Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 38 Posts
- 236 Comments
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•The ‘European’ Jolla Phone Is an Anti-Big-Tech SmartphoneEnglish
3·2 months agounfortunately, like its predecessor (Nokia’s Maemo/Meego), Jolla’s SailfishOS has never been (and has never had plans to be) fully free/libre open source software.
many components of it are freely licensed, but not nearly enough to constitute an actual mobile operating system you can use.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•How to disable this blinking light on a WD External Hard Drive?English
6·2 months ago
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•How to disable this blinking light on a WD External Hard Drive?English
3·2 months agobased on the other comments here i had to double check if this thread was in [email protected] smh my head
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•CrackArmor: Critical AppArmor Flaws Enable Local Privilege Escalation to RootEnglish
22·2 months agoYou’re correct on both points (🤦♂️ indeed).
I’ve now edited this post to link to their advisory text file instead of their advertising-heavy blog post about it which I had initially linked when the above comment was posted. Thanks.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Konform Browser 140.8.0-106 - Security- and privacy oriented open source web browserEnglish
2·2 months agoNice, thanks.
It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.
re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/
imo it would be better to bundle UBO and ship its updates along with browser updates.
are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Konform Browser 140.8.0-106 - Security- and privacy oriented open source web browserEnglish
9·2 months agoFull-page machine translations are disabled
Firefox translations are done offline (after downloading the model for a langauge pair).
Does anybody know why Konform decided to disable this very useful feature?
your instance has a list of communities federated to it here: https://piefed.zip/communities
the most active community for announcing new communities is [email protected] (which includes communities on many different instances, not only .world)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Curious about the relationship between Red Hat and FedoraEnglish
12·2 months agocould Red Hat eventually take control of the project
Fedora started in 2002 and merged with “Red Hat Linux” in 2003.
Red Hat, Inc has had full control of it ever since then.
It is a “community project” inasmuch as there are Fedora developers who are volunteers (and some who are paid by companies other than Red Hat), and the Fedora Council includes people who are not employed by Red Hat - but the Project Leader is always a Red Hat employee, and if the Council ever has an irreconcilable difference with Red Hat then Red Hat can simply ignore and/or dismiss them.
Red Hat owns all Fedora-related trademarks, and the Fedora Project is not an independent legal entity: it is a part of Red Hat.
If Fedora developers don’t like Red Hat’s decisions regarding the project, they can fork it but they’d need to change the name and find some other sources funding.
Also, icymi, Red Hat became a subsidiary of IBM in 2019.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Technology@beehaw.org•A History of DHTML and Web Applications - The History of the WebEnglish
2·3 months agoI don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.
As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.
The term “web app” hadn’t been coined yet but, even without AJAX I think in retrospect it’s reasonable to call things like the early versions of Hotmail and RocketMail applications - they were functional replacements for a native application, on the web, even though they did require a new page load for every click (or at least every click that required network interaction).
At some point, though, I’m pretty sure that some clicks didn’t require server connections, and those didn’t require another page load (at least if js was enabled): this is what “DHTML” originally meant: using JavaScript to modify the DOM client-side, in the era before sans-page-reload network connections were technically possible.
The term DHTML definitely predates AJAX and the existence of
XMLHTTP(laterXMLHttpRequest), so it’s also odd that this article writes a lot about the former while not mentioning the latter. (The article actually incorrectly defines DHTML as making possible “websites that could refresh interactive data without the need for a page reload” - that was AJAX, not DHTML.)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Technology@beehaw.org•A History of DHTML and Web Applications - The History of the WebEnglish
7·3 months agoWeird this article doesn’t mention Hotmail and RocketMail, which both had email client web apps in 1996.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Can you use Linux today without the terminal?English
32·4 months agoDoes anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR
I am not aware of any software distribution service with a comparable experience (massive userbase with zero vetting for uploaders) as Arch’s amazing AUR - if you are looking for a way to distribute malware to many unsuspecting people (who’s friends think they’re hackerman), it’s really unparalleled. (😢)
To your primary question, yes, many people do successfully daily drive various Linux distros without ever opening the terminal. 🙄
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Technology@beehaw.org•Woman felt 'dehumanised' after Musk's Grok AI used to digitally remove her clothesEnglish
1·4 months agoi thought the photo in this thumbnail looked familiar, and then realized it’s because I just saw a post from her a minute ago - one of many linking to a very old video of a large crowd in Venezuela falsely claiming that it shows people celebrating the US kidnapping Maduro today.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•Here is a more polished release of nanogram. Fully compatible on raspberry pi now.English
0·5 months agolook at their responses in the .ml cross-post,
that post is now deleted, but you can see their modlog here
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Android@lemdro.id•Jolla announces "the other half" extensible backcovers as strech-goal to phone pre-order campainEnglish
21·5 months agoThanks. Sorry to see my assumption was correct; that does indeed sound a lot like when they were called OSSO two decades ago.
Notably absent from the list of things they might open source soon is their current “Lipstick” UI, the graphical shell itself.
All of the stuff they plan to open source are things I didn’t even figure out were still closed from my 5-10 minutes of research before writing my previous comments. It is difficult to estimate the number (do you know how?) of other small closed components which they can dribble out over the next years to maintain users’ false hope that they will one day have an actually-open-source operating system.
we’ll see though
my advice is: don’t hold your breath.
Sorry if this sounds bitter, but it’s because I am - I naively believed that OSSO might actually ship a free OS one day (to be fair they didn’t say they would either, but they helped us believe that they might… in effect saying “we’ll see” for years while releasing bits here and there) and it was frustrating to realize that it was never a real possibility.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Android@lemdro.id•Jolla announces "the other half" extensible backcovers as strech-goal to phone pre-order campainEnglish
2·5 months agoGot a link about it? Have they just said they plan to make it “more” open, or do they actually plan to make the full OS actually be free software, like AOSP, pmOS, or most of the other things on, eg, the pinephone software page? (note that sailfish is also listed there, but iiuc its UI and some other bits remain closed-source).
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Android@lemdro.id•Jolla announces "the other half" extensible backcovers as strech-goal to phone pre-order campainEnglish
3·5 months agoIt is the direct descendant of Nokia’s OSSO (“Open Source Software Operations”) division, both in terms of people and software.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Android@lemdro.id•Jolla announces "the other half" extensible backcovers as strech-goal to phone pre-order campainEnglish
4·5 months agoUnfortunately they’ve been saying on and off that they plan to slowly open source more of it literally since they first started… which was [checks calendar] now 20 years ago. So, I lost my optimism that they would ever finish opening it quite a while ago.
💀

Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Android@lemdro.id•Jolla announces "the other half" extensible backcovers as strech-goal to phone pre-order campainEnglish
181·5 months agoand we’ll open source the hardware and software interface specs so anyone can design, 3D-print, or produce their own modules
oh cool, people can make open source “other half” add-ons for the proprietary “first half” of the phone itself 🙄
i wonder what percentage of jolla customers still mistakenly believe SailfishOS to be open source? (most of the ones i’ve met did…)
1 reason it’s wrong to me: https://nosystemd.org/
Under “Notable bugs and security issues” there is a big list of issues which were all (afaict) fixed many years ago.
There have been reasonable philosophical objections to systemd, some of which are still relevant, and as that site shows there are still many distros without it, but for the vast majority of desktop users who want something that JustWorks… using a mainstream distro with systemd is the way to go.
This blog post from pmOS covers some of the pain of trying to use KDE or GNOME without it.












that kernel release (which most distros have still not shipped yet) fixes only one of the two vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-43284); afaik even upstream still doesn’t have a patch for the second one (CVE-2026-43500) at this time.
(for people relying on Linux privilege separation, here are mitigation instructions.)