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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 20th, 2024

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  • Flatpaks are great for situations where installing software is unnecessary complex or complicated.

    That’s my main use for flatpaks too. Add to that any and all closed source software, because you can’t trust that without a sandbox around it.

    Recently I’ve moved from using flatpak for electron apps and instead have a single flatpak ungoogled chromium instance I use for PWAs.


  • Nah, it’s the same as with systemd, docker, immutable distros etc. Some people just don’t appreciate the added complexity for features they don’t need/use and prefer to opt out. Then the advocates come, take not using their favorite software as a personal insult and make up straw-men to ridicule and argue against. Then the less enlightened of those opting out will get defensive and let themselves get dragged into the argument. 90% that’s the way these flame wars get started and not the other way around.

    For the record, I use flatpak on all my desktops, it’s great, and all of the other mentioned things in some capacity, but I get why someone might want to not use them. Let’s not make software choice a tribalism thing please. Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless they use Windows, in which case, kill the bastard. /s


  • It is great. I actually was a heavy critic of pulseaudio and stuck with ALSA on my desktop for as long as I could (until last year) by using Gentoo with USE="alsa -pulseaudio", the X-Fi’s hardware mixing and automatic S/PDIF passthrough.

    I tried to switch to pulseaudio a couple of times whenever I read one of those “it’s good now, trust me bro” articles, but it wasn’t, ever. It had and still has a huge amount of hard-coded, opinionated, often perplexing, behavioral quirks that made it feel like it just fought me every step of the way.

    Pipewire on the other hand does not only have saner defaults, almost everything is softcoded with a great Lua plugin API. Don’t like a default routing choice or want to automate your own, Wireplumber got you covered. Last year my X-Fi failed (or rather got flakey) and I had to choose between buying another used one or moving to PW. Almost everything worked out of the box on PW the way I like it, except a few details which were almost all covered by the settings. For the last problem, encoded streams not clearing the output, I wrote my own routing plugin.

    The documentation for that API isn’t necessarily the best, but it’s easy to start from something small and work your way to understanding how to get the result you want.


  • I’m in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.

    If you have zero experience with CAD, but some experience with programming languages or things like LaTeX, JSON, XML, HTML, etc., I’d suggest giving OpenSCAD a try. While it is definitely for more advanced users, it managed to instantly click with me, in contrast to FreeCAD and others I just couldn’t get into (or rather back into, since my AutoCAD lessons back in school >20 years ago). That it allowed me to work work on CAD drawings in Emacs helped too…