LWDW 228: Original Hipsters

Krita 4.3.0 is out! Swiss Army USB recovery drives, Brave browsers without the BAT, open-source NDI, and Pi powered Bluetooth radios.

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Timestamps:
01:40 Graphic PC mutilation
05:50 DNxHD with OBS
08:00 Braver browser
12:05 GNOME shell UX plans
18:40 Diskonaut
22:45 Krita 4.3.0
24:05 PhotoGIMP
27:55 Rescuezilla
31:05 Ventoy
33:55 Open-source NDI
38:00 Shameless self promotion
40:15 Hipster Pi radio
43:30 Emails

Colour key: Venn Pedro Jill

OBS & DNxHD

So you want to play with Davinci resolve.
Things is, the free version has zero support for mp4 under Linux.
Converting video to DNxHD is time consuming.
Let’s record in the native format using OBS.
Preview video on compiling OBS with a working browser source is in preview mode for Patrons.
BTW early videos are in the announcements tab on Discord.

Braver

Brave without the crypto credit “features” or embedded “privacy respecting” ads.
Yeah, Brave has a lot of features enabled by default that most people don’t dig.
Use Chromium.
This is like the ungoogled-chromium browser we talked about a few weeks ago, but instead of removing Google web services it is removing the pay to surf features from the Brave browser.
Brave is a very zippy browser, and feels a lot faster than Chromium, so Brave minus ads and crypto should be even faster.
Braver is looking for contributors.

I’m glad the Gnome UX works for somebody.
I know how to get to a terminal and install XFCE.
The Gnome Shell has improved visually and now is much faster, but the app grid paradigm has always bothered me.
As a user that prefers a traditional menu, the app grid seems disorganized and app discovery difficult.
I don’t like that there are several pages of apps to scroll thru.
You do get used to it after a while of use, but it is still a cumbersome experience for me.
If there was a way to satisfy the needs of traditional menu users with that of the grid layout, I am all for it.
I’m glad they recognize some of the issues.
But there’s something to be said for a well designed UI and if you absolutely need to use the search function, you made something you know doesn’t work and just put that in as a crutch.

Disco naught

“RAM nom”, the file explorer.
- Oh, it only indexes everything and doesn’t actually map everything to RAM.
- My bad!
Launched it on Debian, works.
Stick around for the feedback.
Used cargo install diskonaut on Ubuntu and works great.
My largest size folder is Steam of course!
An interactive graphical representation of file sizes and folders in CLI, reminds me of . . .
Aah, yes the very simple GUI XDiskUsage.

Krita 4.3.0

Krita 4.3.0 has been released with lots of new features and bug fixes.
There’s a whole new set of brush presets that are great for watercolor painting.
You can now adjust the opacity and lightness on colored brush tips separately.
And for multi monitor setups, you can have the canvas on one screen and the tools on the other by going to the Window menu and clicking New Window.
The other exciting news in this release is the Android/ChromeOS Beta for Arm and Intel.

Photo GIMP

If you really don’t like learning new layouts.
This is a simple patch for GIMP 2.10+ to make GIMP look like Photoshop and to make it easier for Photoshop users to use GIMP.
The tools are organized in the same position as in Photoshop.
And keyboard shortcuts are similar to Photoshop.
Hundreds of new fonts are included, which is awesome, and helps from having to hunt for them.
And since the GIMPshop development was put on hold 14 years ago . . .
I used to tell people to install GIMPPS: https://github.com/arbaes/GimpPs
- That repo was forked to support 2.10

Rescuezilla

Rescuezilla is an actively maintained fork of an old application named Redo Backup and Recovery and relies on Patreon support for continued development.
Added support for booting on EFI-only machines.
I often use GParted Live to back up individual disk partitions using one of my favourite backups utilities partimage.
They claim to have made Clonezilla and SystemRescueCD easy to use.
Bold claim there, Cotton!
Most of the software involved in this stuff is all CLI.
Did they make GUIs for everything?

Ventoy and boot your ISOs

Generating a boot menu is handy.
Ventoy is an open source tool to create a bootable USB drive from multiple ISO files.
Just run the Ventoy script to a flash drive.
You can then copy many ISO files at a time, using command line or a file manager, and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them.
Being able to drag and drop ISOs on your flash drive without formatting it is so convenient.
Also, it supports legacy BIOS as well as UEFI.
And, yes, you can even boot, not just from Linux ISOs, but from the Windows 10 ISO too.
I wish this had been around when I effectively distro hopping.

Open-source NDI

The goal of this project is to provide a way to interact with NDI streams, without requiring to use a non-open-source SDK, and targeting numerous platforms.
It’s nice and alpha at this point.
It only supports receiving at the moment but sending is in the works.
What I would like to see is a nice virtual cam module that can plug into chrome.
It’s doable but requires building ffmpeg with NDI support, keeying in the magical incantation, and setting up a loopback device.

Slice of Pi

Hipster Pi