401–410 of 464 posts
You laugh, but there is nothing as good as old Notepad on Linux. Every single built-in "basic" text editor of every single distro comes with syntax highlighting, line numbers, tabs, etc. I just want a rectangle to type text into. Notepad is turning into what Linux text editors already are: too complicated.
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Is VLC really "complex software" if you just want to use it as a media player? Double click your media file, it plays. Play, pause, volume controls are where you'd guess they are. There's plenty of complexity underneath, but the happy path is simple. By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a hand…
I've used VLC forever and I had no idea there is anything more to it than playing media. It always seems to have the most recent codecs, so it doesn't seem crusty to me.
I am no expert but these things I've done in limited amounts. Mostly I just double click a file and watch it though.
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Even when just opening a single video file it tries to do way too much at once. Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar? I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usab…
Yeah mpv is great on win; I switched from VLC because VLC had trouble with playback combined with large subtitle offsets. mpv just works and the couple things I need for UI were easily configured as hotkeys
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Is VLC really "complex software" if you just want to use it as a media player? Double click your media file, it plays. Play, pause, volume controls are where you'd guess they are. There's plenty of complexity underneath, but the happy path is simple. By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a hand…
It feels like GIMP was designed with user-hostility in mind. There’s no Paint.net for Linux, so I have to use GIMP from time to time for my gui server job needs. And gosh, I hate the damn thing. Every simple step in it is as hard as you can’t bear. (No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
I hate that Win11 Notepad has so many tabs open even after you close the app. Many times, I just paste my copied text in Notepad to strip the formatting + special characters and close it after re-copying the data. Pretty efficient. Now that I open Notepad.. all my previous tabs are open asking me to close them one after the other (extra click on not so save the file) :@ so annoying
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Is VLC really "complex software" if you just want to use it as a media player? Double click your media file, it plays. Play, pause, volume controls are where you'd guess they are. There's plenty of complexity underneath, but the happy path is simple. By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a hand…
It feels like GIMP was designed with user-hostility in mind. There’s no Paint.net for Linux, so I have to use GIMP from time to time for my gui server job needs. And gosh, I hate the damn thing. Every simple step in it is as hard as you can’t bear. (No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
If you want to annotate screenshots, KDE's screenshot tool, Spectacle, has this built in too.
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It feels like GIMP was designed with user-hostility in mind. There’s no Paint.net for Linux, so I have to use GIMP from time to time for my gui server job needs. And gosh, I hate the damn thing. Every simple step in it is as hard as you can’t bear. (No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
Try Kolourpaint for this use case. If you want to annotate screenshots, KDE's screenshot tool, Spectacle, has this built in too.
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I've used VLC forever and I had no idea there is anything more to it than playing media. It always seems to have the most recent codecs, so it doesn't seem crusty to me.
Even when just opening a single video file it tries to do way too much at once. Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar? I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usab…
Is there? I know the feature but I thought it was off by default and I think it's this way on my computers.
I’m surprised Windows isn’t given away for free at this point.
Microsoft remembers Bill Gates's mantra that piracy at the individual level actually gets you an audience who will then sign on the dotted line once the big-money deals -- enterprise license contracts -- need to be made.
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What is depressing about old tools? I love the GNU coreutils and am really passionate about them. They are old, but near perfect.
I don't know about depressing, but eg grep is slow and lacks some quality of life features working with modern toolchains (aka git, but also codebase size). ag and rg both read .gitignore if there is one (disable with rg -uuu); for today's multi-language repos, ag can look inside a specific language's files eg ag --go or ag --js.
I usually use rg, which is way faster than grep for searching many repositories at once.
But one of my tasks involves searching things in a single XML file of hundreds megabytes, or even several gigabytes, and for this, grep is way faster than rg apparently.
So under the right conditions, grep is actually quite fast and you may be missing out if you never try using it.