I’m also in the process of moving my music production (composition, DJing, editing, a little bit of sound design for video) to Linux. Just curious: what software and interfaces are you using? What’s worked well for you and what hasn’t?

There’s so much I love about Aurora. Every time I boot up my video editing laptop or rendering desktop, it’s like… slipping into a hot tub on a cold winter night.

Funny you say that… my previous job was on Win 11 and a sovereign cloud version of Copilot, the latter of which we were “strongly encouraged” to use for everything. That went nowhere fast.

But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.

Nah. I used to think that GUI git clients were The Way. But they all fall short, especially when the ***slightest ***thing goes sideways. Once you get your head around the paradigm, the git CLI is how you get real shit done and quickly. If anything, the GUI clients are all sharp edges and half-measures; the only reason I pull out a GUI client is to get a visual on all the branches in progress/already merged.

Gwenview is a new one on me. Thanks for the tip! Downloading it now.

Raster as background and marking up as vector graphics on an overlay.

There are lots of use cases for exactly that, like certain graphics tasks my partner does for her employer (flyers, t-shirt designs). with an existing raster image as background in Inkscape. For what I do, that workflow would be serious overkill.

Inkscape is for vectors and handles rasters poorly. I love Inkscape, but it boots slowly. Paint.NET is fast and light. Perfect for marking up screenshots for technical documentation. Pinta does okay in this role, but it’s no Paint.NET.

I don’t know, man… My Gentoo evangelizing coworkers… those dudes fuck. One is in a death metal band, the other is a kick-ass turntablist, and the third is a free-climber. They all wear Crocs with socks and have to beat back the admirers with a stick.

I’m sure it’s the Gentoo that makes them who they are . 😆

• Audio configuration: I just install DRS in Win10 and it works, as does all of the GPU integration*. My DAW also just works, no fiddling with the buffer to get rid of the crackling or to get it recognized.
• FL Studio: It’s not really FLS that I’m missing but rather I have a couple VSTs that absolutely won’t work in Linux, plus a huge amount of patches I built in those instruments. However, Bitwig kicks so much ass that it’s been worthwhile to try to rebuild those sounds inside Bitwig’s Grid.
• Inventor and AutoCAD: I hate Autodesk with the fury of a 1000 suns, but I know these apps cold and have a huge library of parts and assemblies. FreeCAD just ain’t there yet, and the new workbench menu has been an annoying learning curve. Inventor can handle enormous assemblies on my (previously running Win 10) laptop; FreeCAD still crashes when the object tree gets over a certain depth even on my burliest workstation. Assemblies in FreeCAD are a total mess too. I want to love FreeCAD and have great hopes for future versions.
• Suspend: one of my laptops won’t suspend correctly. Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it suspends, sometimes it goes into a weird middle state running at full throttle but the screen is dark and the keyboard is unresponsive even to REIUSB. I just always shut it down now, no BFD.

And despite all that, I don’t miss Windows at all.

*DRS was actually painless on Aurora Linux with my big workstation that only has a dGPU. All my computers with both iGPU and dGPU were more fiddly. I mostly blame Nvidia on this issue. I’m pretty sure the suspend problem is also an iGPU/dGPU thing and also blaming Nvidia for that.

I deeply empathize and sympathize with the challenge. I also failed to choose “congenitally rich” at birth, and I hope to remedy this error on my next iteration.

But seriously, I grew up very poor and left my abusive home at 16. I was homeless twice. Once in my late teens and again in my mid-20s. Not “crashing on my friends’ couches” homeless, but rather “living in the woods and dumpster diving for food” homeless.

I bring this up as empathy by way of anecdote, and also as acknowledgement of my immense luck and privilege. I know that reaching a place of relative comfort is fucking hard in our modern environment. What’s an even bigger pisser is that cost of living is stupid, the systems required for modern life are expensive, and the attacks on our attention, focus, health, and well-being are legion.

So it comes down to: is your position yet painful enough for you to want to do something about it?

I completely agree with everything you said, both in this response and your response to Scrubbles. I also appreciate your long-form responses in both.

This is, however, the system in which we live. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Choosing to pay cash for big ticket items, real estate, and durable goods when other accounts/portfolios earn more interest than the financing… that’s just throwing money away. If your laddered certificates accounts earn >3.5% and you can get 0% or 1% automobile financing (and you need a vehicle where you live), I don’t think anyone would choose to burn that much liquidity.

You really haven’t ‘bought’ your home untill you’ve fully paid off the mortgage, untill then you’re more or less doing a complex rent-to-own from the bank.

Agreed. My options where I live are primarily rent or mortgage; there are intentional communities with equitable arrangements, but the waitlist is 5 to 10 years. And with rents here going up at about 8% to 12% per year, I chose the 3.7% mortgage. FWIW, most home sales in my area are industrial investors or second homes, which absolutely underscore your points regarding livability, financial violence, and <waving around> all this shit in which we live.

real estate is only a hedge against inflation in a society that is stratifying, becoming more inequitable

Again, fully agreed. Inflation is here. None of us are going to wish away inflation or predatory lending, because primate brain and “they” have our number. If one has interest rate arbitrage available, using it prudently leaves more disposable income, and therefore more time to strive for more equitable systems. For example, I am the treasurer for my regional timebank, and among my offered services are financial literacy, budgeting, and household bookkeeping. This won’t surprise you at all: it’s my most used offer (>100 hours used) and the number of people lacking these skills… it’s almost like this system is designed for a certain scope and scale of financial ignorance.

This is a financially naive and reductionist take, approaching financial illiteracy. Applied correctly, financing allows you to preserve liquidity while still leaving funds in accounts with higher returns. Financing also provides a hedge against inflation, e.g. real estate.

The original, the legend.

Casual AF. I’m here to get shit done, not take any shit from my OS, not pay permanent rents to run my computers*, and do things my way. Protecting my privacy, fulfilling the promise of general purpose computing, and lack of DRM are just icing on the cake.

*Totally happy to donate on the regular to the open source apps I use!

Are Crocs with socks Gentoo?

A handful of my co-workers are Gentoo loyalists, and they wear CwS year-round. Contrary to the stereotype of CwS being the strongest possible birth control, these dudes are beating back the female suitors with a stick.

Some people get their validation from sex. They might not even like the sex. In fact they probably don’t enjoy it but they do like that bit of validation.

It took me a few decades to get perspective, but then I encountered people with commitment issues, some of the more chaotic attachment style variants, and various traumas. “Ah, now I understand. You do you and be safe out there, neighbor.”

Oh, gawd, it’s a special kind of hell. My partner and I were ENM when we met, but mutually decided we preferred monogamy (long story). Over the past summer, we decided to dip our toes back into having sidepieces. And our tolerance for modern dating bullshit lasted all of three weeks.

We’re not monogamous because of societal norms; we’re monogamous because of zero tolerance for the state of dating. 😆

🤣 I swear, my double-entendre was completely unintentional. Thank you Internet stranger for the solid laugh!

For most of my life, I failed to understand hookup culture and ONS. “Damn, I met someone appealing enough that I would like to have sex with them! You know what would make this better? Never seeing them again!” You discovered a Fountain of Sex! Why abandon that now that it’s flowing?!

Serious question: what are y’all’s methods to prevent/deal with spicy pillows?