Imagine killing yourself over NC State.

I still think it’s a good platform for the “Linux version” of certain apps, like Slack or something. Package it as a Flatpak and you’ll reach the vast majority of distros in one shot. But it needs some elbow grease before it’s the right tool for managing all apps.

what 3d printer do you have that needs Windows drivers? a Formlabs?

Flatpak often trips over its own feet with their attempt to sandbox apps, they hamstring their own capabilities by not having the necessary file system or device permissions. Attempting to use the Flatpak version of Steam for example, it couldn’t see my games library because it basically had no file permissions. Yes, this is the packager’s fault and not Flatpak as a whole, but why do so many packagers fuck this up?

Flatpaks also install in /var for some reason rather than like /usr or somewhere that makes sense, and they have commands like “flatpak run com.steam.Steam” or whatever rather than just “steam” so a lot of pre-existing machinery fails if you’re using the flatpak versions. Flatpak essentially breaks any case where you pipe data into or out of an app. A recent example I ran into is trying to use MakeMKV as a blu-ray decoder for VLC. A major selling point of Flatpak is it can’t do that.

I had a higher opinion of Flatpak when I entirely ran Mint Cinnamon and it was an additional software source. Fedora treats Flatpak as the main source of GUI apps, a lot of them aren’t available as .rpms and it’s worse.

Long time Cinnamon user that has recently spent some time in KDE Plasma here.

Going from Cinnamon to Gnome, I often feel limited because Gnome has no problem saying “You can’t do that.” Nemo has more functionality than Nautilus does. Gnome applets are often minimum viable or less, Cinnamon is usually most things you need, most of the time. Cinnamon’s USB image writer is still my favorite.

Even though I often describe KDE’s interface and applets as being full of options and settings and capabilities, switching from Cinnamon to KDE doesn’t feel as freeing and enabling as switching from Gnome to Cinnamon. Options you never need don’t make you feel more free. It often feels overcooked. Compare how you customize the panel in Cinnamon and Plasma, KDE just has…more. It’s not more because it does more, it’s more because they didn’t stop making things.

In some cases I think KDE is technically more capable but Cinnamon is more pragmatic. Also I’m a lot more used to Cinnamon. I know how to do things the Cinnamon way.

There’s some functionality I don’t use like KDE Connect which looks cool but I’ve already got things like Syncthing in use.

I do sometimes end up wandering through KDE’s settings menu trying to find the thing I need because I don’t know exactly what to call it. Like, I’ve noticed that it has kind of a sticky effect when you try to move the cursor slowly across the boundry between two monitors, like it’s trying to be helpful and keeping you from overshooting. Except invariably I was reaching for the scroll bar, overshot, and now it’s “helpfully” keeping me from slowly reaching back across to the second monitor. If there is a check box somewhere to turn that off, what would it be labeled and what category would it be under? Mouse? Display? Desktop? Windows? I come across things like that more on KDE than Cinnamon, again possibly because I’ve been on Cinnamon for 10 years and know what most of the options do.

I have had some deal breaking issues but I’d blame them on Fedora rather than KDE. Long rant shortened there’s just less software available for Fedora because the .rpm repositories are empty, Flatpak is deeply imperfect and no one writes compiling instructions for Fedora. If you try translating the apt-get commands for installing prerequisite libraries to dnf commands often it fails because that library isn’t in the repos at least not under that name. So if the software manager lets you down, which it does more often on Fedora than it does on Mint, the hike through the desert to get what you need is longer and along rougher trails.

With the way Sony is treating their gaming customers lately I consider it a dead brand.

Didn’t they move their operations to the city of Gridfailure, TX?

Yeah, and it outright isn’t documented.

Because common advice isbto use Mint for beginners.

I really got used to a space mouse with a piece of software called Geomagic Wrap, which we were using to take point clouds from a 3D scanner and turn them into solid models. Part of that process involves turning the model every which way to look for holes and whatnot in it to correct, and being able to use both hands for this really sped up the process. At this point I just cannot stand doing the Click-a click-a click-a click-a required to move a model around with the mouse. And if I’m modeling something large like a building or a landscape in a video game? Forget it. I want to be able to fly the camera around.

One of the things I would do if I had control of FreeCAD would be to reduce the number of workbenches it ships with. Why does every copy come with the Robot workbench? Who is A) working with industrial robot arms and B) using FreeCAD to do so? Especially since it’s “Currently unmaintained?” there was awhile there where it also came with a “ship” workbench which could generate a container ship hull with one click. For my purposes I end up hiding the BIM, CAM, Draft, FEM, Inspection, Mesh, Points, and Surface workbenches as I never use them, and it declutters things quite nicely.

FreeCAD has long had open source disease in that it is very powerful and yet a pain in the ass to work with partially through crap UI design.

1.0 includes a lot of changes that address this. They’ve modernized a lot of it, added a lot of missing features, and brought a lot of things up to modern snuff.

There are things I like about FreeCAD better than Fusion360, for example FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built into it. Fusion360, last time I used it, had a kind of underbaked Parameters list that you couldn’t even sort, the ability to have a spreadsheet for your dimensions and such.

All Parametric CAD software is complicated to use, you need to wrap your head around designing with rules, but once you get that basically all of them unlock.

yes

The “and prop your monitor on top” thing: I kinda wish there were more modern PC cases that could stand being horizontal. Most are designed to be towers.

No probalo.

Fedora KDE, because my preferred distro Mint Cinnamon doesn’t at the moment have good support for things like FreeSync.

Sort of. What that page describes is in the same building as what I’m thinking about.

The thing I’m more nostalgic for was the time when everything had to be a glistening amorphous translucent blob, a bit like the Cingular Wireless logo or the MusicMatch Jukebox logo. And I’m in that era where you can just play MSN messenger sounds and you’ll get an OH MY GOD out of me.

I’m changing my vote in the Agora from “yes defederate” to "Hell fucking yes defederate.’

Excel?