I really wasn't going to do a third entry on this, but since the blogs became popular and I continue to experience things with my linux mint thingy, I'll throw some stuff down. Read at your own discretion.
(links to part one and to part two).
The quest for an audio switcher
I mostly mentioned this last time, but hadn't gone around to implementing it: from this page, I gathered more information than I could chew on how to do it. I assumed that creating a script and changing the correct lines to fit MY output was needed, but neither of these proved harder than needed (or even hard at all). Just copy-paste the code in a text document and set its permissions to allow to be executed as code. That was it (okay, I obviously tested it, but really: that was it).
I already mentioned the global hotkeys last time as well. Here too: I just added a new one that pointed to "my own" created script. Result: I can switch sound outputs with one simple hotkey, which is a double improvement over windows. Not only do I not have to rely on an extra command line program (nircommand), but it also cycles with one press rather than require two. Oh, and it works fullscreen as well, though this could've been my media player disallowing some shortcuts rather than windows itself.
Alternative programs
Not that I think anyone would care, but there are three convenient programs I had to find alternatives for:
* foxit reader: I've used this for years on windows. It was one of the first real alternatives to adobe reader, which meant that it was about one tenth in size and worked twice as fast (I guess the original reader is less bloated now, but back then...jezus). While there is a linux variant, I thought it was a good time to check on what the internet had produced ever since I got in this groove. As such, I ended up with okular. While some shortcuts are a bit different, it is actually more lenient and performant than I would give it credit for. It's hard to compare it to foxit reader (it's a PDF viewer...not rocket science), but I would say okular just wins with a flash finish.
* screenshot captor: yes...windows has a snipping tool. However, for work I often have to screenshot parts and quickly copy-paste that. If the snipping tool just allowed me to do that with one or two clicks left, I'd never have used it. To my own delight, I found out that this "shift+screenshot" key to screenshot a part of the screen is already on board in linux mint. So...that is able to be replaced by...no program at all.
* ReNamer: another work-related one. I don't mass-rename much, but when I do I want to do it. Renamer is just such a nifty tool that allows this all in a (for me) intuitive way that I feared I'd miss it. This one I'm not 100% sure on, but at least métamorphose (version 2) has everything on board I want at a first glance. It'll probably do.
The file browser
I almost feel like this is a crowd request. I already stated that nemo was pretty decent, but I tried thunar and dolphin. Comparisons would take less time than I would think:
Thunar quickly fell out of the boat. At least on cinnamon, it looks almost exactly the same as nemo...except worse. One of the first things I noticed was that it didn't have a second pane out of the box. It's apparently possible with this or that plug-in, but to me these were already two strikes. I mean...on windows, I can't even begin to count how often I drag windows around (it's now halfway my workday and I have seven open). Half of those are destinations from copying over the first half so two panes are the natural progression. It's not that thunar is bad in that regard...It's just not what I want when there's already a (IMHO) better alternative as my default. Oh, and nemo also allowed to bookmark folders, in the same way as how you bookmark favorite web sites. Ingenious, but missing in thunar (at least: not visible).
Then I tried dolphin. This was at least a worthy competitor. This went a bit back-and-forth. A few things that dolphin had as default were options in nemo and vice versa. After a bit of trying, I settled with dolphin as my default, though nemo is still on the system. My only real disadvantage is that dolphin doesn't have a "open as root" option. It's apparently possible through tinkering, but at least for now they both reside on my system.
GoG versus steam
For those who don't know: Good old Games is awesome. steam initially got big on being the first online platform, but GoG is a worthy second. They offer quite some great games that sometimes don't even appear in steam (like...half of the anno games, tyrian, lula the sexy empire and some settlers games), and there is no DRM on it. Since DRM is often a culprit in screwing up wine, GoG windows games were my usual test cases when I tested wine, years ago.
Steam (and initially humble bundle) certainly made a push toward linux five years ago. Ever since, indie games often had a linux port. Maybe for completeness sake, but probably because game creation engines made it almost easier NOT to skip on linux. GoG announced linux support as well, but I can't deny that it's not on the same level. They have search filters, but their client (galaxy) simply isn't available for linux. At all.
Getting windows games to work under linux is...peculiar. Wine is changing versions much faster now, but even so it's amazing that there's a huge database on almost the most exotic windows software in the first place. You're up to the mercy of tinkerers like me who might have completely different setups trying completely different versions of the game to work on completely different linux distros. It can be pretty satisfying to get some piece of software to work, but it's not as fun as pirating. I mean...it's not very ethic, but when you attempt to get a pirated piece of software to run, there is no loss state: you didn't pay for the software so you can't be picky. Attempting to get Anno 1404 to work is like being slapped in the face (why, oh why did I HAVE to go linux???). You can't expect bluebyte to come to the rescue as they've made a windows program, and the online community is more likely to throw vague instructions at you than actually help (to be frank: I can't blame them. By the time I get anno to work, I plan to play it at least until I've forgotten how I got it to work in the first place ).
...and then a couple months ago valve released proton and opened a FLOODGATE of new games. In terms of a match between GoG versus steam, that's a huge uppercut. It's even a pretty hard blow against windows users in general, though this is more something in the long run.
You see: I remember playing windows steam games on wine. Despite it being DRM, it actually worked. What you had to do was install the windows version of steam under wine. This had slight flaws in the UI, but actually worked to install and even play games. Not all games, obviously...but if they worked on the same version as steam, they would work in the same way. You couldn't configure things individually and if you had the linux steam client it lived side by side to it, but hey...it worked.
Nonetheless: take it from me that proton is a heaven's gift compared to wine antics.
Lutris, wine and playonlinux
Playonlinux is one of those programs I can't quite place. Crossover is a different breed: that's a commercial package that uses wine as a main base and handles the configuration for you. Seeing how wine sometimes handles, I'm inclined to even consider paying for it (especially since it directly and indirectly funds wine research as well). In fact, I think that nowadays, crossover and steam aren't even so different (just that steam is limited to games, obviously). But playonlinux? It's a program that allows you to create virtual drives in which you can install windows games...but isn't that what wine does? It says it's not wine, but is it not wine if that's the underlying code???
Sorry...the bottom line is: I don't know the intricacies of playonlinux, nor how it really gels with wine. Is it a frontend? A plugin? I honestly don't know.
It gets even weirder since I heard about lutris. Lutris is at least clear in what it wants to be: a be-all-end-all linux client for your games. From what I understand, its idea is simple: if you can get a game to run on linux, all the steps can be captured in an installer script which might help a future poor user whom is stuck in the same situation of attempting to get that same game to run.
I thought I'd try it out with the aforementioned Anno 1404. At least it started out correct: I found two installers (one for another platform, one for GoG) and picked the GoG one. It wanted to know my installation files, so I gladly directed it to the pre-downloaded GoG files. I thought all I had to do afterward was lie back, but alas...first it informed me a certain "inaccess"(1) was missing. No clue how to solve it, but at least it was in mint's software center.
The game installed correctly, and ran fine...except the entire screen was black. The sound played and I could see a nice-looking mouse pointer, but that was it. Damn.
Now...the winehq page told me that this was because I should need the stagebranch version of wine. Yyyyyeaaaahhh....it's not that I hadn't heard of it, but if so, shouldn't the installer have caught that? And how do I solve it? and considering that lutris had installed it...shouldn't it be in the install list? In fact: is it installed in the first place?
My second attempt at lutris worked better, though I should probably add "alas". I wanted epic games launcher to start. This is a free launcher that just required my account credentials. Upon installing, lutris threw up another exception: no vulkan support. But at least it linked me to a page where I could check my video card compatibility (erm...as in: it told me to run a terminal command and check for the presence of "radeon"...if it was there it wouldn't have worked for me) and install the proper drivers. After this, the installer worked fine.
Now...I immediately spent the next half hour installing Unreal Tournament (still pre-alpha) and shadow complex. They both ran...at a snail's pace.
Granted: even my gaming PC isn't the newest of the newest anymore (and it wasn't bleeding edge when it came out of the boxes(2) ), but still...both these games ran fine on windows. If I'm still missing things, I've yet to find out what.
Even with these incidents, I'm sure lutris will prove itself a good program. I usually learn the best when I get something to work, and when I do I can often apply that knowledge elsewhere. I'm currently simply not there yet. But that doesn't matter: my steam library is already huge, I've already gamed quite a bit through proton (played through unreal 1 and now rollers of the realm) and my linux-compatible GoG account isn't small either. I'm just curious to know if I can make it grow some more.
(1): note: it probably wasn't "inassess" it could probably be "incontrol", "inattend" or something vague starting with "in"
(2): I assemble my own PC's from purchased products
(links to part one and to part two).
The quest for an audio switcher
I mostly mentioned this last time, but hadn't gone around to implementing it: from this page, I gathered more information than I could chew on how to do it. I assumed that creating a script and changing the correct lines to fit MY output was needed, but neither of these proved harder than needed (or even hard at all). Just copy-paste the code in a text document and set its permissions to allow to be executed as code. That was it (okay, I obviously tested it, but really: that was it).
I already mentioned the global hotkeys last time as well. Here too: I just added a new one that pointed to "my own" created script. Result: I can switch sound outputs with one simple hotkey, which is a double improvement over windows. Not only do I not have to rely on an extra command line program (nircommand), but it also cycles with one press rather than require two. Oh, and it works fullscreen as well, though this could've been my media player disallowing some shortcuts rather than windows itself.
Alternative programs
Not that I think anyone would care, but there are three convenient programs I had to find alternatives for:
* foxit reader: I've used this for years on windows. It was one of the first real alternatives to adobe reader, which meant that it was about one tenth in size and worked twice as fast (I guess the original reader is less bloated now, but back then...jezus). While there is a linux variant, I thought it was a good time to check on what the internet had produced ever since I got in this groove. As such, I ended up with okular. While some shortcuts are a bit different, it is actually more lenient and performant than I would give it credit for. It's hard to compare it to foxit reader (it's a PDF viewer...not rocket science), but I would say okular just wins with a flash finish.
* screenshot captor: yes...windows has a snipping tool. However, for work I often have to screenshot parts and quickly copy-paste that. If the snipping tool just allowed me to do that with one or two clicks left, I'd never have used it. To my own delight, I found out that this "shift+screenshot" key to screenshot a part of the screen is already on board in linux mint. So...that is able to be replaced by...no program at all.
* ReNamer: another work-related one. I don't mass-rename much, but when I do I want to do it. Renamer is just such a nifty tool that allows this all in a (for me) intuitive way that I feared I'd miss it. This one I'm not 100% sure on, but at least métamorphose (version 2) has everything on board I want at a first glance. It'll probably do.
The file browser
I almost feel like this is a crowd request. I already stated that nemo was pretty decent, but I tried thunar and dolphin. Comparisons would take less time than I would think:
Thunar quickly fell out of the boat. At least on cinnamon, it looks almost exactly the same as nemo...except worse. One of the first things I noticed was that it didn't have a second pane out of the box. It's apparently possible with this or that plug-in, but to me these were already two strikes. I mean...on windows, I can't even begin to count how often I drag windows around (it's now halfway my workday and I have seven open). Half of those are destinations from copying over the first half so two panes are the natural progression. It's not that thunar is bad in that regard...It's just not what I want when there's already a (IMHO) better alternative as my default. Oh, and nemo also allowed to bookmark folders, in the same way as how you bookmark favorite web sites. Ingenious, but missing in thunar (at least: not visible).
Then I tried dolphin. This was at least a worthy competitor. This went a bit back-and-forth. A few things that dolphin had as default were options in nemo and vice versa. After a bit of trying, I settled with dolphin as my default, though nemo is still on the system. My only real disadvantage is that dolphin doesn't have a "open as root" option. It's apparently possible through tinkering, but at least for now they both reside on my system.
GoG versus steam
For those who don't know: Good old Games is awesome. steam initially got big on being the first online platform, but GoG is a worthy second. They offer quite some great games that sometimes don't even appear in steam (like...half of the anno games, tyrian, lula the sexy empire and some settlers games), and there is no DRM on it. Since DRM is often a culprit in screwing up wine, GoG windows games were my usual test cases when I tested wine, years ago.
Steam (and initially humble bundle) certainly made a push toward linux five years ago. Ever since, indie games often had a linux port. Maybe for completeness sake, but probably because game creation engines made it almost easier NOT to skip on linux. GoG announced linux support as well, but I can't deny that it's not on the same level. They have search filters, but their client (galaxy) simply isn't available for linux. At all.
Getting windows games to work under linux is...peculiar. Wine is changing versions much faster now, but even so it's amazing that there's a huge database on almost the most exotic windows software in the first place. You're up to the mercy of tinkerers like me who might have completely different setups trying completely different versions of the game to work on completely different linux distros. It can be pretty satisfying to get some piece of software to work, but it's not as fun as pirating. I mean...it's not very ethic, but when you attempt to get a pirated piece of software to run, there is no loss state: you didn't pay for the software so you can't be picky. Attempting to get Anno 1404 to work is like being slapped in the face (why, oh why did I HAVE to go linux???). You can't expect bluebyte to come to the rescue as they've made a windows program, and the online community is more likely to throw vague instructions at you than actually help (to be frank: I can't blame them. By the time I get anno to work, I plan to play it at least until I've forgotten how I got it to work in the first place
)....and then a couple months ago valve released proton and opened a FLOODGATE of new games. In terms of a match between GoG versus steam, that's a huge uppercut. It's even a pretty hard blow against windows users in general, though this is more something in the long run.
You see: I remember playing windows steam games on wine. Despite it being DRM, it actually worked. What you had to do was install the windows version of steam under wine. This had slight flaws in the UI, but actually worked to install and even play games. Not all games, obviously...but if they worked on the same version as steam, they would work in the same way. You couldn't configure things individually and if you had the linux steam client it lived side by side to it, but hey...it worked.
Nonetheless: take it from me that proton is a heaven's gift compared to wine antics.
Lutris, wine and playonlinux
Playonlinux is one of those programs I can't quite place. Crossover is a different breed: that's a commercial package that uses wine as a main base and handles the configuration for you. Seeing how wine sometimes handles, I'm inclined to even consider paying for it (especially since it directly and indirectly funds wine research as well). In fact, I think that nowadays, crossover and steam aren't even so different (just that steam is limited to games, obviously). But playonlinux? It's a program that allows you to create virtual drives in which you can install windows games...but isn't that what wine does? It says it's not wine, but is it not wine if that's the underlying code???
Sorry...the bottom line is: I don't know the intricacies of playonlinux, nor how it really gels with wine. Is it a frontend? A plugin? I honestly don't know.
It gets even weirder since I heard about lutris. Lutris is at least clear in what it wants to be: a be-all-end-all linux client for your games. From what I understand, its idea is simple: if you can get a game to run on linux, all the steps can be captured in an installer script which might help a future poor user whom is stuck in the same situation of attempting to get that same game to run.
I thought I'd try it out with the aforementioned Anno 1404. At least it started out correct: I found two installers (one for another platform, one for GoG) and picked the GoG one. It wanted to know my installation files, so I gladly directed it to the pre-downloaded GoG files. I thought all I had to do afterward was lie back, but alas...first it informed me a certain "inaccess"(1) was missing. No clue how to solve it, but at least it was in mint's software center.
The game installed correctly, and ran fine...except the entire screen was black. The sound played and I could see a nice-looking mouse pointer, but that was it. Damn.
Now...the winehq page told me that this was because I should need the stagebranch version of wine. Yyyyyeaaaahhh....it's not that I hadn't heard of it, but if so, shouldn't the installer have caught that? And how do I solve it? and considering that lutris had installed it...shouldn't it be in the install list? In fact: is it installed in the first place?
My second attempt at lutris worked better, though I should probably add "alas". I wanted epic games launcher to start. This is a free launcher that just required my account credentials. Upon installing, lutris threw up another exception: no vulkan support. But at least it linked me to a page where I could check my video card compatibility (erm...as in: it told me to run a terminal command and check for the presence of "radeon"...if it was there it wouldn't have worked for me) and install the proper drivers. After this, the installer worked fine.
Now...I immediately spent the next half hour installing Unreal Tournament (still pre-alpha) and shadow complex. They both ran...at a snail's pace.
Granted: even my gaming PC isn't the newest of the newest anymore (and it wasn't bleeding edge when it came out of the boxes(2) ), but still...both these games ran fine on windows. If I'm still missing things, I've yet to find out what.
Even with these incidents, I'm sure lutris will prove itself a good program. I usually learn the best when I get something to work, and when I do I can often apply that knowledge elsewhere. I'm currently simply not there yet. But that doesn't matter: my steam library is already huge, I've already gamed quite a bit through proton (played through unreal 1 and now rollers of the realm) and my linux-compatible GoG account isn't small either. I'm just curious to know if I can make it grow some more.
(1): note: it probably wasn't "inassess" it could probably be "incontrol", "inattend" or something vague starting with "in"
(2): I assemble my own PC's from purchased products
