First, some background -

I work in technical support for a Chinese manufacturer making (among other things) home monitoring devices. I'm our resident open source enthusiast in the North American market, not that any of my bosses know or care. My background is not in comp sci or networking, so the only applicable knowledge I have is from my meager experience with my own home lab.

We have a product (I'll refer to it here as the Brain) that communicates wirelessly with our other devices, takes the data from them, sends the data encrypted to our servers, and is available to our customers through our web portal or phone app.

We got a support ticket recently from a customer (and software developer) asking technical questions about the communication protocol from the Brain to our servers. This customer was trying to work on Home Assistant integration for our product stack, but was hitting some roadblock that I can't even pretend to understand. To my understanding, the integration would allow a Home Assistant server to locally gather the same information sent to our servers.

After escalating the issue to our HQ team and some back and forth there, eventually the answer was that the data transfer is encrypted and we aren't going to share any details about it. We don't officially support this type of integration and have no plans to. Our tech contact at HQ offered to sell API access to this customer, but obviously that isn't what he was hoping to hear.

The customer replied that this answer didn't surprise him, but that he would be happy to develop the Home Assistant integration if we made the necessary information available to him.

So, here's my questions - How can I advocate from within my company to open up this aspect of our platform for open source devs to integrate our products into Home Assistant and other open source IOT platforms? Has anyone successfully made a case for this kind of thing within their own companies? What talking points can I use that my higher ups will actually listen to and understand?

I'm considering reaching out to the customer privately to seek a better understanding of what he needs from our platform. Does that seem ill-advised to anyone here?

TLDR - My employer manufactures IOT devices and locks down the platform with proprietary networking protocols. A customer and developer is seeking to write an integration for our products to work locally with Home Assistant. My higher ups said that isn't possible and I want to convince them to make the changes necessary for it to work.

I recently came across openSUSE again and decided to give it a try this time. I am daily driving Fedora 40 right now and before coming across openSUSE I wanted to switch to Fedora Kinoite or uBlue Aurora (i.e., immutable / atomic). That's why MicroOS piqued my interest but I had a hard time find information if MicroOS is suitable for daily driving as a atomic desktop or mainly used for a container host on a server.

If someone has personal experience with openSUSE or could link me to a nice write up comparing the two I would be very thankful!

Edit:

In the MicroOS portal it is described like this:

Rolling Release: Every new openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshot also automatically produces a new openSUSE MicroOS release.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17012596

While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct (and what a massive job that was), 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take your desktop to a new level.

In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too), as you delve into interacting with desktops on remote machines, become more productive with usability and accessibility enhancements galore, and discover customizations that will even affect the hardware of your computer.

These features and more are being built directly into Plasma's Wayland version natively, avoiding the need for third party software and hacky extensions required by similar solutions implemented in X.

Things will only get more interesting from here. But meanwhile enjoy what will land on your desktop with your next update.

Some of the new features:

• Improved remote desktop support with a new built-in server
• Overhauled desktop edit mode
• Restoration of open applications from the previous session on Wayland
• Synchronization of keyboard LED colors with the desktop accent color
• Making mouse cursor bigger and easier to find by shaking it
• Edge barriers (a sticky area for mouse cursor near the edge between screens)
• Explicit support eliminates flickering and glitches for NVidia graphics card users on Wayland
• Triple Buffering support for smoother animations and screen rendering

wanting to hop into the world of linux on a dual boot method (one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it's a gacha. I don't want to gamble with my account being banned, so I'm keeping windows for it specifically.) this'll be my second go at it, I used Pop!_OS briefly but had some issues with wifi and didn't love the GNOME layout. I have a new distro picked out, but I just was curious what other people are using in this community. was also wondering what made you fall on your current one.

and maybe as some bonus questions, what are some distros you've tried but didn't like? what about a distro you want to try eventually? I've seen distrohopping is a thing, hahaha.

A great resource that makes it quick and easy to find alternatives to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and many more.

How is it possible, that Signal still only provides a .deb package and no .rpm, or even better AppImage or Flatpak? There is an unofficial Flatpak but is it secure?

Mrs. Hedge finally ditched Instagram and is moving to Pixelfed! 🙂👍🎉 Would like to like her posts but not sure if I can from here . . .

I tried Collabora on a Galaxy Droid and it was such a massively buggy disappointment: in a .ODS file, I couldn't backspace more than once; I could only delete one character at a time. I had to enter another character or move the cursor or do something else before it would take another backspace. I don't understand how this app has as high reviews as it does, or no one has used its spreadsheet editor.

I so far can't get away from Google Drive because tables are absolutely critical to my work... Any ideas to help de-Google would be deeply appreciated!

Update: The search continues, as ONLYOFFICE did not work out either and similarly had file-editing problems. For now, I've resorted to .TXTs...

I've used Windows Firewall for my whole life but I'm curious if anyone has any recommendations for a solid FOSS replacement. I do still use Windows on one of my systems on a daily basis but I always try to replace as much as possible with FOSS alternatives.

Any suggestions for a good FOSS alternative for Windows Firewall (and not at the router level)?

No, "just use Linux" is not a suggestion. I already do use Linux, but there are some things I do have to use Windows for.

Their website says to get it on F-Droid: https://molly.im/download/fdroid/

But it's not on there. Did it get delisted for some reason?

I use KoboldAI horde with TavrenAI and some AIs take a long time to get to me from the queue. I would like to use other apps while waiting but the site reloads when i enter the browser, which is native alpha and fennec

Hi, I tried to migrate my pixelfed account to a different server using aliases as the instructions described. It redirects, but no posts or follows have come over, and it's been over 24 hours. Sending a DM to admin doesn't seem to work. Does anyone know if it's backed up right now over people being frustrated with Instagram?

If it isn't going to work that's fine, because I'm willing to start over. I'm just curious if this is working for other people or I'm forgetting something obvious.

I am very out of the loop with related recent tech, but once in a while i wish i had subtitles for internet clips, and i understand there's good tech out there for this these days. Is there something i can download in a typical headless Debian machine that i can then point at some MP4 clip to get subtitles? Even if imperfect it's better than trying to type that from scratch

Hi,

I search for a web software for Android and iOS to collaborate a photo album with friends at a bicycle trip and share it with the families and other friends. Maybe it is similar the photo album on iOS or an album on google photos.

My first idea was to use instagram. But after to much using it, I don't like it anymore. there are to much commercial. So maybe Pixelfed is an option. It is Ad-free and privacy friendly. In Pixelfed I can create collections, but I can't share the rights to add photos in there. So it won't work in my case.

My second idea is to use a Nextcloud. But it isn't user friendly to click on every file to watch the photo.

So my question is, do you know a software, where I can create a photo album and share it with my friends to add photos and my family can watch these?

Solution: Thanks for finding the solution, kate (in the comments). The option to control this is --extractor-retries .

I recently start using SponsorBlock feature with yt-dlp . When it looks up SponsorBlock server, it tries 3 times to connect and download information. I would like to increase the retries for this specifically, but could not find the right setting or option in the manual (man yt-dlp) and help (yt-dlp --help). I would like to increase it to at least 5 or maybe even 10 retries per video.

I've noticed for sometimes it cannot login within the first 3 look ups, but when I retry the command after that it will just look up fine. Therefore an increase in the retries setting would be helpful. Especially helpful when downloading entire playlists, leaving it for some time alone.