podman-compose definitely got better over the past year…

But you can also use docker-compose itself with podman instead!

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/podman-docker-compose

Basically, for system level containers, you can do:

sudo systemctl start podman.socket

(or enable --now instead of start if you want it to stick around after rebooting)

Then use docker-compose and it’ll communicate with podman instead of docker.

For user session “rootless” containers, it’s mainly the same thing, except you’ll need to remove sudo and then add --user after start or enable in that systemctl command. And you’d need to set an environment variable (either prefixing it on the command or using export to set it in your session), like this:

DOCKER_HOST=unix:///run/user/$UID/podman/podman

(Put that in front of the docker-compose command and it’ll connect to podman as your user instead, provided the service is available. Or toss it into your .bashrc with "export " before it and new bash sessions would have it.)

https://brandonrozek.com/blog/rootless-docker-compose-podman/

The one big gotcha I’ve hit is that if you have SELinux on your system, you’ll want to add :z to your volume(s) mount to have it automatically deal with SELinux stuff. (Lowercase z for volumes that can be mounted for multiplayer containers and uppercase Z for volumes that are tied to a specific container.)

But, I’ve found that using “quadlet” service files is much, much better than using podman-compose or docker-compose. There’s a program called “podlet” that can even convert compose files to service files (quadlet)… It can convert command line flags and kubes and other formats too.

Quadlets are basically systems service files that integrate with podman, letting you easily set up a container as a system (or even user level) service, making managing a container just like managing any other service.

Here’s the podlet command that’ll convert things to quadlets: https://github.com/containers/podlet

Peppers are the fruit of the plant. They’re what’s made after the flowers were pollinated and have seeds. They’re also sometimes sweet and not always so spicy.

Of course, there’s the botanical definition and culinary definition and there’s some overlap. The most famous would be a tomato, which is also a fruit and a vegetable from different points of view.

What’s mind-blowing to think about is that a pepper is not just a fruit but also technically a berry.

In cooking, peppers are used as a fruit, a vegetable, and even a spice. (Depending on the pepper variety.) So, anyone classifying it as any of those things is right. 👍

(Wikipedia mentions all this too.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper

Technically, it can be, depending on the type of pepperoni.

In parts of Europe, such as Germany, a pepperoni is a pickled pepper, not the salami named after it.

(And peppers are fruits of a capsicum plant.)

Yep, ArcMenu (@ https://gitlab.com/arcmenu/ArcMenu which is the maintained one, last updated days ago instead of years ago) has a ton of different layouts which can mimic any version of Windows, and so much more.

When using GNOME, use the “Extensions Manager” app (from Flathub) to search for “ArcMenu” and install it, then you can configure it there in the Extensions Manager app as well. In the ArcMenu configuration, go to layouts and select the modern group to see something like the screenshot above. (The previews are generic wireframe sketches; the result will look much more high fidelity.)

You can even stream from the PS5 to the Deck too, thanks to Chiaki4Deck (easily installable on desktop mode from the “Discover” app).

There’s also Zen browser that’s Arc-like and based on Firefox instead of Chromium. Zen lets you sync tabs with Firefox elsewhere (including mobile Firefox), run the full uBlock Origin, and it is a fully open source browser.

https://zen-browser.app/

It’s also available on Linux too (in addition to Windows and macOS), unlike Arc.

What’s the multi window feature in Chrome? Is that like containers in Firefox?

For what it’s worth, you are supposed to be able to access documents stored in OneDrive in Linux. (I haven’t tried it myself; I’m just aware of it.)

Basically: Go to GNOME’s settings, then select online accounts, and sign into OneDrive.

Here the same instructions with lots of details and screenshots: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/04/set-up-onedrive-file-access-in-ubuntu (Nothing in that link is Ubuntu specific. This applies to other distros too, like Fedora, Debian, Arch, Mint, etc. — as long as you have GNOME 46.)

Other desktops have to use various other options, but aren’t natively integrated: https://linuxstans.com/microsoft-onedrive-on-linux/

Of course, once you have access to files like this, you’ll probably want to copy them locally and back them up yourself.

(I suspect Microsoft was trying to make it so people don’t lose their files, ironically, by handling document storage themselves? It’s still absurd that they do this so aggressively.)

My favorite backup software is Pika. It’s powered by Borg, has a friendly UI, and supports both local (including USB drives) and remote locations. https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.World.PikaBackup

Deja Dup is also good and uses Duplicity behind the scenes. https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.DejaDup

There are a ton of other backup solutions too, including Vorta (another UI for Borg) and a bunch of command line tools, like rclone, rsync, etc.

Doesn’t distrobox (and podman) come with SteamOS these days too?

You wouldn’t be able to layer, but using distrobox-export from inside a distrobox container would let you export command line apps as well as graphical ones too. The graphical apps will even show up in your menu and can be pinned as well.

(Of course, if something is available on Flathub already as a Flatpak, installing the app via Discover is easier and better. While Flathub has a lot of apps, it doesn’t have everything, so being able to pick and choose from any distribution using distrobox is nice for a very large selection of software.)

darktable, hands down. It has a learning curve, but it’s a pro app and app pro apps have learning curves.

The linear pipeline is great, masking is superb, and the app keeps getting better every release.

The one downside is that darktable is not opinionated by default (so raw files look a little flat to begin with, without doing anything), but it’s customizable that you can even change that with auto applied presets. On the other hand, it does let you do what you want to do with an image, versus fighting with defaults (which is what it’s like to edit something in Lightroom, if you want to diverge from what it suggests by default).

There are a bunch of great tutorials on YouTube and you’ll want to check out https://discuss.pixls.us/ too. Create an account on the Pixls forum, read some threads, try out some “play raws” (where people post their raw files under a CC license and then lots of people try their own take at editing it and post their edit).

Rico Resolves has a half hour getting started video for darktable 4.6 at https://youtu.be/ucjAmTMIEOI

Anything from Bruce Williams https://youtube.com/@audio2u and Boris Hajdukovic https://youtube.com/@s7habo are both great too, and more people are posting darktable videos all the time as well.

The documentation for darktable is actually very good as well. Do not skip it. You don’t have to read it all, but try reading the intro parts and going back to it when you want some reference on how a part of darktable works. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/

Some tips:

• You can right click on sliders to get a special UI and you can also enter numbers (often even outside the bounds of what the slider would normally permit).

• Modules will be applied in the best order regardless of which one you work on first.

• There are some somewhat redundant modules, as darktable did start out as a “display referred” workflow (just like most all of the other raw editors everywhere) and moved to a “scene referred” (aka “linear rgb”) workflow, which provides better editing, improved color handling, vastly better tone mapping, and so on. If there are two similar modules, try to go with the version that has “RGB” in its title. Older modules still exist mainly for older edits. (You can also change darktable back to the old display referred workflow in the settinfs, but I strongly suggest to not do this. Scene referred is much better.)

I used to shoot film and do darkroom stuff years ago. I’ve used Aperture on OS X. I used Lightroom on OS X and then on Windows. A few years ago, I switched to darktable on Linux… and darktable has gotten so, so much better each release. When I switched years ago, it was more or less a Lightroom competitor (with some advantages and disadvantages). But darktable is really amazing software now, and can give you much better results than Lightroom, when you know how to use it.

It certainly is a differentiator: uBlock Origin already works best on Firefox. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox

And when Manifest v3 is fully enforced in Chromium (current date is slated to be July 2024), then the more restricted uBlock Origin Lite would need to be used instead.

(I’m not sure if Arc will fully adopt v3, but they might not have a choice at some point in time.)

The Lite version still works well considering all the restrictions, but has a lot of limitations: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-1507539114

• Filter lists update only when the extension updates (no fetching up to date lists from servers)

• Many filters are dropped at conversion time due to MV3’s limited filter syntax
• No crafting your own filters (thus no element picker)
• No strict-blocked pages
• No per-site switches
• No dynamic filtering
• No importing external lists

TL;DR: The way uBlock Origin works on Firefox right now is already better, but if Arc has to go along with Manifest v3 in Chromium in a few months, then it’ll be even more of a differentiator.

It also looks like they’re even thinking about rolling out their own tracker blocker (instead of using uBlock Origin) as a result of the Manifest v3 changes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/wiki/index/#wiki_how_will_arc_handle_the_transition_from_manifest_v2_to_manifest_v3.3F

https://twitter.com/joshm/status/1728926780600508716

We’re rolling our own native @arcinternet Ad & Tracker Blocker in 2024 (since Chrome is restricting them)…

Any creative ideas for how we can go above and beyond, and reimagine the category?

Remove GDPR/Cookie Consents? What else?

FOSS apps (all on Flathub)

Some of the AI related apps I’ve been using that are both Free Software and offline (where it runs on your computer without using network services in the cloud) are:

• OCR: “Frog” can take screenshots, select images, accept drag and drop, and you can paste an image from the clipboard. It’ll read the text on the images and immediately have a text area with the result. https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.tenderowl.frog — it’s powered by Tesseract. Note: The completely optional text-to-speech that Frog has does use an online service. But the rest is offline.

• Speech to text: “Speech Note” does text to speech, speech to text, and translations… all locally on your computer, and it supports GPU acceleration (which isn’t needed, but it makes it a little faster). https://flathub.org/apps/net.mkiol.SpeechNote — This is basically the all-in-one “Swiss army knife” of ML text processing. Thanks to being a Flatpak, you don’t have to do anything special for the dependencies. It’s all taken care of for you. It also has tons of different models (for different voices, different backends) all available from within the UI, which just needs a click for downloading.

• Upscaling images: There are two that do something similar, using some of the same backends. A nice and simple one is “Upscaler”. https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.theevilskeleton.Upscaler Another one that’s cross platform is “Upscayl” https://flathub.org/apps/org.upscayl.Upscayl — these both use ESRGAN and Waifu2x in the background.

• Closed captioning: “Live Captions” uses an ML model to transcribe text realtime. It’s wonderful for when a video doesn’t have subtitles, or when you’re participating in a video call (which might also not have CC). There’s also a toggle mode that will transcribe based on microphone input. The default is to use system audio. https://flathub.org/apps/net.sapples.LiveCaptions

• Web page translations: Firefox, for the past few releases, has the ability to translate web pages completely local in-browser. It does need to download a small model file (a quantized one around 20 megabytes per language pair), but this happens automatically on first use. All you need to do is click the translate icon (when it’s auto-detected) or go to the menu and select “Translate page…”. Firefox is located in your distribution already (and is usually installed by default in most Linux distributions) and is available as an official package from Mozilla on Flathub as well. Newer versions keep improving on this, improving speed (it’s pretty quick already), improving accuracy, improving reliability (sometimes you have to try to translate a couple of times on some pages), and adding languages. But what’s there in the release of Firefox is already great.

Chat and image generation (more advanced)

While all the above are graphical apps and on Flathub (some may have distro packages too), there are some additional AI/ML things you can run on Linux as well:

• Chat ML: “Ollama” (https://ollama.ai/) is a friendlier wrapper around llama.cpp and lets you run a variety of models (some FOSS, some just source-available-and-gratis, some not at all).

You can run Ollama in a container to make it even easier. Even a Podman container on your user account works. (You don’t need to set it up as a system container.) The instructions for Docker work on Podman (just swap the docker command for podman instead).

While the official instructions only list CPU (which is fine for some of the smaller models) and NVidia, it’s also possible to use an AMD GPU too:

# Enable device as user (run once per boot)
sudo setsebool container_use_devices=true

# Set up the ollama server for AMD acceleration (run once per session)
podman run --pull=always --replace --detach --device /dev/kfd --device /dev/dri --group-add video -v ollama:/root/.ollama -p 11434:11434 --name ollama ollama/ollama:0.1.22-rocm

# Command-line interaction (run any time you want to use it — the last part is which model you want to use)
podman exec -it ollama ollama run llama2

llama2 is the default ML; there are so many others available. Mixtral is a good one if you have enough vram on your GPU. Whatever you specify, it will auto-download and set it up for you. You only need to wait the first time. (The ROCm version of takes a while to download. Each model varies. The good thing is, it’s all cached for subsequent uses.)

If you want a web UI like ChatGPT, then you could also run this instead of the command line interaction command:

podman run -d --replace -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v ollama-webui:/app/backend/data --name ollama-webui ghcr.io/ollama-webui/ollama-webui:main

…and visit http://localhost:3000/

When done, run podman stop ollama and podman stop ollama-webui to free up resources from your GPU.

There are also integrations for text editors and IDEs, similar to GitHub’s CoPilot. Neovim has a few already. VS Code (or VS Codium) has some too (like twinny and privy).

• Image generation: “Stable Diffusion” is the go-to here. There are a bunch of forks. Some of the better ones are:
  • “Fooocus” https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus/ — an easy to use streamlined app (with some advanced settings) where you don’t need to prompt as much or tweak settings to get a good result by default.
  • “SD.next” https://github.com/vladmandic/automatic — A fork of the Automatic111 fork of the default Stable Diffusion web app that uses the Gradio UI.
  • “ComfyUI” https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI — A node-based UI for Stable Diffusion. …and there are a ton others. Forks of forks of forks.

Krita, GIMP, and Blender all have plugins that can interface with some of these too (usually using a SD Automatic111 API).

For Stable Diffusion on AMD, you need to have ROCm installed and might need to set or use an environment variable to make it work with your card. Something like: HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=11.0.0 or HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 (depending on your GPU). Prefixing means just putting that at the beginning of the the command with a space and then the rest of the command. Setting it as a variable depends on your shell. You might need to export it for some (like for bash). Prefixing it is fine though, especially when you use ctrl+r to do a substrang search in your shell history (so you don’t need to retype it or remember silly-long commands).

As using these image generating apps pulls down a lot of Python libraries, I’d suggest considering setting up a separate user account instead of using your own, so the app doesn’t have access to your local files (like stuff in ~/.ssh/, ~/.local/, your documents, etc.). Setting up containers for these is not so easy (yet), sadly. Some people have done it. And they do run in a toolbox or distrobox podman container… but toolbox and distrobox containers don’t really contain so much, so you’re better off using podman (with a “docker” container) directly or running it as a separate account for some type of isolation from your user account files.

Everything else above is at least contained (via containers or Flatpak) to some degree… but stuff locally via pip installs can do anything. And it’s not just hypothetical either, for example: PyTorch nightly was compromised for a few days on Christmas of 2022.

There are some graphical apps on Flathub for connecting to Stable Diffusion and a ChatGPT AI (which ollama now has)… but in the course of setting them up, you basically have a web and/or text-based UI to interact with.