On Fedora Workstation, GNOME, Epiphany, and WebKitGTK
Were you looking forward to reading an exciting blog post about substantive technical issues affecting GNOME or the Linux desktop community? Sorry, not today. When setting up new machines, I’m often frustrated by lack of syntax highlighting for git commit messages in vim. On my main workstation, vim uses comforting yellow letters for the first …
Continue reading “Enable Git Commit Message Syntax Highlighting in Vim on Fedora”
Were you looking forward to reading an exciting blog post about substantive technical issues affecting GNOME or the Linux desktop community? Sorry, not today. GNOME It used to be an acronym, so it’s all uppercase. Write “GNOME,” never “Gnome.” Please stop writing “Gnome.” Would it help if you imagine an adorable little garden gnome dying …
If you’re using Fedora and discovered that WebKitGTK+ is displaying blank pages, the cause is a bad mesa update, mesa-18.2.3-1.fc29. This in turn was caused by a GCC bug that resulted in miscompilation of mesa. To avoid this bug, downgrade to mesa-18.2.2-1.fc29: $ sudo dnf downgrade mesa* You can also update to mesa-18.2.4-2.fc29, but this build has …
Continue reading “Mesa Update Breaks WebKitGTK+ in Fedora 29”
So, how do you write a shebang for a Python program? Let’s first set aside the python2/python3 issue and focus on whether to use env. Which of the following is correct? #!/usr/bin/env python #!/usr/bin/python The first option seems to work in all environments, but it is banned in popular distros like Fedora (and I believe …
In my original blog post On WebKit Security Updates, I identified three separate problems affecting WebKit users on Linux: Distributions were not providing updates for WebKitGTK+. This was the main focus of that post. Distributions were shipping a insecure compatibility package for old, unmaintained WebKitGTK+ 2.4 (“WebKit1”). Distributions were shipping QtWebKit, which was also unmaintained …
A few quick follow-up thoughts from my original review. First, problems I haven’t solved yet: I forgot an important problem in my first blog: email. Evolution is borderline unusable with PIA. My personal GMail account usually works reliably, but my Google Apps school GMail account (which you’d think would function the same) and my Igalia email both time …
I’m soon going to be moving to Charter Communications territory, but I don’t trust Charter and don’t want it to keep records of all the websites that I visit. The natural solution is to use a VPN, and the natural first choice is Private Internet Access, since it’s a huge financial supporter of GNOME, and I …
I recently read a peer-reviewed academic paper from a couple years ago that analyzed the contributions of different companies to WebKit. The authors didn’t bother to account for individuals using non-corporate email addresses, since that’s hard work, and did not realize that most Google developers contribute to the project using @chromium.org email addresses, resulting in …
Continue reading “On “Insights On Companies/Developers Behind Wayland””
One year ago, I wrote a blog post about WebKit security updates that attracted a fair amount of attention at the time. For a full understanding of the situation, you really have to read the whole thing, but the most important point was that, while WebKitGTK+ — one of the two WebKit ports present in Linux distributions …
GNOME 3.22 is scheduled to be released today. Along with this release come brand new recommendations for distributions on which applications should be installed by default, and which applications should not. I’ve been steadily working on these since joining the release team earlier this year, and I’m quite pleased with the result. When a user …