Okay, fine, Fedora 🔗
Nothing like a four-hour-long strategy summit to tend to a quick bakeoff between Pop!_OS and Fedora. As Ed noted last night after reading yesterday’s post, you can always tell Fedora to load GNOME as an Xorg session instead of a Wayland one. What did that get me?
- Working taskbar widgets
- Decent performance from my Elgato CamLink 4K
- Decent screensharing in Zoom
- Mostly normalish typography? Less wild variation anyhow.
- Fedora’s software store app is faster and less glitchy than the one Pop!_OS offers.
- Fedora’s software is a little more up to date.
Is it snappier? I dunno.
Mainly what I know is that I won’t be fragmenting my muscle memory across three OSes.
What I also know is that Xorg is living on borrowed time in Fedora-land.
AirPlay 2 with shairport-sync 🔗
I mentioned shairport-sync as a way to stream to a Linux machine. From the command line, you just run it and tell it which backend to direct sound to. It advertises your machine with Avahi, you stream to the machine, sound comes out.
As a systemd service it is fussier because there are permissions issues getting at Alsa and or Pipewire. I could see the endpoint in the AirPlay list, but nothing was coming out and there were a bunch of errors when I checked status. I tried a few obviously bad ideas then Googled in earnest.
Putting this in ~/.config/systemd/user/shairport-sync.service then enabling and starting it with systemctl --user did the thing:
[Unit]
Description=Shairport Sync - AirPlay Audio Receiver
After=pipewire-pulse.service
Wants=network-online.target
After=network.target network-online.target
[Service]
Type=simple
StandardOutput=journal
ExecStart=/usr/bin/shairport-sync -o alsa
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
So the Linux box is hooked up to the office bookshelf speakers, I can play music on it directly, or I can stream to it from the Mac or my phone without manually stopping and starting shairport-sync from the command line.
Fixing Flatpak Zoom fonts 🔗
Zoom from a Flatpak looks particularly bonkers under GNOME: The fonts are tiny to the point of unreadability. Evidently they used QT to build it, etc. etc. There are a bunch of incantations all over the place that involve jacking with config files. There is also simply doing an override of the QT scale factor:
sudo flatpak override --env=QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.5 us.zoom.Zoom
Adjust to taste.
LocalSend is pretty much cross-platform AirDrop 🔗
If your machines are on the same network, LocalSend works across Mac, iOS/iPadOS, and Linux to provide an AirDrop-style text, file, and image transfer service. Looks like it also supports Windows and Android.
I have it set to minimize to taskbar on the Mac and Linux machines. Just sits there and does its thing.