From the UK, the dark sky lasted longer than I thought.

I think a lot of people have a few killer apps that just don’t work on Linux even with WINE. Hell, I’ve heard that VR is not worth it on Linux. There are edge cases like that, that need to be sorted some way. Hopefully whatever Valve is doing wrt their supposed standalone VR headset helps there.

I got sick and tired of the AUR for the simple packages so I started using it for most things I would use the AUR for, and I’m very happy with it. I think some packages have issues with default permissions - I was wondering why 86Box would forget my hard drive images but then I realised the permissions on my home folder weren’t set properly - but that can be sorted anyway.

I think the main issue with Content Nation, personally, was that it looked like an SEO spam site that was using the fediverse as its source for content scraping.

That being said, that still doesn’t justify the toxicity from the paranoid nerds that targeted this guy. I was quite surprised when the Bridgy Fed stuff happened, but now, I’m not surprised in the slightest.

Take my upvote. There’s nothing about Mastodon that Bluesky doesn’t do for the average user and for me it’s got an actual laid-back vibe where Mastodon feels like people trying to indoctrinate me into a nerd cult.

Sidenote, it’d be nice if Pleroma or one of its forks had the stronghold on the fediverse instead. It’s got a lot more features than Mastodon and Bluesky.

Probably a lot more hardware using HDMI than DisplayPort? Just throwing a guess, tbh.

That being said, I might consider looking towards DisplayPort when I can get a new monitor…

How’s performance on MusicBee for you? Mine is slow for the components (AMD 7900XT/Ryzen 7950X), but I suspect it might be because of the high resolution album artwork (1200x1200).

MusicBee and Apple Music.

Apple is Apple so they impose dumb restrictions on the web client like any other streaming platform (and Cider is just a fancy frontend for this), so I have a Windows VM so I get the full experience.

And for MusicBee? Well, the Linux music player situation is… bad, to say the least. There is basically nothing like MusicBee in the Linux ecosystem right now. And every time I went to Reddit to see what people are going to, it’s people who are not 100% satisfied with the alternative or Linux users gaslighting them into thinking MusicBee sucks and Their Choice is the Better One. I’ve tried other players and none of them scratch the itch for MusicBee for me. Quod Libet comes close with its queries, and Tauon looks gorgeous, but I had performance issues with QL for what I wanted it for, and I had issues with Tauon’s playlist filtering. And as for WINE? Performance is slow, CJK characters don’t show up, and tab dragging results in errors due to WINE not having implemented the functions for it to work. I’m happy to keep a Windows VM for MusicBee.

I’ll just use ChatGPT standalone, lol. Or cheat.sh.

Why would you use Gentoo for criminal activity over any other operating system

Funnily enough, someone actually did get arrested for allegedly building a Gentoo-based distro for ISIS.

Gentoo can be good if you desire some very weird or exotic configurations or just want more granular customisability that binary DIY distros don’t offer. The way it’s built allows that in a way that makes it easier there. If you don’t really need that and aren’t a fan of the build times, it won’t hurt going for something like Void or Arch which are also DIY distros but all-binary so you don’t need to worry. (unless you use xbps-src or the AUR).

EndeavourOS might be worth a try if you miss the AUR, but if you don’t like the maintenance associated with Arch’s rolling release strategy then I’d stick to Debian.

I’m probably going to stick with Arch, or maybe EndeavourOS.

I’ve hopped from distro to distro but I always keep coming back to Arch. The reason I use Arch is that it’s my weird sweet spot of “DIY” and “it just works”. It gives me a blank slate at first, but it lets me paint the canvas with whatever I want, however I want. It allows for some weird setups (like VFIO, for instance) and the wiki really helps with that. I don’t really use the AUR nowadays unless it’s for a package only available there, so I can’t say anything about that. I use Flatpak nowadays. Some people might prefer the AUR, that’s good for them! Right now it’s just not for me.

If I do distro-hop again, I’ll probably go for EndeavourOS just to have an Arch install that leans heavier on the “just works” side of things.

I’ve yet to find something open-source that scratches what MusicBee can do, and it’s got major performance, usability and visual problems when running through WINE that have been reported.

It’s why I keep a Windows VM around.

I have honestly been tempted to hop to Pop!_OS for their take on GNOME. The auto-tiling was really nice when I tested it in a virtual machine.

I’ve seen a lot of Debian mentions on the Linux communities here, lately. More than usual, lol. Maybe I should give it a good try with Flatpak to handle non-system packages.

Not often but I have a moment where I do. Last year I contributed a plugin for MusicBrainz Picard which allows you to submit your genre tags to MusicBrainz. I want to give it a proper good update in the future but I’m so focused on other things right now.

GNOME should at least support colour schemes, in my opinion. If they don’t want theming, they can at least do that. In any case, Gradience can help with getting a coherent colour scheme on non-GNOME/libadwaita environments, and if the user is just using Breeze, they already have a Breeze colour scheme available. It’s available as a Flatpak.

Gentoo isn’t so much painful but it takes a bloody long time. If anything, some of the packages are really painful. Qtwebengine is one such example.

Hmm… I’m gonna keep tabs on that one then. Good call.