The Steam Deck is at least trying to attract the casual users in, and I feel like the Switch 2 getting hammered with bad press right now and getting destroyed by the Nintendo fanbase might convert a few people over to the Steam Deck too.

That sucks, how long before DR goes full Adobe and starts moving to a subscription model? And how long before Blackmagic paywalls some features on their cine cams like Canon started doing on their still cams?

I thought for sure the free version of DR was still a fully-featured suite and didn’t paywall anything ala Adobe, and what you got with the paid version was an actual upgrade over an already pretty powerful app.

I’d more likely argue they’re facilitating it, but that’s just me.

DaVinci Resolve also has a free version that’s a fully-featured editor with nothing locked behind a paywall, the benefit from buying the paid version is you get an actual upgrade in functionality over the already-pretty-powerful free version.

However it’s still a proprietary app so if that bothers you, then KdenLive seems like a good FOSS alternative to that.

Thanks!

Adobe’s been starting to get some pushback and people ditching them for FOSS alternatives lately, though. One of the more notable examples is James Lee as he details in his ‘How I Broke up with Adobe’ vid.

Also, Endeavour is a thing if someone is a true newbie to the platform and is looking for a prebuilt distro, and archinstall nullifies a lot of the ‘difficulty’ in airquotes of installing Arch.

No prob!

Head Cleaner unironically sounds like something a group really would’ve called themselves.

I have and love them, in fact, Neocolors, or at least Neocolor I’s anyways, are basically just fancy crayons, if you’ve used crayons before, these are literally just a nicer version of that, and I have both Neocolors and your run-of-the-mill Crayola crayons, the latter having a far larger palette than the former (at least if you go for the 120-pack or larger) plus more specialty variants such as a glitter variant, for example, which can come in handy if you’re trying to replicate certain effects such as when sun reflects off water or snow, so I have something to compare, Neocolor II’s are the watercolor variant, and thanks!

You still have the Legion Go for a portable console with detachable controllers, but you’d ideally wipe Windows off of it and install ChimeraOS.

Stuff like this is a good ad for Pixelfed.

The fact that Nintendo is trying to bring back literal license dongles with their Game-Key Card, when dongle DRM died in the '80s for games for a reason, eg. what if you lose your dongle? You can’t play your game that uses it anymore, don’t help matters.

Discs on PS4/XB1 and PS5/Series X are figurative license dongles, which is probably worse as a 50GB or 100GB disc respectively will have been wasted on DRM for a game you still have to download anyways, but Nintendo is using literal license dongles.

Phoronix seems pretty solid, although they’re primarily Linux-centric.

https://www.phoronix.com/

The ‘not leaving centralized services’ thing isn’t really helped when there’s basically no other viable alternatives, like is the case with YT. PeerTube exists, sure, but it’s a content desert, sadly.

Now, if PeerTube had more content to choose from…

Really though, Reddit, Meta, Twitter, and Discord all have viable decentralized alternatives in the form of Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon (Mastodon serving as an alternative for both Facebook and Twitter), and Matrix respectively, why can’t PeerTube serve as a truly viable decentralized alternative for YT?

Even Linux is in its glow-up arc as a viable Windows alternative lately ffs, and I’m glad to have been on that bandwagon for years before that platform started gaining mainstream attention.

Google’s been attacking those lately, mostly to success (Piped and Invidious are effectively dead, ViewTube is also dead, and FreeTube’s a target now).

The general point I’m trying at is just sending a newbie straight off the deep end instead of letting them in easy to start off with and letting them move on to greater challenges on their own when they feel like they’re ready for it, is going to hurt the cause of presenting Linux as a viable Windows or Mac alternative, way more than it’ll help it.

Just pointing someone just ditching Windows or Mac for the first time with no terminal experience at all, straight to Arch, Gentoo, or even Slackware, is only going to fluster them and maybe even piss them off, which the last thing you want to do when introducing someone to a new platform, is alienate them in any way as opposed to welcoming them in, which pointing them straight to a more challenging distro instead of letting them on easy with a more beginner-friendly one and letting them move on to a more challenging one when they’re ready for it, will definitely alienate potential new users.

Think of introducing someone to a new OS platform for the first time, as if you’re teaching someone how to draw for the first time, for example, ideally you’d pick fun and simple exercises to teach them the basics before going into the deeper intricacies of the subject matter at a later date if they continue to be interested in the subject matter, pointing a new Linux user to something like Debian or OpenSUSE, or even Mint so they can learn the basics of the OS platform before moving on to a more advanced distro like Arch or Slackware, is the IT equivalent of that.

I’m of the opinion that if you’re a newbie to Linux and want to use a more GUI-centric distro, then be my guest, telling someone to jump straight into something like Arch when they’re just ditching Windows for the first time is more likely to just turn them off Linux forever.

That said, as said newbie gets more comfortable with the terminal, Arch is there if they want more of a challenge, and even then with archinstall, the main difficult part is effectively nullified, although for more advanced, long-term users, fully manual installation is still there on the Arch ISO as an option, but I’d be more likely to point them to something like Debian or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to start with as those are generally more beginner-friendly than Arch is.

Nothing’s stopping you from nuking your Windows install and installing some Linux distro though, at least on a normal PC. Surface products tend to be more locked to Windows though. I haven’t ran Windows as a main OS in years and don’t plan on going back, and Windows has gotten so user-hostile lately that I don’t even trust it enough to dual-boot it anymore, LTSC included.

(so far LTSC has dodged most of MS’ worst atrocities but it’s only a matter of time before that version starts getting compromised in some way too, so I don’t trust Windows outside of a VM, period, anymore, at least if I virtualize it, whatever stunts it may pull are isolated to that VM and won’t affect the host generally)