• 0 posts
  • 29 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • I came up using primarily Fluxbox and XFCE, and could tolerate Gnome 2. Had a love/hate relationship with Gnome 3 for awhile. Never really liked any version of KDE, but…

    I used Cosmic for about a year, just switched to KDE last weekend. For me, Cosmic is the first Wayland DE to hit that sweet spot of lightweight window manager feel, with a few conveniences like integrated panels, notification bus (which is bidirectional, unlike KDE’s), small application suite, and some useful applets. I’m always tempted to go back and roll my own with LabWC and god knows what at this point, because it’s not quite what I want ideally, but it’s quite good.

    It’s still a bit buggy, recently I started having an issue where windows would lose their position and size after minimizing and restoring. I’ve long had that issue after unlock. Others feel differently, but tiling has never been great for me, I hope they rework it, or introduce more customizable snapping without the rigidity of full tiling.

    But it’s lightweight and clean, fairly customizable (compared to Gnome, not KDE), and generally sane. We’ll see how Budgie and XFCE come along on Wayland, they both have a far more mature DE as a whole, but Cosmic does have a head start on Wayland, and has the benefit of being a fresh code base.

    I’m hoping Cosmic, along with the lightweight DE ports (?) to Wayland, kick start development of more lighter weight, non-DE-centric applications with native Wayland support.

  • I think they care about their customers just about as much as they care about making money, and aside from GOG, the competition simply does not. It’s a pretty good demonstration to how capitalism has failed us, to be honest, because any of those competitors would have been able to compete if they hadn’t treated their customers like shit.

  • I don’t think it’s the noise cancelling, I think it’s that headset manufacturers think gamers all want big boomy bass. My Sennheiser Momentum 4 have noise cancelling, and aren’t boomy in the slightest.

    I also don’t think that it’s the closed back, though closed back are certainly capable of better bass than open back. My Audeze Maxwell also do not have boomy bass, and the Momentums are also closed back.

    All that said, I agree that the sound quality of most gaming headsets is a mess, and I also prefer open back headphones. I don’t want to deal with cables anymore, though, so I’m hopeful that we start getting some nice open back headphones and headsets.

  • I love my Audeze Maxwell. I use it to listen to music all day while I work, and jump on calls throughout the day. It has excellent sound quality, and a built in mic that works very well. When there’s background noise, I pop in the boom mic and that mic’s noise cancellation is great. It also provides a little better clarity.

    There’s both a 2.4ghz wireless dongle (which I plug into my monitor), bluetooth (which I use with my phone using LDAC), USB, and 3.5mm connectivity.

    The battery life is excellent. I charge it weekly, and I really don’t need to.

    They offer an Xbox and Playstation version. The Xbox version comes with an Atmos license, the Playstation version supports Tempest 3D sound.

    The sizing adjustments aren’t great, there’s no telescoping of the ear cups. It just has a sling with three adjustments, by popping it into three different sets of screw holes. It’s ok, but not great, and it’s not the kind of thing you want to move back and forth, say, if you wear hats sometimes, because those holes will wear out. You aren’t supposed to remove the screws.

    It’s also closed back, which is not my preference. I don’t have background noise, I don’t care about isolation. I prefer the sound of open backs, and they also provide more spatial awareness if you want to place footsteps.

    Also, being closed back, and having a not so great ear pad material, they get fairly toasty. There are third party ear pads that improve upon this, but you can only do so much with a closed back can.

  • Oh trust me, I’ve been called plenty of things, and have hurt for a great deal of my life as a result. I’ve also said awful things, and hurt even more for that.

    I just think that separating people from parts of their language is more akin to a cultural lobotomy than anything else. Taking aspects of language from someone who does not truly understand why, will surely be jarring, and lead to negative reactions more often than not. I don’t think this is going to have a long term positive effect, unless we take the slow road of working to understand each other, and truly embrace all diversity. If we condemn those who hurt us, it only acts to drive more of a wedge through our society.

    Telling someone that their actions which are fundamental to their being are hurtful to you, and they need to change, is in fact hurtful to them. It’s not their fault how they were raised, and how their experiences have shaped them, no matter how horrible someone might be. But if we embrace the diversity they add to society, and support them where we can, they just might come to see it for themselves, and strive to be better.

    Only the individual can decide to change themself for the better. And even then, it’s a life long journey, and often only minimal changes are possible. So, we should be celebrating the efforts they put forth, not condemning them for the things they don’t have the capacity to change.

  • My major problem is that our culture and history are interwoven with language. An attack on offensive language could very well, maybe unintentionally, disconnect us further from our culture and history. Not all of that history and culture is great, but even then, we need to stay connected so that we can continue to learn from it for as many generations as possible.

    We live in a world where we’ve been trading in culture for convenience. Now we have some burning books and attacking change. On the other side, we have others who are attacking anything remotely offensive to them, attempting to banish it. The casualty of this war will be the little we have left of our cultural traditions.

  • I really don’t see the problem with honesty in product marketing, aside from the fact that it should be 100% and not limited to artificial meat products. That said, a ban doesn’t seem like the best idea, because it limits your ability to describe the product. How do you describe artificial spare ribs concisely, without being able to say the words “spare” and “ribs” together?

    And just because artificial meat isn’t indistinguishable from the real thing at the moment doesn’t mean:

    1. Manufacturers aren’t dressing up the packaging in a way that makes it difficult to tell the difference. And not even necessarily in order to be deceitful, but rather to make it look appealing, and get more people to try it.
    2. When you’re tired, and hungry, and just want to get back home from a shopping trip, you accidentally choose the wrong package because the identifiers don’t stand out sufficiently. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally bought something with artificial sweetener, after staring right at the two options, and registering that I don’t want the one.

    I wish we could just get past the loud, over the top design language of literally everything. Every time I leave the house, it’s an assault on my senses, everywhere I turn.