u/fraaaaa4

Hello all, I'm here again with GPaint, but a new release. This time (thanks to u/Fine_Pattern4197), GPaint is now distributed, as before on the Github page, but also via my personal flatpak repository: Flatpak repo

Of course, it arrives with numerous updates, such as a new Favorites bar, the pixel/centimeters size dialog actually working, various bug fixes on selections and shapes, and you can hold down Shift to resize while maintaining proportions.

For better discoverability, now it has also a What's New window built directly in the app. And as always, bug reports and translations are more than welcome!

Hi, I developed https://github.com/fraaaaa4/LocalSend32, a Win32/C client for older versions of Windows, and Windows RT!

Features everything that a normal LocalSend client has: multiple receiving streams, sending files or text, discover of other devices on the network, PIN protection, transfer confirmation.

This client targets firstly Windows RT, second x86 Windows. The RT build uses Schannel for its networking, while the x86 build uses DiscordMessenger’s OpenSSL fork for more compatibility. Although I haven’t tried it on all versions, following dm’s compatibility, it should work from 2000 onwards. I tested it on RT 8.1, 8.1 and Wine/Whisky, and it works.

AI was used to help me create the UI from a code standpoint, and bug fixes.

A note for this release: since it targets 8.x, the icons are dynamically loaded from Windows DLLs. As such, on other versions, icons might not be loaded properly.

While using Gnome, I never found a compelling Paint-like program, all the ones I found were really good still though. Drawing is with GTK3, and doesn’t properly support touchpad gestures. KolourPaint looks off on Gnome. Gimp is way too complicated for simple sketches.

So, with the help of AI since I never have developed anything with JavaScript and Gnome before (for help with syntax, bug fixing), I developed GPaint, which is essentially a Paint clone. It has numerous tools and shapes available, each one with many options (brush types, text shadow, outlines, arrows etc). I made the interface to look as native as I could, hope you like it!

In the future I want it to publish on Flathub also; for now, it’s available through the repository https://github.com/fraaaaa4/GPaint.

Bug reports, suggestions and translations are welcome! One thing though, keep in mind the idea of the program itself, it should remain simple.

So, brief history: this is my old laptop, which since September it had Fedora on. Before it had Windows 11, and it was painful to use: standby issues, graphical issues, heat issues; even just being on a Discord call and opening Firefox would start the fans, and then opening another app, depending on what, would really stress it, while it was powered on.
Compared now to Fedora which, on battery, it consumed 60% in 2h30 with a Discord call and screensharing, two tabs of Web (GitHub and Matlab online), Mail, my university site, three small text files open, and Files. 78% RAM used, CPU around 10%, temperature around 50C, with no lag or performance drop. Safe to say, it literally transformed this laptop from a piece of junk to the second best laptop I’ve ever used (first being my current main, the Air M3).

When I installed it, I could only boot it from Fedora 36, so did so and then did an in-place upgrade all the way to 43. Today in Software it said that 44 was available, so I said, why not? Tried it, downloaded it, installed it, and then it went straight to the _ screen; with nothing else.

So I started asking Gemini for help, and looking in the Fedora docs, since I never troubleshooted anything in Linux, and so I dropped into TTY mode, which I discovered its existence today. Basically, it had all the fc43 and fc44 packages installed, but still could boot up only from 44. Dnf wouldn’t let me upgrade because it said it was modifying protected packages, and couldn’t; distro-sync couldn’t do anything useful, etc. At one point, dnf wanted to install 20 packages, update 30 of them, and remove 3100. Albeit the number was scary, it actually turned out to be the right call, as those 3100ish packages were all duplicates.

So I removed those packages, which were leftovers of 43, it remained only with fc44 packages, reinstalled the kernel and the Linux-Surface one, and now Fedora was booting correctly, but gdm wasn’t. Turns out there was a problem with libwacom, so after I installed lightdm to see that it wasn’t a display driver problem, I reinstalled libwacom, and Gnome started as always.

So, I never had to troubleshoot so much like today, but I’ve been very happy about TTY, dnf, distro-sync, and especially journalctl, as the last one was what did lead me to discover the libwacom problem. Fedora truly has been an amazing experience on this laptop.

Edit: now I’ve seen a few posts saying that people had issues with 44. Idk if it could help, but in this case, installing libwacom-surface from fc43 made gdm, in my case, work just fine. Before that though, lightdm and xfce, which I installed as backups in case I couldn’t get gdm to work, worked fine. Even the touchscreen works; as you can see, I’m running the older Linux-Surface kernel, I haven’t tried booting it with the standard newer one