I set up Alpine to read my Gmail last summer, and while the nostalgia hit was nice, the browser version was more responsive and useful, cap I went back to that.

If you’re interested in something that doesn’t even exist, and should be more-or-less straightforward:

Music/podcast app that will accept VST plugins (there are many FOSS ones, as well as non-FOSS ones) so that we can compress/limit the sound range on podcasts while in the car. Or even a built-in compressor/limiter that’s based on FOSS compressors.

I was listening to a hysterical podcast episode between three people, but one of mics was way louder than the other two. I had to take it into Pro Tools and fix it myself before listening to it.

There are apps that allow EQ, but none that do actual compression, from what I can tell.

While I don’t have personal experience with this, I did find this from the bad website:

Install pipewire-jack and use JACK audio device in Reaper. Also, yes make sure that wireplumber is installed.

Link to post.

Gentoo. Not an Arch fork, and uses OpenRC by default. I use it and love it. Portage is the best package manager out there, imo.

You can still get binaries of the really annoying things to compile, like Firefox. Otherwise, it’s all source-based.

I’d advise installing it in a VM or on a spare computer first to get your hands around what it is.

In your case, you’ll want to specify the following flags in you makefile:

OpenRC, -systemd

You’ll add a bunch of others in there too depending on architecture and personal priorities.

Follow the handbook. https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/

There’s also Calculate Linux, which is basically Gentoo with a graphical front end, but I think it’s Intel only. CLI is more fun anyway.

Debian Stable or Testing. Runs on anything, and Stable - especially - will not let you down. Ubintu, Elementary and dozens of others are downstream of Debian. Bookworm is a great experience, so why not go to the source?

“Testing” is described as containing packages that are still in the queue to be accepted into Stable.

“Unstable” branch is all the newest stuff, whether it works or not.

If you’re in school for anything computer-related, once you’ve settled on a distro, you could also start playing with Gentoo.

Yup - vst is OS-agnostic.

I work in music and audio post, and everyone I work with would love to be able to use Reaper (or Logic, or Nuendo) instead of Pro Tools, if Pro Tools didn’t have the post industry completely captured in the US.

Reaper is a world-class product, and the team could easily charge 10x as much for the pro licenses, and get it. Stick with Reaper.

There are alternative drum triggers for Linux, I’m sure. Even SPL makes a drum exchanger. There’s got to be one out there.

VMR shouldn’t be a problem to run, I just don’t know what the install process would look like.

I’m pretty sure Airwindows plugs are Linux compatible, probably Audio Obsession too.

In any case, Reaper’s stock plugins are awesome. My only real complaint about them is the EQ cramping in the hi-end, which is typical for stock plugins.

Alpine is great for VM and containers… Light on resources because of musl.

Portage

Gentoo is more about the fun of building a Linux distro that is perfectly tailored to your hardware and personal preferences. Sometimes you’ll see a performance increase of 0.01%, sometimes 25%+. Just depends on a lot of different things.

The build times are really only a consideration on first or second install of the OS. And even with your first install, you’ll probably want to start with the pre-built options, and then gradually move away from that to compiling more and more of your own system.

There are a couple apps like Firefox that also have pre-compiled binaries available for Gentoo, so no waiting there. Of course, there’s also Flatpak for desktop-based apps.

Otherwise, you just compile what you want, when you want. And you can tell Portage how much in terms of cores/threads/resources it gets to use when compiling, so that it can just run in the background while you’re doing your normal thing (or scheduled for when You’re not using your machine).

Portage is also a phenomenal package manager, and can track and satisfy all dependencies for you as-needed. You can also specify what elements of your system to keep on stable, vs testing, etc. It’s not like Slackware.

Gentoo is what was used to build ChromeOS, along with many other distros. It’s as complex/simple, secure/insecure, private/un-private, latest-and-greatest/LTS as you tell it to be. You can choose to update things continuously in the background, or just once a week overnight, or on any other schedule that you want.

You’ll probably learn some new things in the course of installing it, but follow the handbook to the letter, avail yourself of the community, and be patient to start with. It works for me, and I like it, but there are plenty of excellent pre-cooked distros that are also great. I’m just a tinkerer by nature, and enjoy getting increasingly more out of my machines over time.

Instead of “use anything” you could put in “Debian.”

It was great when Ohlmeyer went on Colbert Report and got mocked for saying NBC was going to lose money on the Winter Olympics. Colbert did a fund drive to help, and presented him with a giant check for like $5.08

It’s also great that he’s been dead since 2017. Conan was right when he called him one of the silverback gorillas running TV.

It’s one of the better -isms currently available.

Workers owning the means of production is the way it should be. Until we can mature further.

Counting on cultural stasis will always result in disappointment. Luckily, neither culture nor disappointment are permanent.

In a vacuum, sure, hydrogen for personal vehicles is great. In reality, though, you’re down at about 30% efficiency between the H2 geting extracted from wherever, and you gassing up your car.

Additionally, if more than 5% of that H2 escapes into the atmosphere at any time, it actually does more damage to the planet than fossil fuels, by preoccupying the hydroxyl radicals in the sky that would otherwise be breaking down greenhouse gases.

Add on to that, that if I actually had to pay for hydrogen fuel, it would cost me 6x as much per mile to run my Hyundai Nexo than a Prius. H2 in SoCal is currently $36/kg at the pump, having doubled or nearly tripled in price in the last 18 months. (Somehow, in Korea it’s only $2/kg.)

H2 fuel cell tech has its place as a fuel (but not in combustion engines like BMW is trying to do though… that’s just a farce). Trucks/long-haul vehicles, planes, ships all would be better off running H2. It fuels up fast, is way lighter than any battery, and is pretty darn energy dense. But for around-town driving, BEVs right now are just a much better option. Their problem is heavy batteries and comparatively longer fueling time than gasoline/hydrogen.

Fossil fuels are just amazingly energy dense, and we’re not going to replace them 1:1 any time soon. Every alternative involves massive tradeoffs.

Source: I own a 2022 Hyundai Nexo hydrogen SUV. Love it as a car, but most of the H2 fueling stations are broken down half the time (you need to check an app to see which one, if any, are currently working), and the price of the fuel in the US is no longer viable. When my free fuel card expires in 2025, I’ll be getting either a BEV or PHEV. Lucid or Polaris are looking nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Most of them, but I’m just tired.

Can it export EDLs or FCP-compatible XMLs for your audio team?

Reaper can go toe-to-toe with any DAW, including Pro Tools.

I work in audio for film and television, and we would all drop Pro Tools and switch to Logic/Nuendo/Studio One/Reaper if Avid didn’t have a legacy stranglehold on the Audio Post industry.