• 2 Posts
  • 187 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
    • Google Maps: Switch to CoMaps, they’re a fork of Organic Maps that grew out of a transparency issue with the Organic Maps core developers
    • Youtube on pc: Not familiar with youtube-tui with mpv but FreeTube is pretty awesome too :3
    • Clients for offline music: I like kew (for PC) :3
    • Discord: Element is good, but in the interim you should check out Equibop! It’s a fork of the Discord client that strips out a lot of the telemetry.

    And regarding PeerTube, be aware that if you go into it expecting it to be a replacement for YouTube, you will always end up disappointed. YouTube is just too big and entrenched at this point and it’s just not possible for any site to be a straight-up 1:1 replacement.

    It’s kind of like renewable energy sources: no one method is going to supplant fossil fuels, but multiple different options being used where each is effective the most has worked quite well in putting a quite noticeable dent, even if not a large one, in the world’s usage of it. Likewise, PeerTube, Odyssey, Nebula, all the different sources cropping up will never replace YouTube individually, but collectively it will give people more options, which is always good.

    Likewise, I’ve found that PeerTube is great for discovering new content, but it requires a perspective change. Honestly it reminds me more of YouTube in its early days. Not a lot of high-cost productions, but more just regular people putting up videos because they have a passion for it and want to share that passion. For now, I still do use YouTube, but I am finding some great stuff here and there on PeerTube as well. I guess what I’m saying is PeerTube cannot be a replacement of YouTube, but it can be a supplement to YouTube, if you want it to be.

    Anyway, sorry for the ramble. Haha. Have a great day and good luck! _


  • As others have said, the general rule is simple: if it no longer runs what you want it to run, upgrade.

    For example, I have an Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU. It’s no longer that new, it’s like 5+ years old at this point. But most of the games I play are at least 10 years old—I think the newest, and most graphically intense, game I own is Cyberpunk 2077—and my GPU runs them just fine.

    So, why would I spend hundreds of dollars on a new GPU when it’s still wholly functional for my needs?















  • Okay, so, please forgive me ahead of time for the following rant. To be blunt, you did ask. 😛

    • It often doesn’t use common UI/UX conventions found in most other editors
    • It has no polygon tools.
    • The Lasso tool is called “Free Select” instead of, you know, “Lasso” like every other software under the sun calls it. (Though I admit this in itself is merely a nitpick, it is indicative of the larger trends.)
    • The text tool is so bad. Honestly, I don’t even know how to put how it’s bad into words, but just using it is…painful…in comparison to Paint.\NET, Pinta, or even MS Paint back on Windows. Other people can probably word the problems with it better than I can. Sorry I can’t be more descriptive.
    • It doesn’t have Lanczos resampling for resizing images (tbf neither do many others but still Paint.\NET does and so that’s a point against it. (If you don’t know, Lanczos is visibly superior in maintaining fidelity when downscaling an image, compared to linear, bilinear, cubic, etc.)
    • The currently active layer seems to randomly change, so that one minute you’re doing something and the next nothing is worked, you wonder “what the hell” and then finally after 10 minutes of searching you find out it’s because the layer has changed and now you need to go click on this one obscure option. (I don’t remember what it is. Select > Select None maybe? Anyway, I’ve had it happen where the option doesn’t even do anything.) It completely throws my whole game off and I’ve never once, even once had it happen until I started using GIMP.
    • The default UI/UX is very rough around the edges. Just to make it minimally usable for me, I had to install PhotoGIMP over GIMP and spend 20-30 minutes customizing the layout and keyboard shortcuts. Speaking of…
    • The default keyboard shortcuts are kinda wacko. For example, Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Fit Image in Window (basically zooming in/out but to see the whole image in your window) is +, -, and Shift+Ctrl+E, respectively; while most other programs have it as ctrl++; (and/or ctrl+=), ctrl+- (and/or ctrl+NumpadMinus), and ctrl+0 (and/or ctrl+NumpadEnter). Also, you cannot use tab or ctrl+tab to move to the next or previous tab, respectively, because tab is a excluded key for keyboard shortcuts. (I think I was once told it has to do with a limitation in GTK, but that’s ridiculous as Pinta has been able to do it for years.) There are countless other inane defaults for the keyboard shortcuts as well, frankly.
    • You cannot use LMB or RMB to switch between the primary and secondary colors selected. You have to use X.

    These are only a few of the most severe frustrations, annoyances, and hair-pulling-out moments for me with regards to GIMP. I’d never have even tried it out if Pinta hadn’t made the ass-backwards decision to move to the stupidly minimalistic and less functional GTK4 adwaita UI and if Paint.\NET worked. (I can’t remember why it doesn’t wanna work; I think it has to do with a dependency. I know it’s not the .NET framework since that could be handled by Mono IIRC.)



  • 1 - tap to pay

    I still don’t see why phone-based tap-to-pay is even a good thing. What, I should hand over all my financial credentials to Google or Apple or Microsoft in addition to my bank? I think not. I’ll just keep using a physical card, thank you. (Which, by the way, can often still use tap-to-pay as most modern cards have RFID chips embedded. No different than with your phone, except it’s not tied to one of the big oligarchs, even less so if you use a credit union as opposed to a bank.)

    2 - android auto/apple CarPlay emulation

    Bog-standard bluetooth is more than enough for me.

    3 - voice assistants

    Why would I need a voice assistant? I can find out information almost as easily just using a search engine. And if I’m driving, I’m not so busy as to be unable to pull over to the side of the road if I absolutely need to check something. Or, you know, get everything ready before I go. At the further risk of yelling at clouds despite my relatively young age (I’m in my early 30s), I think voice assistants and IoT things are largely just fluff that over-complicate things in a world that is already over-complicated.