Not OP, but my personal (mild) meh with Libre is it’s visual style. But to be fair, I use it rarely and for those few occasions I’ve been too lazy to check if there are design alternatives (which most definitely exist, we’re on Linux after all).
Even the tabbed view was hard to use for me, especially the impossible to use “styles” box that scrolls a narrow view. I use it all the time on MS Word, and much prefer how they handle it.
Also, no CSD, so the title bar kinda just chills there, meanwhile it’s used in Microsoft Word.
If your winamp is still functional, I’d just suggest you convert all mp3pro to wav using the disc writer plugin and then use ffmpeg to convert to mp4 or normal mp3.
Then you won’t need to worry about the mp3pro codec issues.
At some point you’ll have to use a new codec, even if it’s in 10 years. So it might be a good idea to download the music instead of converting.
Soulseek with Nicotine+ seems to be a good way to download music. Or streamrip/deemix with a (temporary) Deezer/Tidal subscription supports high quality audio.
More time than trying to shoehorn a defunct package for an abandoned codec in to a random player which even if it works would only be a temporary kludge not a fix?
That particular conversion is lossless but the original MP3 Pro file is lossy and converting to MP3 again would be double lossy. Best solution is to rerip or download a good copy.
wav takes too much space, the collection will grown 5, 6 times the size… I just don’t have that much online storage at my disposal, my NAS is 4 x 2TB drives in RAID5, I have about 6TB at my disposal for everything (personal stuff as well as media).
If it doesn’t work out or you find yourself tight on space in the future you can always recompress to mp3 or ogg and take the quality hit at that point.
Well it’s Black Friday and HDDs are going for cheap. 6TB is nothing these days, when you could get a 16TB external drive for only $200, or a internal SATA one for $185. Or you could replace/supplement your entire NAS with a single 6TB drive for only $50.
Disk space is cheap now, so upgrade your storage, convert your music to FLAC, problem solved.
Ummm… I don’t live in the US and $50 is A LOT for me. My monthly salary is about $500. All of these 2TB drives are used and dicomissioned (replaced for larger one, they’re from work). I just don’t have the funds to replace them. The NAS is DIY as well.
And drives are not that cheap around here. They are, but not as cheap as in the US. SSDs are about the same price though… but our salaries are not.
Well you don’t have to buy them brand new. If you guys have a used goods market there, you could look around for some good deals on used drives there. Or even used PCs, sometime people sell entire PCs for the same cost as a hard drive, so look out for those and take the drives out, sell the rest of parts.
And if things are really desperate money wise, it doesn’t even have to be a hard drive, you could even store your music on CDs/DVDs - not the most convenient option I know, but it’s an option - you could move the music that you don’t listen to often (or music that you’re tired of playing constantly), and keep your more frequently played music on the HDDs.
One thing I’ve learned over the years dealing with PC tech is that spinning drives is the one thing you absolutely don’t buy second hand. Plus, you can’t find 4TB or above drives second hand here. People use them till they die or repurpose them.
Second hand PC parts are generally overpriced here. People wanna get like 70, 80% of the price they paid for them. There are some reasonable sellers, but as I said, they usually don’t sell drives or sell drives that no one would need anyway (250GB, 500GB, 1TB spinning drives).
Your last suggestion is kinda good to be honest, I might opt for that.
One thing I’ve learned over the years dealing with PC tech is that spinning drives is the one thing you absolutely don’t buy second hand.
I think this actually depends on a lot of things. I have an old Dell rack server and I buy ex-enterprise SAS drives for it. I use them in RAID arrays with dedicated hot spares and cold spares on standby. The eBay seller I buy from replaced a drive for free once when it was “error predicted” on arrival.
I have the original source for some of them, but very few, like maybe 1 or 2%.
Doesn’t matter, I’m just gonna redownload them in flac, store them on optical media as flac and keep them as HE-AAC on my NAS for local playback. It’s the only option that’s acceptable in my mind.
My personal laptop is whatever the first gen Framework is called. After many, many years doing the “cool” distros, I’ve settled on Mint and don’t really have any motivation to do anything else… I have real work I need to do and can’t be bothered to deal with figuring out weird shit. I just need it to work.
TBH, the only things I use my laptop for anymore is a browser, vim, git, and kubernetes tooling… I barely have any interest in running Linux on a workstation at this point. The only things that really interest me anymore are being run in distributed clusters. Desktop Linux is kinda boring and tedious for me.
It’s a chicken-egg problem. People stay away from Linux because Linux can’t run (or at least very flawed) industry standard programs like Adobes catalogue and those proprietary software publishers wont publish for Linux because there aren’t enough Linux users to be worth the “trouble”.
But that’s just a part of the problem, the true offender, are the goalpost-movers. “Linux cant run A, that’s why I NEED to stay on windows. What? A now runs flawlessly? Well there’s also B which is really important!” No matter how many programs get ported or at least near flawlessly emulated, there will always be one more program our jack-of-all-trades absolutely can’t live without.
Proprietary software I use on a regular basis with no Linux alternative:
Revit, AutoCAD, Houdini, 3dsMAX, SolidWorks, Rhino, Grasshopper, Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign (and/or their Affinity alternatives), CUDA optimized simulation and rendering plugins, etc.
I use at least one of these every day, almost none of them have any functioning compatibility with Wine or other emulation. Even just using Affinity has caused some issues with team projects when someone picks up where I left off and there’s no layer information and a ton of clipping groups instead.
If all you do with your computer is program, work with documents, use a web browser, and play video games sure go wild don’t use Windows on any of your machines. But I just don’t understand how some people in the FOSS community cannot fathom that there are entire professional workflows and industries that just have zero possibility of moving to Linux.
Do I like using Windows? No. But I do like being able to use all the programs my work and research requires.
I contribute actual, tangible research into FOSS CAD/CAM/BIM software development and implementation. I love it and want to see FOSS options grow and become widely adopted. But it just isn’t anywhere close to having feature parity. And that matters, just as much as industry interoperability matters.
I’m just so tired of this thought process in the community that the only reason someone isn’t using Linux/FOSS is because they’re some fanboy or something
Sounds like you’ve gotten good answers about your formatting question. For the steam proton question, the answer is that yes, steam installs it automatically. You might have to mess with the proton version for specific games, so check www.protondb.com for your game if it doesn’t work immediately.
Congrats on trying out Linux! I hope you enjoy it! I’ve never used Mint myself (I don’t like ubuntu-type package management), nor the Cinnamon desktop (although I’ve heard good things), but that’s part of the beauty of linux, there’s so much to try! Mint is definitely a good starter distro, but if you find you enjoy messing around with it, you might consider a bit of distro-hopping.
I emotionally understand this idealistic view. But you can’t exclude yourself from the economy and exclude yourself from professional collaboration of any kind by switching from Photoshop to GIMP.
See this neckbeard extremist evangelising is why people stay away from Linux community. Linux hobbyists having 0 concerns for others’ jobs, work or needs is incredibly icky. I advocate for FLOSS, but posts like this just gives more ammunition to Windows/MacOS/proprietary culture fanboys.
OP said this to a poster below:
It’s sad you built a career out of black box code lmao. […] I piss on your profession
Opensuse tumbleweed on a lenovo X1 gen 7. Software wise - KDE desktop and VS Code, Dbeaver, Kate and Firefox. Oh, and the usual command line tools - git, npm, terraform… This is a work laptop, but I find tumbleweed to be extremely stable, considering it’s a rolling release. If it does go south, there is a fantastic snapper support to roll back to the previous state.
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