Prophet Zarquon

Haven’t looked at MX Linux before, thanks for the info!

Like I said, I really can’t care much about window managers at this point. Mostly, I’m tired of having multiple window managers installed after just a few app installs. If I start out with Gnome\Plasma, I’ll surely end up wanting some apps that have only been made for KDE, & vice versa. Never once have I seen a Linux machine that had all the apps I’d want, using just one window manager.

I suppose most apps could be compiled from source to run on one or the other, but alternative compiles have invariably been a hassle to me…

Since I end up needing at least two window managers installed anyway & they keep changing generations about 10x as often as I change machines, it’s pointless for me to have a preference. The best window manager is whichever one each developer of each app happened to use?!?

Hahahah, very!

I have still yet to see any other media library handle so many tens of thousands of audio files of varying encoding & naming conventions, so smoothly; “Media Monkey” etc were oft recommended but never once up to the task. Until just a few years ago, it was remarkably convenient for ripping a CD, too; correct metadata & all.

For a short while, WMP was to music files, as Calibre is to ebooks.

Same.

I knew people with NiMh batteries for their RC cars\planes\boats, but the first time I ever saw NiMh AAs, was in a GameGear.

Yeah, Sony lost me when they broke my Linux install and degraded the DVD playback functions, within six months of me buying my PS2. Similarly, the last “good” smartphone I had, was the Palm Treo (650p\680p\Centro); since then, I’ve never had a single phone that granted direct hardware access & allowed unloading/sideloading the OS by default.

Manufacturers want deep control these days; way beyond mere root permissions.

Likewise… I haven’t bought a game on optical media since the Wii.

Hm… I’ve never bought PC software on a disc…!?

And yet I have all these old Windows & Office & game discs… Man, hoarding tech is a weird habit.

Man, I hear “disc drive” & I think “hard disc drive”. I’ve connected optical drives when USB boot wasn’t supported, but the last time I voluntarily used a disc drive was to test an M-Data disc burned to silicon. But yeah, none of these new devices have a HDD or optical (or floppy disk, for that matter).

Those are not discs.

Less “not optimized”, & more “not supported”; IE, accelerations that don’t turn on, because companies like Intel, Broadcom, Samsung, & NVidia, have a long history of only giving preferred partner devteams, prerelease hardware access, much less any peeks at unobfuscated firmware.

Weird: I just noticed that I have seekbar preview on my desktop install of VLC, but not mobile. Now I want to compare to the Win version as well, because I’m noticing some menus look different than I remember.

Honestly, I install VLC just to snag the file-associations away from the WMP / Windows Video apps, because they remain insecure by default.

No. I’m open to suggestions.

If I had to install right now, it would be Debian, just out of familiarity.

Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, even Kali are fundamentally changed from when I last tried them.

Linux window managers change more often than I need to reinstall; I get really tired of picking a distro based largely on its choice of window manager, just to end up with Gnome installed anyway after a few packages fetch their dependencies.

The other nice thing about running vanilla Debian (or Ubuntu) is that at least some of the documentation for some apps, will be applicable!?

I feel like you replied to someone else’s comment?
Gimp feels just like Photoshop before Creative Suite editions…
Everything that’s not MS Paint, feels like a huge upgrade to me. On Windows, I open Paint.NET as often as any other image editor, just because I don’t need more than that for most copy\paste\crop\color tasks.

I haven’t done any illustration or background\logo art in about 20 years. I’m not even sure what features are considered most defining, for a good image editor these days?

That would be more steps than just setting the hotkeys in VLC… I haven’t really had any reason to install MPC in… wow, over a decade? VLC opens everything & works with my remotes, casting, etc.

Godot is not bad for 2D & 2.5D, & it’s a lot better at true 3D than it used to be, but as far as speedy usability, I’d compare it to UnrealEd 2.1 in many ways.

I really think the main reason anyone uses Godot, is the licensing & cross-platform support.

If Unreal 5.1 would run at all on any of my machines, I couldn’t even really begin to make any kind of objective comparison between it & Godot; it’s like the difference between having a bunch of clever hand-tools, versus having a bunch of really well-made power-tools.

Try making a mountainous landscape, sprinkle a handful of different trees, then carve out a tunnel that loops under itself with a ledge overhead. Anyone proficient with both the Godot & Unreal toolsets, seems to get good (& stable) results in moments using Unreal compared to minutes or hours, using Godot. Unreal’s interface & free assets have set such a high standard for so long, that I find Blender is the only thing I could compare it to, but Unreal’s workflows make Blender look like Maya.

The fact that no one in these comments, seems to have had a really decent FOSS IDE \ engine to recommend for 3D game development, makes me sad.

Like, Unreal is pretty great, but it’s not FOSS (& won’t run on any of my machines anyway).

Is there anything FOSS that really streamlines 3D game development?
(I want to say Vulkan but I feel like that’s some sort of perennial “gotcha!” joke, at this point?)

Shotcut crashes unexpectedly, on all the machines I’ve tried it on. Not frequently though, & it was so good I used it anyway.

I’m pretty sure that the masking features of OBS (potentially even VLC) could be paired with a camera aimed at the display, to crop interlopers out of a projected image, so that they don’t get painted\blinded with projected light. Very niche utility, but I’m not aware of any hardware-only solutions for it, & its potentially show\life-saving

Yes, OnlyOffice has been my choice for a while now; not that I need it much anymore, thankfully

The number of times I’ve needed to do something, then realized VLC already did it… Wow

Even had use for the video wall options, a few times.