My problem may be related: how do you find people to follow? I wish I could just follow communities like on Lemmy. I’ve tried following hastags I’m interested in, but it seems like they aren’t always used.

I’ve instead searched for topics that I’m interested in, followed a bunch of people, then unfollowed the ones that post too much stuff I’m not interested in. But this seems like a pain.

I also don’t necessarily want to see everything that a single person posts.

Cool, thanks! This is what I was looking for. I’ve briefly tried playing with Nextcloud before, but this seems like another good option.

This is what I do for my own notes now, but could it work for students writing essays and that sort of thing? I suppose there must be some markdown to HTML/PDF/etc converters (also probably ODT or DOCX or whatever).

This is actually what I did when I was in school, and overall it was quite pleasant. There was some WYSIWYG LaTeX program too that I shared with some colleagues when we were working on a document together, I remember it working okay.

But I don’t see the average student, especially studying non technical stuff, to pick up LaTeX just for normal sort of essays. Even I am fairly rusty now. And honestly I don’t even know if I could have managed it during high school, where I had to write English essays and stuff with specific formatting for references. (I am grateful that my engineering education was less strict about that sort of thing).

I was hoping that someone would suggest a self hosted web document suite, I think “Nextcloud” is a popular one. Then it should work on any OS, and you don’t have to worry about syncing files. Even if you can pay to have someone else host an instance (not sure if this exists), and ideally a program that can keep a local backup synced to your PCs would be a big step in the right direction. Syncthing seems pretty great, though I haven’t used it much, and on iOS it doesn’t seem to be able to run in the background.

edit: I just read another comment that recommended OnlyOffice, this seems like another good option (source: this reply: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9415293). Aside: is there a proper way to link to a comment on lemmy that will go through your own homeserver?

What do you recommend? I love LibreOffice on Windows and Linux, and it still works well on macOS but the GUI seems weird on it, the buttons are really large. I still use it but my partner is put off by it.

I already basically get that half the time I boot into windows after an update. They say “let’s finish setting up your PC” and try to get you to pay for one drive, office, even game pass.

I’m so glad gaming on Linux has gotten to such a good state. I barely ever boot into windows now. (The “ad” on boot up is probably only once every few months, but that’s about as often as I boot into windows).

Message me on matrix in #alexgames:matrix.org if anyone wants to try playing a multiplayer game together :)

(I’m not actually very good at chess or go)

You may know this, but my understanding is that they randomly stop either to do another delivery on a different app, or to get gas/etc. (edit: I don’t think this justifies it to the customer, hence why I’ve stopped using these apps. I do have some sympathy for the driver, I have heard that the companies incentivize them to maintain a streak and take fewer breaks between drives, and somehow it seems like long unnecessary pauses aren’t penalized (perhaps because they’re hard to distinguish from traffic))

I haven’t used delivery apps in a while due to cold food and outrageous prices.

Awesome, thanks for sharing this! I haven’t gotten into audiobooks yet, but it’s good to know that there are user friendly options out there.

Vaguely related: it’s also possible to listen to audio books through local libraries in some cases. I think the app is not as friendly, and does a lot to prevent you from getting DRM free mp3s, but at least there’s no charge.

Thanks, this is somewhat reassuring. Maybe some day I’ll try it. I used to like tinkering with things, but lately I haven’t had as much patience or free time.

Ah, I actually have bought a few music CDs a while ago, and they were actually fairly easy to rip myself. I can’t complain about that at all. If ripping DVDs was that easy then I would probably enthusiastically buy a few DVD boxsets. But I don’t really want to buy dedicated hardware just to read DVDs on my PC to do a cumbersome ripping process, and also probably lug that hardware (or the entire PC) to my TV now and then to watch a movie.

I’ve been interested in vinyl for a while, does it really sound better?

Ah, good point. I had briefly heard of this and was shocked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code

For anyone who hasn’t heard:

This is achieved by way of region-locked DVD players, which will play back only DVDs encoded to their region (plus those without any region code).

This definitely furthers the original post’s point. And he may have even mentioned it.

It’s infuriating that you can pay for something and then move, and lose your collection. This comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/488/

I may have missed it, but does he (or anyone else) have recommendations for options to simply pay for content and get high quality DRM free files (edit: I mean legally)?

And how much of a pain in the ass is it to buy DVD box sets and rip them? Presumably that’s legal for personal use? Is that the only way? :(

I have some additional frustrations with Netflix:

• they have removed some shows that I like
• if you travel to another country, you can’t always watch the same shows— even if you downloaded them within the app
• they completely remove some episodes: the episode of community where they play Dungeons and Dragons, and (other streaming services) remove the Michael Jackson Simpsons episode.
• extremely user hostile way to browse content. They always move your list around and show the same show in multiple places
• I absolutely hate how all these streaming services auto play to the next episode. You can often change this behaviour. But my partner sometimes casts it to our TV and the damn app (Disney+ in this case, I think) changes the interface just as you get to the credits. I want to sit in peace and let the credits play, and discuss the episode. But it tries to shove another one down your throat, presumably to “maximize engagement”. (I get it for content that you’re binging or are re watching. But this is horrible if you’re just watching an episode during dinner and don’t want to have to scramble to stop the autoplay as soon as it ends)

+1 to everything you said. Another funny thing I noticed: I looked at my steam catalog on a family member’s Macbook. Many of the games aren’t available on Mac, plus they dropped 32 bit executable support.

I never thought that only ~15 years later (from when I first tried Linux) we would start booting into linux from a mainstream OS for gaming. How the times have changed.

I came here for tips to be happy but I still enjoyed your tangent dog story. I hope your dog is okay!

My raspberrypi works great as a backup git server, as long as it doesn’t fall off my table and get stepped on or rolled over by my chair. I also host a few static webpages on it for cooking recipes.

It actually has better uptime than my desktop, which I occasionally boot into windows when I (rarely!) encounter a steam game that doesn’t work well on Linux.

It does not work well as a DLNA server though, though it seems to manage lower resolution videos okay. I think I tried both tried reading videos from the SD card, and a USB external hard drive.

Has anyone compared this to a PinePhone?

I bought a PinePhone and it works great as a mini laptop to do light programming. But as a phone I don’t think I could trust it, and the interface seemed to need some work. It was cool (though awkward to control) running full desktop apps like VLC though.

Perhaps I should have tried a different OS though. I couldn’t tell how much of it was software vs hardware limitations.

Does anyone know why they don’t have a headphone jack?

The fact that even they don’t include one actually makes me respect the existing phone manufacturers a lot more. I always assumed that Apple did it to sell airpods, and then the others did it just to copy Apple or sell their own dongles/headphones.

But if even an organization like this chose not to include one, then maybe not including it really does make the phone a lot smaller or cheaper or waterproof or whatever.

That being said, I can’t believe cars don’t have aux ports anymore. Surely the cost and size isn’t significant on that scale.

Disclaimer: both for cars and my phone, I’m generally happy with Bluetooth. But I want the option to use a headphone jack without needing to buy or remember a dongle. It’s insidious because the kinds of things that you would need a headphone jack for are uncommon enough that you won’t get into the habit of bringing a dongle for them (e.g. road trips, full day of phone interviews)