whoBIRD

An app that recognizes birds singing near you, all on device, and has an option to show a photo of the bird too. It's exclusive to F-Droid (not on Google Play), and the only bird recognizing app I know of that does it all immediately on your device (without sending it to a server). https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.woheller69.whobird/

Organic Maps

Highly detailed OpenStreetMap maps local on your device. Wonderful for walking directions, as it has on-device routing and maps out walking pathways (which is something that even Google Maps does not do well) https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/

AntennaPod

The best podcast client also happens to be Free Software and on F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

HeliBoard

This is the best FOSS keyboard that's under active maintenance. It even supports swiping, but that requires a non-free binary library from Google. (Maintained fork of OpenBoard.) https://f-droid.org/en/packages/helium314.keyboard/

Breezy Weather

Good weather app that has so many details (including pollen too) and fetches from multiple sources. It looks great as well. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.breezyweather/

darktable, hands down. It has a learning curve, but it's a pro app and app pro apps have learning curves.

The linear pipeline is great, masking is superb, and the app keeps getting better every release.

The one downside is that darktable is not opinionated by default (so raw files look a little flat to begin with, without doing anything), but it's customizable that you can even change that with auto applied presets. On the other hand, it does let you do what you want to do with an image, versus fighting with defaults (which is what it's like to edit something in Lightroom, if you want to diverge from what it suggests by default).

There are a bunch of great tutorials on YouTube and you'll want to check out https://discuss.pixls.us/ too. Create an account on the Pixls forum, read some threads, try out some "play raws" (where people post their raw files under a CC license and then lots of people try their own take at editing it and post their edit).

Rico Resolves has a half hour getting started video for darktable 4.6 at https://youtu.be/ucjAmTMIEOI

Anything from Bruce Williams https://youtube.com/@audio2u and Boris Hajdukovic https://youtube.com/@s7habo are both great too, and more people are posting darktable videos all the time as well.

The documentation for darktable is actually very good as well. Do not skip it. You don't have to read it all, but try reading the intro parts and going back to it when you want some reference on how a part of darktable works. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/

Some tips:

• You can right click on sliders to get a special UI and you can also enter numbers (often even outside the bounds of what the slider would normally permit).

• Modules will be applied in the best order regardless of which one you work on first.

• There are some somewhat redundant modules, as darktable did start out as a "display referred" workflow (just like most all of the other raw editors everywhere) and moved to a "scene referred" (aka "linear rgb") workflow, which provides better editing, improved color handling, vastly better tone mapping, and so on. If there are two similar modules, try to go with the version that has "RGB" in its title. Older modules still exist mainly for older edits. (You can also change darktable back to the old display referred workflow in the settinfs, but I strongly suggest to not do this. Scene referred is much better.)

I used to shoot film and do darkroom stuff years ago. I've used Aperture on OS X. I used Lightroom on OS X and then on Windows. A few years ago, I switched to darktable on Linux... and darktable has gotten so, so much better each release. When I switched years ago, it was more or less a Lightroom competitor (with some advantages and disadvantages). But darktable is really amazing software now, and can give you much better results than Lightroom, when you know how to use it.

GNOME 46 (currently in release candidate mode and fully releasing later this month on March 20) is adding support for remote graphical logins via rdp:

https://9to5linux.com/gnome-46-to-introduce-headless-remote-logins-via-gnome-display-manager

So you'll be able to do this pretty soon, after upgrading.

It'll be in Fedora 40, scheduled for release around April 16.

https://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-40/f-40-all-tasks.html

If you're in Europe, it may be due to the DMA.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2024/03/06/digital-markets-act-how-the-way-you-use-google-maps-and-messenger-is-changing_6591969_13.html

You may also have noticed something new on Google, when looking for the address of a place: It's now impossible to click on the map that appears in your search results.

Google is one of the "gatekeepers" according to the DMA (Digital Markets Act). The law recently went into effect. It is supposed to lessen the amount of preferential treatment the big tech companies give themselves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act

That's not how Flatpak works.

Flatpak has runtimes, which is where most shared libraries are. There's a common base one called Freedesktop, a GNOME runtime, a KDE runtime , an Elementary runtime, and more. (The GNOME and KDE ones are built on top and inherit from the Freedesktop base runtime.)

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/available-runtimes.html

Additionally, at least for Flathub, they have shared modules for commonly used libraries that aren't in runtimes. (Many are related to games or legacy support like GTK2.)

https://github.com/flathub/shared-modules

Lastly, some distributions are building their own runtimes and apps on top, so the packages they build are available as flatpaks as well. This is the case for Fedora, Elementary, Endless, and others.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flatpak

It certainly is a differentiator: uBlock Origin already works best on Firefox. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox

And when Manifest v3 is fully enforced in Chromium (current date is slated to be July 2024), then the more restricted uBlock Origin Lite would need to be used instead.

(I'm not sure if Arc will fully adopt v3, but they might not have a choice at some point in time.)

The Lite version still works well considering all the restrictions, but has a lot of limitations: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-1507539114

• Filter lists update only when the extension updates (no fetching up to date lists from servers)

• Many filters are dropped at conversion time due to MV3's limited filter syntax
• No crafting your own filters (thus no element picker)
• No strict-blocked pages
• No per-site switches
• No dynamic filtering
• No importing external lists

TL;DR: The way uBlock Origin works on Firefox right now is already better, but if Arc has to go along with Manifest v3 in Chromium in a few months, then it'll be even more of a differentiator.

It also looks like they're even thinking about rolling out their own tracker blocker (instead of using uBlock Origin) as a result of the Manifest v3 changes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/wiki/index/#wiki_how_will_arc_handle_the_transition_from_manifest_v2_to_manifest_v3.3F

https://twitter.com/joshm/status/1728926780600508716

We're rolling our own native @arcinternet Ad & Tracker Blocker in 2024 (since Chrome is restricting them)...

Any creative ideas for how we can go above and beyond, and reimagine the category?

Remove GDPR/Cookie Consents? What else?

FOSS apps (all on Flathub)

Some of the AI related apps I've been using that are both Free Software and offline (where it runs on your computer without using network services in the cloud) are:

• OCR: "Frog" can take screenshots, select images, accept drag and drop, and you can paste an image from the clipboard. It'll read the text on the images and immediately have a text area with the result. https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.tenderowl.frog — it's powered by Tesseract. Note: The completely optional text-to-speech that Frog has does use an online service. But the rest is offline.

• Speech to text: "Speech Note" does text to speech, speech to text, and translations... all locally on your computer, and it supports GPU acceleration (which isn't needed, but it makes it a little faster). https://flathub.org/apps/net.mkiol.SpeechNote — This is basically the all-in-one "Swiss army knife" of ML text processing. Thanks to being a Flatpak, you don't have to do anything special for the dependencies. It's all taken care of for you. It also has tons of different models (for different voices, different backends) all available from within the UI, which just needs a click for downloading.

• Upscaling images: There are two that do something similar, using some of the same backends. A nice and simple one is "Upscaler". https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.theevilskeleton.Upscaler Another one that's cross platform is "Upscayl" https://flathub.org/apps/org.upscayl.Upscayl — these both use ESRGAN and Waifu2x in the background.

• Closed captioning: "Live Captions" uses an ML model to transcribe text realtime. It's wonderful for when a video doesn't have subtitles, or when you're participating in a video call (which might also not have CC). There's also a toggle mode that will transcribe based on microphone input. The default is to use system audio. https://flathub.org/apps/net.sapples.LiveCaptions

• Web page translations: Firefox, for the past few releases, has the ability to translate web pages completely local in-browser. It does need to download a small model file (a quantized one around 20 megabytes per language pair), but this happens automatically on first use. All you need to do is click the translate icon (when it's auto-detected) or go to the menu and select "Translate page...". Firefox is located in your distribution already (and is usually installed by default in most Linux distributions) and is available as an official package from Mozilla on Flathub as well. Newer versions keep improving on this, improving speed (it's pretty quick already), improving accuracy, improving reliability (sometimes you have to try to translate a couple of times on some pages), and adding languages. But what's there in the release of Firefox is already great.

Chat and image generation (more advanced)

While all the above are graphical apps and on Flathub (some may have distro packages too), there are some additional AI/ML things you can run on Linux as well:

• Chat ML: "Ollama" (https://ollama.ai/) is a friendlier wrapper around llama.cpp and lets you run a variety of models (some FOSS, some just source-available-and-gratis, some not at all).

You can run Ollama in a container to make it even easier. Even a Podman container on your user account works. (You don't need to set it up as a system container.) The instructions for Docker work on Podman (just swap the docker command for podman instead).

While the official instructions only list CPU (which is fine for some of the smaller models) and NVidia, it's also possible to use an AMD GPU too:

# Enable device as user (run once per boot)
sudo setsebool container_use_devices=true

# Set up the ollama server for AMD acceleration (run once per session)
podman run --pull=always --replace --detach --device /dev/kfd --device /dev/dri --group-add video -v ollama:/root/.ollama -p 11434:11434 --name ollama ollama/ollama:0.1.22-rocm

# Command-line interaction (run any time you want to use it — the last part is which model you want to use)
podman exec -it ollama ollama run llama2

llama2 is the default ML; there are so many others available. Mixtral is a good one if you have enough vram on your GPU. Whatever you specify, it will auto-download and set it up for you. You only need to wait the first time. (The ROCm version of takes a while to download. Each model varies. The good thing is, it's all cached for subsequent uses.)

If you want a web UI like ChatGPT, then you could also run this instead of the command line interaction command:

podman run -d --replace -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v ollama-webui:/app/backend/data --name ollama-webui ghcr.io/ollama-webui/ollama-webui:main

...and visit http://localhost:3000/

When done, run podman stop ollama and podman stop ollama-webui to free up resources from your GPU.

There are also integrations for text editors and IDEs, similar to GitHub's CoPilot. Neovim has a few already. VS Code (or VS Codium) has some too (like twinny and privy).

• Image generation: "Stable Diffusion" is the go-to here. There are a bunch of forks. Some of the better ones are:
  • "Fooocus" https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus/ — an easy to use streamlined app (with some advanced settings) where you don't need to prompt as much or tweak settings to get a good result by default.
  • "SD.next" https://github.com/vladmandic/automatic — A fork of the Automatic111 fork of the default Stable Diffusion web app that uses the Gradio UI.
  • "ComfyUI" https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI — A node-based UI for Stable Diffusion. ...and there are a ton others. Forks of forks of forks.

Krita, GIMP, and Blender all have plugins that can interface with some of these too (usually using a SD Automatic111 API).

For Stable Diffusion on AMD, you need to have ROCm installed and might need to set or use an environment variable to make it work with your card. Something like: HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=11.0.0 or HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 (depending on your GPU). Prefixing means just putting that at the beginning of the the command with a space and then the rest of the command. Setting it as a variable depends on your shell. You might need to export it for some (like for bash). Prefixing it is fine though, especially when you use ctrl+r to do a substrang search in your shell history (so you don't need to retype it or remember silly-long commands).

As using these image generating apps pulls down a lot of Python libraries, I'd suggest considering setting up a separate user account instead of using your own, so the app doesn't have access to your local files (like stuff in ~/.ssh/, ~/.local/, your documents, etc.). Setting up containers for these is not so easy (yet), sadly. Some people have done it. And they do run in a toolbox or distrobox podman container... but toolbox and distrobox containers don't really contain so much, so you're better off using podman (with a "docker" container) directly or running it as a separate account for some type of isolation from your user account files.

Everything else above is at least contained (via containers or Flatpak) to some degree... but stuff locally via pip installs can do anything. And it's not just hypothetical either, for example: PyTorch nightly was compromised for a few days on Christmas of 2022.

There are some graphical apps on Flathub for connecting to Stable Diffusion and a ChatGPT AI (which ollama now has)... but in the course of setting them up, you basically have a web and/or text-based UI to interact with.

Literally almost all of my and my partner's friends and coworkers who are in Europe (including Germany, UK, Finland, Czechia, Greece, and more) have been sick with COVID in the past couple months to (especially) right now — it's very real in Europe still.

People are all talking about COVID right now, in messages, emails, video calls, Mastodon, and more. (It's usually to inform others that they're sick and can't work or meet up. But also complaining that doing basic stuff is difficult.)

Europe is a large place, of course, but at least in a lot of it, COVID is sadly still going strong.

I saw a video the other day that compared F:NV via DirectX 9 and DXVK on Windows and how DXVK (and Vulkan underneath of course) does magic to make it so much better with frame pacing.

https://youtu.be/tGF0tKPVbqY

It's funny how we get that by default on Linux, and Windows folks are trying out parts of Proton to improve their gaming experience in Windows in various games. 🤣

What's even funnier is that at least in the case of New Vegas, it's actually even better on Linux, as it compiles and caches the Vulkan shaders, so we shouldn't have any hiccups (once it's cached), at least if you're running it in Steam.

My first attempt to try to fix something like this would be to:

1. Download Fedora Workstation live media. (Within Windows or some other computer that boots.)
2. Flash it to a USB stick.
3. Reboot to the live desktop from the USB stick. (It might require pressing F12 or some other key combo during boot.)
4. "Try out" Fedora. (That is: do not install.)
5. Open GNOME Disks. (I think it's included. Otherwise, you can sudo dnf install gnome-disks to install it temporarily on the live session.)
6. Try to mount the main filesystem that contains /etc/fstab (it should ask you for the LUKS password.
7. Comment out the Windows mount point. Or if you want to keep it (if the partition still exists and is just "dirty" and still needs a check from Windows) add ",nofail" after "auto" to the options in the line for the mount, so your system should still boot without that mount point.
8. Save the /etc/fstab file.
9. Shut down the computer.
10. Unplug USB stick.
11. Boot computer. Linux should successfully boot... hopefully. 😉

I'm also wondering: How did you add the Windows partition to Fedora? Was it from within Fedora's installer (aka: "Anaconda")? Or did you add it in a different way?

(BTW: I use Silverblue and have a long history with Fedora. 😁)

This actually is an option!

I've used it to play games from the Deck at native 1080p on my TV.

I'm not at my Steam Deck right now, but I remember it's in the settings. I think if you go to the game's settings, look for something like "native" display. You have to go into the settings for each game you want at a larger resolution on an external monitor in game mode and select "native".

I don't remember if it needs to first be enabled on the system settings in the display area. (I think it does the right thing for system settings by default in most cases.)

IIRC, desktop mode also automatically supports the native resolution, but game mode is nice and console-like. Desktop mode might be a bit clunkier than what you'd want for couch gaming. Setting the option in game mode for the game is likely your best option.

It's not necessarily that smoking is a larger percentage of the population. It varies, but stats show a similar percentage more or less... it is a bit higher in Europe on average than in the US on average — but both places are large with varied amounts of smokers. It's more that people are outside near each other more in Europe.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/smoking-rates-by-country

In Europe they're walking down the street, sitting outdoors at cafes, hanging out in the city center, etc. Whereas in the US, people are often driving from place to place to go to a destination, so you don't notice the smoking as much. Plus, smoking sections are a concept that exists in the US (even outside), whereas they don't in Europe. Thankfully, in much of the US and EU, most places are finally non-smoking indoors now.

This is a gross overgeneralization. It's different in different parts of the US and different parts of Europe, of course.

(FWIW: I totally agree with you that it's gross. And it's far too common to run into in Europe.)