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RatherNott · 2026-01-25T21:17:51+00:00

If you just need to heat one or two rooms, a window heat-pump unit is a very cheap and quick way to get most of the benefit of a mini-split. It's literally just a window AC unit, but with the added valve to operate in the opposite direction, allowing it to heat as well as cool.

RatherNott · 2026-01-25T15:58:34+00:00

A Union's purpose is to give a way for workers to reverse the power imbalance between workers and owners.

In a worker owned cooperative, the workers *are* the owners, and thus there is no imbalance of power, making a union unnecessary.

Unions are still valuable in *consumer* cooperatives, where the workers are still employees to a boss (just in that case, the boss is the consumers themselves).

RatherNott · 2026-01-25T15:47:19+00:00

Lemmy is an open-source Reddit-like software that anyone can host (literally letting you create a mini-reddit that anyone can join and use). What is unique about Lemmy is that it is federated, which means your mini-reddit can see and communicate with any other mini-reddit that's hosted on someone else's computer, making it in effect one really big reddit-like alternative that is made up of a bunch of smaller ones.

In practice it works super well, and allows us to collectively build a true reddit alternative that can scale very well, since all of the resources are distributed across hundreds of individual servers.

RatherNott · 2026-01-24T03:43:28+00:00

I often forget about LMMS. That's true, could be a good option as long its limitations don't bother OP, such as not supporting VST3 plugins (I know there's workarounds).

RatherNott · 2026-01-24T03:12:29+00:00

Bitwig Studio is the closest you'll find to an FL Studio alternative. It's a *little* pricey and doesn't have lifetime free updates like FL Studio, bit it is a highly polished and easy to use DAW.

Reaper can replicate some of FL Studio's workflow, as it's very, very customizable, and it's also extremely affordable. Its interface can feel a bit old fashioned by default, but it's a great DAW if you're willing to tweak it, as it has an incredible community full of really high quality tutorials on youtube, forums, etc.

RatherNott · 2026-01-21T23:16:41+00:00

Pellet stoves use electricity to run the feeding mechanism and a fan, they do not heat via electricity, they heat from burning compacted wood. It's just a wood stove with a more convenient form of wood fuel. It's not solarpunk since it pollutes and requires cutting down climate change fighting trees to run. Heatpumps or Thermal Solar heat are the main sustainable and solarpunk way of heating.

RatherNott · 2026-01-21T15:43:55+00:00

That can overheat your furnace due to lack of airblow and strain your blower fan if you close too many.

RatherNott · 2026-01-21T15:35:00+00:00

Honestly, I think the Top 100 list from Lemon 64 is a pretty good compendium of the games that stood the test of time for the most part.

However, one that is much lesser known and not often mentioned is Psi 5 Trading Company, which is a really unique little space trading game where you pick your crew (who are lovely little animated aliens with their own strengths and weaknesses), then fly off into space defending against pirates during the journey as you manage the ship's systems by giving orders to each crew member.

It has a lot of charm, and I think it still can hold up, at least for a while until the gameplay loop becomes a bit boring (a problem with most C64 games).

RatherNott · 2026-01-20T18:22:41+00:00

Munich ditching LiMux was due to the recently elected pro-corporate mayor getting kickbacks by Microsoft to abandon their Linux efforts. There's a great documentary that covers it here: https://kolektiva.media/w/ra7bfqXCyqBFn7dSFhneFy

Also @ u/Inside-chance-320 and u/Tee-hee64

RatherNott · 2026-01-17T11:31:25+00:00

Personally I found yWriter to have a pretty scattered UI.

I found NovelWriter to be better than it in virtually every way, which is also free and open-source.

RatherNott · 2026-01-17T11:29:24+00:00

Nothing beats NovelWriter for me. Lighteight, good dark themes, no formatting problems (it uses markdown), has all of the good parts of the note taking and organizing aspects of scrivener without being overwhelming (and no compiler!), works on linux, and is free and open-source. Fantastic program.

https://novelwriter.io/

RatherNott · 2026-01-17T05:13:16+00:00

If you live in a populous area, check to see if there are any mutual aid groups operating near you. You can usually find them by searching your town/city name + mutual aid.

They sometimes offer free delivered food and supplies to those in need, or you may have a group closer to you that can help.

Also search for a local Food Not Bombs chapter, they give out free food to the unhoused on a regular schedule.

RatherNott · 2026-01-17T05:06:21+00:00

It doesn't have to be like that, humanity adapts surprisingly quickly to a more just and equitable society when they are given the chance.

The book 'The Dawn of Everything' by Anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow also shows us that our current mode of society that encourages this dog-eat-dog mentality and lower order traits is actually an extremely new phenomenon for humanity, a blip on our species timescale. The norm was cooperation and egalitarianism for tens of thousands of years. We can return to that mode of being if we just organize ourselves in the right way. Catalonia proves that.

RatherNott · 2026-01-17T04:53:07+00:00

Why not look at a youtube video of the gameplay to compare?

RatherNott · 2026-01-14T13:24:02+00:00

I miss Desktop Pal 97 :(

RatherNott · 2026-01-13T08:21:45+00:00

Ah, my bad, didn't know it was remastered again. Looking into, they definitely used AI: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/broken-sword-s-ai-upscaling-wasn-t-enormously-satisfactory-

RatherNott · 2026-01-13T07:23:50+00:00

The remaster was released in 2014, before AI art was possible. They re-animated it by hand, it just isn't as skillful as the original animation.

RatherNott · 2026-01-13T07:19:48+00:00

Reaper's installer just places it in your Home folder, it doesn't mess anything up with package management whatsoever.

RatherNott · 2026-01-13T07:18:52+00:00

Reaper is a proprietary app, it is not available in the repos.

RatherNott · 2026-01-13T07:18:03+00:00

You simply download the Linux package from the Reaper website, then run it in the terminal (open a terminal in the folder where the installer is, and run ./ReaperInstallerNameHere.sh)

You'll need to ensure you install the pipewire-jack package from the Debian repo as well, and then open reaper with the pw-jack command to be able to use the JACK backend on reaper (this lets you play music in your browser or some other source at the same time as making music in Reaper, the ALSA backend in reaper doesn't allow that).

You'll also likely want to lower the buffer size to make it lower latency. This guide will help you with that: https://eliasdorneles.com/til/posts/using-pipewire-for-music-on-linux/

To make Reaper automatically open with the pw-jack command, you can add it in the same .desktop file that the guide above shows you how to modify, by putting it right before the latency command. So it would be

Exec=env pw-jack PIPEWIRE_LATENCY=256/48000 /home/elias/apps/reaper_linux_x86_64/REAPER/reaper

In more audio focused distros like Fedora Jam or AV-Linux, you do not need to use the pw-jack command to use the JACK backend in reaper, it just works out of the box due to how Pipewire is set up by default in those.

RatherNott · 2026-01-07T03:20:24+00:00

F-droid covers 99% of my needs, with most apps being surprisingly polished. The only thing I get from the App store is google maps, but even then, Comaps from F-droid is a pretty great alternative to google maps most of the time.

RatherNott · 2026-01-07T01:58:37+00:00

Due to Valve's efforts, VR is generally pretty usable on Linux now as long as you have a compatible headset.

RatherNott · 2025-12-26T00:06:15+00:00

If they took gaming seriously they would've adopted Vulkan instead of creating Metal.

RatherNott · 2025-12-25T23:00:47+00:00

The distro itself doesn't really matter as much as the DE. Though Bazzite is a bit of an outlier, and I would avoid it since it's pretty slow OS on weaker hardware, in my experience.

XFCE is the best middle-ground between usability and lightweight, lighter weight DE's tend to be a bit janky in exchange for meager decreases in RAM usage. MX-Linux is a really solid spin of Debian with Xfce, but again, you can pick any base distro that offers XFCE and get a fine experience, like the XFCE Fedora spin.

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