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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Most Adobe tools don’t have any good free alternatives even for home use.

    Yep. Lightroom is the one piece of software I tolerate paying a subscription for. Alternatives do exist, but they all suffer from the typical FOSS problem of never having had a designer look at them and help them build UI that’s meant to be used by humans.

    I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to learn Darktable, and at the end I still couldn’t arrive to the same results I could in Lightroom by watching a 5 minutes tutorial and adjusting a few sliders. Not to mention that searching for a few of the issues I had led me to a bunch of threads of people complaining about the exact same issues only to be met by a developer telling them “if you don’t like the UI use another tool”.


  • And it’s not like the output is saved for the next time; you need to do it every time.

    You can cache transcoded content in Jellyfin. So use a large enough cache and you basically only have to transcode once for every resolution. It’s easier for me to set up transcoding than it would be to manually figure out which resolutions I’ll prefer having around and transcoding them. Most of my stuff exists in 1080p, with 4k files for stuff I REALLY like, but I sometimes find myself watching on very low resolutions on my phone when away because I have pretty limited data.

    I find that in a few movies the 4K versions have a generally better image quality and are worth it even if you are sitting far away or not watching the content in 4K resolution at all. But like you, I only keep around 4k files for stuff I really like.

    EDIT: I’ve also run into problems with codecs on other people’s devices when not transcoding. I could keep my files in whatever the most compatible codec is nowadays but having the ability to transcode on the spot is easier.






  • He was in the opensuse board of directors at some point I think. I knew him from his Youtube channel that talked about Linux and related topics, it was fairly popular in the Linux community for a while. I mostly watched it for Linux related news and technical opinions. A bit after he left that position, he started occasionally mentioning how now that he wasn’t representing opensuse anymore he could finally “speak freely”. That’s when the channel started taking a weird turn.

    At first he started going on weird political tangents while doing the whole “I don’t talk about politics” thing. Some videos started popping up where he would attack some person or organization for what seemed to be mostly political reasons, but under the guise of his reasoning being purely technical.

    Eventually, he just started sounding like someone who fell into a conspiracy rabbit hole, or some weird far right cult. I stopped watching then, most of his videos by then had little technical interest anymore and they sounded more like someone who was losing their mind. I don’t know if it’s a mental issue or something, but his whole persona shifted dramatically into something… weird. I haven’t kept up in the mean time, though.


  • But people are definitely less productive working from home

    How so? I personally think it’s a somewhat personal matter, but people who are less productive are home seem to be people who can’t focus in general. I am far more productive working from home, mostly because I don’t get distracted by others. I have colleagues who spend hours bantering only to then stay in the company until later to compensate for the banter - I’d rather get my work done so I can end my day on time and go home do the fun stuff. But I do have colleagues who say they get distracted easily when working at home and they’d rather work at the office.

    Overall though, my company used to be very against working from home, but after the period of mandatory work from home, management admitted overall productivity had increased. They still insist people should come to the office every now and then to maintain the “friendly” environment the company is supposed to have, though, which is fair I guess.



  • While I understand the sentiment, I hate this trend that whenever someones talks about how soulless the internet has become, the answer is always Web 1.0.

    I don’t want web 1.0. I like having CSS and Javascript around. I use them to build things I couldn’t with HTML alone, and I’ve seen countless incredibly creative websites which fundamentally couldn’t have been built without Javascript. It’s weird to me how the article mentions the creative aspect of the old web, versus the commercial aspect and “sameyness” of the current web, only to then toss out tools that allow for even more creativity and personalization in the current web.

    Whenever I finish reading one of these articles it always feels like it’s mostly nostalgia and not much else.


  • I used to be an Arch guy, I had a pretty stable setup for a couple of years, until I had some problem with a printer and I just decided to toss the whole thing out and just go for a distro with neat defaults in which I wouldn’t be having problems with printers.

    I’ve been using Solus since then and it’s been fine. Even during the “bad times” of no updates, my laptop kept working fine so I didn’t bother switching to something else and I keep using it since it’s been more stable than distros I’ve used in the past which were supposed to be stable. I’ve seen mentions of the possibility of it eventually having an AUR style thing which would honestly make it the perfect distro.



  • I’d love to say the same but on my Lenovo laptop I get frequent disconnects with bluetooth earphones on Linux alone. Apparently it’s a firmware problem with the AX200 board, but even after having updated the firmware and following all the online fixes I still have the problem.

    My whole use case for my laptop is getting away from my desk when I want to read something and listen to music at the end of the day, but it’s annoying to have to reconnect the earphones every 10 or so minutes. Like everything Linux, it’s incredible as long as you have supported hardware and you don’t bump into some weird edge case.


  • I don’t understand the frustration. With all of the recent examples of people winning photo contests only to reveal later that their “photos” were made by AI, it’s only natural that judges grow paranoid of these things.

    As for your friend’s comment on photo competitions, that sounds like someone who’s butt hurt for not winning. I enter some photo contests ocasionally and I have yet to see one in which the winner hadn’t produced some pretty decent work.


  • I’ll sometimes contribute when I’m travelling to more rural areas which are less likely to be well mapped. The experience in my country has been that cities are very well mapped on OpenStreetMaps with a lot of detail, often having more up to date information than Google Maps. Less populated areas usually don’t have as much detail, but the basics, like roads and buildings are usually well mapped.

    I’ve also noticed OpenStreetMaps is awesome for trails and smaller roads used by hikers, usually being much more useful than Google Maps.




  • It’s not pedantry, it’s just that RAID and instant data duplication or synchronization aren’t meant to protect you from many of the situations in which you would need a backup. If a drive fails, you can restore the information from wherever you duplicated the data to. If, however, your data is corrupted somehow, the corruption is just duplicated over and you have no way to restore the data to a state before the corruption happened. If you accidentally delete files you didn’t want to delete, the deletion is replicated over and, again, no way to restore them. RAID wasn’t built to solve the problems a backup tries to solve.