this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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This is very exciting. Here is the APK I downloaded. And the associated discussion.

It even already seems to support stylus input which is very exciting seeing as there has been talk of porting RNote to Android.

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[–] kurumin@linux.community 1 points 3 days ago

Now Gnome will be used where they intended it

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I can't read the discussion because some damn Canadian neko waifu thinks I'm a bot.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 22 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It does that for all clients

You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete

[–] sxan@midwest.social 10 points 1 week ago (7 children)

You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete

I will never find the irony in this anything other than pathetic.

The one legitimate grievance against Bitcoin and other POW cryptocurrencies - the wasteful burning of energy to do throw-away calculations simply to prove the work has been done... the environmental cost of distributed scale meaningless CPU cycle waste purely for the purpose of wasting CPU cycles, has been so eagerly grasped by people who are largely doing it to foil another energy wasteful infotech invention.

It really is astonishing.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

either you have the service with anubis or you have no service at all

unlike pyramid coins, anubis serves a purpose

[–] sxan@midwest.social 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It still uses Proof-of-Work, in which the coal being burned is only to prove that you burned the coal.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Everything uses energy

Do you have any measurements on power usage? It seems very minor.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Everything computer does use power. The issue is the same very valid criticism of (most) crypto currencies: the design objectives are only to use power. That's the very definition of "proof of work." You usually don't care what the work is, only that it was done. An appropriate metaphor is: for "reasons", I want to know that you moved a pile of rocks from one place to another, and back again. I have some way of proving this - a video camera watching you, a proof of a factorization that I can easily verify, something - and in return, I give you something: monopoly money, or access to a web site. But moving the rocks is literally just a way I can be certain that you've burned a number of calories.

I don't even care if you go get a ~~GPU~~ tractor and move the rocks with that. You've still burned the calories, by burning oil. The rocks being moved has no value, except that I've rewarded you for burning the calories.

That's proof of work. Whether the reward is fake internet points, some invented digital currency, or access to web content, you're still being rewarded for making your CPU burn calories to calculate a result that has no intrinsic informational value in itself.

The cost is at scale. For a single person, say it's a fraction of a watt. Negligible. But for scrapers, all of those fractions add up to real electricity bill impacts. However - and this is the crux - it's always at scale, even without scrapers, because every visitor is contributing to the PoW total, global cost of that one website's use of this software. The cost isn't being noticeable by individuals, but it is being incurred; it's unavoidable, by design.

If there's no cost in the aggregate of 10,000 individual browsers performing this PoW, then it's not going to cost scrapers, either. The cost has to be significant enough to deter bots; and if it's enough to be too expensive for bots, it's equally significant for the global aggregate; it's just spread out across a lot of people.

But the electricity is still being used, and heat is still being generated, and it's yet another straw on the environmental camel's back.

It's intentionally wasteful, and a such, it's a terrible design.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

It doesn't need to be anywhere near as resource intensive as a crypto currency since it isn't used for security. The goal is not to stop bots altogether. The goal is to slow down the crawlers enough so that the server hosting the service doesn't get pegged. The bots went from being respectful of server operators to hitting pages millions of times a second. This is made much worse by the fact that git hosting services like Forgejo have many links many of which trigger the server to do computations. The idea behind Arubis is that a user really only has to do the PoW once since they aren't browsing to millions of pages. On a crawler it will try to do tons of proofs of work which will bog down the crawling rate. PoW also has the advantage of requiring the server to hold minimal state. If you try to enforce a time delay that means that the server has to track all of that.

It is also important to realize that Anubis is a act of desperation. Many projects do not want to implement it but they had no choice since their servers were getting wrecked by bots. The only other option would be Cloudflare which is much worse.

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[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The point is to make it too expensive for them, so they leave you alone (or, ideally, totally die but that's a long way off). They're making a choice to harvest data on your site. Make them choose not to. It saves energy in the long run.

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Do you have a better way? It is way more private than anything else I've seen.

From a energy usage perspective it also isn't bad. Spiking the CPU for a few seconds is minor especially compared to other tasks.

[–] jasory@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

The mersenneforums have users solve an obscure (to a non-mathematician) but relatively simple number theory problem.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Yeah, tarpits. Or, even just intentionally fractionally lagging the connection, or putting a delay on the response to some mime types. Delays don't consume nearly as much processing as PoW. Personally, I like tar pits that trickle out content like a really slow server. Hidden URLs that users are not likely to click on. These are about the least energy-demanding solutions that have a chance of fooling bots; a true, no-response tarpit would use less energy, but is easily detected by bots and terminated.

Proof of work is just a terrible idea, once you've accepted that PoW is bad for the environment, which it demonstrably is.

[–] solardirus@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Tarpits suck. Not worth the implementation or overhead. Instead the better strat is to pretend the server is down with a 503 code or that the url is onvalid with a 404 code so the bots stop clinging to your content.

Also we already have non-PoW captchas that dont require javascript. See: go-away for these implemwntations

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Good luck detecting bots...

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

None of those things work well is the problem. It doesn't stop the bots from hammering you site. Crawlers will just timeout and move on.

[–] JadedBlueEyes@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I run a service that gets attacked by AI bots, and while PoW isn't the only way to do things, none of your suggestions work at all.

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

Tar pits rely on crawlers being dumb. That isn't necessarily the case with a lot of stuff on the internet. It isn't uncommon for a not to render a page and then only process the visible stuff.

Also I've yet to see any evidence that Arubis is any worse for the environment than any basic computer function.

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[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I did but it told me I'm a bot :(

Edit: Yay, it worked.

[–] PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It actually doesn't do that for all clients, according to the docs

It'll let you straight through if your user agent doesn't contain "Mozilla"

[–] Linearity@infosec.pub 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Whaaaat? Why only look for Mozilla?

[–] LunaChocken@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

Because it's super common in web scrapers

All normal web browsers have Mozilla in the name so it’s kinda weird to only do it for that. Both chrome safari and FF start with Mozilla 5.0

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 23 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Doesn't KDE/Plasma (or Qt) have this for years?

[–] klangcola@reddthat.com 52 points 1 week ago

Yes, and a few KDE apps work great on Android.

But more FOSS is more better, so GTK on Android is great news for both Android users and GTK developers

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Yes, e.g. Krita has long been available for Android tablets.

darktable on Android would be awesome, I don't think there's currently any good FOSS raw development software for Android.

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[–] artyom@piefed.social 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] subarctictundra@lemmy.world 48 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Quite a substantial step towards being able to use Linux apps on Android phones.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago

Ohhhh I see

[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

Oh, are we getting Year of android desktop?!

[–] _cryptagion@quokk.au 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Somebody is gonna put Gnome on an Android, I can feel it.

[–] subarctictundra@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Gnome for phones already kinda exists with Phosh. I guess that wouldn't be too hard to port

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[–] dil@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago

So gimp on android?

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 points 1 week ago

less gooo!!

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I tried using GTK with C, JavaScript and Rust and the experience was always terrible. The tools, the documentation... C is just sooooo old and GTK doesn't translate well to Rust. For me GTK is great for Window Manger level tools that need to be small, super fast and are fairly static (you don't add new features do settings app or clock widget that often). I definitely wouldn't do cross platform apps in it.

[–] illucidmind@programming.dev 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

First, what do you mean by "C is just so old"? That seems like a language problem, not a GTK problem. Tbh, when it comes to documentation, you're likely better off with C as the official GTK docs targets the C API (https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/).

Also, what do you mean by "it doesn't translate well to Rust"? Because, Rust, like other supported langs like Python, have bindings that are equally well-documented to an extent. I haven't used the Rust binding but I've used the Python binding extensively and there are references to all the APIs (https://lazka.github.io/pgi-docs/)—same with Rust (https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/).

Lastly, I can understand not using GTK for cross-platform apps, but not for the reasons you mentioned. While GTK's primary target is Linux, you can technically still make it cross-platform.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

By "C is so old" I mean it lacks a lot of features modern languages have. Proper linting, code formatting, dependency management, version management, virtual environments, modules. Yes, you can solve some of it with docker but it's terrible compared with Rust for example.

By "it doesn't translate well to Rust" I mean that GObject doesn't translate well to Rust structs so you end up with weird structures split into multiple modules and terrible code overhead. Compared with modern UI frameworks it's just not ergonomic to work with.

Yes, I know GTK supports multiple platforms but if I want to develop for desktop and mobile I had way better experience using Tauri+Leptos. It's not just about having some bindings and some docs for it. It's about how much effort does it take to set it up and figure out how to implement specific functionality. Good docs, good tools good compiler and readable code for the framework help a lot.

[–] illucidmind@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Your statement about C is still mostly wrong. First, linting isn't typically a built-in feature for many languages; you mostly depend on external tools or IDEs (for C/C++, CLion and VSCode with specific extensions solve this). A similar occurrence is seen in formatting, where, except for a few languages like Rust and Go (with officially maintained formatters), you still have to depend on external tools or IDEs. For dependency management, it is well-known that C/C++ lacks an official package manager, but there are well-tested third-party package managers such as conan (https://conan.io/) and vcpkg (https://vcpkg.io/). Another benefit is the project-local support in both package managers (although it is more robust in Conan), which effectively addresses both the version management and virtual environment issues you raised. You don't always need virtual environments anyway (Rust doesn't use one either).

I haven't used the Rust binding, so I don't have direct experience with this and may not fully understand the pain points. However, a glance at the docs shows the Rust binding and trait-based pattern still does the job effectively. I don't understand what you mean by "weird structures split into multiple modules", as you're just reusing built-in structs like you would use a class in the Python binding, for instance. So I don't see the problem.

Well, mobile support for GTK is currently experimental, so there's that.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Of course linting and formatting is not part of the language. Of course you can install extensions in some IDE that will handle it. Conan looks great but I never saw a project using it and when I was asking C devs about dependency management no one mentioned it. I checked dozens of GTK projects looking for some decent template to copy and didn't find anything remotely "modern". All projects I see simply use meson/ninja, install deps on system level, don't provide any code formatting or linting guidelines. Most don't bother with any modules and just dump all source code into 100 files in src. And I'm talking about actively developed tools for Gnome, not some long forgotten ones. For me the big difference between languages like C and Rust is that every Rust project uses the same formatting, linting tools, uses modules and proper dependency management while most C projects don't. Because it's old. Because a lot of C devs learned programming when it wasn't a thing. Because a lot of C project started when those tools didn't exist. You can probably start a new C project in 'modern' way but when I was trying to do it there were no examples, no documentation and when I asked C devs I was told that "you just do it like always". In modern languages the default way is the "modern" way.

This is how you declare a new component in gtk-rs:

glib::wrapper! {
    pub struct MainMenu(ObjectSubclass<imp::MainMenu>)
        @extends gtk::PopoverMenu, gtk::Popover, gtk::Window, gtk::Widget,
        @implements gtk::Accessible, gtk::Buildable, gtk::ConstraintTarget, gtk::Native, gtk::ShortcutManager;
}

impl MainMenu {
    pub fn new() -> Self {
        Object::new(&[]).expect("Failed to create `MainMenu`.")
    }
}

#[glib::object_subclass]
impl ObjectSubclass for MainMenu {
    const NAME: &'static str = "MainMenu";
    type Type = super::MainMenu;
    type ParentType = gtk::PopoverMenu;

    fn class_init(klass: &mut Self::Class) {
        klass.bind_template();
    }

    fn instance_init(obj: &glib::subclass::InitializingObject<Self>) {
        obj.init_template();
    }
}

This is how you declare a new component in Leptos:

#[component]
fn App() -> impl IntoView {

    view! {
   <div>test</div>
    }
}

That's what I mean by "it's not ergonomic".

[–] illucidmind@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

Well, for a modern approach to development in C, you may have to be creative and not rely on ready examples, but it's still doable. A lot of the C issues are at the "conventional" level and can be solved if you just do things a little bit differently (e.g. nothing stops you from modularising source/headers files even though C doesn’t enforce this at the language level).

I can understand the "ergonomics" you speak of in Rust but it's not very surprising in that aspect especially given that C faces same challenge (and is even more verbose). The GObject system seems to map well with languages that favour the OOP style (built-in classes, inheritance etc) like Python. So yeah, on that, I understand ;)

[–] subarctictundra@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I definitely recommend using Vala for Gtk as it was tailor made for it. It's built on top of the object system that Gtk uses so the API fits in to the language flawlessly, unlike Rust. It even has its own website for browsing the Gnome APIs https://valadoc.org/

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[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tangent, but why did you ex lisp?

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 1 week ago

I did some Lisp programming long time ago but I don't touch it anymore.

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