
                -device usb-tablet,bus=usb-bus.0                                                                                                                                             \
        -display none                                                                                                                                                                        \
        -vga qxl                                                                                                                                                                             \
        -device virtio-serial-pci                                                                                                                                                            \
                -chardev spicevmc,id=spice0,name=vdagent                                                                                                                                     \
                        -device virtserialport,chardev=spice0,name=com.redhat.spice.0                                                                                                        \
                        -spice unix,addr=/tmp/win10_spice.socket,disable-ticketing                                                                                                           \
                -chardev socket,path=/tmp/win10_qga.socket,server,nowait,id=qga0                                                                                                             \
                        -device virtserialport,chardev=qga0,name=org.qemu.guest_agent.0                                                                                                      \
        -device intel-hda -device hda-duplex                                                                                                \
        -rtc base=localtime                                                                                                                                                                  \
        -monitor stdio                                                                                                                                                                       \
        -k es                                                                                                                                                                                \
        -device usb-host,bus=usb-bus.<...>,vendorid=<...>,productid=<...>                                                                                                                      \
        -device usb-host,bus=usb-bus.<...>,vendorid=<...>,productid=<...>                                                                                                                      \
        -device usb-host,bus=usb-bus.<...>,vendorid=<...>,productid=<...>

Some investigation on your side is required if wanting to use spice (to add copy/paste cabalities on the guest, but perhaps that’s not needed anymore with libvirt and some of the popular forntends from GTK/QT), and the QLX dirver needs to be chosen correctly since it depends on the windows version (there was one for windows 10, not sure if there’s a 11 one).

Again, all this just to improve the windows guest experience. Some of this might have been made easier through libvirt, but the windows side of the drivers is a manual windows process, one driver at a time, and using virtualized storage is tricky on windows guests…

BTW I was setting a tap interface, with IP tables, because I found it to be the easier way to share my host VPN connection with the guest, without the need to establish a host and a guest VPN connection…

virtio-win allow for much better performance using virtualized drivers rather than plain emulation from qemu. Virt Manager doesn’t offer windows guest paravirtualized drivers, that’s on the guest side, and virtio-win ISO helps a lot with this.

There’s no need to jump into conclusions when it’s too early to tell.

If later, it so happens it gets removed, and you don’t want use out of tree stuff, which is still possible through several means, including building your own linux (your own kernel), then you can back all contents of your partitions up, create new partitions with the FS of your preference (ext4, btrfs, whatever), and finally copying over the contents of that last backup. No need to stress out this early, :)

Arch and Arch based distros like Artix have linux-libre available from AUR if one doesn’t have an issue with building from source. Also see my other comment about Guix, there’s a non official repo with ucode and hardware firmware…