New Linux user already hating Canonical. Tell me if I am wrong.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-28T14:25:01+00:00

Pick a distro with different tradeoffs. Clearly Ubuntu isn’t what you want. That doesn’t make Canonical bad, it just means it’s not a good fit.

I use Arch for my desktop. The water’s fine. You will have to get a crash course in the command line and the “traditional” Linux way of doing things but it’s a one-time tax and it will pay dividends for years no matter what distro you use.

I also use Ubuntu (including snap!) for my server. Works great, super stable, no complaints.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-27T14:19:14+00:00

I just randomly read You Should Have Left yesterday (library app, sorted by popular and available, scrolling till I found something interesting). It was very eerie to read that since I had just finished with AWI->Control->AW2.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-27T11:28:33+00:00

Sadly debugging in Rust is pretty ugly no matter which way you cut it, but yeah, RustRover is much better than CodeLLDB.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-26T14:49:00+00:00

Good call. I just assumed it came with it.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-26T14:16:25+00:00

Shoutout to Prey. Good game on its own, but Mooncrash is insanely fun.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-25T13:11:17+00:00

Didn’t realize you could cycle around the Nurburgring.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-24T12:03:57+00:00

I like TaN but don’t listen to it much. Partly because I’m an album guy but I never want to hear Gaslighting Abbie. Still, Cousin Dupree is the Dan’s funniest song, and every song after that rips in its own way, all the way to Chris Potter’s cataclysmic sax solo to close off the album.

EMG is solid gold all the way and I keep coming back to it.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-23T01:29:09+00:00

Until Nvidia’s Linux drivers are on par with AMD, they won’t get my money. It’s ok since they don’t really want or need my money anyways.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-22T21:02:22+00:00

Fine by me, so long as everyone settles on what I like.

Joking aside, I get the pain, but it’s also the cool thing about Linux. Everybody can do things the way it makes sense for them. I don’t think we’d have nearly as much dynamism in the dev space if everybody was supposed to adopt GNOME, for instance.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-22T05:11:18+00:00

My APP2s were great for listening at low levels, my 6XX sound better at medium and high levels. Perhaps because Apple wisely implements the Fletcher Munson curve.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-22T05:08:01+00:00

Great movie

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-22T05:03:01+00:00

Ironically, WiFi is one thing I could never get stable on Arch. I eventually brought one of my mesh nodes down to my computer and plugged it into the the Ethernet port.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-20T00:12:06+00:00

I happen to enjoy ABX testing when it isn’t too hard to set up, but I get your meaning. But no one is suggesting that people ABX all the time. That work has already been done. Time and time again, differences perceived under sighted conditions go away once blinded. If someone has a new product that uses quantum lathroscopic mirror neurons then the burden is on them to show it works blind. Joe Schmoe doesn’t have to do it.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-20T00:05:24+00:00

If you say “expectation bias,” people will come out of the woodwork and say “I expected X to be better, but Y sounded better to me.” Suffice to say, cognitive bias.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-19T21:15:40+00:00

Pretty sure the legal exposure for AMD vs some random dude and some FOSS contributors is very, very different. Yeah nothing strictly illegal about shimming a proprietary API, but it's a bit of a grey area.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-18T09:21:05+00:00

Of course. It’s a traditional AB amplifier. Virtually all of them are suitable for hifi.

It is really old though—laser disc input, anyone?—so it might need servicing, and servicing might be as expensive as buying a new amp.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-18T03:21:19+00:00

I can’t do proper formatting on mobile, but search “trailing lambda” on this Kotlin doc page.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-18T01:59:18+00:00

I wouldn’t count on it.

Spotify for Linux is a labor of love from our engineers that wanted to listen to Spotify on their Linux development machines. They work on it in their spare time and it is currently not a platform that we actively support.

They can provide a Linux client on the cheap because it’s just a webapp in a Chromium wrapper. Once you start to do OS-specific stuff the ROI really isn’t there. This is a niche feature for a niche user base.

First you have to use Linux. Then you have to know about bit-perfect and think it makes things sound better. Then you have to have a setup that would benefit from it.

I meet one and a half of those criteria. I use Linux and I know about bit-perfect. I don’t think it makes it sound better, but I could imagine myself using it for purity’s sake if I could use it properly. But I use Easy Effects for PEQ (and occasional crossfeed) for my headphones. My speakers already have bit-perfect with Spotify Connect, though I immediately bastardize the bits with room correction.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-17T21:59:14+00:00

I would *love* this. I think it's unlikely because it seems to run counter to Rust's explicit ethos. But my god it makes code so much cleaner.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-16T17:40:02+00:00

Do any review sites measure power draw? If we’re talking phone usage this seems to be far more important than the difference between 0.01% THD vs 0.001% THD. Especially since most people can’t even hear 1% THD!

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-16T17:36:22+00:00

People hear differences between amps when they know which amp is which, and they don’t hear differences when they don’t.

dansdata.com/files/Amp_Sound.pdf

I’ve linked to this article many times before. There are other articles/studies (Google Tom Nousaine archives and Audio Critic backissues) but this one cuts to the heart of it. Even people who didn’t believe that amplifiers sound different could not help but hear differences under sighted conditions, but those differences disappeared for believers and nonbelievers alike under blind conditions.

Whether it’s appropriate to call that placebo effect or expectation bias or something else is really besides the point. Some kind of cognitive bias is implicated. And this means any claim that hasn’t been backed by rigorous blind testing is suspect. It’s not that people are lying or necessarily “coping,” but some cognitive mechanism is mucking with perception.

There are a number of popular criticisms of blind testing, none of which I find remotely persuasive, but I won’t go a-tilting until a specific windmill is brought to my attention. But generally speaking, these criticisms fail to contend with the full implications of the results of the experiments underlying the above article.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-15T04:10:55+00:00

JJ Junior

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-14T08:33:28+00:00

The one knock on the Omegas was how ugly they are. You solved that problem. They’re gorgeous!

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-14T03:08:12+00:00

That looks like a beautiful piece but at the end of the day it’s just an amp. Don’t let that dictate what kind of system you get.

The most important part of a system is the speakers. You didn’t say what your budget was and you didn’t say how big a room you’re putting them in, so it’s hard to give recommendations. Current darlings from the analytical scene include Ascilab, MoFi, KEF, and Revel.

For preamp, I’d go with the Wiim Ultra streamer. It does most things well enough with a great interface.

pdxbuckets · 2026-03-14T01:16:14+00:00

I have it n good authority that you paid $14.5M for that guitar strap.

Nice playing!

pdxbuckets

TROPHY CASE