for one video, absolutely. for fifty? it’s a lifesaver.

in the terminal of course!

ffmpeg? no ui at all there.

less actually has most of that, weirdly.

i mean… less?

the main thing you’d want out of a good e-reader is font customization. which you can’t do on an application basis in the terminal.

yeah especially now that they’re finnish

no it’s from bell labs

really? i thought one of the main benefits of gamescope was that it can be nested inside an existing DE?

bazzite is probably the better choice.

you can most likely get all of the same benefits from your existing install, though. just need the right configuration.

it’s 300TB

when you install a DE as part of system setup it’s usually preconfigured by the distro maintainers. otherwise you need to do that configuration yourself, which is more difficult.

cringe

of course but it doesn’t help the “this isn’t that hard” case.

yeah but that’s a step removed. if i’m helping someone set up a machine i will usually make the media beforehand, but they need to be present to set up their name and password.

idk if you’ve ever tried to guide people unfamiliar with computers through troubleshooting over the phone, but my experience is that the more explanations are given the more they despair, and the more choices are given the more confused they get.

reading the manual is sort of compulsory if you want to do stuff like changing DEs, and for most people (read: the 99% that don’t know what “operating system” means) the mere existence of a choice is enough to cause paralysis.

i really do like the new wave of “opinionated” distros like kalpa, cachy and aeon where the system takes care of most issues rather than the user having to deal with them. shows maturity. but this selector screen sort of runs contrary to that. either be opinionated or be fully free, imo.

i think that’s calamares, so any distro that uses it can technically do this. the reason most don’t is that you can just add more DE’s after install. i know endeavourOS and openSUSE do this, and i think fedora has something like this too?

but the main reason is to keep install size to a minimum. if you want your system to be installable without an internet connection you can’t just ship every DE known to man.

theoretically it can absolutely figure out how to do that without it being in the training data.

we know it’s in the training data because of google’s filters, but theoretically it could have been generated without having anything to draw on just due to how the thing works.

i mean python is 99% backwards compatible so as long as you tell your tooling you’re working with 3.10 it will warn you about using stuff that’s too new. that’s why the shipping version is usually enough. in general it’s not recommended to have multiple versions of python3 installed at the same time, but if you are a habitual venv user it’s usually not a problem. however i have also run into the issue of some versions being “too new” for a project, where the thing just would not work with newer versions.

basically, if your issue is only that you don’t want to “contaminate” an older codebase, that can be solved by configuring your tooling. but if your issue is that the thing just doesn’t work with the “wrong” version, you’re probably best of using a container. a user installation of the version you want will work but having multiple installations is annoying.

use something like uv to install whatever python version you want and set up a venv with it. that way you can have project-specific python versions.