sp3ctr4l

Completely off topic, but I first read that as ‘DNA’, did a double take.

At this point, an announcement that whoever is in charge of all DNA continuing to work just stepped down or got fired… wouldn’t really seem that out of character for this timeline.

Now we need Cardi B Linux alongside Hannah Montana Linux.

meta-ad-ception

Ads within an ad, about about ads.

The problem is not the remote app in and of itself.

The problem is common to using the remote app, because both remote screen share and remote input recognition through gamescope (the actual process that translates steam deck or controller inputs into direct system inputs) are not allowed by wayland, for security reasons.

So, when you try to allow someone else to view your screen, or allow an app to be recognized as an inpuy sourcr, wayland explicitly asks you if this is ok.

… The way Wayland works, theres no way to avoid that initial prompt.

But the baffling part is that when you do grant permission… the system doesn’t remember you did so, so this keeps happening, it keeps asking over and over.

the xdg-desktop-portal-kde/gnome/whatever package should, as I understand it, be able to permenantly grant this permission.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal

In the ‘input capture portal’ column…

We’ve got yes for GNOME/GTK4 Yes for hyprland, yes for kde, which both use QT6…

But No for the generic GTK3.

Fuck, maybe thats this whole thing?

That any GTK3 app just cannot actually permanently grant the permission, because they have no pathway to send a permament permission through wayland to xdg desktop portal?

So … basically, if any link of the chains between your input and anything you are rendering involves a GTK3 dependent app, it’ll just keep asking forever?

That would explain why this issue seems to start popping up alongside both Wayland and GTK4.

Fuck.

Ok, so that would mean that to solve this issue, either xdg-desktop-portal-gtk needs to be updated to allow an input portal request confirmation to actually go through…

Or you have to purge every app that hasn’t fully transitioned to GTK4 or QT6.

I am quite confused now.

You seem to be either quite confident or quite knowledgable about this, or both.

If the issue is Xwayland doesn’t remember the permission… why does clicking to grant access work at all, even temporarily?

If the issue is Xwayland doesn’t have the ability to set the permission at all, even temporarily, which it seems to, why is Xwayland not just automatically shunting the actual directive to set the permission over to xdg-desktop-portal, which you say can correctly handle this, on kde.

As I understand it, thats what is supposed to be happening.

The problem is not just that the prompt happens once, the first time you use a new input. There doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid that with Wayland.

The problem is that this prompt keeps happening and is not remembered.

How can it be the case that XWayland can grant you an app temporary permission, but not permanent?

And again… I solved the ‘permission not getting remembered’ problem by switching to Bazzite GNOME.

To me, this strongly implies a disparity in handling this issue between KDE and GNOME… that or Bazzite is doing some kind of special something that others are not.

It re pops up for you, on a handheld, with chimeraOS.

Fuck.

I’m running Bazzite/Gnome on a SteamDeck, and I only ever get pop ups like this a single time, when buried deep in trying to get gamescope to pass a steam deck input into a newly set up emulator program…

… what the heck is bazzite doing differenty than chimeraOS?

Please actually do test hyprland and post it, if you can.

I am frankly baffled that such a common issue has been going on for years now and no one has seemingly 100% fixed it… yet every distro targeted at a steam deck or other handheld, which doesn’t have a kb+m unless you also have a dock and a kb+m, seems to have gone with wayland, and are just pretending this doesn’t functionally cripple your handheld in desktop mode.

Its somehow worse than stickykeys prompt in windows alt tabbing your game: this will lock up your entire control scheme, and seemingly can’t actually be permanently fixed or turned off.

My suspicion is that the initial pop up still happens in gnome, but in kde, when you click the grant access prompt… it doesn’t actually permanently give the permission; some amount of time or sets of sequences of events will reset the granted access and then lock you out and re-prompt you.

… Ok.

So, Wayland cannot actually directly allow input events to access the system directly.

It instead passes them off, as a request for access, to xdg-desktop-portal, which prompts the user with an access request.

This should only occur once, user hits ‘grant access’ and then the system remembers this.

(Note that this is a fairly significant problem on its own if the user does not have a mouse and keyboard, such as on a game deck, in situations where the user has no actual way to give inputs that are not moderated by an app)

But instead, it keeps recurring, the system doesn’t remember properly, it’ll work for a bit, and then ask again.

The reporting of bugs I’ve seen like this goes back to around 3 years ago, when people/distros/DEs started to switch and then default to wayland.

What I’ve also seen is far less bug reports from gnome users than kde users, and in at least my own experience, switching to gnome completely solved the ‘constantly re-requesting access’ problem.

It doesn’t fix the problem of ‘how do you grant access the first time if you don’t have a mouse and keyboard’.

So… it seems to me that the more technically accurate thing to say would be:

xdg-desktop-portal-gnome has actually properly been updated to handle this, whereas xdg-desktop-portal-kde has not.

Because gnome wayland seems to at least remember the granted access once you figure out how to give it once, kde wayland does not.

Ok so I’ve run into this bug frequently with my Steam Deck for the past 2 years.

The following is my possibly innacurate, but genuine attempt to best describe whats going:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490666

Its a KDE bug that is specific to how KDE handles GTK (2 and 3?) in Wayland.

It is not a bug with Wayland. It is not a bug with GTK.

GNOME doesn’t seem to have this problem.

Its existed for about 3 years, the thread I linked above shows some of the explanation of how/why its occuring… even though this particular bug report is only a few months old, you can find it recurring further back in the past.

Here’s some more bug threads:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480412

https://forums.opensuse.org/t/remote-control-requested-every-time-i-use-kde-connect-remote-control/175083

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/xdg-desktop-portal-kde/-/issues/6

Basically, in an attempt to make remote access/control permissions for GTK to work properly in KDE Wayland, KDE implemented what multiple KDE developers have themselves described as a ‘hack’, a temporary, quick fix solution, in various comments on forums.

EDIT// Here’s an example of a KDE dev outright stating this, from the first thread:

Just to clarify that, we have two paths. One uses xtest one does not.

The xtest path is more of a hack, at the time for just GTK3. If anyone can test commenting out:

plasma-workspace/xembedsniproxy/sniproxy.cpp

    if (windowAttributes && !(windowAttributes->all_event_masks & XCB_EVENT_MASK_BUTTON_PRESS)) {
        m_injectMode = XTest;
    }

and see if clicking their app still works that would be useful. We can try and make the xtest path less used.

The rest of that thread is another KDE dev pushing hotfixes, interspersed with others saying that the problem persists.

//

Unsuprisingly, having a quick fix hack as an underlying, integral part of an entire DE, is not a good idea, as it doesn’t actually solve the problem except in very specific situations, and causes mass confusion downstream.

The problem has persisted for years because… as far as I can tell, to fix it properly would require a significant rewrite of KDE’s entire permission model, and also as far as i can tell, this has yet to be done.

The problem originally was pretty rare and thus I guess low priority, but as more and more people are trying to use KDE Wayland and a console controller or Steam Deck or gamescope or something like that, you can find more and more people complaining about it.

The devs seem to keep thinking they’ve fixed it, over 2024, only to find… no, they have not.

There is no functional ‘fix’, outside of switching back to X11, not until KDE gets its shit together.

For me on a Steam Deck, wanting to be able to use it as a gaming device and a PC, I switched over to the GNOME flavor of Bazzite, all problems solved.

Why would this be unexpected?

Proton already handed over the IP of a climate protester to authorities several years ago, while boasting that they had a no log policy.

https://therecord.media/protonmail-forced-to-collect-an-activists-ip-address-in-police-investigation

Every time, in the past few years, that I bring this up, everyone just acts like I’m setting an impossible standard and no alternative exists.

Proton has been shady for years.

Yep, I’ve been using Tuta for email for years now, just the free version.

Ok so…

I have bazzite on a steam deck.

It works extremely well!

But… say I want to set up… Unity, or Godot, or Bevy, or something that doesn’t have a flatpak or appimage.

If I am understanding this right…

The actual base OS is basically a custom version of an immutable/atomic Fedora 41 variant, and I should not fuck with that.

The system update terminal?

I should only run ublue ujust commands in it, not yum, not dnf, not rpm-ostree.

When I want to install something not flatpak or app imagified, things like all the requirements for compiling code …

For that, I should be using the ‘fedora’ container… as the current fedora container is actually what allows for that level of tinkering with… or if something only actually lists its sources and dependencies in debian based os’s, just set it up in a debian distrobox container… right?

Wrong?

Its one of the US’s three main social credit score companies, that determines your ability to rent or buy a home or car or get a job by selling your credit data to companies that perform background checks on you, background credit checks which you pay for.

I just set up Nobara.

Shockingly straightforward.

Entire install process was very simple, with a GUI, then a neat little post install app that gives you another very straightforward GUI for running your first batch of system updates.

But uh if you’re just looking for an OS for a standard desktop PC, everything I’ve outlined in the above spoiler is not gonna be a problem, and you’ll likely have a very straightforward install process.

I’m also a fan of Nobara’s default UI… kind of a gnomeified KDE?

As well as its default apps, built in DeckyLoader and plugins for the Deck, ProtonPlus for runtime environments, and of course its built in kernel customizations/optimizations for to play vidya gaem.

Oh, and I went with Nobara over the default SteamOS because SteamOS on a Deck is a read only OS by default…

You can install flatpaks, but if you want to actually install new core packages, those will get wiped with a SteamOS update… or you have to use DistroBox… which may also get wiped on an update?

Not sure, but Nobara allowse to use the deck as both a Deck and a more standard desktop linux PC with more customizability… and not having to rely on the AUR, which I find incredibly frustrating.

Yeah.

OP suggests the ease of use for just using ProtonMail and ProtonVPN all bundled together.

Maybe don’t do that. Maybe use Proton VPN, but find a seperate and/or more secure email provider.

Tuta, Mailfence, StartMail are all comparably secure compared to ProtonMail.

Posteo is possibly more secure/safe from a legal subpoena in that they claim to not log IPs, and they claim they anonymize your account from your payment method… though I have not researched it enough to personally say yes they do this and it actually works to prevent the legal info request situation.

EDIT: Also, just to throw this in, another weird thing about IVPN is that they are actually legally based in Gibraltar, which puts it in a fairly weird legal situation where it does not appear to be totally clear how a legal request for data from them would actually be processed.

Proton VPN is no log…

But they have and will turn over your real IP address from your ProtonMail account if legally ordered to.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/6/22659861/protonmail-swiss-court-order-french-climate-activist-arrest-identification

https://proton.me/legal/transparency

Similar stuff has happened to me.

Here’s a rough template of an input questionaire in MSFT Forms, its not actually ready yet as we haven’t set up the actual place the inputs will be recorded, nor set up a way to mirror it into our actual database that our entire intranet uses.

Come back after the weekend, dummy questionaire has replaced the front end of our old system, meaning we’ve just functionally not logged about 72 hours of requests for assistance from the homeless, during a blizzard, and COVID.

After this, our webmaster / marketing director, this woman who earns a quarter mil a year… straight up told me, in an email, she does not actually read anything I write in my emails to her that requires scrolling.

She’s very busy, you see.

When she asked me, unprompted, in an in person meeting, if I could ‘implement the blockchain’ in our (PostGres, not that she knows what that is) database, for ‘security benefits’, I wanted to strangle her to death, but settled on collapsing my head into my hands, then looking up and saying no, that would make everything extremely inefficient and make it much more insecure.

She says, oh really, are you sure about that?

Yes.

Ok then well I guess that wraps up this meeting (shit eating grin) keep up the good work!

… I no longer work in the tech industry.

Do NOT network-enable TempleOS.

God will get angry if you do.

Every single time I mention that Krita is basically an older version of photoshop, someone appears and says this.

I never said its a photoshop clone, as in it has parity with modern photoshop.

I said it can basically be used as one would have photoshop from a decade ago.

This is true, no matter whether or not it was ‘designed with drawing and digital media creation in mind.’

If you need something with more options and features than GiMP, or you don’t like GiMPs user interface… Krita works quite well.

Fucking incredible.