Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

Anything that isn’t Arch.

• 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 Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.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.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

This is good to know. I’m more into rolling releases like Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE anyway, so the latest Ubuntu’s packages tend to be a bit old for me anyway.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

The main package I was thinking of was the kernel. I saw the recent Linux Experiment video by Nick and they were using a kernel version (6.1?) that was no longer supported nor an LTS.

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

The equation for YotLD is simple for me:

Adobe looks at Linux market share and thinks, “Hmm, we could make some money from this,” and ports Photoshop, After Effects, and inDesign to Linux

Or:

Adobe looks at ChromeOS and thinks, “Hmm, we could make some money from this,” and ports all their programs to the web except After Effects because that involves massively extending web protocols again to support all the codecs and improving performance.

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

Stable or development branch?

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

So you’d think, but why else would Adobe bother developing a web version of Photoshop? Good to know, though.

Obviously it defeats piracy, but that argument doesn’t make sense if Adobe is still shipping a native version of Photoshop.

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

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.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

You’ll try it and it’s going to end up in the drawer of unfinished projects.

Guilty as charged.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

I have a lot to say about the Pinephone, but in the interest of not re-iterating what has been said before, I’ll just say this:

Correctly inserting the SIM card was the most harrowing experience I’ve ever had with a phone.

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

I don’t really have a least favorite distribution. I mean, I guess between Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, Manjaro, and Gentoo, the least appealing choices to me are Manjaro and Gentoo. Manjaro is just Arch but worse, because the packages are old and likely to cause incompatibilities with AUR packages that need really up-to-date system packages, and I…don’t trust the maintainers to have configured everything better than I could have myself. Just based on history.

Debian has ancient packages. That’s the only reason. I’d just end up using Flatpak packages or compiling from source.

Any other distribution I could use, including Gentoo, but Arch is the sweet spot for me.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

NVK is looking to be a viable replacement for general desktop computing in a few months, so long as you don’t need NVENC and any of the other stuff.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

I know you said don’t suggest Vim, but I use Neovim for my writing and write in markdown. Any markdown editor will do. Marker is fine. It’s really easy to convert to another format like HTML or EPUB with pandoc. Markdown has minimal formatting, too, so it shouldn’t bug you so much.

FocusWriter is another good suggestion if that’s more what you’re interested in.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

Compatibility is apparently really good on Linux according to CrossOver reports only a month or two ago: www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/…/scrivener

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

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).

They removed it because nobody wanted to maintain the code, which was generally agreed to be subpar, and it was blocking development elsewhere in Nautilus. They acknowledge it was a dumb idea to implement this functionality inside of Nautilus in the first place when they should have done it in the shell. They realized they were leaving users in the lurch here, so offered a few solutions like installing Nemo Desktop. They even developed a GNOME shell extension prototype before removing it that users could move straight to.

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.

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

I recognize this is an odd comment to make, but I’m glad to see this screenshot tool supports capturing a window in Wayland. My next question is, can the screenshot tool be invoked from the command-line or via a script?

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

It was interesting to hear your perspective!

I’m a newbie programmer (and have been for quite a few years), but I’ve recently started trying to build useful programs. They’re small ones (under 1000 lines of code), but they accomplish the general task well enough. I’m also really busy, so as much as I like learning this stuff, I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to it. The first program, which was 300 lines of code, took me about a week to build. I did it all myself in Python. It was a really good learning experience. I learned everything from how to read technical specifications to how to package the program for others to easily install.

The second program I built was about 500 lines of code, a little smaller in scope, and prototyped entirely in ChatGPT. I needed to get this done in a weekend, and so I got it done in 6 hours. It used SQLite and a lot of database queries that I didn’t know much about before starting the project, which surely would have taken hours to research. I spent about 4 hours fixing the things ChatGPT screwed up myself. I think I still learned a lot from the project, though I obviously would have learned more if I had to do it myself. One thing I asked it to do was to generate a man page, because I don’t know Groff. I was able to improve it afterward by glancing at the Groff docs, and I’m pretty happy with it. I still have yet to write a man page for the first program, despite wanting to do it over a year ago.

I was not particularly concerned about my programs being used as training data because they used a free license anyway. LLMs seem great for doing the work you don’t want to do, or don’t want to do right now. In a completely unrelated example, I sometimes ask ChatGPT to generate names for countries/continents because I really don’t care that much about that stuff in my story. The ones it comes up with are a lot better than any half-assed stuff I could have thought of, which probably says more about me than anything else.

On the other hand, I really don’t like how LLMs seem to be mainly controlled by large corporations. Most don’t even meet the open source definition, but even if they did, they’re not something a much smaller business can run. I almost want to reject LLMs for that reason on principle. I think we’re also likely to see a dramatic increase in pricing and enshittification in the next few years, once the excitement dies down. I want to avoid becoming dependent on this stuff, so I don’t use it much.

I think LLMs would be great for automating a lot of the junk work away, as you say. The problem I see is they aren’t reliable, and reliability is a crucial aspect of automation. You never really know what you’re going to get out of an LLM. Despite that, they’ll probably save you time anyway.

I’m no expert, but neither is most of the workforce (although kernel work is, again, much more in the expert realm).

I think experts are the ones who would benefit from LLMs the most, despite LLMs consistently producing average work in my experience. They know enough to tell when it’s wrong, and they’re not so close to the code that they miss the obvious. For years, translators have been using machine translation tools to speed up their work, basically relegating them to being translation checkers. Of course, you’d probably see a lot of this with companies that contract translators at pitiful rates per word who need to work really hard to get decent pay. Which means the company now expects everyone to perform at that level, which means everyone needs to use machine translation tools to keep up, which means efficiency is prioritized over quality.

This is a very different scenario to kernel work. Translation has kind of been like that for a while from what I know, so LLMs are just the latest thing to exacerbate the issues.

I’m still pretty undecided on where I fall on the issue of LLMs. Ugh, nothing in life can ever be simple. Sorry for jumping all over the place, lol. That’s why I would have been interested in Linus Torvalds’ opinion :)

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

That would be the logical conclusion, but I believe Debian uses the old version for years after it’s unsupported and might backport security fixes depending on how severe they are. Either way, I personally wouldn’t trust Debian or Ubuntu to properly fix security issues with a program (or in this case, programming language) that they do not actively develop or maintain themselves.

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

On Arch, I use ffmpegthumbnailer to accomplish this.

Kickass Women isn’t going to see this comment because this user is from lemmy.world, which has blocked my instance.

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

Cheers!

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

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?

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

It’s good to see you guys on Lemmy :)

I tested it a bit a few days ago, but I’ll see if I can give it a more rigorous go today. The ones I’ve found Mojeek to be weak in are bug strings that programs I’m working with spit out. Although I think I’ve had more luck in the past few months.

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

So if GNOME does something everyone else is not doing, they’re “fucking up”, but if they follow what someone else has done that you like, they’re just creating a “cheap copy”? How do they win?

Spectacle8011, 8 months ago

So you ditched and unethical mega corp that runs ads for a wanna be unethical mega corp that also mines your data and you’re happy about it? Oh boy the illusion.

What data mining is Canonical doing, exactly?

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

In case anyone was wondering what TorrentFreak thinks of this whole thing: torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries…

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.