Pantherina

Funny. True, on superstable but also super unstable systems, having separated apps makes most sense.

Not actually on "immutable" rpm-ostree systems, as these have the best and most solid package management.

So actually when people say "these immutable systems, you just use Flatpaks", actually on the regular systems you should mainly use Flatpaks.

Use MakeMKV. It is really good. It will give you files to work with, and automatically extract all good ones.

Then use Handbrake. You may also directly use handbrake, I dont know I used a total Potato (intel core duo) for the first step, no chance for encoding.

I literally just did that. DVDs have pretty uncompressed video, like an old movie is 8GB or bigger.

Have a look at the back cover of the DVD, mine had "PAL" written on it.

Recommended settings if you only want to use it with VLC or MPV, not strange media players.

• container: use mkv. It is free, works very well and has a funny name.
• video: AV1 (it is completely free and really good for the future. For better support use h264, but it is not as good)
  • resolution: 570p or something, PAL
  • compression rate: 25
  • FPS: 22 or something, PAL
• audio: AAC or opus, AAC is the default
  • bitrate 128kb/s for crappy movies, 160kb/s and up for music. But using more than the original DVD has makes no sense.
  • make sure to add all tracks
• subtitles: also make sure to add all of them

Save these settings as custom preset "PAL DVDs"

Then run it. If you have multiple files from makemkv, you can "open directory" in handbrake, and then under "queue" "add multiple ones to queue" and select all of them. Make sure to have the preset chosen, and run.

I literally encoded all my DVDs with 720p, artificially increasing the size. I am not redoing everything, my laptop is heating for 50h or so. Working well but damn that takes time.

If the videos have grain, you may want to apply a grain filter. Grain is hard to compress, as it is random noise all over the place.

Like in JPG image compression, pictures are converted to areas of the same color, like this:

(More examples)

If you have grain, noise, in videos, the images cannot be compressed that well and the size can be double. So if it works well, use that to decrease the video size.

Jpeg, aac, opus, AV1 are all "lossy" so they will remove information that cannot be gotten back. Unlike zip for example, or jpeg-xl (JXL) for images, or FLAC for Audio.

But encoding something that is lossy, in a lossless format, makes no sense.

You can increase the size of a lossy encoded video, by re-encoding with better presets. Without adding any real information.

So test the presets first, and if you are unhappy, run them again but on the original files.

With the correct settings I got a 6GB movie down to 600MB or less, without notable data loss.

Literally a KDE setting. In the GUI.

And nobody needs that, otherwise there would be a plasmoid.

Crazyy!

Btw I am XWayland free since today!

I have a list of recommended apps here

Some apps need environment variables:

Qt:

• qpwgraph

GTK

• GPU Screen recorder, I guess

Electron

• Nextcloud Flatpak
• MullvadVPN RPM
• Signal Flatpak
• (Element, I switched to the Webapp in Librewolf)
• Freetube Flatpak

You can use xlsclients -l to detect apps using XWayland.

Some may even want to run apps through XWayland on purpose, like KeepassXC for Clipboard access or autotype. Lets see how long it takes to implement all the needed protocols.

You got me in the first part XD

No joking, apart from that

But since apparently PulseAudio is the GNome / Microsoft approved way

I think I understand your point.

Pulseaudio is outdated, Pipewire AND Pulseaudio are now needed. Maybe also just Pipewire, and you can somehow fake Pulseaudio?

I never used a system without Pulseaudio, and Fedora has both (?) Or just Pipewire.

Pulseaudio is the old stuff that apps want to use, pipewire is the new cool stuff (I recommend qpwgraph) which allows like everything.

Aaand it is not overcomplicated, it isolated apps and introduces a permission system. Privileged programs that channel the requests and permissions, and sometimes need user interaction. Its actually less chaotic, the problem simply is that Flatpak ALSO tries to run all apps everywhere. And apps are mostly not up to date, so Flatpaks have randomly poked holes everywhere.

Today I worked on hardening configs for my apps. I maintain a list of recommended ones here. I will just put my overrides in my (currently still private) dotfiles, will upload them some day.

I am for example now Wayland only. Not all apps want to, but with the correct env vars (which I just globally set for all flatpaks, hoping it will not mess with anything), all apps use it.

This makes the system way faster, and applying different vars on the apps is very easy with Flatpak.

Literally no downsides!

Not true. It still has no updating mechanism, the binary may be official, but the rest are random libraries that may not be well versioned or controlled, etc etc.

The post is specifically about upstream supported Appimages, while Flathub is mainly maintained by the same 4 peolple (it is crazy). The request is for upstream devs to maintain Flatpaks.

But for sure not everything is nice. Runtimes are too huge, outdated apps cause huge library garbage, downloads are inefficient, ...

Btw get Mull from the DivestOS repo, the F-Droid version has veeery slow updates and less.

I am pretty happy with GrapheneOS. Things like separate toggles for internet, or long powerbutton press foe torch are missing.

But you cannot imagine how much effort it is to maintain such a project, and their base is stable, the updates are damn fast.

First stability and security, then features.

Their core OS is minimal on purpose. I use the phone, vanadium (hardened chromium, with JIT toggle, now with adblock, completely degoogled), their attestation app, etc.

Most of the other stuff are random FOSS projects, I dont even use sandboxed play, but if I wanted to I could create a separate user profile and install it just in there.

DivestOS is doing sandboxed microG which is way more secure than unsandboxed, but still tons of effort and will break a lot.

Interesting. What are the App IDs of those both apps?

If they base on Chromite that is probably fine.

Thanks! TLDR spamhaus (a big spamlist provider) has them on their spamlist, or maybe not, and they are using some fancy CDN.

It is VERY likely just a technical error.

What do you mean?

To my knowledge they dont ship GNOME 46 but some old "LTS" variant (GNOME doesnt do LTS variants)

Yes I know, and I want to try DivestOS one time. But they do incomplete patches.

They cannot update the kernel themselves or even worse the firmware. The kernel needs to be built and patched for the specific hardware, GrapheneOS relies completely on Google here. And the firmware needs to be signed by the vendors, so no chance either.

And especially baseband, cellular stuff has extremely many vulnerabilities in the code.

Same