aleph

aleph , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

For your use case, I'd go with LosslessCut as opposed Shotcut, Openshot, etc.

The reason being that it is much simpler and faster to use, and generally results in smaller filesizes because you aren't having to re-encode from scratch.

aleph , 2 months ago

Man that side-by-side of the scrolling lag was super obvious. That would drive me up the wall.

It's such a shame that Google still can't get their act together and offer as smooth and consistent an experience as their rivals because otherwise they do have a lot going for them

aleph , 2 months ago

Ah, shame - I'd heard mixed reports over whether Graphene manages to fix some of the performance issues of the stock ROM, but that's one more data point in the Nope column.

I guess Tensor still has some fundamental issues that have yet to be ironed out.

aleph , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I'd say it's more like a cousin/sibling of Exynos rather than being a straight rebrand. They share very similar clock management and power management architecture, although there are enough differences to set them apart.

It could well be that certain apps are optimized more towards Qualcomm's Snapdragon architecture over Tensor, which would account for why the Nothing Phone appears to perform better in certain apps than Pixels do, or it could be that the SoC's thermal management or clock profiling is leading to inefficiencies in performance.

Could be a little from column A and a little from column B, so to speak.

aleph , 2 months ago

Agreed. The 6 was too boxy and too big.

aleph , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Going from 192kbps to 320kbps would be audibly negligible unless you used a really bad codec to begin with, in which case adding AI into the mix would likely just compound the problem.

Probably not even worth it, tbh.

aleph , 3 months ago

Fractional scaling has been perfectly functional on Gnome's Wayland implementation for some time already.

aleph , 2 months ago

That's a problem with XWayland, not Wayland. Forcing electron apps to run using the latter generally fixes the problem.

aleph , 7 months ago

Yup. People often start fussing over bit depths and sample rates, but more often than not it’s something as simple as a difference in volume.

aleph , 7 months ago

For Gnome I use adw-gtk3 on automatic day/night switching because it makes everything look nice and uniform.

I prefer Tela icons to Papirus as they’re less cartoony.

aleph , 7 months ago

The DE is the limiting factor here. MX uses XFCE, which does not yet support Wayland. For that, you’ll need to use KDE Plasma or Gnome. The former requires an additional wayland session package to be installed, while Gnome comes with it by default.

You could create a new user session, install whichever one you prefer and then see if that works with Waydroid.

aleph , 7 months ago

Huh? Gnome has had fractional scaling for ages.

All it takes is changing a gconf setting.

aleph , 7 months ago

/shrug

I’ve been using it on my multiple monitor setup for well over a year with no noticeable performance impact.

aleph , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

It’s been working flawlessly for me for quite some time, but I guess other people’s mileage may vary.

aleph , 8 months ago

Well, the two aren’t all that different. openSUSE has an better installer, which offers even full disk encryption, automated partitioning for disks in BTRFS with backups enabled.

If you want the above with Arch, the EndeavourOS installer also offers these features.

One big plus I can see in openSUSE’s favour is YaST, the graphical utility for system configuration, and allows you to configure nearly everything in a GUI.

It’s not widely known, but EndeavourOS also has a GUI manager for btrfs snapshots, btrfs-assistant, that offers equivalent functionality to 'Suse.

It doesn’t come pre-installed, but it’s pretty easy to setup.

aleph , 8 months ago

Which terminal font is that, by the way?

aleph , 8 months ago

Nice, that’s a new one on me. That lower case k is pretty unusual.

aleph , 8 months ago

Heresy! /s

Is that really the default font for Xfce-ternimal on EndeavourOS? I use the same distro but with Gnome, which is probably how that little detail passed me by.

My personal ride-or-die terminal font is Jetbrains Mono, which you might want to try out. I know it supports ligatures although not sure about emojis etc.

aleph , 8 months ago

Ah, that explains it - the community spin changed the default. Thought I was going crazy for a second there 😄

aleph , 8 months ago

Arch does too, albeit to a lesser extent. Gnome updates usually take around 4 to 5 weeks after the official release to hit the Pacman repos.

Means you can stay bleeding edge but avoid day 1 breakages for the most part.

aleph , 8 months ago

If you’re hanging onto Windows for just one app, you could try running it in a virtual machine. I do that for a few work-related apps that have no Linux/web versions and it works great.

You could also dual boot, if VM performance doesn’t quite cut it.

aleph , 8 months ago

Gaming these days is generally excellent thanks to Proton. Certain titles do still have issues, but it’s on a case by case basis.

Audio latency is a good point - I don’t know how that fares under a VM these days. Pipewire has brought many improvements over Pulse, so it’s possible that the situation has also gotten better.

aleph , 8 months ago

Next on the list of pointlessly reductive comparisons: let’s judge which is the best desktop environment solely on which has the superior clock app.

aleph , 8 months ago

This has some good info.

news.itsfoss.com/vanilla-os-beta/

The main change with 2.0 is the Debian Sid base, as opposed to Ubuntu.

aleph , 8 months ago

The devs laid out their reasoning here:

vanillaos.org/…/vanilla-os-20-orchid---initial-wo…

Essentially, they want a non-opinionated rolling release and to stick with apt as a base package manager, which means that Sid is the obvious solution.

aleph , 8 months ago

Agreed. I had a dual boot setup like this for years and it worked well.

The only downside is that you run the risk of running out of space in your system partitions and you can’t really do much to resize them once you’re up and running. For this reason I recently went full Linux and set up Windows 11 in a VM in case I need to use it for work.

aleph , 8 months ago

They really need to bolster their software support. It’s really the main thing keeping me from considering a ZenFone for my next upgrade.

aleph , 8 months ago

About damn time.

aleph , 8 months ago

Fedora, in the sense that I often see it widely recommended, especially to new users.

It’s not bad by any means, but it’s a very opinionated distro that requires end users to install a bunch of additional repositories and packages just to make it useable for the average user.

It also still doesn’t come with out-of-the-box system restore functionality that works well with btrfs even though it is the default filesystem, unlike OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

aleph , 8 months ago

Any effort that goes into making Linux more accessible is a worthwhile thing, so props to you for sitting down and putting this together.

That said, it wouldn’t be a distro recommendation discussion with out at least some disagreement, so I guess I’ll start the ball rolling!

In my view, the primary considerations for new users getting into Linux are:

• How easy is it to find and select the live image I want to install?
• How good is the out-of-the-box experience?
• How much manual tinkering will I need to do to get everything working so I can get on with gaming/studying/whatever?
• How easy will the OS be to maintain and is there a pre-installed system restore utility in case I break anything?

From this standpoint, distros like Pop OS! and Nobara are leaps and bounds ahead of Debian and Fedora, the former of which is infamous for having one of the least user friendly websites in the Linux distro world (and yes, it’s better since Bookworm, but it’s still a maze for new users to find the right Live image).

Sure, forks and downstream distros tend to add a bunch of extra software that may or may not be needed, but the overall utility and improved ease-of-use to new users greatly outweigh the drawback of having some extra packages that they don’t end up using. The base distros are great if you only want free, non-proprietary software on your machine, but the average new user is much more concerned with having a working computer without having to dig around in config files and find the additional packages they need to install first.

Also, while Linux Mint is still a great distro, its lack of Wayland and multi-monitor support means it is falling behind and is no longer the automatic recommendation it once was, I would argue. Users with a newer machine are going to find distros that offer KDE Plasma or Gnome feel much more slick and modern than Mint does.

TL;DR - Debian and Fedora are not beginner-friendly distros and should not appear on any recommendation list for new users, IMHO. Pop OS! and Nobara are the safest and best two to recommend to most users right now, for my money, with Tumbleweed and Mint following along behind.

aleph , 9 months ago

Bingo.

Despite what the clickbait headline says, the main barrier to entry is not just knowing what an operating system is but the know-how to go about replacing the one that came with the computer in the first place. The decision over which distro to choose is relatively easy once you’ve got past that initial stage.

aleph , 9 months ago

I suppose it depends on your definition of “very little” but I would say that for most Linux users, “Windows 11 can have cluttered start menus with unwanted icons” is definitely accurate.

I did a fresh install of Windows 11 Home the other day and it had at least 10 apps that I manually removed right off the bat. Stuff like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, One Note, Xbox Live and a few freebie games were sitting front and center in the start menu, even though I had not agreed to have any of them installed.

aleph , 9 months ago

That’s correct. The default Save action in Photoshop saves the entire project in their own proprietary format, rather than simply saving as an image file. GIMP and Krita work similarly.

Also, .zip is just as readily available and we easy to use in Linux as .tar is.

I don’t really get where OP is coming from, tbh.

aleph , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Except this “series of unfortunate events” appears to be entirely self-inflicted.

We’re not talking about a couple of hobbyists making YT videos in their spare time; LTT/LMG are by this point a huge media content factory whose unrelenting drive to produce the next hot slice of monetized infotainment means they are making constant (and often quite large) errors and not giving these products the time and attention required to assess them properly.

If you have the time, Gamer Nexus’ initial video critique where they matter-of-factly listed all the reasons why LTT need to seriously reevaluate how they do business is a very interesting watch.

youtu.be/FGW3TPytTjc?t=99

Edit: wow, it seems to have finally sunk in - LTT posted this video not two hours after I posted my comment.

(Piped link because apparently the apology video is monetized 😑) :

piped.mha.fi/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY

aleph , 9 months ago

Oh, is that what it is? I had no end of problems with my laptop display not waking from sleep and failing to boot when I was using btrfs, but I assumed it being caused by something else.

Is that an NVME specific problem?

aleph , 9 months ago

It’s good to see that they’re making progress. Really interested to watch how Solus integrates Serpent OS in v.5.

aleph , 9 months ago

I like 43’s but not these new ones. The colors are weird, plus there’s that patch on the left that looks like someone has taken a cigarette lighter to it.

aleph , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I’ve played around with NixOS, Silverblue, and MicroOS (has recently been renamed Aeon) in VMs and really dig the concept. My general thoughts are:

NixOS - a genius idea but quite a steep learning curve as you have to throw out a lot of what you know about traditional Linux OSs and learn to do things the Nix way. Is too much for me to use as a daily driver, personally, but for people who need to spin up reproduceable systems super quickly, it would be amazing.

Silverblue - much more user friendly than Nix, but (like Fedora) the out of the box experience is a little awkward, especially if using vanilla Gnome with no extensions or modifications doesn’t appeal to you. If not, then you’re going to have to layer on things like Gnome Tweaks and Extension Manager and that can be a little confusing if all you’re used to doing is running dnf install package in a terminal.

MicroOS / Aeon - This is, IMO, the best of the three for beginners because it comes with a lot of quality-of-life additions out of the box: distrobox, Gnome Tweaks, and Extension Manager are already built-in so you don’t have to figure anything out (well, apart from how to use distrobox of you aren’t already familiar). The only thing I think that Silverblue does better than Aeon is updates, which are a little opaque in the latter. Also, because Aeon is based on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed it is, in theory, less of a stable base than Fedora. (edit: oh, and documentation too! Silverblue is much better in that regard.)

I haven’t tried Vanilla OS yet, but it looks pretty interesting. I’m waiting for the 2.0 Orchid release where they’ll be moving to Debian Sid before I take it for a test run.

aleph , 9 months ago

A lot of those apps are years out of date, though.

aleph , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

In that case, you’d also want Lygisk instead of Magisk, to automatically have root reinstalled after every OTA upgrade. (Lygisk is a fork of Magisk, you get the same functionality otherwise)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Lygisk is a blanket recommendation for all devices running Lineage OS. I believe it’s for A-partition-only devices, so phones with A-B should use Magisk instead.

aleph , 9 months ago

It’s not true to say their use cases are just “children and old people”; they’re saying that while it’s more of a obstacle to ease-of-use in those groups, all users have to manually relocate poorly placed application windows.

If the OS can remove the need to do that, it improves workflow.

aleph , 9 months ago

It may not be of interest to you personally, but the growing popularity of tiling window managers means there’s a lot of demand for this type of feature.

As long as they give the user the ability to opt out/in, what’s the harm in introducing it?

aleph , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

But they also say that the classic “floating” window state would still be one of the three options. In this case, this would effectively allow users to keep the “standard” behavior if they want.

aleph , 9 months ago

Gnome without extensions?? I could never.

aleph , 9 months ago

Gnome without extensions?? I could never.

aleph , 9 months ago

Gnome without extensions?? I could never.

aleph , 9 months ago

I use about ten different extensions that all add useful functionality, but the absolute deal breakers are 1) indicators for apps that require a system tray, 2) GSConnect to transfer stuff between my computer and my phone, and 3) clipboard history. I can’t survive without those.

aleph , 9 months ago

I answered that in this comment.