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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Others mentioned it but I’ll insist on kdenlive.

    Yes it’s intimidating, so much so I initially started it, closed it and went back to ffmpeg, so the CLI.

    What I was lacking wasn’t a good UI or UX but rather the principle of video editing. Once you actually learn the basics :

    • cuts (each file become a track, each file can be sliced in smaller piece and re-arranged)
    • timeline (cuts next to each other or on top of each other, including audio, videos, cards, etc)
    • effects (fade in, fade out, etc)
    • project management (organizing files, designing cards for titles, etc)

    then regardless of which software you use it’s nearly the same.

    So I would actually invest just an hour to try a tutorial, edit a 1min video, get feedback on it from friends then try again. Honestly video as a medium is not going away anytime soon, in fact arguably platform like TikTok (sadly) made it even more popular. Consequently investing a bit of time today would benefit you for decades to come.


  • I’ll be honest : because people is ignorant.

    They tried Debian once few years ago, it didn’t have the exact driver they wanted out of the box, they gave up. They think that’s the normal and current experience.

    Reality is I use Debian every day on my servers, SBCs, laptop but also my desktop. I’ve been gaming on it since the first day of the installation and it just worked. Sure I had to follow https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and basically follow those steps. It took me maybe 15min and 1 reboot but since then NO tinkering, 0, and I’m gaming nearly daily from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR. As I mentioned in another reply sure I might not have perfectly optimized all my performance but I don’t give a shit, I’m just gaming!

    Also as I mentioned elsewhere the “cutting edge” is bullshit. You can have a Debian installation, stable, and cherry pick the parks you want. Heck you can even pull from a forge the software you want, built it, run it. That’s how “bleeding edge” it can be. Of course you can use VM (with GPU passthrough), distrobox, AppImage, nix (not NixOS), etc so they are many many ways to make sure you use the absolute latest without breaking your system.

    TL;DR: Debian does not position itself as a gaming distribution. A lot of gamers want to optimize everything for gaming and consequently assume a specialized distribution will do better. Meanwhile people who JUST want to play can definitely do so on Debian.


  • Gamers need the newest libraries and the newest drivers or their stuff might not run as well as it possibly could

    No they don’t. They think they do because they believe they run their precious expensive hardware only at 99% whereas they imagine, I bet due to trying to compete with each others on benchmarks, that with the absolute latest driver they can actually push their GPU at 99.99% and gain .1FPS in the most popular game they might not even like and 2 points in the trendy benchmark.

    Source : I’m a gamer playing on Debian, from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR, and it just works. Sure I’m not at 99% perf on my hardware, I might even be at 80% but I’m definitely spending 0% time tinkering and 100% having fun.



  • lol, sorry but in what world do you live in? NONE of the OS “just works”.

    I’m sorry but this is such a trope. I watched someone using an up to date iOS phone. That thing is LOCKED down to no end, countless people claim that Apple are some kind of UX geniuses … well you look somebody trying to do anything as complex as watching a video on this and it’s a damn struggle.

    Sorry for going on a rant here but the very concept is a lie. It’s like Windows being easier to use, it’s absolutely not BUT people have trained, at school (sigh) or at work, on how to use it. They somehow “forget” that they went through hours or even days of training and somehow they believe it feels “natural”. That’s entirely dishonest but why do I insist on this so much? Because it’s unfair to then compare Linux distributions to things that do not exist!

    What “just works” but STILL is not perfect or flawless, is SteamOS on the SteamDeck not due to any “magic” from Valve but rather because :

    • the hardware is very limited (basically selected to work well for it)
    • the use case is very limited (start Steam, play)

    and as soon as one start to tinker with SteamOS on SteamDeck by replacing part, adding USB-C devices, remote the r/w restriction on the OS, etc then again “just works” becomes “worked at some point”.







  • So… I’m kind of in the same situation but mine is actually by mistake. Namely my SIM somehow (OK maybe I tinkered with eSIM a bit much… anyway) works for data and SMS but not for calls. I tried to fix it a bit… then honestly I like it without. Most of the calls I received are not important, nor urgent, and the few that are can leave a message or an SMS.

    I stopped relying on my phone for calls entirely and I like it.

    When I tell people it doesn’t work they just shrug it off and always find a way to contact me without making a big deal out of it.

    I still like having a SIM though if only to

    • check where I am on a path the first time I get there
    • know if the person I’m meeting might be late
    • warn if I’m late on the way to somewhere

    but typically my phone works well entirely offline (e.g. I do not stream music, I have actual files on my phone) so I understand.

    Honestly in your shoes I’d gauge the person, if they are potentially interesting enough to explore the topic with curiosity, I’d be honest. If I just want to move on because they seem obtuse I’d keep it to the minimum.





  • turns off SteamDeck sorry, what’s a “terminal”? Isn’t it at the airport?

    Jokes aside… yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that’s fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It’s not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.

    So… finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.




  • Oof… it actually happened to me and it’s not 1 problem but 2 namely :

    • you ran out of disk space while updating
    • AND one of the messed up packages is one that is required for the upgrade process, e.g. curl or wget (sorry can’t recall which it actually is)

    so that leaves you in a terrible stable. You can still clean up this mess BUT that’s tricky. Basically you have to

    • actually find out what’s taking up space (often old kernels) or “just” give up on data temporarily (basically you move your /home, or part of it, to a USB stick) via rescue mode (you need to be familiar with the CLI) or remount the disk on another working system
    • get the actually missing packages via another working system then install locally (typically dpkg on .deb files but NOT apt get because that requires connectivity and thus packages you do not have anymore) the bare minimum you need then finish the update.

    For me it was on a small temporary system (e.g. RPi for HomeAssistant) so it was basically easier to recover from a recent backup after formatting.

    It’s annoying but it’s actually not that bad.

    Edit: clarified on the broken state and dpkg vs apt get



  • I would recommend against a new player when existing scriptable ones like vlc and mpv already exist.

    Instead what I would do is a plugin for either, eventually repackaged as its own player (if somehow installing the script itself is too much for some) for which the script would

    • include a very small torrent client
    • point that client to the torrent (which AFAICT is still not public, so for now a reconfigurable URL)
    • include a search function that when it fails, proposes to search within the trimmed cleaned torrent metadata then does the torrent download then plays.