Hello everyone! I am interested in replacing the Google Speech Recognition and Synthesis app on Android. For Speech-to-Text (STT), I've tried Whisper and FUTO, and settled on the latter because it seemed to be more versatile. Also, FUTO seems to have some decent recognition, but not yet capable of handling all the languages that I want. Regardless, so far happy with STT. The only annoyance I have is that it does not appear as an option in the settings for Speech recognition :(

However, I can't seem to find any replacements that have good Text-to-Speech (TTS) quality. I tried espeak-ng and RHVoice, but both have robotic outputs.

Given the recent advancements in AI, I was expecting that there would be ways to incorporate open source TTS models like Kokoro to generate speech on the go. Nevertheless, I could not really find any such apps so far.

Has anyone managed to completely replace the Google app with (an)other privacy-focused FOSS app(s)?

Some great news regarding the development of computer chips in the EU. However, the total of €240 million allocated to the project is not as much as I would say we need to invest in this area. Let's see how things change in the next few years!

Previously used link: https://archive.ph/ICJZZ

Link to petition

Until now, the EU has allowed a majority of countries to rely on American big tech companies for communication and storage of sensitive data. For example, many universities across Europe rely on Google or Microsoft for email services, research data storage, and department communication. Similarly, many of them write their research using Microsoft Word, which could be used by these big companies to train their own AI models.

A majority of regular citizens rely on Meta for instant messaging apps (WhatsApp), Facebook, Instagram, but also on X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok. None of these apps are properly regulated even with EU's efforts, leaving people unshielded to other states' attempts at polarization. There is also the problem of mass profiling of users, which is used to supply targeted advertisements and sometimes influence public opinion on certain topics (cough Musk tweaking the Twitter algorithm to promote AfD cough).

The article that I supplied focuses mainly on the aspect of maintaining data privacy when our data is harvested by outside entities. However, this is, in my opinion, a horrible approach. We need to move everything ASAP to open source alternatives, and preferably EU based ones. Some attempts at this have been previously made in Germany, which should give hope to other countries in the EU.

The cost of moving away from Google/Microsoft tech stacks will be a drop in the bucket compared to the wealth that these companies extract from EU. Similarly, offering alternatives to social media like Friendica, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and perhaps PeerTube, would be a huge win against disinformation and propaganda from other countries. We should also push for instant messaging platforms like SimpleX that do not rely on Google's proprietary Push Notification services, and perhaps deGoogled Android devices.

If the recent events are not a catalyst to push everyone away from US software in the EU, I do not know what else will. Do you think that this would be possible at all?

I have never donated money in my life before, but what happened yesterday really upset me. Ended up sending some money this morning. I know that my small donation won't contribute to much, but I am trying to help :D

I hope this post doesn't break any rules!

Hi! I'm trying to archive papers as soon as they appear in a scientific journal, and I've attempted to search for PDF links on each page using some regular web scraping.

The problem is that most of these journals will add their fancy PDF readers, and downloading the file is not as straight-forward as it seems. However, the Zotero Connector works flawlessly when you trigger the extension. Therefore, I attempted to set up a selenium instance with this extension to download the papers given a link, but I struggle to actually get the extension to trigger. I tried sending a Shift + Ctrl + S command, but that doesn't seem to get picked up. Similarly, I can't figure out how to call the extension from the console.

Did anyone else attempt such a workflow before? Am I doing something completely unnecessary, as there are better options available? Help a fellow sailor out. Thanks a lot in advance for your help!

I recently discovered that Redox OS got a new release earlier this month. I'm quite surprised how far they managed to get, given that only a handful of people are working on this project (compared to the Linux kernel).

Now, I'm curious what it would take to get bigger players to focus on this project. Given the recent Linux + Rust drama, it would surprise me if the backers of Rust for Linux would not give this project some attention.

Hello everyone! I've been playing around with Wayland for a bit and was hoping to start learning some more about it. For example, I would be interested in making a lock screen, similar to Swaylock, as a toy project.

What GUI toolkit would you use to develop apps on Wayland? I've added a little poll below with some of the popular choices I've seen thrown around. Feel free to add your own suggestions and maybe leave a comment as to why you'd use that!

Link to poll

Hi! I am trying to automate my install process by creating a json file that can be used by archinstall (example). One of the example shows how you can run custom commands to get paru (yay, but written in Rust):

"custom-commands": [
        "cd /home/devel; git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git",
        "chown -R devel:devel /home/devel/paru",
    ]

However, their example doesn't provide any further information about installing packages with paru. I would like to install some stuff just for my user.

My idea was the following:

• using archinstall, install everything according to the config
• disregard the "custom-commands" option in the config and create a separate custom script
• get all the users from the system and allow user to choose which one to chroot as
• run all commands as the chosen user ( e.g., install Rust with curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh )

I need to install a few packages that are not in the official repository, as well as moving my dotfiles in /home/user/.config and making sure everything is accessible by that user. If there are any better approaches to this, I would be glad to hear them!

An example of the script I am planning to use after running archinstall:

#!/bin/bash

# Find all users on the system
for user in $(ls /home); do
    if [ "$user" != "lost+found" ]; then
        users+=($user)
    fi
done

# If there is more than one user, ask which user to install for
if [ ${#users[@]} -gt 1 ]; then
    echo "Multiple users found on system. Please select a user to install for:"
    select user in "${users[@]}"; do
        if [[ " ${users[@]} " =~ " ${user} " ]]; then
            break
        else
            echo "Invalid selection"
        fi
    done
else
    user=${users[0]}
fi

echo "Installing for user $user"

# chroot as the user
arch-chroot -u $user /mnt/archinstall # This only opens bash, but I am working on it :D 
cd /home/$user

# Install paru
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -si

# Install stuff with paru
paru -S tlrc --noconfirm

Server performance is not very good with so many mods, and I have been looking into ways to fix this. One of the latest comments on the ATM8 page on CurseForge is from XZot1K, and says the following:

After lots of testing I resolved most of my issues by installing the following mods to the server (Ensure to install the correct versions, as of writing this the version is latest of each for 1.19.2):

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/too-fast

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/smooth-chunk-save

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/chunk-sending-forge-fabric

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/packet-size-doubler

These mods will resolve larger packet disconnect issues, chunk lag, and irregular movement rubber banding.

In addition to these, for further improvement, set the tick rate to -1 in the server.properties file.

Paste the following into the bottom of your "user_jvm_args.txt" (change the 6GB and 256m to your liking

Xms must be less than Xmx):

-Xmx6G -Xms256m -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+ParallelRefProcEnabled -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=200 -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch -XX:G1NewSizePercent=30 -XX:G1MaxNewSizePercent=40 -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=32M -XX:G1ReservePercent=20 -XX:G1HeapWastePercent=5 -XX:G1MixedGCCountTarget=4 -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=15 -XX:G1MixedGCLiveThresholdPercent=90 -XX:G1RSetUpdatingPauseTimePercent=5 -XX:SurvivorRatio=32 -XX:+PerfDisableSharedMem -XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=1 -Dusing.aikars.flags=https://mcflags.emc.gs -Daikars.new.flags=true

Please note that while these additional mods do work on the client the major improvement comes from the server-side.

I've already used those jvm arguments, but I didn't look for performance mods before. Now, after fiddling a bit around with them, the server feels much snappier (and I don't have to install anything client side)! I'm hosting on Azure, with a Standard D2s v3 (2 vcpus, 8 GiB memory) VM, and when I would do a /home from a far away place it would take a few seconds to load. Now, it's almost instantaneous! Thanks XZot1K! :)

The server also used to crash whenever multiple people entered the Nether, but I haven't been able to test this yet with the new configuration.

If you have any tips to improve performance, please share them here :)

As the title implies, should I do it? I love Arch so far, and I can fix most issues that pop out. However, I sometimes wish to start fresh without too much hassle, but I get a feeling NixOS isn't as mature as Arch.

Have any of you used both, and if so, what do you miss from Arch? What are you grateful for in NixOS?

Hi everyone! I'll soon take the DP-100 exam for Microsoft Azure, and I was interested in finding more leaked exam questions. At the moment, I was using examtopics for this, but it sucks because it basically cuts you off halfway through.

I heard there are some private trackers that specialize in exam questions, such as LearnFlakes, but I do not have anyone that can invite me to them. Therefore, I was wondering if there is another way to find the information I need for this exam.

Do you know any other sources that are fully free?