The story thus far by my recollection:
I'm trying to get Retrieval-based Voice Conversion (RVC) โ a program for making voice "deepfakes" using audio-to-audio conversion โ working on my Linux Mint Xfce machine. To this end, I've had to...
(everything I've done thus far + the Pyenv stuff highlighted)
First get Git and ffmpeg, then git clone RVC and then create a virtual environment ("venv") in that folder, then activate that venv, and I also had to get Pip, and use Pip to install torch, torchvision, and torchaudio, then I had to install Poetry, then I had to install RVC's dependencies using Poetry, exceeeeept two of those dependencies refuse to install, so I've ended up a bit stuck. At least one of these dependencies is apparently refusing to install because it's not compatible with my version of Python, which means that I also have to install Pyenv in order to change the Python version in the venv, and so I've installed Pyenv's dependencies and run the command to install Pyenv itself...
...But then the terminal spat out a message about "adding 'pyenv' to the load path", ~/.bash_profile vs ~/.profile vs ~/.bashrc, and restarting my shell? After consulting a tutorial about this message, and installing Vim because it seemed like I might need that, I was still confused about what I was supposed to do, so I decided to take another break rather than continue to exhaust myself.
And this isn't to mention how every single step of this process has also had its own hiccups and confusions, as I'm "diving in the deep end" with basically no knowledge of anything I'm doing.
Put simply, it feels like all the forces of the universe are conspiring against me, trying to keep me from installing this one simple program onto my computer.
Compare this to another form of machine learning technology: large language models. Those things are everywhere nowadays! They're practically inescapable! They're in Google and DuckDuckGo. Firefox even on Linux has an LLM feature now. Several mainstream social media apps have them. Windows has its Copilot, phones are getting "AI" features left and right, yadda yadda. And I'm sure you all know everything wrong with the mass adoption of LLMs already.
Put simply, it feels like all the forces of the universe are conspiring against me, trying to make it impossible for me to stay away from this crap I absolutely don't want.
And this raises the question of why, if both of these things are popularly called "AI", do they differ so much in this regard?
The answer to me seems to just be money. RVC has no subscription fee nor gathering of my personal data, certainly not on a privacy-friendly OS; contrarily RVC makes me more private by letting me mask my voice. RVC is also literally incapable of even attempting to influence my opinions or dull my mind; it does not rely on overseas server farms whose water use is leaving surrounding communities without tap water; and I could even swap out RVC's training material if I objected to it. And without these "features", it's basically impossible for anyone to make a profit from RVC. And if it's impossible to make a profit from RVC, then there's no money being put into making this incredibly useful program accessible for laypeople โ certainly no money being put into forcing it on people!
And I just think that's some glorpshit.
Not even Docker has preserved my sanity because I've had it update and break too.
IDK what's going on with coding environments these days but it feels like decades of bloat, disorganization, fragmentation, and lack of standardization are coming home to roost
my solution is to never ever update docker
I'm afraid linux desktop is not gonna survive for another decade if things keep going in the same direction. All the garbage like snap and flatpak is the proof that something has to urgently change - the system is becoming so complicated that you can't even install a program without essentially spinning up a virtual machine. It's insane
People don't write portable software anymore. People used to write portable software and while it wasn't magic, you could build and run it on most distros, even the BSDs, Mac, Solaris, or other funky operating systems. The build scripts were tolerant of different shells, different system utilities, different software versions. A lot of newer software is built exclusively on CI/CD pipelines, and while you could run the pipeline on various platforms, you are effectively just building a Makefile which downloads Linux ISOs over BitTorrent.
I mean, the time had come to replace autoconf, but this ain't it chief.
The other thing is programming language package managers. At some point, we decided distributions were a bad thing and we should just cut distribution maintainers out of the picture. Just let software developers pick and bundle their own dependencies. Just let build systems clone hundreds of arbitrary repositories directly from other developers with no impartial quality assurance or sign-off. People just write a requirements.txt, or a cargo.toml, or a package.json and call it a fucking day. That is just a dev environment. That is not something which can be properly integrated into any OS. The amount of work that needs to be done by actual distro maintainers to package shit written in Perl / Python / Rust / Node / etc is absurd because everyone just codes with no discipline about dependencies whatsoever.
Preach!
Right and that's the thing, Linux was already complicated. Now it's more complicated? I've been waiting since 2004 for Linux to really get good, or at least better than Windows or Mac. I'd say it's there now, but not because Linux has ironed out its problems, but because the corporates have deliberately ruined their OSs leaving Linux the only internet-secure option left in the game
(although sometimes I have considered trying to run TempleOS just for the meme value)