Is there a community or database where people have tested different plugins on Linux either natively or with Wine to see if they can get things working?
There is, if you look up yabridge that’s like a plugin bridge that natively runs windows vsts in reaper for Linux through wine with almost no hassle. They have a list somewhere
last time I checked Windows was the dominant player
Huh? I am confused now. Has the cycle come back around again because in the late 90s/early 2000s last I checked when I was into this stuff, Apple was king with Pro Tools. It's been a while, I used to mess around with FL Studio 20 years ago.
Huh, last I checked, the professional standard was Mac, at least for recording instruments. From what I vaguely recall, Windows has a latency issue due to how they handle audio stream inputs. I went through these woes myself once while using my guitar & Amp through my computer to practice with headphones on and having the music playing on top. The latency just doesn’t allow you to concentrate on what you’re playing, it completely distracts you. You can get it lower by doing something, I don’t remember what, but that solution ends up introducing random new bugs such as certain audio streams suddenly not playing at all for a while before fixing themselves, and it still doesn’t quite get latency low enough to not notice it.
Maybe it depends on who you ask or where you are. Maybe a US vs EU thing? I never was a professional Musician, but when I started reading about creating/composing music for Video Games I learned that many professional Studios run on Windows because of proprietary standards and software. that is not available for Apple (and Linux)
There are some DAWs like Ardour and LMMS for linux. The bigger issue is plugins. They are mostly NOT for Linux. There are some but the selection is not big. You can use a VST-bridge like Carla. It worked for me, I could use proprietary windows based VSTs in LMMS on Linux. However, I wanted to go fully FOSS. This is rather difficult. You make it sound like there are a bunch of open source plugins. This was not my experience. Especially not if you are looking for more specific things. If it is like that, shit has changed radically for the best the last two years. I had some coding projects related to music production so I would just try to build whatever I needed. But I dropped these projects unfortunately.
I am very pleasantly surprised so far, but that’s because my expectations were so low that I was shocked that ANY plugins even exist. With the way prices are going when it comes to music software, I expect to start seeing rapid progression in the music FOSS space.
Client like thunderbird is good if you always use the same desktop/laptop machine to do your email. If you are using multiple devices like school, friend, work, library or even mobile it totally breaks down. To say nothing of system failures, breaking or losing the machine etc.
Most people who love TB have a setup that has been stable for 20 years. Good for them, it suits their needs. But the contempt with which they seem to hold the majority of the population for whom TB would be a totally unsuitable choice is rather unpleasent.
Ever notice how rarely you see someone saying “I switched to TB from webmail 2 years ago and its great”?
Too bad, as i would absolutely love to switch the floss desktop/mobile clients and have tried to do so on a few occasions. They are simply not compatible with modern communications habits.
I’m a heavy Thunderbird user and to be honest, I don’t understand what you’re saying at all? I have multiple private mail accounts and a work mail account and I use all of them on multiple machines with Thunderbird but also with different clients (e.g. FairEmail on Android) as well as webmail (at least for my work mail I use it sometimes) and I never experienced any problems. What exactly do you mean? I mean, I do have an export of my thunderbird profiles (maybe not up to date, though, tbh), but more so out of comfort than necessity. Without this export, and in the unlikely case of a system failure, I would have to go through the process of adding my mail accounts (server, password, username) by hand and that’s basically it
Sorry, I kind of forgot about lemmy or a few days. In Thunderbird, I create a new dedicated folder, use Tools --> Message Filters. I then can add the desired filter (something like must cotain at least ‘host.tld’ in sender) and make it move all filtered mails into the previously created folder. I just checked, it works (you can also specify when that filter should be executed (e.g. when getting new mails or every 10 minutes) and the folder with the filtered mails also shows up in FairMail on Android. Better description: …mozilla.org/…/organize-your-messages-using-filte…
As someone else pointed out, maybe you’re thinking of POP instead of IMAP? I basically have all my mails on the host’s servers (including folders) and just synchronize using my different clients
I use Thunderbird on several machines, and I use broadly the default config (no fancy business). I also have the same email accounts set up on my Android phone (Gmail ones on the native Gmail client app, an Outlook one on the Outlook app). When accessing my email on a machine which doesn’t have Thunderbird set up for me (such as my corporate laptop), I just use the webmail interfaces.
And it all works…fine. why wouldn’t it? Thunderbird and the Android apps just send their service calls off via IMAP and it all sorts itself out without any fuss from me. All the data lives off in the cloud anyway; it’s just a different way to interact with it other than the web interface.
I just happen to like having all my email accounts in one combined place, running in the background and throwing system notifications.
I think they’re expecting thunderbird users to use POP instead of imap, Gmail integration, OWA, or other protocol that expects the mail to stay on the server.
Leaving the mail on the server has been great in Thunderbird since the Mozilla days. I did jump to Gmail web app a long time ago though. I’m assuming Gmail support has improved in the last 15 years?
ELI5 please, why would I use thunderbird over a web client? I have used a local email client in years but it seems everyone uses and loves thunderbird.
If you don’t have multiple email accounts, then probably a webmail is fine. If you have multiple accounts, and require some advanced email features, then a local client is often more efficient. Unfortunately, because the majority of people are fine with a webmail, those clients are not attracting much activity for development and Thunderbird itself almost died some ten years ago.
May I ask the opposite? Why use JavaScript client from the web instead of desktop ones?
Most operating systems, excluding Windows, are shipping with decent native and fast email client. They are automatically updated with the system, again excluding Windows, integrate with other apps (for ex. right-click and share with mail), can store messages offline just in case and are overall nicer to use.
The only use case I think of is when using someone’s else computer and you don’t want to remember to log out, because browsers have “incognito” mode.
One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.
You can have any desktop you want on any distro. But some customizations are redone in some distros. In terms of programs you want to run, they pretty much all work on any distro. If a distro is “better for gaming” it usually just means the programs are pre-installed.
People talk about arch and Debian as the best because they have the least customizations, allowing you to install and customize as you wish.
Linux users are mostly tinkerers, they like their customizations their way. I’m in that boat. The less I have to remove to get my customization working, the better. Just give me a black screen and a white blinking cursor, I know how to do the rest from there.
One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.
This is true for the traditional model in which the package manager is the main differentiator between distros. Therefore Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE etc and their derivatives (which make up about 90% of the distros found on DistroWatch) are indeed mostly the same.
But the likes of Gentoo and NixOS etc don’t quite fit the bill. Granted, a new user should only very rarely (if ever) start their Linux journeys on any of these advanced distros.
Yeah, you look at how there are a handful of package managers, and hundreds of distros, they’re pretty much all the “same”
But yes gentoo and NixOS do things the most differently. But even on those you can game on them.
I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.
I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.
Thank you for being thoughtful! I just wanted to add some nuance with my previous comment.
Imo, Chris Titus should just stop making Linux content… His windows content is genuinely useful, yet his Linux content boils down to "arch and debian good, ye old packages good, Wayland not ready, snaps/flatpaks/everything else sucks, Gnome bad, gnome bad (again), fedora bad… He’s the literal definition of a gatekeeper.
Depends on the farmer. Some are really rough with the sheers and end up cutting the skin. Some really throw the sheep about and aren’t really looked after well.
In the long history of farming, and knowing a few frugal farmers, I’d bet a substantial sum that a farmer has sheared their own sheep and has nicked a few in the process.
when this was originally posted, it got a lot of flack because Linux users were unhappy Chris Titus dares to use both Linux AND Windows
as @bbbhitz pointed out, “Pointless” was probably a poor choice of words, but Chris’ definition for that tier was basically “distros that install a couple stock packages and give it a new name”
as for the Devil tier
RedHat for closing their source
CentOS Stream because it’s not CentOS
Fedora guilt by association (they are actually a separate entity from their founder RedHat)
In time, I’ve come to realise that people that complain about snaps are not worth listening to.
99% of the complainers of snaps don’t understand their full use case, they are an invaluable resource for servers and embedded systems, snaps support features that flatpak never will do.
The thing is Snaps are pushed on the desktop, and the server world already uses containers like Docker, so there isn't much Snap does that's truly unique and useful.
the main issue with snaps is (generally) not the snaps themselves or the snap daemon, it’s that the Snap Store itself is closed source
a combination of rampant enshittification of online platforms, losing faith in Canonical’s direction, and lack of transparency into ranking/promotion/filtering of apps in the Snap Store (there’s already been a few claims that they’ve replaced an already installed native app with a snap package 🤷 )
Fedora is a separate entity with RedHat employment as a prerequisite for some of the key leadership roles. It’s ran and designed to feed into RedHat.
I love Fedora, heck I like RHEL too, but they have gone from my top recommendation for enterprise solutions to me having to research whether their offering is even FOSS and constant concern that a EULA will put us in legal jeopardy for treating our FOSS product choices like FOSS.
Red Hat created Fedora specifically to be the “community” distro. There used to just be Red Hat which tried to be both free and paid. Now they have Fedora and RHEL.
Red Hat releases all their own software as GPL. They are one of the few players releasing new and important GPL software. As you state, they employ and pay people to spend most of their time building an emphatically free and community based distro. I cannot think of a company that does more for Open Source.
That was hilarious! Thank you for calling out big corps on their fake solution which in fact is a monopoly nightmare! I love the innovative solutions offered by the host at the end.
Don’t like that he called some distros pointless. I would have found a better word. Lots on there that I have never used, obviously, because I am not a sadist. I couldn’t tell you what would be good for gaming or not, but flatpaks have made some things easier (or so I’ve heard, don’t quote me on that). And Fedora is a “Devil?”
Anyway. While I don’t watch this channel ever, I am aware of it as a reputable channel for things like this, so it might be trustworthy.
Why are Debian and Arch at the top? Debian is one of the grandaddies. Many distros are built on Debian—MX, Mint, Ubunu, Pop, Zorin, Neon, etc.—and there are many packages in the repos, which are divided into stable, and testing, and unstable sections. So, a Debian base can be stable or extremely up to date. The Debian community and maintainers are another reason the distro is so well-liked. Arch also has a large selection of packages, an excellent wiki, and the AUR to have access to anything missing from regular repos. Manjaro and dozens of others are based on Arch as well, meaning the community is rather large.
No need to follow rules and conventions though. There are many people, myself included, that use Alpine for their desktop because the packages are very up to date.
Interesting that you said Arch has a good wiki. Maybe its just because its not common for beginners to start with Arch but when i read through the installation guide i noticed that there is no explanation on how to create a bootable usb in windows, at least the part for how to verify the signature wasnt explained for a windows user. For Linux Mint it was pretty much at the top, how to create a bootable usb in windows. I was very suprised that this guy called fedora and ubuntu the “devil” when i saw many people here use fedora.
One question though, you talked about packages and how they are sometimes different. How much had the amount of options for packages an effect on you, or anyone, while choosing your distro?
How much had the amount of options for packages an effect on you, or anyone, while choosing your distro?
The number of packages was not something I looked at. I checked the availability of the packages I wanted, and whether or not they we’re up to date.
When I switched to the current distribution I’m using, I did not plan on using it for more than a few days. I just wanted a quick and easy way to try out an up-to-date version of a DE on a low-powered device and have the newest version of the browser I use. It worked so I put it on my main laptop and it still works
If I were going for numbers, Nix has the most I think. The AUR is up there as well. Debian is in 3rd place. But, like I said, I didn’t really think about that.
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