New and old apps on Flathub

3D Printing Slicers

 I recently replaced my Flashforge Adventurer 3 printer that I had been using for a few years as my first printer with a BambuLab X1 Carbon, wanting a printer that was not a “project” so I could focus on modelling and printing. It's an investment, but my partner convinced me that I was using the printer often enough to warrant it, and told me to look out for Black Friday sales, which I did.

The hardware-specific slicer, Bambu Studio, was available for Linux, but only as an AppImage, with many people reporting crashes on startup, non-working video live view, and other problems that the hardware maker tried to work-around by shipping separate AppImage variants for Ubuntu and Fedora.

After close to 150 patches to the upstream software (which, in hindsight, I could probably have avoided by compiling the C++ code with LLVM), I manage to “flatpak” the application and make it available on Flathub. It's reached 3k installs in about a month, which is quite a bit for a niche piece of software.

Note that if you click the “Donate” button on the Flathub page, it will take you a page where you can feed my transformed fossil fuel addiction buy filament for repairs and printing perfectly fitting everyday items, rather than bulk importing them from the other side of the planet.

 

Preparing a Game Gear consoliser shell

I will continue to maintain the FlashPrint slicer for FlashForge printers, installed by nearly 15k users, although I enabled automated updates now, and will not be updating the release notes, which required manual intervention.

FlashForge have unfortunately never answered my queries about making this distribution of their software official (and fixing the crash when using a VPN...).

 Rhythmbox

As I was updating the Rhythmbox Flatpak on Flathub, I realised that it just reached 250k installs, which puts the number of installations of those 3D printing slicers above into perspective.

 

The updated screenshot used on Flathub

Congratulations, and many thanks, to all the developers that keep on contributing to this very mature project, especially Jonathan Matthew who's been maintaining the app since 2008.

Re: New responsibilities

 A few months have passed since New Responsibilities was posted, so I thought I would provide an update.

Projects Maintenance

Of all the freedesktop projects I created and maintained, only one doesn't have a new maintainer, low-memory-monitor.

This daemon is what the GMemoryMonitor GLib API is based on, so it can't be replaced trivially. Efforts seem to be under way to replace it with systemd APIs.

As for the other daemons:

• switcheroo-control got picked up by Jonas Ådahl, one of the mutter maintainers. I'm looking forward to seeing this merge request fixed so we can have better menu items on dual-GPU systems
• iio-sensor-proxy added Dylan Van Assche to its maintenance team, assisting Guido Günther.
• power-profiles-daemon is now maintained by Marco Trevisan. It recently got support for separate system and CPU power profiles, and display power saving features are in the works.

(As an aside, there's posturing towards replacing power-profiles-daemon with tuned in Fedora. I would advise stakeholders to figure out whether having a large Python script in the boot hot path is a good idea, taking a look at bootcharts, and then thinking about whether hardware manufacturers would be able to help with supporting a tool with so many moving parts. Useful for tinkering, not for shipping in a product)

Updated responsibilities

Since mid-August, I've joined the Platform Enablement Team. Right now, I'm helping out with maintenance of the Bluetooth kernel stack in RHEL (and thus CentOS).

The goal is to eventually pivot to hardware enablement, which is likely to involve backporting and testing, more so than upstream enablement. This is currently dependent on attending some formal kernel development (and debugging) training sessions which should make it easier to see where my hodge-podge kernel knowledge stands.

Blog backlog

Before being moved to a different project, and apart from the usual and very time-consuming bug triage, user support and project maintenance, I also worked on a few new features. I have a few posts planned that will lay that out.