Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

This week's changes and improvements cover a wide range of applications, from audio apps (including the classic Amarok, which is making a comeback) to Kate getting improvements to its integrated Git features.

In between, you have everything from new functionalities for note-taking utilities and media players, to upgrades in financial software and mobile apps.

This is something I have been stuck on for a while.

I want to use Wayland for that variable refresh rate and some better handeling of screen recordings.

I have tried time and time again to get a wayland session running with the proprietary nvidia driver, but have not gotten there yet.

Only the X11 options are listed on the login screen. When using the fallback FOSS nvidia driver however, all the correct X11 and Wayland options show up (Including Gnome and KDE, both in X11 and Wayland).

Wasn't this fixed, like, about a year ago? I have the "latest" proprietary nvidia driver, but the current debain one is still pretty old (535.183.06).

Sun Oct 27 03:21:06 2024       
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.183.06             Driver Version: 535.183.06   CUDA Version: 12.2     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB    Off | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 25%   43C    P0              25W / 120W |    476MiB /  6144MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                            |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                             Usage      |
|=======================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      6923      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                          143MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7045    C+G   ...libexec/gnome-remote-desktop-daemon       63MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7096      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                         81MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7798      G   firefox-esr                                 167MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      7850      G   /usr/lib/huiontablet/huiontablet             13MiB |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

I am contemplating buying one of the Seagate OneTouch Hub external hard drives as a backup for my media that's currently stored on some other external hard drives connected to my home server since they are always spinning.

My local retailers don't give me many options as far as large storage storage solution goes, and the only other viable option now is a WD My BOOK 14 TB.

However, the retailer I will be buying it from goes out of its way to state that Windows or macOS is required. Is there any reason I should believe that I will run into troubles under Linux? I've had no issues whatsoever with some other Seagate hard drives (Expansion 5 TB), which I just instantly reformat to ext4 and use as normal. My guess is that this is just for the included software? I just want to make sure before I order.

(More long term I will set up a NAS, but for now time to learn and configure is more scarce than money, so I just want a solution that will prevent me from losing my data)

Does anyone here use Starlabs computers? I'm thinking of buying one of their laptops and I'm interested in how well their products are supported in the long term. Specifically, firmware updates and spare parts & repairs.

Thanks

Hello! My girlfriend bought a new pc, an HP pavilion x360 with the touchscreen, and asked me to install her kubuntu as in her previous non-tablet pc, and so I did. It works very well, except for the fact that I tried really hard without success to setup a virtual keyboard. fcitx5 was already installed, but I couldn't find a way to use it as virtual keyboard, and apparently it does not bundle a UI. i then installed maliit (the one that I use on my EndeavourOS 2in1 laptop flawlessly) but it seems to have a strange bug where it only works once, then after you close it it will never pop up again. I tried the workaround suggested here but it works once every 4 tries and the keyboard pops up but is unable to write anything.

Has anyone achieved to install a virtual keyboard on Kubuntu 24.04? I'd rather not switch to X11 because except for the keyboard, the touch support is way better under wayland

thanks in advance to anyone!

If you love exploit mitigations, you may have heard of a new system call named mseal landing into the Linux kernel’s 6.10 release, providing a protection called “memory sealing.” Beyond notes from the authors, very little information about this mitigation exists. In this blog post, we’ll explain what this syscall is, including how it’s different from prior memory protection schemes and how it works in the kernel to protect virtual memory. We’ll also describe the particular exploit scenarios that mseal helps stop in Linux userspace, such as stopping malicious permissions tampering and preventing memory unmapping attacks.

Memory sealing allows developers to make memory regions immutable from illicit modifications during program runtime. When a virtual memory address (VMA) range is sealed, an attacker with a code execution primitive cannot perform subsequent virtual memory operations to change the VMA’s permissions or modify how it is laid out for their benefit.

...

mseal digresses from prior memory protection schemes on Linux because it is a syscall tailored specifically for exploit mitigation against remote attackers seeking code execution rather than potentially local ones looking to exfiltrate sensitive secrets in-memory.

...

From the disallowed operations, we can discern two particular exploit scenarios that memory sealing will prevent:

• Tampering with a VMA’s permissions. Notably, not allowing executable permissions to be set can stop the revival of shellcode-based attacks.
• “Hole-punching” through arbitrary unmapping/remapping of a memory region, mitigating data-only exploits that take advantage of refilling memory regions with attacker-controlled data.

...

There are likely many other use cases and scenarios that we didn’t cover. After all, mseal is the newest kid on the block in the Linux kernel! As the glibc integration completes and matures, we expect to see improved iterations for the syscall to meet particular demands, including fleshing out the ultimate use of the flags parameter.

This is probably the last version by me.

Features:

• Linux native
• time, 3BV/s and IOE high scores, including percentiles and non-flagging versions
• scores kept indefinitely for all played games
• recording and playing replays
• CSV export
• timing in milliseconds
• responsive on slow hardware
• adjustable square size
• to reveal squares around a numbered square with flagged adjacent mines you can click the square with any button
• no "?" marks
• pause

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21289888

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/chaftrix

This program written in C will render the matrix effect in the terminal window in the background, while rendering an image in the foreground, allowing animation of this image in one or two dimensions.

Image rendering is done with chafa.

This program is the continuation and evolution of other projects:

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/matrix_clone

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/ascii-matrix

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/animatrix

I run a qemu/KVM setup in which I have different VMs for different use cases/profiles. Very similar in theory to something like Qubes OS. So far when I want to swap to another VM I have to first un-fullscreen, then click the other VM display window and fullscreen that. I was beginning to work on hotkeys and scripts to allow switching between VMs by assigning Ctrl+NumPad# to specific VMs and then having the triggered VM appear in full screen. But I'm imagining there's probably already a VM display manager that streamlines this.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

The biggest factor is that the display needs to be responsive as I'm using these VMs for daily tasks.

Bonus points if the display manager can output a variable for the currently focused VM so I can script the keyboard backlight to change to an assigned color as well as change the power profile of the base operating system to match the currently highlighted VM better.

This started today and hasn’t happened before. Initially I thought it was an application from work that was causing issues. I SSHed into the machine and didn’t see anything strange - I used btop.

I updated the system and rebooted. A few minutes later when I got to the machine to check everything, was frozen again. I hadn’t even logged in.

I’ve used the eos-sendlog feature to get the logs and it seems like it might be GPU related.

I was using KDE with X11 when this happened, but I’ve been using that combination for months at this point. Nothing that I’m aware of has changed or been updated recently to possibly cause this issue.

Update: I’ve done a complete shutdown (turned the PSU off) and rebooted with the LTS kernel. So far so good. It doesn’t seem to be a hardware issue as it worked fine on the live USB.

@brjsp thanks again for submitting the concern here. We have made some adjustments to how the SDK code is organized and packaged to allow you to build and run the app with only GPL/OSI licenses included. The sdk-internal package references in the clients now come from a new sdk-internal repository, which follows the licensing model we have historically used for all of our clients (see LICENSE_FAQ.md for more info). The sdk-internal reference only uses GPL licenses at this time. If the reference were to include Bitwarden License code in the future, we will provide a way to produce multiple build variants of the client, similar to what we do with web vault client builds.

The original sdk repository will be renamed to sdk-secrets, and retains its existing Bitwarden SDK License structure for our Secrets Manager business products. The sdk-secrets repository and packages will no longer be referenced from the client apps, since that code is not used there.

This appears at least okay on the surface. The clients' dependency on sdk-internal didn't change but that's okay now because they have licensed sdk-internal as GPL.

The sdk-secrets will remain proprietary but that's a separate product (Secrets Manager) and will apparently not be used in the regular clients. Who knows for how long though because, if you read carefully, they didn't promise that it will not be used in the future.

The fact that they had ever intended to make parts of the client proprietary without telling anyone and attempted to subvert the GPL while doing so still remains utterly unacceptable. They didn't even attempt to apologise for that.

Bitwarden has now landed itself in the category of software that I would rather move away from and cannot wholeheartedly recommend anymore. That's pretty sad.

I see these here and there on flatpak GTK applications that already have access to my GTK themes. Anyone knows what they're trying to load but fail?

# here is where my aliases go yo

alias alias-edit="vim ~/.local/config/alias_config && source ~/.local/config/alias_config && echo 'Alias updated. \n'"


## Modern cli
alias ls="exa"
alias find="fdfind"

## System 76
alias battery-full="system76-power charge-thresholds --profile full_charge"
alias battery-balanced="system76-power charge-thresholds --profile balanced"
alias battery-maxhealth="system76-power charge-thresholds --profile max_lifespan"

## Maintenance
alias update-flatapt="sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && flatpak update --assumeyes"

## Misc
alias tree="exa --tree"

## Incus
alias devi-do="sudo incus exec dev0 -- su -l devi"

## Some programs
alias code="flatpak run com.visualstudio.code"
~                                                

I’m a teacher and our division just “upgraded” to W11 with a new version of outlook that is basically a web app on desktop. Several times a day my laptop comes to a complete crawl while Teams decides to open itself. Can’t open or close programs, Firefox won’t register mouse clicks, nothing. Graphical glitches appear al the time with menu bars and task bars disappearing regularly, requiring force quitting the app or logging out of the desktop.

When I first switched to Linux I assumed my experience would be like this. But now it’s the other way around.

Rant over.