Because it’s based on fedora atomic it uses rpm-ostree, which lets you layer packages to persist between updates. Good for stuff that isn’t available as a flatpak or doesn’t work as well when installed as a flatpak. Beyond that not much, maybe if someone doesn’t trust Valve with their OS?

On SteamOS you can still kind of have non-flatpak packages persist by using distrobox. It’s still a sandbox, just one that has a bit more latitude in what you can install than a flatpak.

edit: distrobox seems more integrated with the host OS than I thought

Considering Microsoft is dropping support for Windows Mixed Reality devices with Windows 11 24H2, effectively sending millions of otherwise perfectly fine VR headsets to landfill with no recourse. I can see them releasing a handheld with a “custom” version of Windows that allows users to install Steam, GOG, Epic, etc… then bait and switch with a future “feature update” that makes compatibility “too hard” to support or a “security risk”. Maybe the desktop mode is a “developer only” option that gets disabled, or you have to enable third party apps like in windows 10 S and that ability gets taken away. I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft.

Maybe I’m just peeved at Microsoft for deciding that my VR headset will be E-waste even though the hardware is fine, or ignoring the concept of user consent by enabling OneDrive cloud backups for local folders by default while basically forcing you to create a Microsoft account to install Windows if you don’t know the right sequence of arcane f-ing rituals to create a local account. But I don’t trust them…

I’m sure the EU will love that bit of malicious compliance that apple have shown they will use to remove non-malware that they just don’t approve of using the same mechanism…

Not sure if this is what you’re talking about but RIP the coolest media that never got to production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

INB4 trust fund babies and gormless capitalists go and ream every last fucking cent from the brand destroying it in the process before moving on to the next thing.

deleted by creator

How is ROCm these days? I remember needing the official AMD drivers for OpenCL stuff a while ago and ROCm was in very early development.

I mean offsetting complex shapes in one go.

Just randomly throwing together an example:

I don’t even mind the UI that much,

Agree to disagree.

From what I remember something as common as offsetting lines in a sketch required switching away from the sketch workbench into the draft workbench and exiting the sketch editor altogether.

FreeCAD feels like it’s where Blender was before version 2.8. The core functionality is there but the UI feels almost user hostile.

I mean if you pay attention most social media inundated with influencers and companies is basically:

“Buy this, no buy this, buy this instead, spend your money here!” It even leeches into everyday conversations outside of social media.

Pay attention to how often people talk about buying things and newly released products. Hell, I’ve caught myself contributing to it. It’s kind of gross when you realize how steeped in consumerism nearly everything has become.

What I’m getting from this is that some monopoly busting is sorely needed.

What happens if you take a picture of the screen with your phone? Not ideal in terms of quality but I’m willing to bet it would work as a stupid easy bypass.

What I’d like to see is an image format that is digitally signed by default so that modifications can be flagged and the source can be verified. Yeah people could modify them for malicious use cases (I don’t think it will be possible to ever prevent that unfortunately) but at least we’d know that it wasn’t the original. This doesn’t work for cases where people want to be anonymous but for things like social media selfies and posts where people are visible it could be helpful in preventing people spreading deepfakes and claiming they’re real.

Voice typing long messages is IMO faster than using a phone keyboard, even with gesture typing.

Pure “prompt → image” with nothing in between I absolutely agree. It’s lazy and ripe for abuse by copyright trolls. That being said there’s a lot more in the world of AI assisted art than what most people are aware of.

Determining where the legal lines will be drawn is going to be a monumental task but I think there’s value in allowing authors to retain copyright on AI assisted works. I also can’t see the free open source models not going the way of restricting training data to public domain works like Adobe did with Firefly if that becomes a legal issue.

My pie in the sky hope is that copyright somehow becomes less stringent after all of this.

Don’t get me wrong I want protections for creators and support reasonable copyright (life of the author +25 years with the possibility of a 15 year extension) but letting a company lord over an IP for damn near a century isn’t ideal for anyone.

This is a list of all the open source software I have come across and use frequently to semi frequently. There will likely be some overlap with stuff everyone has already posted.

Photography and Image manipulation

• Darktable → RAW photo processing
• GIMP→ Photoshop alternative
• Krita → Digital painting (have only used it a bit, but I hear it’s good)
• Inkscape → Vector Graphics
• Automatic1111 → Diffusion model AI toolkit (mostly Stable Diffusion but also has extensions for other diffusion based models like OpenAI’s Shap-E)

3D modeling and Printing

• Blender → 3D Modeling, sculpting, 2D animation, compositing all rolled together (simply one of the best examples of FOSS)
• Meshroom → Photogrammetry
• PrusaSlicer → 3D printing slicer based on Slic3r

Video editing and Processing

• Kdenlive → Genuinely good video editor
• FFMPEG → Command line media toolkit (very complex but also works on android through Termux)
• Instant NeRF → Neural Radiance Fields, think photoscan to a 3D representation (not meant to make 3D meshes unfortunately)

Misc

• Calibre → E-book management
• Serge → Self hosted Local LLM’s made a bit easier to deal with
• Firefox → Web browser

FOSS I’m excited for

• DragGAN → Manipulate images by intuitively dragging, more on this here and here (official code being released this month but there are already projects based on the paper with working examples)
• CoDi → “Composable Diffusion” Any2Any conversion Txt2Vid, Vid2Audio, Audio+Txt2Img, whatever
• Neuralangelo → Promises to be NeRF’s for 3D models (don’t know if it will be FOSS but I’m hopeful)