Ubuntu’s package managers won’t stop fighting with each other so I can’t complete an upgrade easily. Also, I hate apt. Trusting prebuilt binaries from PPAs seems a little dangerous to me compared to trusting build scripts in the AUR, so I don’t feel comfortable with that. I do like it otherwise, though.
Linux Mint is fine, I guess, but no Wayland yet and I don’t like Cinnamon. Same PPA issues. Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.
openSUSE is great, but the package managers won’t stop fighting with each other and it’s lacking a few packages. I like the Open Build System a lot less than the AUR.
Fedora is fine, while missing some packages, but it broke on me after a week and I had no idea how to fix it so I stopped using it.
Pop_OS makes everything about GNOME worse.
Debian’s packages are too old.
Manjaro is more work than Arch and the packages are out of sync with the AUR.
The packages I want aren’t in Solus. Is this distro even still around?
And for distros I won’t consider trying:
Gentoo is too much work.
Qubes is too much work and I can’t play games on it.
I don’t like any of the ZorinOS modifications and the packages are old.
I don’t work with music at all, so most of this update doesn’t mean much to me. However, it’s nice to see the export window was improved—I want my single-click behavior, damn it.
The telemetry is limited to update-checking and error reports. Distributions will disable update-checking because they already handle updating Audacity. Error reports need to be manually submitted. It’s possible that most distributions just disable networking altogether when building Audacity, if it even exists in their repositories at all. Fedora’s package is waaay out of date. Arch disables networking altogether.
Audacity has still instituted a CLA. This is quite worrying. But nothing has happened yet.
There’s Lightworks, too, although it’s geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It’s powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There’s no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don’t need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.
Aussies tend to be quite direct. It’s basically our natural state. I get how it can be perceived as hostile, but I don’t actually think Brodie is very abrasive. He seems like a pretty relaxed guy.
Kagi is the only search engine I use which has really good results and no junk links. …and you have to pay for it, of course. It’s a meta search engine but they use their own indexes for news results and Teclis, which indexes small commercial sites with fewer than 5 trackers. One of the cool features it added recently was an icon for identifying paywalled articles.
I’d like to recommend Mojeek, my default search engine, but it still has a way to go. If you’re just looking for an “answer engine” rather than a general search engine…I guess an LLM probably isn’t a bad place to start?
pushed useless crap like the activity view to people
This is easily the best part of GNOME. I wish macOS implemented mission control as well as GNOME has implemented Activity Overview, because using macOS feels like typing with one hand tied behind my back.
slow animations that can’t be completely turned off.
Go to GNOME Control Centre > Accessibility > Seeing > Reduce Animation. It also sets it globally so websites can choose to respect this setting. What animations remain?
They try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).
Wait, this is not GNOME, this is Nautilus as a file manager app. There are more providers of desktop icons, namely nemo-desktop is one of the best and you can use that together with Nautilus and the rest of GNOME. Why would you use a worse provider of that functionality?
It wasn’t part of some grand design decision that precluded desktop icons. They just made a bad technical decision 20 years ago that ended up accumulating a lot of technical debt.
Now, if you wanted to complain about something, shell extensions are certainly a horse worth beating. Or only letting you set shortcuts for the first four workspaces and forcing you to use Dconf for more. This is really dumb design.
It took an hour or two to compile and takes up about 5GB of space. The only program I’m really interested in is Xcode, which doesn’t work at the moment.
I like them both. GNOME’s desktop metaphor is nicer but it can be replicated on Plasma with a few shortcuts. Plasma has a few niceties not present in GNOME. GNOME is prettier. Dolphin is a better file manager than Nautilus. GNOME programs don’t have a way of rebinding keyboard shortcuts.
It just depends on what I consider more important at the time.
I know this is probably tongue-in-cheek, but if you wanted the serious answer:
GIMP:
Non-destructive Editing (it’s coming real soon!)
Vector shapes, not bitmap
Smart objects
Full CMYK support
Full PSD support (for collaboration purposes), hahaha
KILL ALL FLOATING SELECTIONS
Kdenlive:
Well, I actually do use Kdenlive. I’m fine with Lightworks too, and Resolve on macOS. But it’s lacking finer color grading controls, the interface is inefficient (being fixed in a future release), hardware-based decoding/encoding needs to either exist or be improved.
And the other big reason is collaboration with other Adobe users.
The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don’t live in India, so I don’t know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It’s the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn’t affected?
YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn’t pay if the user hits “Skip”. Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.
I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It’s beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain’t free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it’s more friendly than Google search ads…
I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.