Good Bye Tiny Tiny RSS / TT-RSS

Yesterday – after roughly eleven years (just checked the database entries) – I’ve decided to switch from Tiny Tiny RSS to FreshRSS. The transition was quite smooth, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

First let me point out the reasons for me wanting to switch.

  1. Feed refresh issues: About 2-3 months ago, I noticed that when I opened my feed reader app (also called Tiny Tiny RSS) on the phone, I wouldn’t see new articles. Even manually ‘pulling down’ the feed list, which used to force a refresh, didn’t do anything – same article counts as before. You would think the whole thing is broken, except that once I entered a feed, and I pulled down the article list, suddenly all the new articles appeared. So it was definitely something more subtle than “the whole thing is broken”. I tried the obvious thing: Updated the app (which I think was no longer in Google Play, so I got the new version from F-Droid). That didn’t change anything. Then I wanted to update TT-RSS on the server (which I do every couple of months, by pulling the git master branch). Then it didn’t work anymore at all, because…
  2. PHP Version compatibility: The maintainer(s) had decided that PHP 8.1 – despite being the default still in Ubuntu 22.04, and being officially supported until December 2025 – wasn’t worth supporting anymore. Because…
  3. Strong focus on Docker: In many places, for quite a while now, the maintainer(s) make it clear that they don’t care about any other way to deploy TT-RSS than via Docker. Where obviously having a newer basis with a more up-to-date PHP is trivial. I can understand that to some extent, but I just don’t feel like going the container way for something as simple as my PHP-based RSS feed aggregator webapp. I guess I’m just old-fashioned. And why didn’t I attempt to get support with my initial issue (1) from the community? Because…
  4. Unfriendly community, especially the main contributor / maintainer: From previous bug reports / feature requests (which I can’t remember in detail) I remember the harsh tone and unfriendliness, especially from the maintainer ‘fox’. I’ve met my fair share of assholes in FOSS, but he stood out and left a lasting memory. And while I was thinking about that, I also remembered an article from Flameeyes, which really unnerved me back then in 2017. I was quite close to switching to another RSS aggregator then, but since Flameyes’ ModSecurity rule must have malfunctioned or something, and I still got articles from his blog, I stuck with TT-RSS, despite definitely not being a Nazi sympathizer. Call me lazy…

So, root cause: Supermassive asshole (works like a supermassive black hole, only in the other direction – stuff comes out from it), whom I didn’t want to report a bug to (again).

So why FreshRSS?

  1. FreshRSS was really easy to set up, even without using Docker. The documentation is really good, and it took me only about an hour from start to finish (all feeds migrated, refresh cronjob set up, app installed and connected to the webapp’s API, etc.)
  2. It actually feels snappier than TT-RSS, but of course I now have a nearly empty database. It also supports two common APIs: greader and fever, which makes it compatible with various mobile clients. I picked FeedMe for now, let’s see whether I’ll stick with it.
  3. I read that the community around FreshRSS is not centered around a supermassive asshole, which is definitely a plus.

That’s it. I should now be able to consume my news and blog articles the way I like it… without having to manually refresh every feed, deployed how I like it, and with the PHP version I like.

Fix DaVinci Resolve installation (symbol lookup errors)

This post is mostly for my future self, but feel free to use the one-liner if you have just installed or upgraded BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve (Studio) onto your Linux machine and it’s not starting because of symbol lookup errors, e.g. /opt/resolve/bin/resolve: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/libpango-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_string_free_and_steal.

One-liner

for lib in $(ldd /opt/resolve/bin/resolve | cut -d' ' -f1);
do
  [ -f "/usr/lib/${lib}" ] \
  && [ -f "/opt/resolve/libs/${lib}" ] \
  && { echo "Found ${lib} in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/${lib}" \
       && sudo rm "/opt/resolve/libs/${lib}"; } \
done

Example output

pn@vision ~ $ for lib in $(ldd /opt/resolve/bin/resolve | cut -d' ' -f1);
do
  [ -f "/usr/lib/${lib}" ] \
  && [ -f "/opt/resolve/libs/${lib}" ] \
  && { echo "Found ${lib} in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/${lib}" \
       && sudo rm "/opt/resolve/libs/${lib}"; } \
done
Found libavformat.so.60 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libavformat.so.60
Found libavcodec.so.60 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libavcodec.so.60
Found libavutil.so.58 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libavutil.so.58
Found libswscale.so.7 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libswscale.so.7
Found libmp3lame.so in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libmp3lame.so
Found libgstreamer-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstreamer-1.0.so.0
Found libgobject-2.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgobject-2.0.so.0
Found libglib-2.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libglib-2.0.so.0
Found libgstbase-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstbase-1.0.so.0
Found libgstapp-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstapp-1.0.so.0
Found libgstrtp-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstrtp-1.0.so.0
Found libgstvideo-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstvideo-1.0.so.0
Found libgstsdp-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstsdp-1.0.so.0
Found libgstpbutils-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstpbutils-1.0.so.0
Found libgstaudio-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstaudio-1.0.so.0
Found libgsttag-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgsttag-1.0.so.0
Found libgstwebrtc-1.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgstwebrtc-1.0.so.0
Found libgio-2.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgio-2.0.so.0
Found libgmodule-2.0.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/libgmodule-2.0.so.0
Found liborc-0.4.so.0 in both /usr/lib and /opt/resolve/libs - deleting /opt/resolve/libs/liborc-0.4.so.0

Explanation

  1. ldd is used to get a list of all shared libraries that the DaVinci Resolve executable (/opt/resolve/bin/resolve) links against
  2. The for loop iterates over these collected filenames and for each checks whether it’s both present in the standard library path (/usr/lib) and in DaVinci Resolve’s own libs directory (/opt/resolve/libs).
  3. If that is the case, they’re deleted from /opt/resolve/libs, so that only the ones coming with the distro remain.

Why does this work?

Some shared libraries (those that the one-liner deletes) that come with DaVinci Resolve are older versions that are not compatible with other libs that come with your distro.

At the time of writing there are 20 such libs, see in the Example Output section for a list.

By deleting them, the loader will find the ones in /usr/lib instead. These are compatible with the aforementioned other libs from your distro, because they are coming from your distro.

I’ve written the one-liner for DaVinci Resolve 19.1.2 and tested it with it on my Gentoo system. It should work on other distros as well.

Wayland, finally.

I’ve been watching the Wayland development from afar for a couple of years now, probably since 2014. But whenever I gave it a try, after less than 10 minutes something was so obviously broken that I immediately went back to X11.

Until yesterday, when I decided to give it another try. The trigger was, that KDE/Plasma felt sluggish on my machine. Even though it has decent specs (12 core Ryzen, Nvidia 4060 Ti, fast NVMe), opening a simple application like Konsole takes 1.5+ seconds. Even clicking the start menu button has a noticeable delay (~300-500ms). On X11 that is.

After rebuilding a bunch of packages (because I had to toggle the ‘wayland’ USE flag on, which had previously been off in my Gentoo installation), I chose the “Plasma (Wayland)” item in the SDDM dropdown and logged in. To my surprise KDE/Plasma instantly felt much better. No more delays, very smooth animations, etc.

IMO there must be serious bugs in Qt or KDE to have such bad performance on X11 nowadays. Using a simple Window Manager (Fluxbox) I didn’t feel any lags on X11. Even launching Konsole or other KDE apps from an xterm is snappy. But I don’t have the time and energy to do serious profiling, and I also really want to use KDE/Plasma.

So I’m happy that I didn’t find any issues with Wayland in the hours since. For a few minutes I thought screen recording was broken, but then it turned out that I just had to enable the ‘screencast’ USE flag and do a few rebuilds.

Will have to spend some time learning all the underlying concepts and new terms – but that doesn’t prevent me from using Wayland.

I’ll post updates here if / when I encounter issues.

Update (2025-01-05)

Today I wanted to write in German for the first time, and noticed that my .Xmodmap keyboard remapping for Umlauts no longer works. That was already problematic in X11 for a while, but it was a good solution that I’d been using for many years (and even “ported” to Windows – see here – when I had to use Windows at work).

So now I had to figure out something new. A guy in the always helpful German #gentoo-de@libera.chat IRC channel told me about the “EurKEY” keyboard layout – “The Layout for Europeans, Coders and Translators” – covers pretty much all European languages with one layout. Love it. And they took the exact same approach that I did: on an English keyboard, use a modifier key and when it’s pressed, “a” becomes “ä”, “o” becomes “ö” and so on. It comes out of the box in KDE, just had to choose it from the dropdown list!

The only issue with that is: they’re using the right ALT key as modifier, and I have nearly two decades worth of muscle memory using the Meta/Windows key as modifier. It would take a while to retrain myself, so I decided to instead remap the Meta/Windows key to the right ALT key. Works perfectly. Phew, problem solved.