That’s disappointing, as one of the advantages of SPDIF is no ground loops between the PC and the receiver/amp. Maybe that’s not really as much of a problem now, but it solved that for me years ago and I’ve used it ever since.
Then again, I don’t have a surround setup, simple stereo is good enough.
I’m using Manjaro for my desktop and laptop. If I had to pick a new distro today, I’d likely give EndeavourOS a try. But Manjaro has been working well for me for a several years now, does everything I want with little drama, and issues have been few. So I’m a happy camper and I’ll keep on using it.
I have a home server that has been running Debian Stable since the mid-2000’s or so. It just chugs right along, so complaints are few. Though occasionally having to deal with the old versions of some of the packages on it can be annoying.
If you’re comfortable with swapping out components in your PC, just buy a second SSD. Remove the Windows drive, put Linux on the new drive. If Linux doesn’t work out for you, just swap them back.
You could also run a live Linux distribution from a USB stick, or potentially install Linux onto a USB stick or SD.
It’s been a while since I’ve used Gnome, but back when I did I also felt it lacked a lot of configurability much like the Mac.
In comparison, KDE felt a lot more like Windows (or how Windows used to be in the past) where you could configure and tweak all sorts of things.
Finder? Polished? Even compared to Windows Explorer, Finder is terrible.
Not too long ago, on a Slackware box I needed to manually change glibc to another version. No problem, I thought, just remove the version that’s there and install the package for the version I needed. So removepkg glibc and then immediately dawned on me… oh wait I really didn’t want to do that… Of course, after that installpkg and pretty much everything else was broken since pretty much everything either depends on glibc, or has a dependency that depends on glibc, so I couldn’t install the new package or do pretty much anything other than smack my forehead.
Wasn’t actually too big of a deal to fix. Used another computer to create a bootable USB stick with the Slackware installer, booted the computer with the USB stick, and did some chroot trickery to reinstall the old glibc package again. Then booted it back up normally and used upgradepkg to change glibc like I should have in the first place.
The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.
Today it’s just push something out the door now, and we’ll patch it soak them for even more money with DLC later.
Donald trumP?
I did switch over to yt-dlp some time later as development seems to have slowed on Pytube and yt-dlp seems to be where all the activity is.
That reminds me back when some time ago, I was tired of dealing with sketchy, and often broken, websites and programs for downloading videos from Youtube. I figured these sorts of programs must be doing something along the lines of downloading the Youtube page, parsing through the massive pile of HTML and Javascript to find the stream, and then saving that to a video file. That seemed like something I could do myself with Python, so I set out to see if I could figure out how to do it.
A few minutes and a couple of web searches later, I discovered that someone else had figured that all out already and I just needed to do “pip install pytube”.
I did the opposite. After one of the big updates, Windows 10 decided it was no longer going to work with the Vista-era drivers for an old Core 2 Duo laptop. To be fair to Microsoft, was I pretty impressed when I initially installed Windows 10 and it accepted those ancient drivers without any complaints on a laptop that was 10 years old at that time.
So I instead installed Manjaro and everything worked just fine.
I’d say the same thing about “Sunshine” and “Interstellar”.
Some movies I might consider including, in no particular order:
There’s always the centrally managed corporate Windows desktops. My workplace is better about this now, but previously they’d just push down updates and with some of them you’d have little other choice but to let it proceed no matter how inconvenient the timing.
The reason we have timezones is because of the railroads. Before the railroads came in, every town would have its own time, typically set so noon is the time when the sun is highest in the sky. This really wasn’t a problem, as back then it didn’t really matter that the time was different in every little burg.
Then the railroads came in. They needed things running on a coordinated time table out of necessity, and having every town with its own time was unworkable. I’m sure the railroads would have loved running everything off of the same clock everywhere because that would be simple. But people were too used to noon being the middle of the day, so instead we got the compromise of having timezones so that the railroads can still run on a coordinated time table, but also so that noon is still approximately the middle of the day as people were used to.
So the solution is just go back to the 1800’s and convince the railroads that timezones are actually silly and that they really should run everything based upon UTC. And if people want rail service to their town, they can just deal with not having 12PM being when the sun is highest in the sky.