TIL Firefox could use the updated GNOME File Picker with thumbnails. Just set widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker to 1 instead of 2.

For KDE.

Ah, I can see how that might be useful. I first learned about the command pallette when I needed to instruct everyday users on taking a full-page screenshot on Chrome…it’s far more complicated than Firefox’s method of Right-Click > Take Screenshot. Just another odd thing, lol. Interestingly, Firefox is considering implementing this feature: https://github.com/firefox-devtools/ux/issues/101

I don’t think it would make much sense in my workflow right now but I can see how it would benefit others. Quickly turning on accessibility constraints I’m sure would be very useful. One thing Firefox’s dev tools is desperately missing is search. I get along fine without it, but it would be nice to have.

Photoshop Web (Beta) only supports Chromium-based browsers, Descript only supports Chromium-based browsers (well, Firefox still seems to work but you’re on your own), and many new webapps are only supporting Chromium-based browsers. Now, these are beta products, so that might change, but it seems unlikely. So I’ve been switching to Chromium-based browsers to use some of these apps, but I’d really rather not. It’s the way everything is going, unfortunately.

A lot of developers target the web because it means they can have one codebase that is supported on multiple operating systems. Imagine how much harder it would be to develop a macOS, ChromeOS and GNU/Linux version in concert with the Windows version. In reality, some browser engines support more web features than others, and Google has by far the most resources to keep up with those standards. So Firefox is an afterthought. Google Chrome is on every operating system worth supporting anyway, so why bother supporting another browser? It’s a lot less work and testing.

MDN is the best place to read about those standards, though.

I like Firefox:

• userChrome.css lets me make Firefox look like a GNOME program
• I much prefer the developer tools. Everything is a lot easier. I always use Firefox when doing web development.
• I can easily customize the browser. For me, this means having a separate dedicated URL bar and search engine bar.
  • The search engine bar lets me swap between search engines very quickly and keep my previous search terms for new tabs. Switching search engines is really annoying in Chromium-based browsers because you need to use shortcuts, and there’s no autocomplete for shortcuts. It also doesn’t tell you whether you typed the shortcut correctly, so you’re guessing every time! It’s really under-developed. The Android Chromium-based browsers are even worse. You can’t change search engines at all when searching; you need to change your default engine. Firefox lets you search any search engine easily on iOS, and slightly less easily on Android.
• I can…turn off history? Apparently this is an amazingly complex feature that Chromium-based browsers just can’t handle. The best you can do is clear it when exiting, but you can’t just turn history off.

Okay, it’s mostly the search engine thing, to be honest.

But Firefox still doesn’t use the new GNOME thumbnail view when you’re uploading files, for example…

I also prefer chromium dev tools, though it isn’t that bad to switch to Firefox’s dev tools.

I actually vastly prefer Firefox’s dev tools to Chromium’s. There are keyboard shortcuts to open every tab, it has a color picker, it has a multi-line Javascript console, and in general I find it more intuitive. Chromium developer tools seem to be less complete than Firefox and harder to use.

I just learned Chromium technically has a color picker tool, but you need to scroll through CSS propetries to find a color selector, click the color, then click the color picker. With Firefox, I tap CTRL+SHIFT+I to open dev tools, click the color picker which is front-and-center, and it copies the hex code to my clipboard. This is a microcosm of my overall experience with Chromium’s developer tools. Everything is slower or further out of reach.

I don’t know how it ended up this way.

I wish I’d known how to use node-based compositors like Natron to produce VFX so I don’t have to keep going back to macOS to use After Effects.

Oh my goodness, I’m sorry to hear that this is happening to others but I am so glad its not just me. This has been something that’s driving me crazy, because I knew it wasn’t a cable / GPU issue due to the fact that it doesn’t occur in Windows.

I know right! I thought it was something I did! You don’t know how many times I’ve gone into the back of my monitor and tried to shove the HDMI cable in just a bit further, to no effect. I thought I’d broken it by trying to run Sway or something…

Nope, the driver is just that bad. Ughhh.

KDE is worse, but GNOME isn’t great either. It’s been going on for months! Additionally, I have “Prefer Maximum Performance” set, but it hasn’t helped much. I’ve seriously been considering an AMD card next year… I have an RTX 2060S with 535.98.

Yeah, uhh…it’s pretty stupid. The more I think about it, the more shocked I am that BMW is so aware of this that they need two separate warnings for it in the handbook, but make it the owner’s responsibility not to put themselves in that situation…?

Car is on some sort of lease program where you trade it in for the next model after a few years. There would need to be some way of installing a manual release without causing damage to the car…or preventing BMW from taking it back.

TIL Teslas are better designed than this BMW model 🤷‍♀️

Is your issue that Lutris is buggy or limiting? I haven’t encountered buggy behavior in Lutris, and it gives you a ton of options. I like some parts of bottles but I would really like to be able to change cover art without editing a config file, lol. It’s definitely the easiest way to get started with Wine though.

There’s Heroic Games Launcher too, by the way. It has less features than Lutris but it’s probably easier to use? It’s also prettier than Lutris, I think. What issues were you having with Lutris?

I’ve only used CrossOver on Linux and actually find it harder to use than Lutris. There’s some crazy stuff like needing to declare environment variables inside a configuration file instead of having a GUI for it. But if you look at CodeWeavers’ blog and release notes, you’ll see them constantly making changes to improve gaming on macOS. That’s where they seem to be devoting most of their energy these days. CrossOver on Linux worked for Microsoft Office when I needed to use it, but that was the only reason I bought it.

I still think it was a worthwhile purchase, if only to support further Wine development. CodeWeavers has a great article about the differences between CrossOver and other Wine distributions: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/alasky/2019/3/21/wine-crossover-and-proton-whats-the-relation

PlayOnLinux is no longer under active development (even Phoenics seems to have been stale for a while now), and Steam’s Proton, Lutris, or Bottles are what you should use on Linux nowadays.

I was aware of the Game Porting Toolkit announcement. In fact, I first learned of it from CodeWeavers, who noticed Apple used their code to develop it.

We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit. We have decades of experience creating ports with Wine, and we are very pleased that Apple is recognizing that Wine is a fantastic solution for running Windows games on macOS. We did not work with Apple on this tool, but we would be delighted to work with any game developers who try out the Game Porting Toolkit and see the massive potential that Wine offers. Our PortJump™ team has perfected the art and science of creating ports of Windows applications using our Wine technology, and we welcome inquiries about how we can help get your game working on macOS.

I don’t play games on macOS, but my understanding was the same as yours; that it was a testing tool for developers to test out how the game might work on macOS. That’s how it was presented. I didn’t think it was meant to be used by macOS users.

In any case, CrossOver is intended to be used by macOS users (and the GPT uses the same code, as enthusiastically explained above), and it has a good graphical interface. I think these factors make it obvious to recommend CrossOver as the canonical solution for playing Windows games on macOS.

macOS has made it difficult for both game developers and Wine developers to support the platform by letting their OpenGL support rot, removing 32-bit support, ignoring Vulkan and coming out with their own graphics API, Metal. Wine is in a worse state than on GNU/Linux. There aren’t many native games available for macOS.

That being said, your best bet is likely CrossOver. They employ the principle Wine developers, worked with Valve on Proton, and have put a lot of effort into supporting macOS. They’ve got a free trial with complete functionality you can try out.

But if the games you’re playing have native releases for macOS, that’s not something you need to worry about. There are just so few games available on macOS that I assumed they don’t. Now, I only have an Intel iMac which I never play games on so I couldn’t tell you how the newer ARM laptops perform.

The previous generation BMW car my friend owned worked fine. This is a new regression, and if you look further up the thread, you’ll see I’ve posted a photo of page 86 of the BMW handbook where BMW acknowledges their own bad design and pushes the responsibility onto the owner to not lock people inside the car. While also having an auto-lock feature which is on by default.

It would be good to find out if this design was intentional or somehow just not tested until they had produced these models. The wording makes it seem that way.

BMW thinks so too!

330i

I’m assuming uralsolo is talking about free software as in, software which gives users the four freedoms.

I don’t think all software needs to be free, but in some ways, it’s no longer the issue of the day. In this day and age, a lot of what we’re using is no longer really software. We’re using services with client-side Javascript which is nominally free software (but not really). Most of the actual software is sitting behind a server. I see this as good and bad. It means users of less popular operating systems get access to the same services as users of popular operating systems so long as they have browsers, and the negatives are, well…I’m sure you don’t need my help to think of some.

It’s hard to make money with free software because everyone has the right to commercially exploit it. For this reason alone, I don’t think it’s necessary for all software to be free, but I’ll be there to celebrate the programs that are free.

This is how the BMW a friend owns works, and it’s not an EV. The unlock button in the driver’s seat just stops working if the car is off.

How do I know this? I decided to stay in the car while my friend went to go get something, and it auto-locked as he walked away. After about 5 minutes of trying everything I could think of to get out (including attempting to climb into the boot, which was too small for anything except a malnourished child to fit through), he came back and unlocked it.

There is no manual way to unlock the door from the inside. I checked the driver’s manual. It says it’s impossible to do without “special knowledge” and does not provide any pointers on how to do so. The friend asked a guy at the BMW place after a service how to unlock it from the inside, and he said “oh, yeah, there’s no way to do that,” and laughed it off.

Previous BMW models weren’t designed like this. I can’t imagine what they’ll do to the next generation…

It’s a shame that Cory Doctorow of all people seems to have misinterpreted this. And that he is using Medium to deliver this story.

Well, so much for me having the right side of history 🙂

Thanks for the correction! I had a proper look at the CUPS page on Wikipedia and it’s as you say:

Michael Sweet, who owned Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997 and the first public betas appeared in 1999.[5][6] The original design of CUPS used the Line Printer Daemon protocol (LPD), but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was initially called “The Common UNIX Printing System”. This name was shortened to just “CUPS” beginning with CUPS 1.4 due to legal concerns with the UNIX trademark.[7] CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for most Linux distributions. In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[8] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[9] On December 20, 2019, Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.[10][11] In 2020, the OpenPrinting organization forked the project, with Michael Sweet continuing work on it.[12][13]

This is kind of counter to the point I was making, so thanks for bringing it up. Apple still released some of their software under a free license back then, but without CUPS, it’s nowhere near as significant. I guess it’s worth mentioning that Apple forked KHTML from KDE as Webkit and continues to develop and maintain that browser engine today. However, Safari is not free software. Webkit is free software because KHTML was released under the LGPL, which prevents derivative software from developing it under a proprietary license.

Although, Apple’s own contributions and “any further contributions” are available under the BSD 2-Clause license: https://webkit.org/licensing-webkit/

Which kind of contradicts what I’ve read on the Wikipedia page where it says certain parts of the browser are licensed under LGPL and others are licensed under the BSD license…

I have no idea how it ended up that way, but there’s this announcement: https://docs.webkit.org/Other/Licensing.html