Prophet Zarquon

Haven’t looked at MX Linux before, thanks for the info!

Like I said, I really can’t care much about window managers at this point. Mostly, I’m tired of having multiple window managers installed after just a few app installs. If I start out with Gnome\Plasma, I’ll surely end up wanting some apps that have only been made for KDE, & vice versa. Never once have I seen a Linux machine that had all the apps I’d want, using just one window manager.

I suppose most apps could be compiled from source to run on one or the other, but alternative compiles have invariably been a hassle to me…

Since I end up needing at least two window managers installed anyway & they keep changing generations about 10x as often as I change machines, it’s pointless for me to have a preference. The best window manager is whichever one each developer of each app happened to use?!?

Hahahah, very!

I have still yet to see any other media library handle so many tens of thousands of audio files of varying encoding & naming conventions, so smoothly; “Media Monkey” etc were oft recommended but never once up to the task. Until just a few years ago, it was remarkably convenient for ripping a CD, too; correct metadata & all.

For a short while, WMP was to music files, as Calibre is to ebooks.

Same.

Hodor?

Dark Matter

Weird: I just noticed that I have seekbar preview on my desktop install of VLC, but not mobile. Now I want to compare to the Win version as well, because I’m noticing some menus look different than I remember.

Honestly, I install VLC just to snag the file-associations away from the WMP / Windows Video apps, because they remain insecure by default.

No. I’m open to suggestions.

If I had to install right now, it would be Debian, just out of familiarity.

Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, even Kali are fundamentally changed from when I last tried them.

Linux window managers change more often than I need to reinstall; I get really tired of picking a distro based largely on its choice of window manager, just to end up with Gnome installed anyway after a few packages fetch their dependencies.

The other nice thing about running vanilla Debian (or Ubuntu) is that at least some of the documentation for some apps, will be applicable!?

So real; I have just years of old '90s SciFi etched into my brain. SciFi novels, too, but it might be nice if some percentage were nonfiction? I dunno, honestly at this point I’m just glad when I see media with a plot that I don’t immediately foresee the denouement of.

Weirdly, I watch less TV now than when I had more monthly bills to work off.

I was even doing pretty well about steering clear of social-marketing sites, until SMBC-comics added a comments section directly below the first of four stops on my (semi-)daily funny pages.

I feel like you replied to someone else’s comment?
Gimp feels just like Photoshop before Creative Suite editions…
Everything that’s not MS Paint, feels like a huge upgrade to me. On Windows, I open Paint.NET as often as any other image editor, just because I don’t need more than that for most copy\paste\crop\color tasks.

I haven’t done any illustration or background\logo art in about 20 years. I’m not even sure what features are considered most defining, for a good image editor these days?

That would be more steps than just setting the hotkeys in VLC… I haven’t really had any reason to install MPC in… wow, over a decade? VLC opens everything & works with my remotes, casting, etc.

Similarly to I2P, IPFS sites can be relatively decentralized & censorship resistant; so, that & social features, are probably why Veilid was mentioned.

They’re intrinsically more suited to private cliques than public sharing, so I agree that they don’t really replace major public forums like TPB or the old KAT.

That said, TPB’s continual relaunches are about the best a well-known centralized public site can manage, on a system as oppressive as the corporate-run “internet” we have today.

It’s a lot harder to shut down P2P apps & devices, than websites on the clearnet.

It’s planned to have communication features beyond file-transfer, but otherwise I’m not sure what similarity you’re seeing, to what the OP suggested…

Which describes torrent apps 15 years ago. I’m really not sure what people think is missing?

Search engine functionality goes in the sharing\communication app.

DHTs in the '90s already had search & tagging & even some rudimentary social networking, built in.

Networks like Tribler’s don’t really need a lot more features, so much as just raw usage; most people torrenting are still using the mainline DHT, which doesn’t have a search layer.

That’s largely on those users. Advanced DHT search with rich social features, already exists for those who decide to use it.

+1 to just use Tribler, as it already does most of what OP mentioned:

• Social features
• Discovery\follow
• Patronage\ratios
• Sync (via following \ autodownload)
• Curation\filtering\tags

Doesn’t really do privacy, but P2P over corpnets ≠ private; for “privacy”, use a proxy (or torrent exclusively things no one gets jailed for, like entertainment video\music\books).

(I know this sounds insane, but I don’t use a proxy for torrenting, yet the only ISP that ever complained was CenturyLink, when using a friend’s computer that lacked ad-blocking, to download extremely well-known torrents of a recent show, without removing the tracker URLs from the magnet link. Since 2005, zero complaints from my own torrenting, AFAIK…? I even torrent directly on my phone & cast to a TV. 🤷 I’m not recommending a no-proxy philosophy, just noting that I’ve never had an issue that required me to proxy\VPN up, even when DLing apps.)

+1 to those who said DHT.

There’s no tagging support, but I’m not sure why I’d need tagging.
DHT crawling reveals pretty much every active public torrent, & finding what I want is just a matter of including it in the search terms.

“s04e10 2160p x265” brings up every torrent containing a file with s04e10, 2160p, & x265 in its filename.

I could foresee plenty of situations where tagging for quality, & for metadata beyond filenames & sizes, would be useful; I just haven’t actually had it come up.

Everything I need shows up on DHT search.

Well, except .STL files, but that seems to be because they’re given away for free so often there’s no impetus to make torrents of them?

DHT crawlers find pretty much all the active torrents. No shortage of 4K content; as @burgersc12@sh.itjust.works said, just add 2160p to the search terms.

No trackers needed. (Omit the tracker URLs when loading magnet links too; they’re not at all necessary.)

Godot is not bad for 2D & 2.5D, & it’s a lot better at true 3D than it used to be, but as far as speedy usability, I’d compare it to UnrealEd 2.1 in many ways.

I really think the main reason anyone uses Godot, is the licensing & cross-platform support.

If Unreal 5.1 would run at all on any of my machines, I couldn’t even really begin to make any kind of objective comparison between it & Godot; it’s like the difference between having a bunch of clever hand-tools, versus having a bunch of really well-made power-tools.

Try making a mountainous landscape, sprinkle a handful of different trees, then carve out a tunnel that loops under itself with a ledge overhead. Anyone proficient with both the Godot & Unreal toolsets, seems to get good (& stable) results in moments using Unreal compared to minutes or hours, using Godot. Unreal’s interface & free assets have set such a high standard for so long, that I find Blender is the only thing I could compare it to, but Unreal’s workflows make Blender look like Maya.

The fact that no one in these comments, seems to have had a really decent FOSS IDE \ engine to recommend for 3D game development, makes me sad.

Like, Unreal is pretty great, but it’s not FOSS (& won’t run on any of my machines anyway).

Is there anything FOSS that really streamlines 3D game development?
(I want to say Vulkan but I feel like that’s some sort of perennial “gotcha!” joke, at this point?)