Only 5.4 hours before you hit a UUID collision. That’s insane

I have the same preference, but companies keep giving me macbooks to use for work no matter how many times I ask for a cheaper (or better specced at the same price) Linux laptop.

If you don’t upgrade the RAM, go with Linux Mint with the MATE desktop. If you do upgrade to 8GB RAM, probably LMDE? You don’t need to be on a bleeding edge kernel with a Windows 8 era laptop, modern optimizations will not affect perf much.

You should really try Kodi. There are a ton of alternative theme options for it and the video player built into it can play anything

Sure we do. Just only in and around cities

Yeah. It’s improved by leaps and bounds since DXVK and VKD3D came into existence. Wine was already incredibly robust and powerful with like 20 years of development on it, so Proton combining Wine with those other 2 projects for better DirectX support and then also managing Wine prefixes and tweaks automatically brought us from “if you’re persistent and tweak a lot of settings a good chunk of games work” to “most games just work”, and now even “if a game doesn’t work on Linux now it’s because the devs are blocking it actively”

And of course, Valve’s active financial support and direct contributions to all of the projects involved has improved the reliability and performance of all of the tech involved by leaps and bounds.

When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.

Proton’s existence did not overlap the existence of the Steam Machine program, like at all. Proton’s initial release was on the 21st of August 2018. Steam Machines were first released in 2015 and had been delisted from Steam entirely by April 2018.

Wine existed back then, sure, but Steam Machines didn’t benefit from DXVK, VKD3D, or any of the myriad per-game and gaming-oriented tweaks that Valve and Codeweavers have made to Wine in the version bundled with Proton. For most people, the prospect of using Wine on a Steam Machine was a huge pain at best. Valve’s official position at the time was that they were helping pay for Linux ports of games.

About 20 years ago, I wanted to add recording studio capabilities to my gaming PC but I was a broke high schooler, so I installed Ubuntu Studio as a dual boot option alongside Windows XP.

Anyway, I installed Arch on my laptop about 3 years later in college using the Arch Book, which was essentially the same as the wiki’s install guide at the time.

I had a dual boot system with Windows and Mac (it was a hackintosh) as my home recording studio Pro Tools/gaming PC for about a decade, then my Windows install had to be wiped due to an issue I had, so I decided to just wipe the whole thing and go single boot with Linux Mint, so now I use Reaper for recording and Steam + Heroic + emulators are meeting all my gaming needs. I use the Xanmod kernel and the kisak-mesa PPA, and since making the switch I’ve upgraded essentially all of the parts in my PC, which is good because I first built it in 2013

It hurt itself in its confusion!

Yeah, exactly. I was trained on Pro Tools and Ardour worked OK and made sense to me, but Reaper feels more intuitive to use than either Pro Tools or Ardour.

Audio Engineer here.

You want Reaper. It’s a $60 program but you can keep it in trial mode for as long as you want till you’ve got the money. Reaper has lots of tutorials available on YouTube and can use industry-standard VST plugins, plus it has enough plugins bundled in to get you started.

A teapot

Why sort in the train when you can sort ahead of time and maximize storage space? The ZIP code system allows for a national radix sort.

I use KISS Launcher. Always fast, predictable and easy to find anything I want.

Did you see the epic YouTube documentary series about it last year?

Edit: Here’s the link

Also Python as a toy lang and somehow more “nu” than Java despite Java being younger?

AAC is more widely supported than Opus and sits closer to Opus than MP3 in terms of compression efficiency, but still trails Opus in that category.

Still, better than MP3 for sure.

Generally this is true, but it depends on the encoder used. Back during the huge boom of MP3 popularity in the late 90s and early 00s, it likely did make a difference, so if you’re looking at MP3s that were encoded back then I would go for 320kbps every time just to be safe, but modern encoders generally do much better like you said.

These days if I were encoding an MP3 I’d use LAME at -V0 setting, letting it lower the bitrate where it can without sacrificing quality. That said, per this test from 2014 that I found as a source on Wikipedia, a 96kbps VBR Opus file is at least as good if not better than an MP3 with -V 5 as the setting on LAME with approximately a 135kbps bitrate.

This, @Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works.

I’m an audio engineer and can confirm that if you want the best quality audio for the file size, you want Opus. Opus at 128kbps is considered transparent, so it’s roughly as good as 320kbps MP3s, but y’know, less than half the size.

Yep, you’re right. I’ll delete my previous comment. Seems like my info was like 15+ years out of date.