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?
If you have installed wlroots, that’s why. Wlroots has a hard dependency on libseatd, which is provided by seatd. Labwc also directly depends on it. Sway as well can use seatd as both documented by sway itself, and its arch wiki, but for some reason it doesn’t directly depend on it, though it depends on wlroots, :). This is not a problem on arch since the seatd service can co-exist with logind/systemd, and on arch you can use the seatd service combined with libseatd for software build on top of libseatd, and users on arch can then choose between seatd or policy kit on that software. On other non systemd distros like artix, the seatd daemon is in conflict with logind (on artix it’s extracted from systemd), precisely because you can get away without logind as long as you use acpid to provide some of the functionality logind also provides besides session administration. Not sure if besides wlroots on archthere’s additional software depending on seatd. Several wayland compositors are based on wlroots, which attempts to somehow offer a standard for compositor and applications developers.
So it might be xdg-desktop-portal behaves differently for sandboxed apps such as flatpak ones than regular apps, hmm. So I’d still like to know how required d-bus is…
Thanks a lot !
Have you explore hyprland, niri (scrollable, not dynamic, but it’s sort of dynamic then) or sway (static tiling though, but offering tabbed layout and dynamic stacking/floating, plus hugely customizable)? Did you discard them because not close enough to bspwm? Just curious, not to judge your decision or anything like that.
Being an artix user, are you using logind (the official default), or just seatd, or the new logind alternative turnstile (not supported by all init systems, looks like only dinit which I use and openrc, tough void has it working with runit I believe)? I’m wondering what’s really required on wayland. I like the approach of just seatd, but I don’t know what one would lose and what are the wins, but if not seat alone then turnstile which actually require seatd. Also I would like to drop calling d-bus, but I’m not sure if that would prevent the compositor to work, but further if screen sharing with webrtc, electron apps like slack or teams-for-linux would stop working. I guess not using d-bus would not affect mako. But any ways, I’m curious of what would be you choice for your wayland experience if/when you get into it. The official and default way is just logind plus d-bus plus polkit. For such sharing xdg-desktop-portal is required, which fundamentally seems to be plumbing of d-bus, but I’m not sure…
BTW, from the blog post referenced, dudemanguy is also the mpv developer, so that requires quite a lot of effort (mpv specially on the support side of things, besides the developing effort, particularly to support wayland, and mpv does for some time now) together with artix effort. I’m glad he’s back writing, :)
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 !
BTW, just in case, not only the system configs are inmutable on Guix, the root/system directory is also read-only making it an inmutable distribution. So the argument that the Guix system is not inmutable is not correct. There are many places clearly stating that, but the itsfoss 12 inmutable linux distributions is one of them, and by its definition of inmutable:
An immutable distro ensures that the operating system’s core remains unchanged. The root file system for an immutable distro remains read-only, making it possible to stay the same across multiple instances.
So Guix is actually an unmutable distribution. But moreover, it’s much more than that.
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…
The only reasons I sometime back looked into betterbird was thunderbird breaking TbSync and its companion “Provider for Exchange ActiveSync”, which I really need for work, and because of their tray support (I don’t like the modern way which rejects the benefits of the tray functionality, or notification area which is how it’s also called now a days).
For the first thing, I was able to live with thunderbird by reverting the upgrade and keep its package from upgrading at all, until the two extensions I required eventually supported the new thunderbird version which broke them. I looked into betterbird as an alternative since someone suggested it given betterbird wasn’t moving as fast at that time as thunderbird was, and at that moment they were not breaking the extensions I’m force to use if wanting to use thunderbird as email client at work.
For the tray, ohh well, it doesn’t work on wayland if you don’t use gnome or kde (I use wayfire), so it couldn’t help me at all. I found a bug reported on mozilla (not sure why not also on betterbird) which matches my case, so no luck with their tray support, :(
Other than that I really didn’t find a compelling reason to use betterbird instead of thunderbird. But if I were a gnome or kde user, perhaps its tray support might be compelling enough.
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…
Not sure why you mentioned this. At least on Arc, or any distro based on it like Artix, the ucode per CPU is offered as a separate package:
% pacman -Ss ucode
system/amd-ucode 20241111.b5885ec5-1
Microcode update image for AMD CPUs
world/intel-ucode 20241112-1 [installed]
Microcode update files for Intel CPUs
world/iucode-tool 2.3.1-5
Tool to manipulate Intel
galaxy/amd-ucode-xz 20230625.ee91452d-4
Microcode update image for AMD CPUs
extra/intel-ucode 20241112-1 [installed]
Microcode update files for Intel CPUs
extra/iucode-tool 2.3.1-5
Tool to manipulate Intel
If your distro doesn’t help with ucode packages, you can ultimately download it from intel/amd/whatever. And the same applies for the hardware firmware in general.
So it’s true that some hardware won’t properly work out of the box by using libre-linux, but nothing prevents you from getting the required firmware from other packages or sources. Granted that doesn’t make things easier. And granted that might defeat the purpose of using linux-libre, but you might at least only add only strictly required binary blobs for your current hardware.
linux-libre is harder because if you want cpu ucode plus hardware firmware support in general so that you can make your bad citizen hardware work, you’ll need to add it out of the linux package.
Someone mentioned Guix as a gnu + linux distribution was hard, and in general that’s true, but not because of linux-libre since there’s a non official Guix repository providing non libre/free cpu ucode plus hardware firmware, see:
https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
The complex part of Guix comes from it being a inmutable distribution based on the ideas from NixOS, though it’s not a fork from Nix since it’s even based on Guile rather than the Nix language, but their packages and configurations are quite different than any other distribution, the same as its inmutable system and I believe on both reproducibility is a thing…
But bottom line, for Guix you can even get packages to make linux-libre work with your hardware provided you find the corresponding firmware in the non official repo, and in general (not just Guix) as long as you find the firmware somewhere else (not in linux-libre) you would be OK, and depending on your distro that might be a really hard task.
I use Artix, and though I haven’t explored it yet, I’ve been wondering how hard it’d be to install linux-libre, and get the strictly required firmware from the AUR, perhaps it’s possible. The package is actually offered from AUR:
% aur search linux-libre
aur/linux-libre 6.11.9-1 (+37 0.35%)
The Linux Libre kernel and modules
aur/linux-libre-docs 6.11.9-1 (+37 0.35%)
Documentation for the Linux Libre kernel
aur/linux-libre-firmware 1.4-1 (+3 0.00%) (Orphaned)
Firmware files for Linux-libre
aur/linux-libre-headers 6.11.9-1 (+37 0.35%)
Headers and scripts for building modules for the Linux Libre kernel
aur/linux-librem5 6.6.57-1 (+0 0.00%)
The Linux kernel for Purism Librem 5
aur/linux-librem5-docs 6.6.57-1 (+0 0.00%)
The Linux kernel for Purism Librem 5 (documentation)
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.