Basically visual arts software and some writing software. Additionally I have a free version of Ableton Live Lite 11 (so one music-making application as well) that came with my keyboard.
I mostly do photography, writing, and other visual arts type work on my two computers. I use quite a few photography and painting applications (Photoshop, ArtRage, Rebelle, Lightroom, Inspirit, and a few others; I’m also looking at BlackInk), as well as Scrivener and MS Office when I’m writing. I don’t know if any of those run well or at all in Linux or in Wine, etc. Also I stopped flirting with learning programming and there wasn’t much point maintaining a Linux machine after that. I think Linux is better than Windows all around, and I hate Windows, but it’s just because I use certain apps and from what I’ve heard and seen the Linux apps just aren’t as good.
TLDR, creative software that won’t run on Linux (to my knowledge, anyway).
I never tried Linux, but I consider it every few years. However if I weigh that
O&O Shutup10 and group policies can remove all the telemetry and intrusiveness from Windows +
most of my work involves Adobe products +
my main hobby is gaming, with the vast majority of my games not having a Linux port
there are simply too many factors that would make Linux to be more hassle, have less performance or downright impossible to serve as a substitute for Windows, while for me personally not really offering any practical benefits over Windows.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Definitely. So many searches lately will return results that only partially match the search terms. What’s even the point of searching if you’re just going to show a bunch of unrelated results?
Even exact matches with quotes don’t seem to be as useful these days. Google tries to be helpful by matching on what it thinks I want instead of what I actually want. That plus the ads and all the other junk
They’re not trying to be helpful, they’re trying to guide you towards a product or towards content they control that they think you will be more engaged with. They also give results that will lead to more searches, and therefore more ad exposure for their business.
Plus, I used to set my new tab page to Google, but God, it’s so bad. There’s always some stupid image for some stupid anniversary like Mary F. Dinklehorn becoming the first trans-gay-librarian in Antarctica or something (not that I’m against any of that) I just want to get some work done and not be distracted by Google desperately clinging to power.
I’m using Chrome and added an extension called Empty New Tab Page that makes Chrome open to a blank page. I had to do that because the Google home page got to be so annoying. Also removing the need to fetch content makes the browser and new tabs open faster.
You seem to be misunderstanding the point of your doing your search: they got paid for the results that they delivered, and for the ad traffic of you having received it! Don't you see why this is best for them you? /s
I actually prefer Google for shopping. Just turn off your adblocker, search for a particular item you want to buy and bam your first 3 to 4 pages are retailers pushing the product with their prices listed (with a touch of scam websites that I presume pay for advertising). Anything else I add ‘Reddit’ or just watch a few YouTube videos depending on what kind of answers I’m looking for
Duck Duck Go search results are a little lacking, though, like it’s completely missing some possibilities. Looking up tech stuff for a Linux issue I’m having, Duck will miss a site that Google finds - and even if I enter the exact text of the site, it’s completely absent from Duck.
I really want to like DuckDuckGo, but the results are never right. I always end up going back to Google. But I’m a professional programmer, so it might be different for me.
My pattern with linux is that I tinker with it until I eventually break it in a way I don’t have the knowledge or skill to repair, and then I balk at the thought of starting from scratch again, so I just put windows back on the machine…
I tried to use Ubuntu for a bit but I just wanted to have regular Firefox with the built in updater, turns out this is way more of a hassle than it is on Windows.
It shouldn’t be that hard to “install” a program like Firefox directly from a website but all you get is an archive thing that you have to manually “install” basically, it’s tricky enough that someone wrote a tool just do do this: gitlab.com/…/Firefox-automatic-install-for-Linux
APT and Flatpacks are all cool but an offline installation should still be available and easy to use without being forced to use a terminal. Maybe I’m incorrect and I would love to hear about it but this is my experience.
Steam for whatever reason is basically installed the same way on windows as on PC in terms of user experience, you download a file and double click it. Maybe it’s Mozillas fault? Who knows, it’s frustrating in any case.
Ubuntu (and most other linux distributions) have a slightly different way of installing programs and applications. It has an app store, similar to Android and iOS, you can search for Firefox (and other apps) from in there. If I’m not mistaken, Ubuntu searched and notifies you for updates regularly.
The philosophy of Ubuntu (and most other linux distributions) is that you don’t need to go to a bunch of different sites to download your software, you can just download all your software from the “app store”.
And all of these tools are GUI’s (so ‘point and click’-based), so you don’t need to open a terminal, if you don’t want to.
Everything you said is true but it’s beside the point, all this app store stuff shouldn’t affect how easy or hard it is to install something the old fashioned way.
I know Firefox is there but I would to have the option to install it and programs like it without some kind of app store.
You mentioned android and it’s a perfect example of what I want, you have a nice app store but you can if you want download any app or anything from a website and it’s just one file that’s easy to install and it won’t update along with everything else or they can often check for updates on their own.
to me this is a feature rather than an issue, whenever a package is updated in the package repository it’s super convenient to just update them from the same place instead of having auto-updaters built into all applications on the system. i guess that’s a preference thing though.
Yes but my main issue is that installing software can be a pain in general. The script that someone made just to download and install firefox from mozilla.org is evident of that:
“The objective is to provide a method to easily install Mozilla Firefox directly from Mozilla’s website and enable Firefox’s automatic update feature for the latest releases. Providing a pure stock Mozilla Firefox experience for everyone using your Linux computer at home.”
Isn’t it kind of odd that this has to have a script in the first place? Or is it actually easy and this script is redundant? From a windows perspective the fact that you can’t just download an installer that works it’s pretty weird. I notice that other software often offers .deb or .rpm files and maybe those are more what I want…
But also repositories can be a pain, I remember trying to install the emulation thing RetroArch via the app store thing on ubuntu and that was outdated and installing cores was very different from how I did it on PC.
“Cores should be downloaded from within the program using the Online Updater’s Core Updater, if possible. Some distros patch out the Online Updater, in which case you’ll need to install cores using your package manager. There are core packages available in the PPAs, as well, and they will continue to be updated, but new packages for new cores will not be created.”
Basically my heart is here now and this is where I come for social media , that does not mean I will not use reddit from time to time , but those times are getting less and less, my main reason to use reddit now is to promote lemmy. To give a better idea I spent probably an hour a day on reddit or two or three visits. Now I have not visited for over a week and recent visits have been a few minutes.
More and more I have been using the Bing “chat” search. It does a search, filters through the results and summarizes the answer with links to the sites it found them on.
For certain types of search it is a huge time saver of scrolling through results to find answers on various pages.
If it isn’t open / free / private there is a % of the community that will not even try it.
Just like on Reddit lots of negative energy in some subs.
Hardly saying bing is amazing only that lately I have been drawn to trying it more since the chat based search that allows follow ups in natural language.
Google bards equivalent is only available in the US and just this last week the UK so I can’t try it out.
However over all I agree that more and more google search results have more adds and the good results pushed further and further down.
I don’t like the idea of getting answers from a search engine. That gives too much power to the company that runs the search engine. Id prefer to get a variety of links from independent sources.
Have it compile a list of sources it’s already sourced from, and keep searching for any new sources it can add. Have it list its expectations for what an expert should know about a particular subject, then have it learn about each of those points, and finally present as if it is an expert there to assist you.
I downvoted because I have literally no idea what that guy is talking about.
Bing has never been a good search engine. The results are always so terrible, plus you have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baity crap they put everywhere.
Have you tried using the Chat feature (GPT-4) to do searching? I just tried it, and it surprisingly works really well for some inquiries.
Like, use their chat AI, but as a natural language search engine. It’s integrated to Bing’s index so it can peruse it itself, so you don’t have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baits crap they put everywhere.
I recently switched to Bing after years of disappointment from Google and months of disappointment from DDG. Bing is pretty disappointing too, but less so, so far. I tried to use the chat feature a couple of days ago, but it said I have to download the app. Nah… fuck these tech companies and their apps.
The “preview” for the chat feature requires the app or edge on desktop currently but I do find myself turning to it every time I get frustrated with a google search these days.
Less disappointing is probably the best discrimination as you said.
I use the ChatGPT feature from desktop Firefox with no problems. Maybe it specifically denies Chrome, in which case I bet you could change the user agent string and get it to work.
I just tried it again on desktop and it worked, but the reason was that I downloaded an extension a while ago and forgot about it. When I disabled the extension, it stopped working.
There used to be a way to enable installing any extension on mobile FFx Dev, but I'm not sure if that still works. The desktop extension just changes the user agent string, so that might be another route to enabling it.
I downloaded Firefox Nightly on my phone about a week ago so that I can change my user agent string to get Google to stop F’ing up YouTube pages, but it doesn’t seem to work. I guess I’ll look into that extension. Do you know what it’s called?
asklemmy
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.