I have to admit, when it comes to new developments in the Linux world, I tend to live under a rock … never switched to Wayland, not because I have any ideological reservations, but because my favorite WM (a minimalist WM developed by a friend of mine) is available only for Xorg.

I had heard about NixOS before, but until I stumbled upon this thread, I didn’t have a good understanding about what an atomic distro is. Now that I have a bit of an understanding, I guess I can only repeat what others said before, it seems to be solving a problem that I don’t have. I’ve been using rolling release distros for a very long time (at first Gentoo, like, 15 or more years ago, but Arch (btw) for over a decade now, with occasional, typically short stints in Debian-based distros), and the amount of problems caused by updates has been negligible for the last decade (Gentoo overlays 15 years ago could be a pain, for sure).

It does sometimes bother me that my OS config seems to so … static these days, but then again I have so many things going on in life on that I don’t feel a huge need to prioritize changing an OS that feels blazingly fast to use, stable, minimalist, and basically checks all the boxes. It just became my high-productivity comfort zone.

Hmm my first linux distro was Suse 5.x that came on 5 CDs (i think it was 1998) … can’t say I used it much, I had weird German ISDN Internet at the time and the PPPoverWhatever (forgot the exact name) just didn’t wanna work. Making music wasn’t really feasible at the time. It mostly lay dormant. I slowly climbed the learning curve and switched to Linux full-time in the mid-2000s, when a lot more things were possible …

My first ever smartphone (in 2015) was a BQ Aquaris 4.5 Ubuntu Edition that came with Ubuntu Phone pre-installed … a lightweight, 4.5" smartphone … there wasn’t much of an app ecosystem at the time but I didn’t miss it because up to that date I used a dumb phone, and the smartphone allowed me to do eMail and use a browser, which was enough for me.

At some point I accidentially dropped it on a hard floor and it broke, and I was quite unhappy that the company didn’t continue that line :(

I guess it depends a lot on what you think of as “an alternative”. I’m really happy using FOSS because I generally try to find a different angle on things, and it allows me to do that.

Luckily I’m not dependent on using common office software, the few spreadsheet tasks that I need can be done with online tools, either open or proprietary. For documents I usually use markdown and pandoc. For music making, I use my own software or Ardour for mastering, etc. For modeling and 3D printing I started using OpenSCAD.

There’s also many things that proprietary software just can’t do. Like, my day-to-day workflow is based on a minimalist approach to computing, with the most common operations being very easy to perform (browser, editor, terminal) … MacOS is always hailed for their great UI but honestly, it seems slow and clunky to me even though I used it daily for a long time …

Second this, I’ve tried TinkerCAD before and the whole Idea of CSG started to make sense, and then I found that OpenSCAD does something very similar, just with code … I find it very satisfying … I guess if you’re making highly asymmetrical, organic shapes, you might have some puzzles to solve … but I’m mostly making loudspeakers, so basically boxed with holes, and it’s not a huge problem.

Hmm I think the issue is that Ardour is more focused on recording than electronic music production … There’s more intuitive DAWs out there but I suppose in terms of what it can do it doesn’t have to stand back … compared to ProTools I’d say it’s still quite intuitive (not a high bar for sure).

hmm I might be biased because I’m a programmer by trade, and even make music with code, so describing things as code is pretty natural to me … but I once I got the hang of it I found it easier than TinkerCAD in some sense, because there I would always get lost in the stack of objects … and FreeCAD … well, I couldn’t even get a basic box designed … 😅

Yes :)

OBS for streaming is amazing.

Ardour is a pretty amazing DAW that can compete with proprietary ones. There’re also loads of FOSS plugins out there that don’t have to hide behind the commercial ones. My favorites are the Calf Plugins and the Luftikus EQ for mastering. Helm and Yoshimi are great synths. Pure Data is lightweight and can compete with MaxMSP.

Krita has already been mentioned.

But, I think what strikes me most is that there’s a lot of FLOSS software out there that just doesn’t have direct proprietary counterpart. Small command-line tools like FFMPEG or ImageMagick. Linux as an customizable OS. Programming Languages to make music like SuperCollider. I never learned how to use proprietary CAD software but recently got into OpenSCAD to model some things and it’s really fun once you get the hang of it. I don’t do this professionally so there’s no need for me to learn Fusion360.

Some have a bit of a learning curve but are all the more satisfying to use once you get into them. People are just too stuck in their “industry standard” (which really just means “the most common product that has been around the longest”), but if you’re not bound to that, there’s just a huge number of programs out there that allow you to do amazing things. That to me is the beauty of FLOSS.

An FreeCAD hab ich mich auch schon mehrfach aufgehängt … selbst einfachste Dinge erscheinen da sehr kompliziert, und ich hatte bisher nie den großen Durchbruch …

Wollte einen kleinen Lautsprecher 3D-drucken, und in der Zeit, die ich FreeCAD-Tutorials studiert hatte, hatte ich mit TinkerCAD schon zwei Iterationen des Prototyps in der Hand … und sogar Spaß dabei … klar ist TinkerCAD nicht vergleichbar mit professionellem CAD, aber ich wollte ja auch nur 'n Kiste mit Löchern drin machen … dafür ist ‘n volles CAD-Programm eh’ overkill …

Halbwegs intuitives CAD Ist tatsächlich noch 'ne große Lücke im FLOSS-Universum …

Sprachkritik in allen Ehren aber so scharf abgegrenzt sind die Begriffe, so scheint es mir, dann doch nicht?

Auch im Englischen spricht man gelegentlich von “social housing” (“charitable housing” hab ich noch nie gehört), “social services”, “social security” usw … während man im Deutschen auch von der “sozialen Ordnung” spricht …

Insofern passt “soziale Medien” schon als Übersetzung, würde das nicht als “false friend” bezeichnen, beide Bedeutungen kommen in beiden Sprachen vor …

Ah, gut zu wissen, aber das konnte ich der Beschreibung der Optionen damals nicht entnehmen.

Ich meine mich zu erinnern, das es in dem Client, den ich zum Eröffnen des Raumes genutzt habe, eine “people with the link can join” Option gab, die es aber in Element irgendwie nicht gab? Und die, wie schon gesagt, auch nicht funktioniert hat …

Hab vor ein paar Monaten eine neue Gruppe aufmachen wollen, und dachte mir, warum nicht Matrix?

Invite Links konnte ich zwar generieren, haben aber nicht funktioniert, man musste alle Leute manuell hinzufügen.

Ich dachte mir, Verschlüsselung, warum nicht? Dann konnte aber zunächst mal keiner die Nachrichten sehen (das Problem wurde hier im Thread schon erwähnt), und ich musste selber meinen eigenen Account über ein anderes Gerät verifizieren.

Der Client, den ich auf’m Telefon installiert hab, kann push-notifications nur über Umwege …

Ausserdem haben die unterschiedlichen Clients unterschiedliche Optionen angezeigt, die scheinbar auch nicht ganz kompatibel sind?

Alles sehr verwirrend, und man kann scheinbar einiges falsch machen (und das sage ich als studierter Informatiker, der steile Lernkurven bestimmt nicht scheut).

Letztlich ist die Gruppe schnell eingeschlafen, und ich hab das Gefühl, die Wahl von Matrix hat da durchaus ihren Anteil dran, weil’s umständlich und nervig ist.

Seitdem ist’s eher so auf der “ich guck in 3 Jahren nochmal, ob’s dann rundläuft”-Liste

Wobei sich die Studie ja auf “Filter Ventilation” bezieht, also die kleinen Löcher im Filter, die dem inhalierten Rauch mehr Luft hinzufügen …

Nicht das das Selbstgedrehte mit dichtem Papier jetzt besser macht, oder Zigaretten allgemein.

Finde es aber interessant, das eine scheinbar kleine Änderung im Design da tatsächlich einen Effekt zeigt.

For whatever reason, many of the editors mentioned here never worked for me … like OpenShot, ShotCut or PiTiVi were really unstable the last time I tried (might be a distro or DE thing). Also I found it hard to cut precisely when they worked. Lightworks, Da Vinci, Cinelerra, I had a hard time getting them to run. Maybe that changed in the meantime.

I ultimately stuck with Kdenlive, which is stable enough and allows for reasonably precise cutting.

Hehe, back in the days I was in a similar situation, and I gave a harddisk to a friend who had a more powerful PC, so he could cross-compile everything onto the harddisk. Sneaker-network compilation …

Hmm I get your point, but on the other hand, I suppose nowadays many people are just used to look for a niche community … and finding it. So it’s not a huge surprise if the first reaction is disappointment when you don’t find anything like it or just an empty community.

Well, but that basically means I’d have to rely on different platforms if I want to post and discuss, say, niche music that’d just be buried immediately in the usual “popular” music communities (that often have a slightly rockist slant).

Even on reddit, the ambient music or IDM communities are fairly small.

Yes, and not just that … like, making sure to keep the cursor away from the images all the time because hovering over an image immediately plays some trailer including audio.

Generally, playing media elements without explicit triggers by the user is annoying, but this is the worst.

Like, who thought this was a good idea?

They only work with the windows closed, unfortunately … which, depending where you live, means you’d also need AC, which might spike up your electricity bill, etc …