My wife’s laptop has always had those lovely features with Win10. She’ll be doing normal Word stuff, some browser tabs open, and suddenly Windows decides to do something in the background, fans kick on high, even her mouse becomes sluggish. I had hoped that moving her to an SSD and 64GB(!) of memory would remove any of that, but nope, just Windows being Windows. Meanwhile, I have btop open all the time on my Linux machine, and my memory and CPU are always where I’d expect them to be (except for Snap stuff, I need to do a bit of extraction there for the rest of my normal apps).
Rhaedas
There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.
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- 82 comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024
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Audacious isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than the others that I tried. Had been using VLC forever in WIndows, but for whatever reason I kept running into issues that I couldn’t resolve, so began a search for alternatives.
The only huge issue I have is when I add more songs to my music directory, I can’t refresh the existing playlist. I have to delete and add the directory again. Don’t do it a lot, so it’s more inconvenience, and everything else works so much better than other alternatives did.
I will concede only in the fact that it made me look like a miracle worker to my parents when I “fixed” their mouse that had stopped working with my magic.
On the other hand, the Christmas I gave them an LED mouse was peak level for all of us.
Wired vs. wireless is whatever works for you, but no one misses balled mice. No one.
I actually do this. I have a small power bank I keep the mouse hooked up to, and when it falls low enough it taps into it. Every few weeks or even a month I recharge the bank up. But wires being a problem will depend on your setup and desk real estate. This doesn’t bother me, but having a wired keyboard would lose some space, so I’m glad for my wireless there. And that’s even less of a hassle, as it’s still running off the original batteries it came with years (and years!) ago. Makes sense, there is very little power usage there being a boring old Logitech non-backlit keyboard.
- 4 months
I love how people fight over what’s the better editor. I just use whatever makes sense for the time, and it’s not always the same one. But if you’re happy with just one of them and can make it work for you in any situation, then you do you. That’s the point of Linux, or so I thought.
- 5 months
Default? I think the first thing I did once I settled down with my current setup was find a background of my own liking, not something curated. And it’s all mine; no one else has it.
For those that care, all zero of you, it’s a bunch of frames from a cool star field animation, timed to rotate to the next every few seconds or so. Because I could not find anything that would simply play a video as a background, I made something that worked. If that’s not Linux level, I don’t know what is.
“I’ll remember THAT, it’s such a trivial thing.”
WIndows will install it. Running it correctly… different story.
I’ve used VLC in WIndows forever, but it started giving me glitchy behavior in Ubuntu. Tried to upgrade to see if it was an old version/Snap thing, got frustrated with it not working. So I went through all the lists of Linux players, tried most of them. I like Audacious. It’s not perfect, but it works well, and I can deal with some of the minor things that are more preferences than problems. That’s all I wanted.
The early ones were easier. The one I had needed to do some mess with a grounding screw and some other stuff that I forgot (there are websites dedicated to the procedure guidelines and which requires what), and like you say, it’s not going to be able to do much anyway. Such a contrast with throwing Kubuntu on an old MacBook, and 10 minutes later it was better than new.
It’s true that most people just want instant on functionality with no need for major changes beyond colors and backgrounds. Totally fine too, for many that’s all they need. But as a “power user”, which would mean anyone that needs more than a portable browser, I was very disappointed to find that’s all that ChromeOS is (twas a used one in the family). And then when I researched putting actual Linux on it so it could do more… good god they locked that shit down hard. Not even worth that rabbit hole. And that was the intent of Google.
It also means the OS is in total control of the things it’s running. This goes for running programs, shutting down, and crashing. The only crashes I have on my Linux are when I use up memory, and I’m still convinced that even though everything looks seized up, if I left it for hours or days it would probably end up resolving itself. I’ve had some cases where the OS saw the program wasn’t going in a good direction fast enough and killed it.
- 5 months
Maintained, a bit slow on the updating sometimes, as I mentioned. But a big factor for going with Ubuntu was if you’re looking at software out in the wild, chances are they’ll have either an Ubuntu version or something that will work with it. I’m not a fan of compiling stuff (although maybe with more Linux exposure that will change too).
In hindsight that’s probably not a great reason, after all it’s why Microsoft dominated the field for so long.
- 5 months
Being supportive of Ubuntu seems to be a minority, but I picked it over others simply because it felt more like what I wanted from the Debian lines. And I haven’t had any major issues at all. The main project I’ve got ahead of me is to remove Snap, as I see that’s a problem, mainly due to updates being so far behind (plus I’m pretty sure it’s a resource hog, I can see it there in Btop all the time). I’ve had several apps that I originally used Snap (I mean, it’s right there, why not) to find the version is old and missing newer features. So I just find the Apt or deb version, or even AppImage, and I’m back running. The OS itself is solid, and I so, so love just booting up and going within seconds, as well as shutting down right away. Not the classic Windows “hang”.
But I get that some people run into incompatibilities sometimes with hardware, so you do have to look around and find what works best for you. An example of mine on that was an old MacBook I had that simply was stuck since the OS isn’t supported anymore. So I put Kubuntu on it (since it needed a light OS), and it works fine for what it is.
That’s assuming Copilot could form a coherent report to send back to them.
I’ll be glad to give more info. I’m not sure where to find the logs to tell you what VLC is doing. See my other comment on the comparison of a browser - I want it to use VLC as if I was browsing websites where it just loads into the existing window.
I’m trying to get any new video I click on to play in the existing instance of VLC after running a first video. Not in a new instance. If VLC is open no other video will ever use that instance. It’s like if you load a new webpage in a browser but have to either close the existing browser window first or load into a new tab or window, and I find it difficult to believe that’s an accepted behavior.
Just one layer removed from the problem.
“WTF does this comment even mean?”