Notices by aaron (fireborn@dragonscave.space), page 2

@Em0nM4stodon I've been using botsplaining for a while now – usually in response to emails where someone has clearly just dumped my email asking a question into an llm. Love the word

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@BrodieOnLinux Bazzite would probably be a better base for them – I wonder if there's something around licensing there they don't want to deal with.

@BrodieOnLinux Manjaro might actually make sense for them_Steam OS is based on Arch, after all, and Manjaro isn't (too) far off. The tooling is already in place. Though why they wouldn't just use Arch in that case I don't know.

Here it is. Post 2 in my series on #Linux #accessibility. This time, I'm digitally screaming about the audio stack.
As always, feedback is encouraged and welcomed, and subscribe via rss or email to receive plane-text versions of what I write, the day after publishing at 10 am EST
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-2-the-audio-stack-is-a-crime-scene/
#a11y #linuxAudio #linuxAccessibility

@aral @razze This just works now. As seemlessly as it does under x11, at least with Gnome. Not with anything else though.

@razze @aral Fedora has improved a lot. The installer now works, but there are still fundamental issues that aren't the fault of the Fedora maintainers; it's just the way the stack is right now.

@razze @aral Okay, the installer works in workstation. Not in any other spins, like the Mate spin that blind users tend to gravitate towards.

@razze @aral I'm not saying you did; sorry if I came across that way. I was just informing you that since that other post about fedora shipping with a broken screen reader was made, it has been fixed. For the gnome version.

QEMU is one of those pieces of software where, on the surface, it looks amazing. It emulates everything. It supports every architecture. You can boot a whole-ass operating system inside a YAML file on a toaster if you want.
But the moment you try to actually use it, it becomes immediately clear that QEMU was not written so much as it emerged, fully formed, from the darkest, deepest corner of an obsolete instruction set manual written in blood and Hungarian notation.
You want to do something simple like “boot an ISO”? Ha. Buckle the fuck up. You're about to write a command line 300 characters long, full of flags that mean nothing, do everything, or secretly contradict each other depending on the phase of the moon.
-enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 4 -m 4096 -nic user -device e1000 -drive file=wtf.img,format=raw,if=virtio,index=0 -boot d -cdrom arch.iso -vga std
That’s just the beginner tier. You want UEFI? You better find the exact OVMF blob hidden deep in some /usr/share/qemu/edk2/OVMF.fd directory that varies per distro and isn’t documented anywhere. Want secure boot? Fuck you. You’re on your own.
Need sound? No you don’t. QEMU’s audio stack is a cryptic abomination wrapped around ancient ALSA, PulseAudio, and maybe JACK if you invoke it while holding a sacrificial chicken. Half the time you get silence, the other half you get full-volume digital screaming because your sample rate was wrong by 1Hz and QEMU doesn't clamp that shit.
Want networking? Okay, now you’re really in trouble. Because QEMU supports ten different networking models and none of them are sane. There’s -nic user, which works but can’t access your LAN. There’s -netdev bridge, which requires root, two shell scripts, and a master's degree in Linux networking internals. And then there's -net tap, which may or may not work depending on what libvirt decided to vomit into /etc/qemu/bridge.conf three years ago.
You want USB passthrough? Cool. Here's how you do it:
1.
Run lsusb
2.
Pray
3.
Try -device usb-host,hostbus=3,hostport=2
4.
Watch the guest kernel panic
5.
Cry
And the documentation? HA. It’s not documentation—it’s a vague whisper of meaning. The man pages are 1,200 lines long and still manage to explain nothing. “Use -device” they say. What devices? What does virtio-scsi-pci mean? What is a ich9-usb-ehci1? No one knows. They’re not listed. They’re not described. The only way to find them is to run qemu-system-x86_64 -device help and scroll through pages of raw output, most of which are undocumented internal components that will cause instant death if you use them wrong.
QEMU is not a virtual machine manager. QEMU is a puzzle box built by cursed engineers, and your prize for solving it is maybe, maybe, getting a VM to boot without errors in the logs. Not cleanly. Not efficiently. Just... booted. That’s your win condition.

QEMU is amazing.
QEMU is powerful.
QEMU is the most nightmarish, under-documented, user-hostile hellstack you’ll ever love to hate.
It’s like vi and sed had a baby that speaks binary, communicates only in flags, and will boot your OS if you can decipher its riddles fast enough to stop it from self-destructing.
It is everything great and terrible about Linux condensed into one program. It’s an emulator. A hypervisor. A debugger. A self-inflicted injury. And a perfectly accurate simulation of how much it sucks to try and understand computers.

@talon More software should be like VS Code when it comes to accessibility, yes. I'm just personally not really a fan of my editor doing a hundred other things; it's a text editor. I edit text in it.

@talon this is true. It is basically the gold standard for web app accessibility, though.

@talon that others should absolutely learn from, even other Microsoft teams (teams) internally

@chris Best of luck to her! I'll reach out to some people in my circles to see if anyone has availability.

@aral @starlabssystems I'm out of warranty at this point so I don't really know what could be done. I've had it since March 2023

@aral @starlabssystems It's kind of hard to do when the issue is that I don't know what the issue is and can't boot to flash an update.

@aral @starlabssystems I agree. If I could fix my charging issues I'd have no problem.

@aral @starlabssystems This company make great hardware, it's just a shame that the firmware side of things seems to be very buggy, at least in my experience.

Giveaway!!! 1 BT Speak pro. Entry rules are simple. *1 entry per person. *Must send the correct entry word, nothing else by dm. *I will dm the winner to request shipping info. *The winner will be chosen randomly on July 14th, 2024. *If the winner does not respond by July 16th, 2024, another winner will be selected. If they, too, do not respond, no further attempts will be made. The entry word is 'BTSpeak', note capitalisation. Any questions just ask. Boosts okay. #giveAway #assistiveTechnology #blind #accessibility