This has an empty ffmpeg folder but no binary

That's strange. I downloaded it just now and converted a video. It's not in /app/bin but in /usr/bin instead. I know for a fact it relies on the ffmpeg binary inside the code. You can even access it using flatpak run --command=ffmpeg org.gnome.gitlab.YaLTeR.VideoTrimmer.

The Arch repos are too small.

Eh, I've never felt that way. Even on my Arch system, I only have 15 packages from the AUR and 2134 packages installed from the repositories. But it's probably smaller than you're used to if you're coming from Debian or Fedora.

Many projects use libffmpeg.so dont know if that could be used too.

That library is designed for development as far as I'm aware. I noped out very quickly when looking at the documentation for using ffmpeg libraries :) I think that's why VideoTrimmer relies on the binary instead of the library too.

With the COPR I know who to trust, unlike the AUR, even though I now also setup yay.

I take a different view: I don't trust anybody, but I read the PKGBUILDs and understand them. They're often not complicated. I don't particularly like the AUR much anymore though for this reason.

Everything nearly separated from my OS using the different distrobox homedirs which work flawlessly.

I did try this for a while but I couldn't get used to it. And programs can bypass it anyway with /home/$USER if they're feeling vindictive, though I haven't run into any yet. It'd definitely be nice to have more complete isolation one day.

Also distrobox upgrade --all works awesome its just a wrapper but really valuable.

100% yes. Be nice to have that in Toolbox one day.

But unverified Flatpaks may be way better than distro packages. At least it is very transparent on Github (yeah, sucks) unlike strange distro build systems.

I'm with you there. I can understand PKGBUILDs but everything else is just far too complex for me. Or unfamiliar. The docs for packaging Fedora RPMs is scary as hell.

What, GNU utils? What makes it special, apart from apt? They have nala so that is dealt with.

To be honest, it's mostly apt. I really hate apt. I am also not very familiar with how the system is configured. It's very different from Arch, anyway. I can just never feel at home on an Ubuntu system even in a container, but I do run it on servers.

I've downgraded my "hate" to "it's fiiine".

Yeah this will be crazy. dnf has a lot more commands for querying etc, that will be useful.

It also sounded like they would reinvent the wheel a bit? Dont know

I really have no idea what to expect. But if I never need to use rpm for querying or whatever again I'll be happy.

My friend's response:

Yep, but they make shit so much easier

They took my 2 weeks of turning CSVs into other CSVs into 2 days

🤷‍♀️

Adobe Creative Cloud doesn't work in CrossOver.

I don't think Signal is interested in doing that.

Does Unity support Wayland?

Nope. However, UnityX, a prototype desktop environment (which will be available as a variant of Unity once ready), will include Wayland support.

I realize the name was likely chosen for completely unrelated reasons, but I can't stop laughing about UnityX being the only variant of Unity with Wayland support.

No idea. It was the first time I ever used Linux. Ubuntu just booted into GRUB rescue mode after a month, and the only thing I can remember doing is installing another desktop environment. On Arch, I've had KDE and GNOME installed side-by-side for years now.

Microsoft Exchange. For running an email server. It's easily the most popular use for Windows servers.

Exchange.

Ah, okay. It sounds like you have a physical server, too...you would need to upgrade it yourself if you wanted to use AV1, right? Sounds expensive and annoying...

My understanding is the client needs to explicitly support hardware decoding with the relevant APIs, and Jellyfin probably accomplishes it with FFmpeg. There is no way Jellyfin would be implementing a software decoder for HEVC, but they should have no problem implementing hardware decoders for every platform.

iOS doesn't even have a software decoder for AV1 yet, but the iPhone 15 Pro hardware decoder is a start. Likewise, only expensive Android phones have hardware AV1 decoders right now. More desktop GPUs are implementing AV1 decoders. But this transition looks like it's going to take another 3 years (?) to hit every market segment (cheapest to most expensive)... sigh. I don't have an AV1 hardware decoder on any of my devices either. It's insane how long it takes for new hardware decoders to become mainstream. Many HEVC patents might be close to expiring by then, lol.

Thanks for the suggestion! If you can believe it, I already have Syncthing installed but haven't used it in ages. I didn't even think of using this for keeping git repositories in sync! I did find these forum posts that seem to recommend against using Syncthing for git repositories, though they're 6-7 years old:

• https://forum.syncthing.net/t/can-syncthing-reliably-sync-local-git-repos-not-github/8404
• https://forum.syncthing.net/t/is-putting-a-git-workspace-in-a-synced-folder-really-a-good-idea/1774

Well, conflicting reports really, but it's enough to make me wary. Interestingly, someone recommends the branch solution as an alternative:

One of the objectives of git is to be decentralized. Just make a branch called uncompilable_mess and then clone the repo on your laptop.

Seemed to be working out well for the OP, though.

i don’t really know where this is coming from. would you like to elaborate?

As I said, I don't deal with a lot of Microsoft or Google services, though I do run my email through Microsoft Exchange. It took me roughly three hours to figure out how to download the Microsoft Office executable from the Microsoft website. I tried everything on Firefox, Brave, Chrome, even on my Mac. In the end, I needed Microsoft Edge to get it. I don't remember the exact details because this was 2 or so years ago, but requiring a particular version of a Blink-based browser just to download Microsoft Office seems...unnecessary.

I remember needing to use Brave for Microsoft Teams, but I could be remembering wrong. When I think of Microsoft being actively hostile toward their customers, I think of about ten years ago when Microsoft tried to prevent Xbox owners from sharing physical disk games with the Xbox One, essentially killing preowned games (not that they went through with it). Of course, Apple is an easier target than Microsoft for customer-hostile behavior. Frankly, these megacorporations all blend together for me.

I don't have any particular feelings about Microsoft, and after using Windows for 20 years, I don't have any major complaints with it (from memory; it's been a while), aside from the obvious. If there's any particular corporation I despise, that would have to be Amazon.

Ren'Py is a fantastic engine and it would be great to have more games developed in it. Unfortunately, a lot of visual novels don't use Ren'Py, so they are only released for Windows and need to be run through Wine. This includes the vast majority of Japanese visual novels before 2010. The good news is that most of the time, this works pretty well—assuming you do it right. The setup isn't complicated and hopefully this guide makes it easy to follow.

There's a neat trick for running NScripter games natively on Linux, even if they were only developed for Windows: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:vnsonlinux#playing_nscripter_games_with_onscripter

ONScripter is a drop-in replacement for the NScripter engine that works on Linux, and it can interpret NScripter game files just by running it in the same folder. This worked for me with TRianThology.

Steam games tend to work out of the box thanks to Valve, but this guide is for the visual novels that aren't released on Steam (which there are a lot of).