today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 23, 2025

GNU/Linux/BSD

• Applications

  • Unix Men ☛ Open-Source Photoshop Alternatives: Top 5 list

    13 Reasons to choose GIMP over Photoshop!

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • PC World ☛ Unblockable ads now litter Microsoft's Windows Surface app

      Note that those ads were pushed to my PC without my consent. But the Surface app also includes a separate drop-down menu for “Discover offers & devices,” which at least is closed by default. When I opened it, I was pushed to buy an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and both of Microsoft’s latest Copilot+ PCs, with an additional button to click, leading to an entire page of Surface accessories. All told, Microsoft pushed three separate opportunities for me to buy Surface hardware and accessories.

      What’s frustrating about this is that the Surface app appears to be specifically coded to allow ads. The ads popped up within the Surface app on recent devices, both on the Beta and Dev Channels. But I also hauled out the Surface Laptop Go 3, released midway through 2023 — about a year before Microsoft released its first Copilot+ PCs.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Hotfix updated to fix Marvel Rivals and Indiana Jones on Steam Deck / Linux

    Valve have released a fresh update to the special Proton Hotfix version. This fixes up issues on Steam Deck / Linux across Marvel Rivals and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. If you're confused on all the different Proton versions see my guide for more info.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • Brian Callahan ☛ 2025-02-22: State of virtualizing the BSDs on Apple Silicon

      Testing VMWare Fusion and the Apple virtualization framework wht each *BSD

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Events

    • Volker Krause ☛ OSM Hack Weekend February 2025

      Last weekend I once more attended the biannual OSM Hack Weekend hosted by Geofabrik in Karlsruhe, Germany, discussing and working on things related to Itinerary, Transitous and emergency and weather alerts.

      With an growing number of Itinerary users among the attendees the first order of business for me was fixing a bunch of issues that got reported: [...]

  • 'FSFE'

    • FSFE ☛ 2025-02-17 [Older] Legal Corner: MIA or Dead Contributors - Does It Matter For Your Software Project? [Ed: 'FSFE', which tried to throw the founder of the real FSF (which it fakes) under the bus]

    • FSFE ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] FOSDEM: Celebrating 25 years of community and Free Software [Ed: A "keynote on the Apple litigation" from a Microsoft-bribed group (without disclosing the conflict of interest)]