Am definitely human.

  • 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • noughtnaut@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•A few beginner questions about the differences between distros.
    6·
    17 days ago

    I would recommend you visit distrowatch.org as they have reviews of a great many distros over a long period. That would prepare you to form an opinion on what kind of experience you want to have.

    Example - UI, ie. Desktop Environment: chose Gnome if you like Apples way of making things very polished and giving the user few (visible) options to tinker. Choose KDE if you like a “busy” UI with *all* the options exposed and a ton of desktop widgets. Choose MATE or LXDE if you like a snappy and minimalist approach.

    Possibly the biggest differentiator between distros is their native package manager. You can take any distro and swap out eg. KDE for Gnome, but the package manager is fundamental and probably(?) impossible to replace fully.

    Example: All the Debian based distros use DEB packages. You’ll find a ton, though dine distros lag behind the most recent versions. Others use Redhat’s RPM system, while still others build everything from source (which is slow as fuck but gets you to the cutting edge with all the knobs and dials). There’s also the Snap and Flatpak systems which strive to supply platform agnostic packages, but do so with very different approaches.

    Good luck!

  • noughtnaut@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Looking for a desktop environment for my media pc
    3·
    5 months ago

    I’m just running a pain Linux with the MATE desktop, with increased sizes of mouse cursor and UI elements.

    The big thing is using VLC with a wireless keyboard, and using a white sharpie on the keycaps to show the quite customised VLC shortcuts.

    It’s been years since I tried Kodi et al, and I always found the actual media playback to be lacking some customisation (eg. audio or subtitle timing offsets).

    In lieu of a media database, I simply mark the movie folders with file emblems when I’ve watched a movie or episode (VLC keeps track of partial viewings, resuming where it left off).

  • noughtnaut@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•People who used older macintosh OS in the 90s, what was it like for your daily use, work, games etc?
    6·
    7 months ago

    I used to joke that the last Mac I used was the first one they made that had colour - I’ve used every Mac from the seminal one up to and including the Color Classic (MacOS 1 up to 7) - but my last job gave me a MacBook. I was curious about it since I’ve seen many a coworker love them, but I soon found myself hating the damn thing so much that I ended up installing the work tools on my own Linux-laden ThinkPad.

    Used to be, they were fast and no nonsense, simply effective and efficient work horses. No doubt they still are, but it was fighting med in everything I wanted it to do. What do you mean “there’s no way to mount a USB stick on MACOS”?!

    Hardware wise they’re still brilliant wrt. power and battery life, but getting a 2nd (or, gasp, even 3rd) monitor to work with it? Yikes what a shit show that was. Truly a walled garden, I stand by my usual words of “they’re excellent machines if you want to use them exactly as Apple intended.”

    …sorry for going off track. So, back in the day. There was MacWrite, MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker (which, then, was way more useful for actual publishing work than after the Adobe take-over), and a ton of games! Granted, you only had 512*whatever in pure black and white, but it was crisp and the games had excellent sound. Pinball Construction Set had 4-voice digital sound and flawless physics (hmm, except I don’t actually remember if it had a Tilt feature). Oh yeah, add in AppleTalk which blew Novell and Windows for Workgroups plain out of the water. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector predates PS/2 and curiously allowed a Mac to have any number of keyboards and two mice connected, something we made good use of when gaming.

    There was the ImageWriter which could do plain copy paper rather than Leparello paper and had exquisite resolution compared to the clunky 8-pin DOS offerings. Really, the Mac SE and the ImageWriter II are, in my mind, the pinnacle of industrial design - at least of the 80s era.

    Thanks for reading all that. You should go have a look at folklore.org if you’re interested in stories from the inside.