leopold

leopold, 5 days ago

Is there any reason you need to switch other than the age of the last releases? Avidemux had its last release in 2022 and its last commit a week ago. For a piece of software with a fairly stable and unchanging set of features, that seems pretty reasonable to me. Avidemux still works fine on Linux and is still packaged by all of the large Linux distros, so I don’t see the problem. VirtualDub’s definitely dead, though.

leopold, 5 days ago

Why would Adobe do literally anything about CS6 in the year 2024 when they discontinued in 2013?

leopold, 5 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Holy shit, will people ever shut up about the name? The truth is that barely anyone actually gives a shit except FOSS zealots trying to come up with excuses for why GIMP wasn’t successful (or those belonging to the anti-GIMP circlejerk that’s surfaced as of late trying to come up with new nonsensical reasons to hate a random piece of FOSS). Outside of the English-speaking world, the amount of people who give a shit about GIMP’s name is precisely zero and the word gimp is almost exclusively associated with the program. Even inside of the English-speaking world, I see GIMP used to refer to the program more often than for anything else. The amount of people actually who actually care about the name is negligible and the amount of brand recognition that would be lost from a rename would significantly outweigh the benefits of possibly having a couple more schools think about maybe starting to use GIMP.

And the truth is that as far as FOSS GUI programs are concerned, GIMP has been tremendously successful. It’s easily among the most popular, alongside Blender, Firefox and LibreOffice. It is and always has been far more popular than Krita in both professional and non-professional contexts. I’ve seen it installed on the computers of both my secondary school and college, because it turns out school computer labs need image editors and they’re not going to pay for Photoshop licenses.

But it hasn’t been more successful than Photoshop. And Firefox hasn’t been more successful than Chrome. And LibreOffice hasn’t been more successful than MS Office. And Blender hasn’t been more successful than Maya. And Godot hasn’t been more successful than Unity. And I could go on. Because no single FOSS GUI program has achieved industry standard status. Though Blender has a pretty good shot at making it.

leopold, 5 days ago

IIRC the Krita people were working on redoing the text tool. Not sure if/when it’s going to be finished, though.

leopold, 7 days ago

Oh boy, Davinci? Don’t hold your breath, it’s super picky even with the more mature GPU drivers.

leopold, 7 days ago

Nah, a ton of Linux fans seem to shill hard for Apple for some reason.

leopold, 8 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Content blockers like uBlock use filter lists which list every single element that needs to be blocked across the entire web. I currently have nearly 700000 of these filters active. That is very far outside the scope of a simple script. Basically all ad blocking userscripts are site-specific and they still usually block significantly less than uBlock would on the same site. Also, userscripts are not safer than extensions.

leopold, 9 days ago

I wonder. The Steam Deck holds charge very well, but then another comment here says “Nothing with with a recent AMD gfx Card or APU will officially support S3”. Perhaps the Steam Deck uses hibernate? It launches pretty fast, but then maybe storing memory to the built-in SSD is fast enough. Or perhaps even if not officially supported the S3 in the Steam Deck’s APU still works well enough. Or perhaps the APU is older than I think it is.

leopold, 9 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

It’s not an unpopular opinion that Apple is the only one that does sleep right. It is an unpopular opinion that this is only possible because they have a complete walled garden and that open platforms are fucked, especially considering it is easy and common to install applications from outside the App Store on macOS. We used to have sleep figured out, that’s what S3 was. But then hardware vendors dropped it. So yes, drivers and hardware vendors are part of the problem. The Steam Deck is an example of an open platform where sleep works fine.

leopold, 9 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Most AUR packages that aren’t postfixed with “-bin” are compiled on your system. Most distro packages have AUR counterparts, but they’re usually git builds, so using them for every package you can will probably just break your system.

leopold, 12 days ago

eh, still beats Discord as far as I’m concerned

leopold, 13 days ago

The problem with gaming mode is how quickly it falls appart the moment you try to use it for something other than gaming. Something as simple as having more than one window is impossible under Gamescope. That’s pretty problematic when a toolkit decides to implement something as a stealth window, like GTK context menus. Qt doesn’t do this as much as GTK does so using Qt applications isn’t as problematic, but it’s still a pain. For instance, you’re extracting a file with Dolphin and a pop up window shows up to report progress, making you completely unable to access the main Dolphin window until the operation has been completed.

The best part is that SteamOS displays a little “Switch Windows” section under the “Exit game” button when you have multiple windows opened, which literally just doesn’t work and as far as I can tell never has. The only thing that menu does is show you the names of the opened windows and let you close them by pressing X. Switching windows, the thing the section is literally named after, doesn’t work and never has since I got a Steam Deck last year. You select a window, it gets highlighted in the menu and that’s it. Nothing else happens. It doesn’t switch focus or switch the window displayed by Gamescope, it does nothing.

Another thing that’s often problematic is that you can’t maximize windows. Say your app decides to open itself windowed, Gamescope is just going to blow that 480x360 window up to full screen and makes zero attempt to actually resize the window to fit the screen, so you’re stuck with a very blurry and zoomed-in window. The maximize button in apps with CSD does nothing, but other built-in means of resizing windows or achieving full screen do often work. But these built-in means often don’t exist, because applications expect to be running on a window manager that’s actually capable of managing windows.

And then there’s just all kinds of bugs. Say you open a game with a certain aspect ratio/resolution while also having apps with a different aspect ration/resolution open, you’ll often find that when going back to your app you can’t move your mouse outside the boundaries of the window for the game you just opened. Another thing I’ve seen with many games is that the view often gets shrunk to a tiny square in the center of the screen. There’s a lot more, but I’m sick of ranting about gaming mode.

My personal take is that SteamOS’s Big Picture/Gaming Mode shell sucks balls. It’s impossible to make most desktop apps work well in Gaming mode without bending over backwards to work around the myriad of issues it has (for the ones that can even be worked around) and since it’s closed source there’s nothing you can do about it. Thus, the best solution would be to develop a new Gamepad-centric open source shell to replace it. I also think rather than repurposing Plasma Mobile applications like Angelfish it would be better to design new ones that are truly designed for gamepads. Perhaps Plasma Big Picture could be used as a starting point. But it would be a really big undertaking and there probably aren’t enough devs interested right now.

leopold, 13 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

This has actually been the most positive reaction to a Firefox announcement I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve yet to find a piece of open source software users act more toxic towards than Firefox. It is impossible to find any Firefox-related announcement in recent years that’s received broadly positive feedback. For a long time, the top voted comment would always be someone demanding tab groups or vertical tabs. Now they’re adding those, which is probably why the reaction has been a bit more positive. But of course, AI and UI changes have become the new things to complain about.

leopold, 14 days ago

why did it insert and translate some random japanese phrase in the lede

leopold, 14 days ago

can’t find any client by that name

leopold, 14 days ago

You learn significantly more from actually fixing the problems with your install as opposed to just constantly starting over every time. Doing it just to get rid of a couple of GNOME packages is especially not worth the trouble, considering it’s a rather trivial task.

leopold, 14 days ago

No. all KDE config is in the home directory except maybe some SDDM stuff, which should be trivial to reconfigure if needed.

leopold, 14 days ago

?

leopold, 15 days ago

Enlightenment is easily the lightest full DE. It is my recommendation.

leopold, 15 days ago

The idea that a web application for screen recording is less bloat than OBS is absurd. As this was the idea presented by OP, atzanteol reacted by figuratively saying that the word no longer had any meaning. Given the context, this was quite clearly not an attempt to downplay the effects or severity of software bloat, but simply a figurative use of the phrase meant to point out how badly the word bloat had been misused. You completely misinterpreted their comment. Then, when this was pointed out to you, you proceeded to do the Reddit thing of mockingly editing your original downvoted comment, successfully making an ass out of yourself.