Some companies are alright with this but yeah there’s always a catch with Apple.

From the UK, the dark sky lasted longer than I thought.

Getting 404 on that link. 😩

Quod Libet was one I tried. Doesn’t quite scratch the itch MusicBee gives me, but still solid nonetheless. Tauon Music Box is a gorgeous looking player that’s similar.

I tried LM Studio since AMD advertised it for their GPUs. Once ROCm was installed my GPU was detected and I could use LLMs on that rather than on the CPU. I struggled to get it to work on Windows even when LM Studio was trying to do everything to get it to work.

When I’ve used it, gapless playback being non-existent due to it basically being a frontend to the web client/MusicKit for web. I listen to a lot of albums in full nowadays, so that can really hurt the experience. It’s a shame because everything else about it is great. I am aware that the Cider devs are trying to find ways of handling that without reliance on the web client/API, which might enable gapless but also stuff like lossless if you got AM for that.

Edit: I should mention that Cider has a new client that’s paid but still supports Linux (specifically with AppImage, .deb and .rpm packages), and my experience was with Cider Classic.

Edit 2: I bought Cider 2 and so far it’s working well. You sacrifice lossless and maybe some gapless playback still, but it’s a mild loss vs. so far a huge gain in usability.

Tempted to throw Sam & Max on my iPad now…

MusicBee. Tried it on WINE. Not great. Linux players also don’t do a lot of what MusicBee does OOTB, and if they do it’s not as seamless as MusicBee. (tag hierarchies are the main thing, but the playlist functionality is also good.)

Thankfully it runs fine in a virtual machine.

Not to mention, Apple Music is so much better than Spotify for my needs and Cider isn’t cutting it for me right now. Once they’re not as reliant on MusicKit, I might give it a go again.

There’s still some stuff I’m tied to Windows for, namely music players (MusicBee and Apple Music but they can be used in a VM) and VR. But it’s nice to see Linux growing.

Honestly I love the Steam Deck for getting Linux into people’s hands in a way that’s easy and Just Works :tm:. They’ve not replaced the OS on their Steam Deck at all, which is a win not just for Valve but the Linux ecosystem as a whole.

Though, the only issue my friends has had is transferring files to and from the Steam Deck if their main PC runs Windows or Mac. There are a multitude of varyingly convenient options but all of my friends have literally just plugged an external hard drive through the sole USB-C port lol. Linux has to cater to people who won’t even install third-party drivers.

I was thinking on moving to Fedora, since it has more robust support for GUI-based installation through PackageKit and it’s got a more stable release cycle. But Arch and its wiki is just my bread and butter at this point that moving to another distro feels foreign and annoying in comparison, even though it’s not the distro’s fault.

Same here!

Agreed. There has been cases of malware sneaking its way into the AUR.

Now it could be avoided by checking PKGBUILDs and I can trust that the reader is checking those (are you, reader? 🤨). But do you have that trust for every user?

I prefer Void Linux’s way of handling packages, where it all goes through one ultimately trusted git repo that gets packaged up if the license allows it, otherwise using xbps-src. If it was a bit less DIY compared to Arch I’d be hopping onto it tbh.

I used Ubuntu, during the GNOME 2 + Compiz days. God I wish for those days to have a comeback. I’ve kept a bit of an eye on Wayfire for that reason.

me, wondering why my VHDs in 86box kept disappearing until I realised I needed to set the permissions in my distro’s Flatpak settings:

You say that but there are people who swear by the AUR for everything because it has everything or they prefer Pacman for everything lol

I used it after getting frustrated with the AUR. Never looked back unless the package wasn’t on Flatpak or had an AppImage.

I’ll probably do that when Plasma 6 hits their main repos. I’m trying it on Arch and so far, I’m well pleased with it.

I’ve had my entire setup crash when I was updating the kernel.