eugenia

eugenia, 3 hours ago

I like best Gnome with modifications, not vanilla. A permanent dock as per “Dash2Dock Animated”, and the “Hide Top Bar” extension, so when an app gets maximized, both the top bar and the dock get out of the way. Also, disabling tap-and-drag via dconf (I really don’t understand why this is enabled by default on most Linux DEs, it’s extremely bad for usability), and enabling the min/max/close buttons via Gnome Tweaks. Other tweaks I like is the Bibata Modern Ice mouse cursor, and the Faenza icon theme. The rest are ok by default for the most part. It’s better than MacOS for me.

Second best gotta be Cinnamon, using the Cinnamenu menu extension, not the default menu. Overall, they’ve thought of almost everything building this DE and its settings. For those who want the best “Windows” could ever be, Cinnamon it is.

Third is XFce. It’s overall good, but it has some things that trigger me: no user admin app, no ability to turn off tap-and-drag (it just doesn’t turn off no matter what you try), and on Debian at least, the machine doesn’t go to sleep without asking for password (requires a policy-kit manual change). Its biggest advantage is that it’s lightweight and I use it as lot for old machines.

I find the rest under-par. I don’t like KDE, and I have thought long and hard why I don’t. It’s not how KDE is structured or works. KDE in fact is fine as a DE! Very powerful. It’s the Qt toolkit that bothers me. When an app loads, it kind of loads in chunks. It doesn’t blast everything rendered in the screen to feel smooth and modern, it kind of renders it as it reads it. And this just bothers me in a UI more than anything. Another thing I dislike is the long right-click menu on the desktop (same for Cinnamon btw).

MATE is nice but it’s just buggy. You setup your panels one way, you logout, you login back again, and the items have changed position. Fully reproducible for me under many different distros. Very, very annoying.

LXDE/LXQT, Budgie, etc, are not as developed as I liked them to be.

eugenia, 2 days ago

With 8 GB of RAM and 5500 CPU passmark points, that’s a good laptop for Linux Mint. Download their “edge” version of Mint, so you get the latest kernel (so it has more chances of supporting 100% that laptop).

eugenia, 2 days ago

KDEnLive is a good “editor” for simpler projects, but not a good video editing “suite”. It comes nowhere near Resolve’s color grading ability, or even audio editing ability these days. And it has no compositing ability at all. In fact, except Natron on Linux (that gets updated once every 2-3 years with just bug fixes and not many features), there’s nothing about compositing. Blender’s compositing is unusable btw.

eugenia, 2 days ago

When it comes to 2D CAD/CAM, then QCad is the best. They have a GPL version, but their commercial version has a lot more features, like importing/exporting most Autocad files, and CAM functionality. For just $40 bucks, it’s worth every penny. The only disadvantage it has is that it can’t ever have an ARM version, because the plugin they use for Autocad files is licensed, and it only exists for x86 afaik.

eugenia, 2 days ago

You misunderstand the word “editing” in this case. It’s not a matter of adding a few plugins and cutting audio. It’s a matter of having the tools to normalize human voice in a way that it’s expected in a movie, or to have automation about it, or envelopes that tracks the volume and fixes it for you. That’s the stuff that neither audacity nor kdenlive has, because they’re very specific to the movie industry. They have more generic plugins instead.

eugenia, 2 days ago

That’s mostly due to the difference in recording equipment rather than editing.

eugenia, 6 days ago

The sad thing about this is that 90% of the skins available for WinAmp since then are gone. You can’t find them to download them anymore.