Most stuff that runs on Windows is uninteresting because there are superior free alternatives on Linux, but in the cases where I needed it, Bottles is great.

I’m not sure what people are referring to in other comments when they say Bottles has “jank”, but for me it works very nicely for the few apps I occasionally need to use it for: Daz3D (just worked), jDownloader (just worked), and Affinity (followed this guide and it worked easily).

I agree with not using the term “sideloading”, but let’s not adopt right wing shame tactics by coining a portmanteau that conflates people’s harmless sexual kinks (e.g., cuckolding) with negativity. It’s sufficient to just avoid app stores, there is no need for childish shorthand.

Also, I don’t see how you are providing anything here resembling a “guide”. You’re stating an opinion, which is fine, but that’s not a guide.

If you’re like me, and you have no idea what Openclaw is, and noticed that the project linked doesn’t explain it either: Openclaw is apparently some sort of AI bot that performs tasks on your personal data without your input.

I don’t understand the concern, domain names are cheap and easy to get, they can just keep using new ones. Why does it matter if they lose the ones they have?

Piratebay used to do the domain dance all the time back in the day (and maybe still do).

Most of the paid plugins I’ve messed with have code to phone home and prevent operation if there’s not a paid license of some sort.

However, before you bother trying to put effort into pirating those, I recommend making certain that what you want isn’t already freely available a different way. Many paid plugins have decent open source and free alternative plugin(s) that can be used instead. You just have to look hard enough in the plugin listing. The WordPress ecosystem is vast, but there are a ton of smarmy assholes charging monthly subscriptions for plugins that replicate features provided by free plugins and hoping you won’t notice.

I’m not trying to convince you to like something you don’t, and KDE is a fucking great suite of software.

However, it does sound like maybe you haven’t used GNOME in quite a long time. It does have various customizations built in that are available to users through the settings UI these days, and “tweaks that barely work” isn’t really a representative critique of the general ecosystem anymore.

GNOME’s extension platform is very mature at this point, and I’ve personally used a bunch of the same extensions for years now spanning like 10 major releases of GNOME without issue. Yeah, the little fly-by-night extensions that get two point releases and then are abandoned don’t work forever, but that’s true of a lot of old software, and is probably a good thing, honestly.

The repo README has some example code that looks like it might get you 90% of the way there to implementing railway highlights.

Could be a nice contribution to finish that out and send in a PR!

Thanks for sharing, but I imagine it doesn’t get mentioned as much here because from a privacy perspective, that app seems kinds shady.

No source code available as far as I can tell, no builds available from a reputable source like F-Droid (just unvetted APK downloads from someone’s Google Drive), no apparent issue tracker beyond a confusing and seemingly outdated network of thread links from 2016 on a forum.

You could use something like WinBoat to make installing and using a virtual machine for Windows a lot easier. It also makes Windows apps feel almost like they are native to your Linux desktop, which is nice.

Alternatively, you could try running Excel in wine using Bottles, but I’m not sure how well that’ll go since Excel is kind of a monster of an application.

No, we don’t force anyone to do anything, electric replacements are offered as a “free” upgrade. We’re a housing cooperative, so technically it’s not free, but it’s paid for by the community’s collective funds.

The other main problem is that people routinely forget to turn off their stoves. We’ve had the fire department come multiple times this year alone because someone left their gas on and filled their unit with it. One resident left his gas open for who knows how long before he passed out in his living room and shit himself. Luckily someone found him and called the paramedics.

I guess if it was one person living in the wilderness and they blew themselves up or suffocated, then that’s on them. In a community though, it endangers everyone nearby.

Gas is not safe.

Speaking as a board member in a housing community where we are actively dealing with residents who claim that their precious gas stoves are safe and they don’t want electric replacements, I appreciate this post being shared.

Isn’t that exactly to be expected, and part of the whole point of the thing? It’s preventing connections to abusive service endpoints, of course it’s going to break things. The idea is that the things it breaks are not desirable, even when it means a game doesn’t work anymore. You have to choose which you want more: privacy, or playing that game.

That’s something I appreciate about the WordPress “block editor”; it tells you when you’ve changed colors in a way that is hard to read for some people. I wish more design software did that automatically.

I’m always confused by people saying that Vortex doesn’t work on Linux, when I’ve used it for years now on both my Fedora desktop and my Steam Deck. I didn’t even have to do anything outrageous to get it working. Install with Lutris like anything else made for Windows, press play, it works great.

Edit: Realized this sounded maybe judgmental, when I didn’t mean it to. Not trying to make anyone feel bad in any way. More like encouragement, because once you get over the hump of figuring out how to use tools like Lutris to run games, running Vortex is the same process.

A so-called “neutral accent” is still an accent.

The specific font isn’t as important for me. Mostly I’ll use whatever sans serif option is available in the reader, since I generally despise serifs. Very occasionally I’ll go for a serif font on a fantasy book for “atmosphere”, though.

Can’t you already do that from Nautilus with bookmarked sftp locations?

I’m not commenting to discourage other tools from being made, just curious if there’s some aspect of that process that isn’t already easy to accomplish on Linux with existing GUI tools, or if you’d like to be able to do it differently is all.

Thanks, yeah I think so. At least, I’ve followed all the steps outlined here https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia but VLC and gstreamer apps continue to tell me that I’m missing codecs. I am stumped, but happy that at least Jellyfin plays everything.

I somehow keep running across videos that won’t load in Clapper, Showtime, mpv, VLC, or Handbrake, and Nautilus won’t show thumbnails for them. It’s very frustrating. Supposedly I’ve already installed all the available codecs from RPMFusion, but still get the “codec missing” error on a bunch of videos.

Jellyfin on the other hand, it plays everything I’ve ever thrown at it. I don’t know what the hell it’s doing differently from the other video players on my system, but it works great.

This looks great so far! I love the concept of an app that makes conversions easy for the most typical use cases.

It looks like you’re still early in the UI phase, so you probably have plans for this already, but I feel like the progress screen could use more feedback than only two progress bars.

Overall though, this looks like it could be solid! Good luck!