I use KOreader on an Android phone because it’s so configurable and allows me to read efficiently on an AMOLED with white on black text and a very minimal, space efficient interface. Also the large amount of style overrides allows one to fix even the most badly formatted epubs without editing or processing them in Calibre.

Most printers with networking capability work well these days. Some even entirely without drivers (thanks to Apple for once). HP should be fine if it’s relatively new. Older printers can be a major pain in the ass.

Scanners access is now also finally easy with AirScan (again thanks Apple, and I don’t say this often), so some devices might just magically work. More likely you’ll need to edit a line or two in a SANE config file somewhere or deal with the horrible web interface of CUPS to configure the printer, but with the right device, there’s finally no hunting for drivers on obscure web archives of Chinese manufacturer pages anymore.

It seems when you have a terrible attitude of entitlement and no willingness to learn, you’ll never be happy with anything. Huh.

In that case, I’d rather have him stay unhappy on Windows and not make those videos anymore.

There is a crossover between the two, for example the Mass Effect Mod Manager and things like that, which work adequately.

Wine works well for most small GUI applications, the biggest issues are with the huge corporate, commercial programs like MS Office, CAD software and Adobe crapware, for which there are ways to get them to work, but you’d be better of migrating to a native alternative.

C# apps are always a pain though. Mono is rarely enough and as soon as you need MS dotnet libraries, everything is going to be a lot more painful.

OT: At my previous job I ran a Windows-exclusive compiler toolchain (Keil C51) with wine in a Makefile, which was a huge improvement to developer workflow compared to everyone having to use the bundled IDE, especially due to the parallel builds. Wine is awesome.

This is why we ask respectfully that our applications not be themed.

Ok, just skimmed the page, but if I read it right, your apps are for screenshots, not people. That’s a choice, but ok, I wasn’t going to use them anyway, judging from the screenshots. May I suggest renaming the site pleasedontusemy.app, for clarity?

env USE=-fascism emerge -ave world

18 years here (started 2008, god, has it really been that long?). And I only had to reinstall once in that time (my own fault). Even new systems are just installed from snapshots of my existing systems.

It’s really low maintenance once it’s set up. It almost never breaks, and for breaking changes you get news through the package manager months in advance, and if you actually need to fix something it’s always possible (easy downgrades, deploying of patches, etc.). I’m also using some Arch and Ubuntu on the side and stability doesn’t even compare.

Emacs is actually a real GUI application. It has font sizes, variable width fonts, image display, etc. and with the pGTK backend even native wayland support. It also has a rendering backend for the terminal, and some people have their reasons for using it, but the default and general advice is to use Emacs in GUI mode.

I’m relatively happy with my FP5 at the moment, but the Nokia N900 was the best phone (i.e. the one I was happiest with at the time) I ever had. I might still be using it if the Javascript-infested modern web hadn’t tanked its performance. It’s also probably the most successful Linux phone of all time.

What I wouldn’t give for an N900 with a modern SoC, AMOLED display and 50% larger in exchange for 50% slimmer… I’d even keep the resistive touch plus stylus, screw multi-touch if I could have that back! Desktop apps and desktop versions of websites were entirely usable with the stylus, even on a tiny screen like that. No comparison to my current fat-fingering links even on mobile layouts on huge 5"+ screens. 🤷 Thanks, Steve Jobs.

And the window-management was also brilliant and unsurpassed on any mobile device ever since… And this was at a time when Android didn’t have copy-paste yet and could open only one app at a time.

At my workplace all the devs are on either Mac OS or Linux, with Mac OS being more common among Web/PHP guys and Linux among the backend devs (like me). As it turns out, given the choice, nobody actually prefers Windows. I’m still baffled by Mac OS being so common, though, at least among devs.

This works because our whole IT infrastructure is designed to be accessible via the web-browser, most of it even without VPN, via two-factor authenticated single-sign-on, most of it self-hosted (all except Teams, which obviously also needs its own authentication). This gives people the freedom to run whatever OS they like on their computers and set it up themselves, with the only requirement being to use FDE with a strong password and regularly do backups to the remote storage. We’re also allowed (if not encouraged) to use the laptops for private stuff and get to keep them when they’re replaced.

And as far as I can tell IT problems because of this diverse environment are surprisingly minimal and mostly with those aforementioned web services.

The problem will likely be the warped perception of “low effort” users like you have, that I went in detail on here

This is indicated by phrases like these:

struggle around with all that crap and I need to keep my music shit

Which translate to me as “I don’t want to learn or change a thing, so tell me how I change the most fundamental part of my computing without doing that”.

As I wrote in the comment linked above, with an attitude like that you’d have a significantly harder time than some non-techy person who just wants to have a system that “just works” without preconceptions, not bother with the technical details, but is entirely open to using new programs and doing things differently, as long as they work reliably.

In your case, I’d say stick to Microsoft until you get your mindset and priorities straight. Because then you’d have an easy time without much tinkering at all. But as it stands I think you’d be setting yourself up for misery and failure.

An idiot proof way to get a video player with support for every video codec.

Is this really still a problem? I haven’t used anything but Gentoo (and some Arch) for 18 years, so for me it hasn’t been a problem for a long, long time. By now it should be clear that these patents are unenforceable and distros, especially non-corporate ones should just ignore them.

I’ve found that all modern E-Ink tablets are trash. They’re built cheaply and to fail after 2 years or less, regardless of premium model or not. I went through 4 devices of various models and manufacturers (Kobo, Kindle, Pocketbook) over <2 years, while I used my old Kindle 3 for >5 years and technically it still works. These days they all use the same wonky chipsets and flakey components especially for power management. 3 of those 4 devices just suddenly didn’t turn on anymore one day.

Personally, I now read on my FP5 with the Android KOReader port, which due to the AMOLED screen has excellent contrast and sufficient battery life with white-on-black text. Maybe when we finally stop producing devices for land fills I’ll take another look at E-Ink.

We already have those. Arguably Windows is much more of a hassle to use than your average “works out of the box” distro. And don’t start talking about the terminal, that’s comparing apples and organges. A more apt comparison to the need of using the terminal on Linux is the need to apply registry tweaks or use powershell on Windows. As if “average users” would need to do that. They install software via the “app store”, change settings via the GUI and run updates when prompted, all of which are seamless on most of these distros. If something breaks, they can’t fix it themselves, but then they just go to someone else to help them, just like on Windows, which they also can’t fix by themselves. Maybe they manage to reinstall, which isn’t any harder than on Windows, if not easier these days.

The group you’re actually talking about (and likely belong to) are the Windows power-users that would need to rethink things, and would be capable of rethinking things, if they wanted, which they don’t. I know some of these people myself, complaining all day about Microsoft and the privacy nightmare that they put in huge effort to mitigate, but sadly they absolutely need to rely on this one “critical” piece of freeware from the 2000s that they are sure won’t run on wine (not that they’ve tried) or a cracked copy of Photoshop they use for cropping and changing the brightness of desktop backgrounds, but it’s the industry leader, so they obviously won’t use “inferior” software for that, face the facts Linux users. They think package managers are much harder than downloading and clicking through Setup.exe for the 100th time in a row, and they’ve had this one bad experience with “rm -rf /” 10 years ago which is why they don’t “trust” the terminal, yet routinely double-click on downloaded .bat files without thought. 🤷

Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.

That’s my main use for flatpaks too. Add to that any and all closed source software, because you can’t trust that without a sandbox around it.

Recently I’ve moved from using flatpak for electron apps and instead have a single flatpak ungoogled chromium instance I use for PWAs.

Nah, it’s the same as with systemd, docker, immutable distros etc. Some people just don’t appreciate the added complexity for features they don’t need/use and prefer to opt out. Then the advocates come, take not using their favorite software as a personal insult and make up straw-men to ridicule and argue against. Then the less enlightened of those opting out will get defensive and let themselves get dragged into the argument. 90% that’s the way these flame wars get started and not the other way around.

For the record, I use flatpak on all my desktops, it’s great, and all of the other mentioned things in some capacity, but I get why someone might want to not use them. Let’s not make software choice a tribalism thing please. Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless they use Windows, in which case, kill the bastard. /s

It is great. I actually was a heavy critic of pulseaudio and stuck with ALSA on my desktop for as long as I could (until last year) by using Gentoo with USE="alsa -pulseaudio", the X-Fi’s hardware mixing and automatic S/PDIF passthrough.

I tried to switch to pulseaudio a couple of times whenever I read one of those “it’s good now, trust me bro” articles, but it wasn’t, ever. It had and still has a huge amount of hard-coded, opinionated, often perplexing, behavioral quirks that made it feel like it just fought me every step of the way.

Pipewire on the other hand does not only have saner defaults, almost everything is softcoded with a great Lua plugin API. Don’t like a default routing choice or want to automate your own, Wireplumber got you covered. Last year my X-Fi failed (or rather got flakey) and I had to choose between buying another used one or moving to PW. Almost everything worked out of the box on PW the way I like it, except a few details which were almost all covered by the settings. For the last problem, encoded streams not clearing the output, I wrote my own routing plugin.

The documentation for that API isn’t necessarily the best, but it’s easy to start from something small and work your way to understanding how to get the result you want.

I’m in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.

If you have zero experience with CAD, but some experience with programming languages or things like LaTeX, JSON, XML, HTML, etc., I’d suggest giving OpenSCAD a try. While it is definitely for more advanced users, it managed to instantly click with me, in contrast to FreeCAD and others I just couldn’t get into (or rather back into, since my AutoCAD lessons back in school >20 years ago). That it allowed me to work work on CAD drawings in Emacs helped too…

I’m using plasma on Gentoo, Arch and Ubuntu with barely any issues, on desktops, work laptop and older Thinkpad, Nvidia and AMD. Since 6.1+ and on wayland even the multi-monitor stuff works as expected.

The only thing I’m still missing on 6.x and wayland is a replacement for khotkey.

Now someone needs to do a rewrite of dunst in rust called runst to make the confusion complete.