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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • From the Discourse Blog:

    The Linux desktop provides XDG Desktop Portals as a standardised way for applications to access resources that are outside of the sandbox. Applications that have been updated to use XDG Desktop Portals will continue to use them. Prompting is not intended to replace XDG Desktop Portals but to complement them by providing the desktop an alternative way to ask the user for permission. Either when an application has not been updated to use XDG Desktop Portals, or when it makes access requests not covered by XDG Desktop Portals.

    Since prompting works at the syscall level, it does not require an application’s awareness or cooperation to work and extends the set of applications that can be run inside of a sandbox, allowing for a safer desktop. It is designed to enable desktop applications to take full advantage of snap packaging that might otherwise require classic confinement.

    So this looks like it complements and not replaces the XDG Desktop Portals, especially for applications that have not implemented the Portals. It allows you to still run those applications in confinement while providing some more granular access controls.























  • No, most likely Pipewire would be used to implement the protocol for various compositors.

    Think of the protocols as high-level descriptions of interfaces (or designs) that specify what needs to be implemented to support a particular feature (in this case capturing images of a “screen”). Looking at this one, it describes a ext_image_capture_source_v1 object that has various methods such as create_source and destroy. Different compositors could then implement or support this interface with whatever technology they wish (most will rely on Pipewire).

    This is already the case with the existing screensharing protocol. For instance wlroots uses pipewire buffers in xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.




  • Not a fan of the XPS line (expensive, not great thermals, and meh port selection) and I have never own one (though I’ve seen others with them). That said, I have a few of their Latitudes (currently using Latitude 7420) and one Precision and those run Linux really well.

    One thing most people don’t realize is that Dell does support Linux (ie. Ubuntu) beyond the XPS line and you can buy Latitudes or Precisions with Linux support OOTB. Additionally, Dell ships firmware updates via LVFS on their XPS, Latitude, and Precision lines. The support isn’t perfect, but I have been happy with using Dell hardware and Linux for over a decade now.

    PS. You can get really good deals via the Dell Outlet (my current laptop is refurbished from there), and you can usually find a number of off-lease or 2nd systems or parts on Ebay (very similar to Thinkpads).



  • Contributing immortal objects into Python introduces true immutability guarantees for the first time ever. It helps objects bypass both reference counts and garbage collection checks. This means that we can now share immortal objects across threads without requiring the GIL to provide thread safety.

    This is actually really cool. In general, if you can make things immutable or avoid state, then that will help you structure things concurrently. With immortal objects you now can guarantee that immutability without costly locks. It will be interesting to see what the final round of benchmarks are when this is fully implemented.