Let me ask you a question: What does the pro version of Zorin get you?

Yeah that’s why I hate Gnome, they have ideas about how you should use your computer and those ideas aren’t yours.

I remember hearing something about Ogg vorbis being outmoded by some other Ogg? I don’t know I’ve moved from mp3 to FLAC personally.

Autodesk.

Abstract: I burned a pair of audio CDs three days ago for listening to in my cars. Two (nearly) identical discs, one for each car. I have largely moved away from optical discs but am making an effort to re-embrace them.

Full text: So when I went to build my PC, I wanted a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini case. I built my cousin’s PC in one, I wanted one too, but they had apparently been discontinued. I wound up with a Pop Air Mini case instead, which in many ways isn’t as nice, but it does feature a pair of 5 1/4" bays hidden behind a magnetic panel at the front of the PSU basement.

One of my little projects was to install one of those multi-format card readers and an old optical drive there, and I got it done a few days ago. I have a USB optical drive, in fact a couple of them, but an internal one is just a nicer thing to deal with. It is my understanding that no one is actually manufacturing those external optical drives anymore; that the ones you see on Amazon with god knows what branding are old laptop drives of whatever spec stuffed into a new case with a USB controller. They’re flaky, janky, and flimsy. Plus there’s never anywhere to put them; they come with short little cables so they’re invariably hard to plug in. So instead I ganked a blu-ray reader/DVD writer drive out of an old Dell I have lying around and installed that, and man is it nicer.

My inaugural project was to make a couple of audio CDs for the car. This project involved little to no piracy; all of the audio came from legitimately purchased CDs that I bought as directly from the band as I could. I want to fund the artists, not the sniveling IP hoarders. So I’ve got discs now that have my favorite 25 out of ~120 tracks I bought from them in my cars. I ripped the discs to FLACs the second I had them and have been listening to them on my phone, my precious originals safely stored in a CD rack.

I also bought a new spindle of CD-Rs, which is also getting harder to do. The ones I bought have inkjet printable labels. And it just so happens my old inkjet printer has a disc printing feature that I’ve yet to use. So I tried it out. Getting this particular printer going in Linux for more than basic features is a no-go; CUPS+Gutenprint is available for at least a thousand makes and models of Epson printers including the models above and below mine in the range, but specifically not mine. I chose to take that personally, but in the meantime I have discs to print. Funnily enough the printer can do this without a PC at all; it has a feature specifically for printing JPGs onto discs, and another feature that I have to assume is designed specifically for piracy:

My Epson XP-830 Expression Premium “Small In One” printer has a built-in feature to copy a CD from the scanner bed to the disc tray. That is, put a CD label side down on the scanner glass, put a printable CD-R on the disc tray, and it will figure it out and copy it. I can think of no purpose for that other than to hand out copies of Now That’s What I Call Music 7 or Windows Vista Home Premium to all your high school friends. It’s useless for things like “File Archives 2011” or “Iron Butterfly Beach Party Mix” but it’s a very user friendly counterfeiting workflow.

So mostly I installed this optical drive for reading rather than writing. I can see a future where I replace this drive with an M-disc burner; I keep threatening to start a Youtube channel, and that might be how I archive video footage, but…I don’t know.

An AM4 computer is still pretty capable.

that’s men’s room egg salad.

KFC was good. it’s now slop.

The British came up with that one.

Wasn’t Linux first released in like 1993?

Okay so, this is less a line in the sand and more a 14 foot concrete wall topped with razor wire and guarded by marines with rifles with fixed bayonets in the sand:

I will not install an end-user application using Cargo, and I will say many mean things to anyone who suggests it.

Python’s Pip or Pypi or PyPy whichever it is (Both of those are the names of two different things and no one had their head slammed into a wall for doing that; proof that justice is a fictional concept) I can almost accept. You could almost get me drunk enough to accept distributing software via Python tooling, because Python is an interpreted language, whether you ship me your project as a .exe, a .deb, a flatpak, whatever, you’re shipping me the source code. Also, Python is a pretty standard inclusion on Linux distros, so Pip is likely to be present.

Few if any distros ship with Rust’s toolset installed, and the officially recommended way to install it, this is from rust-lang.org…is to pipe curl into sh. Don’t ask end users to install a programming language to compile your software.

Go ahead and ask your fellow developers to compile your software; that’s how contributing and forking and all that open source goodness should be done. But not end users. Not for “Install and use as intended.” For that, distribute a compiled binary somehow; at the very least a dockerfile if a service or an appimage if an application. Don’t make people who don’t develop in Rust install the Rust compiler.

My thing is, a dumb phone has the features I would like to do without on my smart phone. Telephone and SMS ARE THE GODDAMN PROBLEM. If people who were not explicitly whitelisted by me out of band had no method of contacting me, that’d be great.

My problem is people keep infecting the world with software designed with Gnome’s “Mac with Meningitis” style sheet.

Believe it or not the first production smart phone was released by IBM in 1989, it was the bastard lovechild of a DOS PC and a car phone; it could do fax and modem over the phone. Blackberry put out a device you’d call a smart phone (runs an extensible OS with an app ecosystem, multimedia capable, mobile data as we know it today) in 2002. But yes the iPhone arrived in 2007 much to the unhealth of society.

The original iPhone did not have an app store.

If you tell me to install an end-user facing application with a programming language’s package manager, I’m out. Like, Adafruit was at one point recommending a Python IDE for their own implementation of micropython called Mu, and the instructions were to install it with Pip. Nope. Not doing that.

Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.

I aim for 10 years with a mid-life upgrade. I even do this with my laptops; my Inspiron got a new battery, a new CPU fan and an SSD for its 6th birthday. It’s 11 now.

My Ryzen 3600 rig is an HTPC now.

What platform? PC, Playstation?

Mostly I have this distinct memory of badly communicating with a Verizon employee when I got my first smart phone, an LG Ally.

I remember asking “Is this a Droid?” Meaning “is the make and model of this handset a Motorola Droid?” And the reply was “They’re all droids.” meaning they all run the Android operating system. I miss LG phones, or at least the state of my personal life back when I had LG phones.

was it Verizon or Motorola?