Sync Updates for Week 25, 2023

Lucien_Lachance
It is the default permissions those directories are created with. What it is set to depends on how old your account is but likely 0755

/root folder change is forced on existing installs. /home/username change is not.

New users created on existing up to date installs will have the more restrictive permissions but new installs won't unless done with Solus 4.4 and later versions since the older ISOs do not contain those changes.

What do I need to know

Your home folder is owned by your own user and group, so for example harvey:harvey

Octal permissions use numbers to represent permissions. The leading zero in a 4 digit octal is for a special bit which we are not and did not set prior. For simplicity from here on out we will ignore it as unless the value is changing it does not need to be explicitly stated when using chmod

If the number is 755 that reads owner|group|others
7 = Read, Write, Execute | 5 = Read, Execute | 5 = Read, Execute

You can play around with a permissions calculator if you would like to see more possibilities: https://chmod-calculator.com

First digit is fine of course the owner has full permissions. Second digit is okay but more restrictive is better, in order for someone to be a member of your usergroup you would have to manually add them to it.

Last digit is troublesome. It is 5 which means any other user account on the system has read & execute permissions to your home directory. Unless of course those files have more restrictive permissions. ~/.ssh/ is more restrictive by default for example.

You can see your permissions in octal using this command: stat -c "%a %n" /home/username
(obviously replace username with your actual username).

If it is not 700 and you would like the more restrictive permissions which I would advise, then run chmod 700 /home/username and you are done.

If you have no other users on your system there obviously is no issue but I would still advise changing permissions, who knows what the future holds and you might forget.

EDIT:
Note if you have samba shares in your home directory this will break it. So default permissions may change again or users will have to learn to change permissions should they want to setup up those shares

EDIT2:
We are going 751 (1 is execute) as the default for home dirs to allow samba shares to still work. As always users can set whatever they want if they prefer more restrictive permissions and like I, do not want samba shares inside home.

The Dev Tracker takes a different account? Well anyway, on the matter of Firefox VAAPI:

GPU: R9 270X
DE: Budgie
System: up to date - stable

After changes, About:support shows Compositing:Webrender, however all three line under WEBRENDER_COMPOSITOR are blocklisted.

There is no VAAPI section.

After starting Firefox, this shows in the console:

When going to the page of the Costa Rica video, which was served in VP9/opus, this seemed interesting:

According to wikipedia VP9 decode wasn't added by AMD until Raven Ridge APU/RDNA discreet, so sure enough it was software decoding. But it looks from the above that at least part of the process worked.

Mod edit: Fixed link

Pipewire is activated per default or we have to do something. Because EasyEffects fails to run :

$ easyeffects 

(easyeffects:480915): easyeffects-ERROR **: 10:04:13.794: 	pipe_manager.cpp:1463	context connection failed
Trappe pour point d'arrêt et de trace (core dumped)