Posting this because I haven't seen anyone else talking about it. Back when Slate first debuted, they offered a reservation for $50. I personally placed one. Today they are asking for a second reservation payment of $300. Not to order the vehicle, but to "lock in your delivery window". What was the $50 for? I already paid. This strikes me as super shady. Will there be another third payment to make before we're offered the privilege of actually buying the vehicle?

Hannah Montana Linux v26.0 is a modern remaster of the original Hannah Montana Linux. It uses Debian's live-build and the Calamares installer.

Much of this project is just a re-skin of KDE Plasma. Many of the Plasma components are direct modifications of Plasma's default theme, Breeze. As such, this project is licensed under GPLv3+.

This project was made as the focus of a video on my YouTube channel. You can watch the video here .

We are open-sourcing (AGPLv3) and going live with our mobile app beta on June 15th. This beta is locked to Android users and Plutonium iOS users. We plan a full rollout in 1 month to Google Play, Apple App Store, F-Droid, and Obtanium after we knock out a few more bugs and features.

A bit late but I didn't see anyone else sharing this.

We have completely overhauled swipe typing to introduce FUTO Swipe, our new swipe typing system that achieves leading accuracy.

This has been a long project in the making, starting with our dataset effort back in late 2024, where thanks to your contributions we built a dataset of 1 million swipes on QWERTY English. It's thanks to this dataset that we've been able to make absolute accuracy evaluations, do various experiments, and develop the system we are releasing with this update.

How accurate is it? In my opinion, a good measure is to look at the error rate (1.0 - accuracy), rather than just accuracy, since it becomes difficult to grasp the numbers that are mostly over >90%. So here are the error rates for a few relevant keyboards, tested on our public test set (filtered to first 20k non-single-letter swipes) in-emulator. A lower number is better, because it means fewer errors. Top-1 error is the rate at which the primary word was incorrect, and top-4 error is when neither of the 3 alternatives were correct either.

FUTO Swipe Gboard iOS Heliboard w/ Google library Old

Top-1 error 7.38% 11.05% 10.82% 13.12% ~34%

Top-4 error 4.19% 5.66% 7.14% 7.63% ~27%

That's right, we are not matching the big keyboards on this benchmark but rather exceeding them, achieving 26% fewer errors relative to Gboard! Hopefully, swipe typing accuracy will no longer be an issue for you on FUTO Keyboard.

The suggestion bar will now show 3 alternatives after you finish swiping. This is so that you can make full use of the top-4 accuracy (1 accepted word + 3 alternatives). If you prefer the old behavior of showing the accepted word in middle, you can change this in settings. There, you can also find options to change the spacebar and backspace gestures, including disabling the spacebar cursor movement.

We will be working on more evaluations and improvements as we work on a paper, and we welcome feedback about specific cases where the new swipe system is lacking.

In the meantime, FUTO Swipe is also released for you to use in your own open-source projects! We recognize that this technology has been locked behind proprietary and closed-source walls for far too long. To learn more, check out https://swipe.futo.tech/

Emoji compatibility

We added Unicode 17 emoji, and reworked the emoji menu a bit. For a while, you may have experienced missing emoji in the emoji menu if you're on an older Android version - this is because we depended on the system font to provide emoji, and if an emoji was from a newer Unicode version that wasn't supported on your system, then it wouldn't be displayed.

On Android, the typical workaround for this is to use an emoji compatibility library called emoji2, but unfortunately the default implementation requires internet access to dynamically download fonts for missing emoji on the system, which is unacceptable for us as an offline keyboard app. Emoji2 provides a bundled library as an alternative, but this would add a shocking 9MB to the app just to support a handful of emojis on some older devices!

It appears that many of the emojis they bundle are unnecessary, so this new update includes a significantly trimmed compatibility font at only 1MB. Now, you should be able to insert 🫪 from FUTO Keyboard, even if you're on Android 7. You may still see tofu rendered by apps - unfortunately this is beyond our control and is on application developers to fix.

If you're unfamiliar with Surf Social it's a pretty simple concept: It allows you to make feeds that incorporate RSS, BlueSky and Mastodon accounts (and thus some Threads accounts), podcasts (yes, also RSS but formatted appropriately), inter-network hashtags, and YouTube (and maybe more, I don't have an exhaustive list). Peertube also works via RSS.

I suppose these are all things that you can technically get with an RSS reader (can you follow bsky with RSS?) but really it has more to do with the way the content is formatted, as well as the fact that I can share feeds, and browse others' feeds.

You can also sign in with bsky/threads and comment using those accounts.

It's very cool, and I've been having a lot of fun with it, but it is and will remain closed-source. The monetization strategy is unclear but it sounds like they're going for a sort of Patreon-style approach, in addition to potentially paid ads. And also you cannot use it without a Surf account, which I do not like.

This is why we install from FDroid.

Over the years I've tested out pretty much all the Android keyboards, but swipe typing always kept me on GBoard, even though GBoard did not support voice typing for anything except Google, so I had to switch keyboards for that.

Recently I learned that HeliBoard has support for gesture typing with the Google library. But I couldn't find any instructions on where to get the necessary files or how to do it. Well, someone posted a link to the file elsewhere so I'll share it here. And it works! Extremely well. I can also pin a button for voice typing and then select Transcribro for that (which uses OpenAI Whisper locally and works super well.

Another gripe I had with GBoard was the cursor moves way too fast when swiping on the space bar. Not so with Heliboard. You can also swipe backwards from the backspace key and it will highlight text and then delete it when you let go.

cross-posted from: https://flipboard.video/videos/watch/c0dfea13-7f2a-402c-b47c-50ccd151554b

AltStore co-founders Riley Testut and Shane Gill are the perfect example of necessity being the mother of invention. When Apple denied the launch of their retro video game app, Delta, in 2016, they realized that indie app developers needed another solution — one that could bring apps to communities without Apple dictating the rules and taking a cut.

Founded in 2019, AltStore is that solution. The creators of the first decentralized app store share their journey, including what an open app store means for developers and how they’re investing in the fediverse.

The conversation includes:

1:11 Genesis of AltStore
3:00 Getting Delta in Apple’s App Store
5:34 The Fortnite factor
8:10 The value of an alternative app store
12:04 The difference between putting an app in AltStore v App Store 14:41 Indie market for apps
18:03 Ecosystem safety
21:30 Is AI increasing the total number of apps out there?
22:45 Vibe coding and paths for app distribution
24:42 Fediverse and eureka moment
32:26 People-powered discovery — a broader movement 34:29 Building communities around apps
36:44 Patreon integration, supporting developers directly 38:38 Curating apps and source collections
40:07 Solutions for in-app payments
43:27 Pieces of the next generation ecosystem
45:56 Decentralizing app innovation
46:32 Relationship with Apple now
51:23 What’s on the horizon for AltStore
54:21 How to experience AltStore

Referenced:

Explore AltStore: https://explore.alt.store/
Riley + Shane’s Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/cw/rileyshane

🔎 You can find Riley and Shane at https://altstore.io/.

✚ Connect with host Mike McCue at @[email protected] and @mmccue.bsky.social.

🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the open social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new product from the people at Flipboard. https://about.surf.social/

Disclosure: Dot Social host Mike McCue serves on the board of AltStore.

The Early Beta Build of Orion for Linux is Now Available!

We know many of you have been eagerly waiting for a chance to try Orion Browser on Linux, and we’ve been hard at work to make progress behind the scenes. After months of building the foundations, we’re excited to share this early beta with you. It’s our first opportunity to let you get hands-on with the new features we’ve been developing.

What’s included in this early beta

Browsing made smoother

The core of Orion is fully connected to the Linux UI, and basic browsing is ready: you can navigate pages, use back, forward, and refresh actions, and start exploring multiple tabs. This milestone lays the groundwork for a more flexible and powerful tab system.

Staying organized and secure

We’ve added password management, history tracking, and Dark Mode and Focus Mode, giving you more control over your browsing experience. Custom search engines can be defined in Settings > Search, making it easy to search directly from the address bar.

Stability and polish

This early beta also brings several fixes that improve reliability - from preventing crashes when closing pinned tabs to resolving freezes in Website Settings, and ensuring new installations allow creating new tabs without issues.

Note:

Kagi Sync and webKit Extensions are still in development and not supported in Beta

✴ Try the Early Beta ✴

You can download the Flatpak build of Orion Browser for Linux here: Download Orion Early Beta (Flatpak)

What’s next

This early beta is just the beginning. Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue refining tab management, expanding WebExtension support and improving stability and usability.

We’d love to hear from you

As always, your thoughts, questions, and suggestions are welcome. They guide us in shaping the future of Orion on Linux, and we’re excited to have you on this journey with us. Go to our dedicated Orion Feedback Website: https://orionfeedback.org/

Browse Beyond ✴︎ The Orion for Linux Team

https://mullvad.net/en/and-then/uk

Photo by https://www.tombrenner.net/

Several years ago I had a Discord community with hundreds of users. This was an IRL community, so it was very difficult to abandon but I did anyway. Tried to get people to leave but they were unwilling. So I handed it off to another member and deleted my account. Now that admin has contacted me again and let me know everyone is ready to leave. I found Fluxer yesterday while poking around #Discord on Mastodon and I think we're going to end up there.

Fluxer is still very early in development and they have plans for many advanced features in the roadmap but it's very feature-rich today. Current monetization plan is freemium + Patreon-like monetization. I understand that may be a dealbreaker for some but there aren't a ton of other great options, and everything is open source, and self-hostable, and if you do, you get all of the premium features for free, while still communicating with the main instance over federation (in roadmap). That still leaves it susceptible to Mattermost-style enshittification but honestly rolling back updates solves most of those style of problems.

https://commet.chat/

@[email protected]

Here's a look at some of my favorite games. I must say pretty much anything from PS is my favorite. Ragnarok, Helldivers, Spider-Man, Ratchet and Clank, etc.

What I love: Primarily story-driven, third-person, high-fidelity, single-player games with solid fighting characteristics with simple upgrade paths. FPS are cool too. Anything with "power fantasy".

What I hate: Anything complicated that I have to scower the internet just to learn how to play. Anything with classes or numerical attributes (Strength, Vitality, etc). I know this comprises many popular games, and if you like it, I'm happy for you, it's just not for me.

Edit: no corporate trash. No Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, Denuvo, or remote accounts.