I’ve been a Linux user for almost 30 years but never had to tinker with any software to solve a problem. Cue a Fedora upgrade to somewhere around 38. I’ve been using the multiseat feature for years. It’s alway seemed very fragile. With this upgrade it was seriously broken. I managed to find a patch someone made that for some reason wasn’t accepted into the gnome-shell package. I was able to grab the patch, rebuild the RPM package and install the update to my system and restore multiseat. It was actually pretty effortless. The hardest part by far was finding the fix. Now updating to Fedora 41 I had to do the same process again. Apparently the problem still exists. This time I had to create a new patch as the original one wouldn’t apply anymore but that wasn’t very hard. It was very satisfying to be able to fix that problem and it was only possible due to the OSS community.

  • cevn@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 days ago

    Awesome work. How well does multi seat work and how to get started with this? Sounds like magic…

    • hapablap@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      0·
      3 days ago

      I set it up a while ago and don’t have a good resource for setting it up now. Once I got it set up it has worked well. But like I said it seems fragile. When I upgraded fedora a couple of years ago it broke. I think it might have been the wayland transition. I switched from Nvidia to AMD. But I’m not sure that’s necessary. My wife and I have two workstations on one computer. It works well until it breaks (if you want to live with end of life software it may not break). For whatever reason multiseat doesn’t seem to be a mainstream feature. But I like it and have been using it for many years.

      https://wiki.debian.org/Multi_Seat_Debian_HOWTO

      Loginctl is the tool you use to assign hardware to different seats. Also I’m not sure every login manager supports it. I used GDM.

  • GideonBear@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    I love the feeling of just forking something to add your wild tiny feature. I forked LeechBlockNG to notify my friend when I pressed “Override” :)

    Or finding a tiny bug in some software, then spending multiple hours learning their codebase so you can fix it. And then building and using your fork because they’re too slow with merging it…

    Using open source software + having enough experience and confidence to figure out most things (given enough time, of course) software-related is so empowering.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 days ago

    That’s great but do you know why the patch was rejected in the first place? If the patch isn’t up to standard I think you should at least raise it however Fedora does their package development so they can address the issue properly

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      I’ve contended with multiseat issues over the years, there isn’t much interest in keeping it maintained. I can certainly see why, it’s not a very well used feature.