Whisper it quietly...
Seasoned visitors to my website, under whatever domain name it inhabits, will know my love of Linux and my loathing of all things Windows and Apple. Don't click on the thumbnail to this blog post, therefore, unless you are sitting down with a bottle of smelling salts handy.
I am a creature of impulse, sometimes, and when I was up in the loft getting down the Christmas decorations for this year's outing, I spotted a 2015 21.5“ iMac sitting forlornly in a spiderweb-encrusted corner and thought… why not? So down it came too, and its Debian installation was wiped and the machine restored to its El Capitan original OS, swiftly updated to the latest officially-supported release of Monterey. It looks nice enough: in fact, the retina screen makes text look gorgeous though twenty one and a half inches of screen real estate seems somewhat underwhelming. It's not a bad computer, though: i5 at 3.1GHz and 16GB RAM are decent enough. It's real drawback is the spinning rust hard disk that makes everything quite slow to load: an upgrade to an SSD would certainly improve things on that score. The star of the show is undoubtedly the retina screen, which makes text look stunning, as previously mentioned. I still find MacOS a complete mystery, though: perhaps unsurprisingly, as I must have spent at most… 16 hours or so using it in my entire life.
Anyway, a few years ago, I made Giocoso Version 2 run on MacOS for some reason or other that I now can't recall: I never bothered trying to get Giocoso Version 3 to run on it, however. The thumbnail to this post tells you, however, that after a day or so spent futzing around with things, I have been able to get Giocoso Version 3.32 (the one due to be released early in December 2025) running on it. I don't entirely know whether it is worth having done so, as everyone who loves Apple will have long since moved on from Intel Macs to the Apple Silicon variety that I don't possess (and am unlikely ever to do so). But the job is done anyway: impulse is like that sometimes!
This may delay the release of Version 3.32 a little: I mentioned last time that I was thinking of releasing it a week earlier than its planned December 10th release date… but the code changes I've implemented to get things on MacOS now need testing back on Linux, to make sure I didn't break anything there. So I think the release date reverts back to December 10th after all. All zero of the thousands not clamouring to run Giocoso on their Macs will be grateful, I suppose!
Rethinking Support
I've been thinking for some time of revamping the support I offer for my three bits of software: there are simply too many distros to be testing all three on all of them! So instead, I've decided on a “tiered support” structure, allowing to focus my efforts on distros I actually use for real, on real hardware, and offering a lesser form of support for running on other distros that I only ever virtualise or have barely heard of.
- Tier 1 will be comprehensively tested on real hardware, using distros I actually use for real every day.
- Tier 2 will be tested for installation and basic functionality using only virtual hardware.
- Tier 3 will not be tested usually, but if specific issues or bugs are raised with me via email, I'll spin up virtual machines on an ad-hoc basis and get issues sorted.
- Tier 4 will not generally be tested at all. Things should work but you're basically on your own should issues ever arise.
Putting specific names to the various tiers, then, we have:
- Tier 1: Full Support: AlmaLinux 9 and 10, Raspberry Pi OS, Fedora, Linux Mint
- Tier 2: Partial Support: Debian, EndeavourOS, Ubuntu
- Tier 3: Some Support: OpenSuse Leap & Tumbleweed, GeckoLinux, Arch, Manjaro, Garuda Linux, Devuan, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Peppermint OS, MX Linux, AntiX Linux, Pop! OS, Linux Lite, Zorin OS, Elementary OS, KDE Neon, Tuxedo OS, Nobara, Ultramarine
- Tier 4: Unsupported: Windows, macOS
Two big casualties are apparent in this new plan: Arch and OpenSuse. Arch is just too fast-moving for me to keep up and is, in any case, never installed in standardised way, which makes supporting it practically impossible. OpenSuse is dropped as a tier 1 platform because it's peculiar and literally no-one I know of uses it as a desktop OS.
Ubuntu and Debian also take a bit of a hit: I loathe Ubuntu's use of snaps and several other features of its 'not invented here' approach to OS development; and Debian is probably a bit too slow-moving and out-of-date to be anyone's primary choice of desktop distro. Nevertheless, it's not that I won't test my software on them at all, but the tests won't be real-world, extensive usage tests. I'm also restricting myself from here out to testing on Long Term Support (LTS) editions of Ubuntu only. Currently, that means 22.04 and 24.04. Imminently, it will also include 26.04… but I won't support running anything on a xx.10 non-LTS release.
The numerous 'minor' distros that proliferate endlessly are all now in Tier 3. Distros like Peppermint Linux, MX Linux, Devuan, Pop! OS, Zorin, Tuxedo and Linux Mint Debian Edition and so on all get some sort of support because their parents (usually Ubuntu or Debian) are in more supported tiers above them. If I'm notified of specific bugs or irregularities in the operation of my software on such 'niche distros', I'll be more than happy to spin up a virtual machine and try to sort the issue out: but I won't generally or routinely test on these distros any more.
The move of Windows to Tier 4 status is occasioned by the end of official support for Windows 10 and the fact that I don't own any hardware that can officially run Windows 11 (and refuse to have a mandatory Microsoft account to use Windows 11 even if I had the hardware!) I know my software will run on these platforms, because if my software runs on 'real' Linux, it will run just fine on the same distros running under the Windows Subsystem for Linux… but I can't really support that platform if I can't myself run it in an officially supported manner. So Windows moves to the “it ought to work, good luck” tier! I'll certainly look at issues if they're brought to my attention, but it will be on a 'best effort' basis only.
On the plus side of the ledger, AlmaLinux gets tier 1 support: it's a free-of-cost clone of Red Hat Enterprise Server, so support for it also applies to Rocky Linux, which is another clone of the same thing. I use AlmaLinux 9 to run Niente and this website; I use AlmaLinux 10 in a virtual environment only. I'll do thorough testing on both versions, though. Raspberry Pi OS also gets tier 1 status because I now use a Pi 4 as my main music player PC and a Pi 3B+ as a secondary player in the summer house. I don't own a Pi 5 yet, so I can't claim things will definitely work on that platform, but they should do.
Fundamentally, then: I'll still offer help and support for running my stuff on any Linux distro. But there will now be just a handful of distros on which I guarantee things will work. There'll be a handful of distros where things have been tested enough to give me confidence things will work -but there might be some edge cases my testing misses. There'll then be a swathe of distros where ad hoc support will be available, but very little pre-release testing will have taken place. And then there's Windows!
Documentation updates will soon take place for Giocoso, Semplice and Niente to reflect this new approach.
Incidentally, the next version of Giocoso (version 3.32) is likely to be released around December 4th, a week earlier than anticipated: it's been in daily use here for a coupld of weeks and there have been no issues, so holding back an extra week seems a bit pointless. Watch this space, I guess…
Happy St. Britten Day!
Tomorrow being St. Britten's Day (well, OK: it's actually St. Cecilia's Day, patron saint of music, but it also happens to be the birthday of the chief of her sons, the blessed Benjamin Britten, who you might have noticed is a sort-of patron saint around here!), I shall wish you all a happy Benjamin Britten Day and encourage you to play nothing but the great BB for the day.
I shall be telling Giocoso to do precisely that (and, in truth, have already started, for a couple of days now, as my play history might tell you!) and I think you'd find it rewarding too.
But, seriously: listen to any good music you care about. As Wystan Auden once put it: Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians: appear and inspire!
Fedora 43 is out
The thumbnail at the left shows a brand new installation of Fedora 43 Workstation running Giocoso in perfect fashion (and with no weird lack-of-graphics problems!).
I dislike the Fedora installation process: it assumes answers to questions it never prompts you for and it's harder than it should be to over-ride those assumptions. For example, no power on Earth would ever persuade me to use the btrfs file system as my main file system but it's Fedora's default option for the root partition. Finding how to change things to use ext4 instead is much harder than it should be, requiring you to click on various unidentified sets of three dots (I believe the yoof call them 'hamburger menus') and then do an awful lot of manual finagling. Not my recommended operating system, then… but at least my software runs on it without drama!
Giocoso Broken!
Click on the thumbnail to this post and see if you can see a bit of a problem!
In one window, on the left, you see Giocoso running as it's supposed to: displaying album art within its terminal session. In the window on the right, however, you see Giocoso playing music just fine… but there's no album art on display.
Giocoso has always displayed its album art by using a technology called “sixel graphics”. Terminals that support sixel graphics can display an image within the terminal by using a command such as: img2sixel albumart.jpg. Konsole, the KDE terminal I'm using on the right of that thumbnail has always supported doing this, which is just as well as it's the terminal I use daily to develop Giocoso in the first place! Unfortunately, as that screenshot tells you, Konsole has stopped doing this for mysterious reasons that I can't fathom. It now means that Giocoso run on any version of KDE within a Konsole window is at risk of not being able to display album art graphics sometime in the near future. The specific version of Konsole that appears to have developed this problem is version 25.08.2.
Since my desktop PC runs on EndeavourOS (a bleeding-edge distro based on Arch Linux), it's software stack is forever being updated: it's picked up the new version of Konsole and has lost the ability it once had to display in-terminal album art. My music playing PC (the one that's plugged into the amplifier and speakers) is running Debian 13, a much more sedate (some would call it old-fashioned!) distro that is running version 24ish of Konsole. Clearly, the Konsole developers nixed sixel graphics sometime in the last year: I'm not holding my breath for them to un-nix any time soon, sadly.
There are alternative terminal emulators, of course: xterm, for one. Unfortunately, they need to be compiled with sixel graphics support and none of the many terminals I've tried on EndeavourOS display sixel graphics properly:
That's xterm not displaying a JPG file. It's true for uxterm, too; for ghosty; for mintty; darktile, gnome-terminal and any other terminal emulator you might suggest, at least on EndeavourOS (and Arch or Arch-derived distros in general: I found Manjaro to be similarly affected).
The only exception is a terminal emulator called kitty, which doesn't use sixel graphics at all, but its own unique way of doing in-terminal graphics which continues to work in every environment I tested:
Unfortunately, you can see that kitty displaying anything requires some quite new syntax… and positioning the graphics display is nowhere near as easy to do as with sixel graphics. I'm also reluctant to make Giocoso dependent on a specific terminal emulator. So, this is not a road I'm keen to journey down.
Of course, Giocoso already has a workaround:
You've always been able to configure Giocoso to display the album art in its own separate pop-out window, which is nowhere near as elegant but continues to work fine, even on Arch-based distros:
For now, my understanding is that this is the only way to get album art displayed correctly on a fully-updated Arch-based distro. More worryingly, as other distros upgrade their KDE environments, I suspect they will lose the ability to do in-terminal graphics display, too. There's nothing much I can do about that, I'm afraid, though I am on a kitty learning curve as we speak.
Edited to add: I have swiftly realised that the kitty terminal emulator is just a special example of a terminal that understands the kitty graphics protocol. Other browsers can understand that protocol too, so it's easy (even on an Arch-based distro!) to get Konsole or other browsers to display images using it:
The title bar tells you this is Konsole… but it's still displaying a piece of albumart anyway! So this is definitely a route I will have to travel in the near future, I think!