Plus RawTherapee and DarkTable are pretty good, and actually free, Lightroom alternatives to boot.

Good thing whenever I set up Windows, Notepad is one of the things I nuke, using Geany to replace it.

If this doesn’t help physical book sales, nothing will.

Because look who’s running it, that’s why. If Musk isn’t a full-blown Nazi, he’s at minimum a Nazi sympathizer.

That depends, the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are easily modded regardless of OS, and I’ve had good luck with HedgeModManager too for Sonic Generations, and even for Civ3, C3X fixes the black map bug however I haven’t found a good fix for the crackling and popping audio.

I’m more of a proponent for running some Linux distro for my main OS and then virtualizing Windows if desired for things that are broken in WINE/Proton somehow but work fine in Windows, at this point.

I don’t trust Windows enough to run it baremetal in a dual-boot anymore though, virtualization at least isolates it from the host where it counts, where in a dual-boot, even if it generally doesn’t happen, there’s still the looming threat of Windows screwing up the Linux install somehow, where that isn’t a problem when virtualizing since, as I said, it’s isolated where it counts, even if paravirtualization is a thing for storage drivers and networking and the like, and hardware passthrough is a thing for things like GPUs.

There’s still the odd game that’s somehow broken in WINE that isn’t broken by anticheat or DRM, but by just being crusty code, but those edge cases will do fine in a Windows VM /w a spare GPU being passed through to it.

Anything that uses kernel anticheat, so basically any modern multiplayer title, is platform-locked into a baremetal Windows install, but since I have no interest whatsoever in modern multiplayer titles and thus no interest in anything with a kernel anticheat, I can do just fine virtualizing Windows in that scenario while using a Linux host for everything else.

(which, Soulbringer, one of my previous edge-case titles, works great in Proton /w dxwrapper+DXVK, but Civ3’s audio is still broken in Proton even if C3X fixes the graphics, so that’s still being ran in a Windows VM, which I currently have Win11 LTSC running in a VM /w my Vega 56 being passed through to it for just that very purpose, while I’m using an RX 6600 for my host card)

As for apps like Maya, Blender is actually competitive with it nowadays.

As an addendum relating to modern multiplayer titles, those are the few titles where it would make more sense to play them on console instead of PC anyways since the way in which they’re locked down goes against PC’s main selling point: the fact that you actually own your system to a degree where the consoles are effectively locked into the PS, Xbox, or Nintendo walled garden.

Even DRM-free storefronts like 7Digital for music or GOG for games aren’t immune to random delistings.

Objectively, dial-up.

Otoh, what I would really badly like to become a thing again is actual media ownership, ie. not having streaming services randomly yank your stuff away from you.

Also, I would nominate the fact that the ‘It’s obsolete as soon as you get it in the door’ meme hasn’t been valid for decades now, but hardware manufacturers, Windows itself, and the game industry are trying really hard to make that a thing again seemingly.

This is just going to push people who aren’t locked into Windows, away from Windows, and Linux is making a pretty good argument for itself as a viable alternative atm, particularly for gaming.

Although another option would be to virtualize Windows on a Linux host too, that’s what I’m doing right now /w Win10 LTSC for general apps that aren’t entirely WINE-friendly, and then Win8.1 for some older games that aren’t entirely WINE-friendly, and the Win8.1 VM has my R9 270 being passed through to it over vfio-pci for graphics for that reason.

The Win10 VM is using VirtIO paravirtualized graphics because its intended use case doesn’t need anything more than basic acceleration as it was spun up mainly for running CUETools on for the things that app can’t do in Mono, eg. like transcoding FLAC images to Vorbis or Opus.

As for gaming beyond the few edge cases that don’t run well in WINE that are due to just being old code, I don’t play anything that has an anticheat so 99% of my gaming is easily doable in Proton.

It’s only on Linux though, for Windows, CUETools and CUERipper are some of the most powerful OSS tools for ripping CDs you can get.

Whipper is pretty much a text-based clone of EAC.

Good luck with that too, especially as GPL3 has a clause specifically forbidding tivoization built into it.

The type of thing RH is doing with the RHEL EULA in order to attempt to circumvent GPL2 protections? Yeah, that wouldn’t fly under GPL3.

The current administration is seemingly trying to kill the very concept of free speech and expression.

Good luck, especially if they try to ban people from ripping their CDs to FLAC as well, like, how would you even find out if someone is doing that, for instance?

Unless you somehow force a backdoor into rippers like Exact Audio Copy, CUERipper, or Whipper, the latter two being OSS, you can’t.

Even SCMS never phoned home to anyone simply because the capability to do that didn’t exist yet when that copy protection scheme was first implemented, and it only applied to dubbing a CD over to DAT, MD, or DCC over S/PDIF on consumer gear.

An i9 for a work PC? Seriously? What did they think you were going to do, compile massive amounts of code all day? Even my current CPU, an R5 4500, is probably overkill for basic office tasks (but it’s perfectly adequate for gaming on if you’re not interested in the latest AAA slop), and it’s truly a low-end part, but an i9 or R9 for basic office tasks is ridiculous.

That’s why I consider that tagline, ‘The Land of the Free,’ to be the failed punchline of a bad joke now. It hasn’t meant anything since before Reagan took office at least.

Not Just Bikes.

NJB’s praise of their infrastructure would have me sold on them if I could actually flee the US.

Hi, and thanks!