I'm not sure how many people on here run archlinux, but recently, a contribution I made to speech dispatcher, namely the pipewire module I talked about a while ago on here, got in the arch package.

Before wooping with joy and other similar feelings because something I made, with the help of the maintainer of course, got into a mainline distribution people actually use, not just in my computer, it'd be really nice if I could know whether it made any tangible difference.

So then, here are afew of the things I hoped to come true with the introduction of a pipewire native audio module:

* less battery usage by speech dispatcher
* the ability to be able to speak normally, even in high stress environments, such as low-memory and so on
* lower cpu consumption
* lower latency when speaking and being interrupted often, the case of screenreaders fits perfectly here

Now, I'm absolutely no statistician, and I don't know how to even begin to measure any of this. So, here is me asking help from the wider fediverse.

For the people who know how any of this part works, can you take afew measurements of the performance of speechd, both with and without the pipewire support enabled? I'm primarily interested in the situations I mentioned before, especially the latency, does well under load and consumes less resources aspect.

For anyone who sees this, can I please have a boost? :p it would be incredibly helpful for me to know if this improved anything, even if one bit, and if it was worth going on and on about latency improvements regarding pipewire. I tried to do local tests with sound first, the results were positive, and so was my experience with using speech dispatcher with this module enabled. It could be because of my older computer, but I definitely feel a difference, although not a huge one. If there are other bottlenecks, I'm not sure they're in audio anymore, unless my code is flawed, which could definitely be and a deeper review on that by someone who knows audio stuff better than me should probably be done at some point, but I'm trying to get an inkling into the benefits this had, if any.
#linux #pipewire #archlinux #statistics

@jackwilliambell @dougmerritt is that addressed to me? acting out...what? now I'm confused, am I missing something? Tuba, the client I use, does have issues with threads, but yeah, I'm not sure what happened here

As of afew seconds ago, I finished Picks and shovels by @pluralistic@mamot.fr. I'm still analysing some of the events, since I read it with quite some speed, but as a first impression, it's awesome! like with all of the books in the Martin Hench arc however, this one ended in not so happy tones, but yeah, all nice things must come to an end eventually I suppose.

for the security, and especially cryptography croud on here:

What's better for me to use to secure myself, a security key, or the TPM? should I even use the TPM, is it known to be bugged in such a way that governments are allowed access intentionally, while hoping and praying that the real adversaries don't find the keys to the kingdom?
And the questions continue: should I use the tpm for my ssh keys? can I make multiple keys with the tpm? if I still have to store them on my computer, why is it better to have it in the TPM, if it won't survive an OS reinstall?
Same about disk encryption. Should I use luks and the tpm, in a similar manner as bitlocker does on windows, sealing the configuration based on the secure boot state? Is data portability even possible with the tpm, like, how can I read stuff stored on one computer and encrypted with the TPM, on another computer, in case, for example, that the first computer broke? do I just have to have more regular backups because I have to assume that data could be gone at any moment? what does this kind of encryption protect me from? am I secure from foreign state adversaries and such with this? or does anyone at the government level have access to all TPM devices? what about big tech and such, am I protected at least from that? should I use a hardware security key after all?

hello there!

so, a friend of mine is trying to make something awesome for VI people, something we, to my knowledge, never had before. It's a tv channel, specifically dedicated to animation and audio described shows, in order to help us understand the culture of it and so on. Either way, if you see this, please boost his post, and, perhaps, share your opinions of the idea and how it could be made better if you have any. Either way, the link is here:

https://tweesecake.social/@GoemonIshikawa/113814098347969919

for now at least, go to social doesn't support admin and instance only messages, so this will have to do

Since some interviews with Mark Zuckerberg a while ago, it's becoming increasingly clearer that the management of Threads no longer cares about truth anymore, if they ever did. Fact checkers will be removed apparently, probably in an attempt to cozy up to the incoming fascist regime.

That being said, I'm preemptively taking the decision to block threads.net after submitting this post. I'm reasonably sure that no one on my instance has relationships with anyone on threads.net, and even if they do, it's not that big of a problem because Threads doesn't implement proper federation anyway.

So yeah, for anyone reading this, consider this as us signing the #FediPact, even if somewhat informally

does anyone know any internal details of #flatpak? in particular, how flatpak builder builds them, what are they at the file level? what archive is that, what happens when you run one step by step? someone asked me a while ago if it's possible to build flatpaks and possibly add them to repos without using the flatpak command itself, perhaps even while being on another OS or something. How much of how flatpak works is the flatpak program, and how much is the format? is there anywhere I can read more about this without reading the full source code of flatpak and painstakingly finding out that way?

the best #ebook reader for linux, at least that I found so far, is called Foliate. It's a gtk app, but that's mostly how it goes, it's OK I suppose, after all most of the software we have and know to be accessible is written in gtk. The only issue with it is, gtk's webview, which barely begun being accessible with orca at all, but orca to this day sees it as a text box where I write tab characters whenever I press tab, while object navigation, if we're willing to mess with it enough, shows us some truncated paragraphs of what we're expecting to be there. If you think the qt version is better, nope, it's not! actually, it's the exact same bug, actually yes, it's a bit better in qt, because orca does say that this is a webview. In both cases, if odilia encounters one of those webviews, it too won't read the text, but if you press tab and somehow reach a link or button or something, that will get read, while it won't with orca.

So yeah, what was I saying? O yeah, Foliate is the best ebook reader for linux? well yes, once this gtk webview bug will be fixed, yes, it will be.

Why am I writing this here? no particular reason at all, perhaps just to document it further, so that someone who knows more about the problem can explain why it happens and why it's hard to be fixed, if it's not my system that has issues after all, because I know from experience that that's a very likely possibility as well

is any visually impaired #linux user in here currently daily driving elementary OS? did anyone try it and get anywhere?

The reason is that I'm trying to get someone into linux, and fedora is a bit too heavy and kinda complicated to use given that particular laptop, while linux mint and similar have old packages for a lot of things and the mate version wasn't very stable, aka it has that old version of mate which crashed orca every so often for no reason whatsoever. Endever OS, garuda linux and other arch based distros, while they may have a calamares based installer which recently became accessible btw, I'm pretty sure none of them will do anything if I press alt+super+s in the live iso, which is supposed to start orca. So yeah, I decided we should try elementary, and here are my findings so far

The good

The installer is, well, absolutely awesome, I've never heard of any other installer which is so accessible, where orca reads everything important there's to know about a step, it's clear a lot of thought was put into this. The fedora one comes close, but it's not quite on par because we still sometimes get a dialog box with two buttons which are supposed to mean yes and no, but we don't know what we're asked to choose untill we use object navigation to focus on the label, which isn't needed here at all. Yes, it sometimes reads inline html used to decorate a label, like <span> and so on, but I think this is a gtk issue and there's nothing much that can be done about it. At every step, this installer told us what to do, even in the beginning where we didn't know the setup finished loading. Suggestion: perhaps add a sound when the setup launches and before the message is spoken? that way, we know the moment it loaded, so if we already know the shortcut to turn on the screenreader, we can go do so before we're told how to.

The bad

So, we're freshly logged into elementary, after the setup is finished. With some difficulty, perhaps by accident pressing the super key twice, we got to an applications list and managed to open the app center. The first thing that happened after we searched for firefox is that we found the app listing, so this imports from flathub automatically without additional configuration, which is very good. However, when we pressed on the app entry, we couldn't find the install button, we found the name, the description, the category, even the license, the website and a call to help with translations if that's what that was, but no install button. What could be going on? O yeah, also notifications aren't read by orca for whatever reason, it works on gnome most of the time though.

The ugly

So, second reboot of elementary, and now we want to find the app center again. Pressing the super key just brings us to a search field, and I forgot to tell the person that the accident with pressing it twice is actually how one is supposed to open the full apps list, so in that moment we thought it broke. However, here comes the weird part, we wanted to check the battery status, connect to another wifi network, you know how it goes. In gnome, which pantheon is also based on, one does this by pressing ctrl+alt+tab to focus the top pannel, then we go from there. Now, every desktop has its own way of focusing that pannel, because apparently there's no way to focus it by just pressing tab from the desktop or something, so one has to know the magic combination of buttons for each one. In gnome, it's alt+ctrl+tab, in kde it's alt+super+p, in cosmic I'm not sure what it is and I don't know how to find out, which is it in here? when pressing ctrl+alt+tab, we heard frame, frame, frame, and nothing else, tab and arrow keys didn't do anything. I'm surely doing something wrong, I can't believe the experience is really broken in this way, since the installer is so nice and accessible. So, anyone knows what I'm doing wrong here, what's the magic combination for this one?

In closing, elementary seemns kinda nice indeed, both from the accessibility standpoint and the visual one according to that person I was helping, except for these few issues. If elementary OS people ever get to read this: perhaps add a tutorial in the installer, if the screenreader is detected to be running, which explains the very basics of using elementary with a screenreader, especially those essential keyboard shortcuts?

I know, I could have told the person exactly what commands to type in order to install actual archlinux, I could have persevered with linux mint, I could have trimmed down fedora, I could have tryed to talk to more distro people to modify their live iso to make it so that a keyboard shortcut turns on the screenreader, but I wanted to try this one because I heard it's quite good from some people along the way, so I wanted to see how it is as well as if it's really beginner friendly, and for a lot of the time we were using it, it was, up to trying to access the top pannel and all that stuff which didn't work.

So, as usual, boosts are always appreciated. If anyone who sees this knows someone who works on elementary, I'd appreciate it if they could send this along. If anyone who sees this works on the project themselves, or is an experienced user of it, what am I doing wrong? am I missing something?

someone over here posted a git repository with tools to migrate mastodon posts to go to social. Anyone remembers what it was? I might have boosted it in the past as well, I just lost the link