News

When your device lies about its compatibility

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TWIF generated on Thursday, 09 May 2024, Week 19

Community News

SimpleX Chat was updated to 5.6.1 but only for armv7 compatible devices. That “only … compatible” sounded odd to you? Well, it’s a interesting story.

First, the arm64 build failed, upstream fixed it and next version builds as we speak. Second, we touched upon arm64-only devices at the end of December 2023 when we talked about how we had to rebuilt Silence, the encrypted SMS app, to make it compatible and available for them too. We are bringing at least one more app into this arm64 future, so stay tuned for more!

Back to SimpleX, the F-Droid team was pinged this week in an issue thread as devs and users thought F-Droid Client might behave unexpectedly. While we saw an issue regarding how F-Droid sorts package versions, that was quickly fixed for the soon to be released 1.20, the real issue was elsewhere… in the reporting users Android version.

F-Droid Client logic is not that complicated, it reads the device information, like Android version, processor architecture and some other features, and decides based on this which package to install. For an app that has no architecture depending libraries, like F-Droid itself, it will always install the same package, for apps that have them, like SimpleX, it matches the right package with the device architecture.

In the case of Silence, before our rebuild, F-Droid saw that some devices could do only arm64, had no package to install, so it marked the app as incompatible and the user could not install it.

The user that reported the SimpleX issue told F-Droid to install the best package, it chose arm64, and that was crashing. The user tried to manually install the other package, armv7, and that one worked fine. Surely there’s a bug in F-Droid as it did not install the ‘compatible’ package, right? I spoiled it above, that’s wrong. It appears that, while the device processor is fine and runs in a myriad of other devices in a compatible way with both armv7 and arm64, the device manufacturer provides an Android version that, infuriatingly, announces it as arm64 but it is not always compatible. The user could install other arm64 apps just fine, but not SimpleX, making debugging confusing at least.

This reminds me of SimpleX’s efforts along the way to bring their app to more devices, as they started as Android 10+ and arm64 only back in 2022, and future 5.7.1 will be available on Android 8+ and both arm64 and armv7.

/PS: As with past TWIFs we ask you, the users, to get the newest Android version available for your device, and to explore if projects like Calyx, Divest and Lineage support it. Android development is frustrating enough for developers to navigate between versions, architectures and targets, having an old and buggy Android base system is not helpful to anyone.

Newly Added Apps

4 apps were newly added
  • Kitsune – Discover new anime & manga and manage your Kitsu.io library
  • Open Biking – Bluetooth application for generating training on an indoor bike
  • Self Attendance Tracker – Attendance Tracker for students with focus on UI and usability
  • mensen – Access the menu of Dresden’s canteens

Updated Apps

105 more apps were updated

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Haiku isn’t a BeOS successor anymore

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So I got accepted into GSoC again! I’m going to be working on WebKit2. But what is WebKit2, or even WebKit, for that matter? Well, WebPositive uses WebKit to render its web pages. Currently, we use the WebKitLegacy API to communicate with WebKit. It would be nice to switch to the newer version: WebKit2. However, our port of WebKit2 still needs work. At present, it has lost its ability to even render any webpage at all! So, getting WebKit2 to work will be the primary goal of my GSoC project. If there’s time left, I might be able to integrate it into WebPositive. The advantages WebKit2 has for WebPositive will be mostly invisible to end-users. The code will hopefully be more maintainable than the deprecated WebKitLegacy and we’ll get access to several newer APIs such as the ad-blocking API. Perhaps the most visible change: problems in one part of the code should be less likely to crash the whole browser. ↫ Zardshard on the Haiku website The current state of WebPositive, the only native Haiku web browser, is emblematic of why I have personally lost all interest in the successor to what is still my favourite operating system of all time. Haiku OS supports several browsers, and if you read any forum post about which browser to use, or watch any of the enthusiastic Haiku videos by the insanely awesome Action Retro, they’ll all advise you to use any of the non-native Qt or GTK browsers instead – because WebPositive just can’t compete with the ported, non-native browsers. Since everybody using Haiku is opting to use the better ported browsers, WebPositive has fallen even more by the wayside; now it has to play catch-up, and by the time WebKit2 has been properly ported and bug-tested, and has been integrated into WebPositive, which then has to be bug-tested as well, we’re going to be months, if not years, down the line. In the meantime, the ported browsers will have been regularly updated with newer, better versions. Unless the focus for the single most important application of any general purpose desktop operating system is placed solely on WebPositive, it simply won’t be able to keep up with the ported browsers. Why even work on WebPositive at all at that point? It’s not like anyone is using it, so why bother? And this highlights a problem for people like me, who prefer to have native Haiku applications instead of ports of software I can already run elsewhere. As a former BeOS user, I am not interested in a vessel for running Qt applications that I can, in all likelihood, run better on Linux. Why would I go through the trouble of assembling a machine with hardware Haiku supports, only to then run the same applications I’m already running on Fedora or OpenBSD, but worse? If you browse through Haiku Depot today, it feels like the vast majority of modern, maintained, and working software are ports of Qt (and GTK) software we already know and love from other, more mature, more stable, more usable, and more feature-rich platforms. Haiku has chosen to pour a lot of energy and manpower into becoming an operating system designed to run ported, often Qt, applications, but the downside to that is that new and maintained native Haiku applications, that play to the strengths of the platform, are few and far between. A Haiku developer once told me that real people use Haiku every day, and they need real applications, and ported applications make it possible for not only Haiku developers themselves, but also normal users, to run and use Haiku every day. This is a valid argument that I fully understand and agree with – it just means Haiku isn’t for me. And while that’s sad for me, it’s entirely fine. Haiku’s developers have chosen to focus on building a daily-drivable operating system with tons of ported applications, instead of an ideologically pure operating system you can’t really use because it only has like 4 native applications and nothing else. And that’s a valid, smart, and practical choice that I fully respect and understand, even if it means Haiku isn’t really a BeOS successor anymore.

Platz machen für Neues. | Dyson Sphere Program | Ep. 116

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Baue die höchst effizienteste intergalaktische Fabrik in Dyson Sphere Program! Sammele Ressourcen, plane und baue Produktionslinien und zapfe Sterne an. Wandle deine interstellare Fabrik von einem kleinen Workshop zu einem galaktischen Imperium.

Genre: Basebuilding
Entwickler: Youthcat Studio
Publisher: Gamera Games
Veröffentlichung: 21.01.2021
Offizielle Seite: https://t.co/H2JwAJK5fP

Game-Tags: #DysonSphereProgram #Automation #Erkundung

Ganze Reihe: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq2AU6IcVNBjIJ4PJHFZoAxXXs8A7p8dS
Weitere Lets Plays: https://saschatee.de

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/satishu
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@satishu
Dailymotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/saschatee
YT-Shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@satishushorts
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@satishushorts
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaschaTee
Mastodon: https://mastodon.cloud/@SaschaTeehttps://dailymotion.com/rss/playlist/x8advi

E-commerce website development – ecommerce website development in wordpress – php – python

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Reminder: Submit your abstract by 14th May for MoodleMoot Global 2024!

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Reminder: Submit your abstract by 14th May for MoodleMoot Global 2024!
by Sandra Matz.  

This is a friendly reminder that the deadline for abstract submissions for MoodleMoot Global 2024 is coming up! The abstract submission deadline is Tuesday 14th May (UTC-6).

With the focus on this year’s theme “Unlocking Human Potential“, we invite Moodlers from any educational, training or learning field to come together as educators, developers, administrators, and learners to learn from each other, share findings and explore best practices to adapt, innovate, and make learning accessible to all.

This year’s MoodleMoot Global conference will address different topics, which align with our Moodle Product vision and the main areas we will focus on when developing our future versions of Moodle. We invite you to review the Moodle Products Roadmap to find out more about each one of the topics and to help you think about how you might address them with your abstract submission.

At Moodle, we’re excited to share and explore the vast possibilities of education in an open and diverse community and we are looking forward to hearing your ideas!

Submit your abstract proposal now for the opportunity to be part of the program.

Visit the event website to find out more about the event and register.

Reminder: Submit your abstract by 14th May for MoodleMoot Global 2024!