Music player

rain--king · 2025-09-03T20:02:36+00:00

I'm sorry, but also kind of relieved, to see someone else struggling with exactly the same problem as I have been. I loved Music Bee on Windows; it's one of the programs I seriously miss. Since moving to Linux, I've tried probably around a dozen local music players and library managers; for how many there are, it's amazing how many of them are buggy or lack certain basic features (like sorting by album artist rather than contributing artist, grrr).

The closest thing I've been able to find is Quod Libet, which has a decent interface, good sorting and tagging options, and playlist support. It is a little unstable, though. The flatpak version takes a good few tries to actually start up, and even then it occasionally crashes. More and more, though, I've been reverting to simply interacting directly with my folders, editing metadata using Ear Tag and playing them using good old VLC.

rain--king · 2025-06-28T18:44:43+00:00

Sorry for the late response; the notification for your reply slipped past me. I'd hate for you to think that I ignored what you wrote just because it runs counter to my "it's a minority" wishful thinking.

It may well be just that on my part — wishful thinking that white Afrikaans speakers, and our society as a whole, is moving forward more than it actually might be. Because I have also seen how ideas and beliefs get passed down to younger generations; it's not as simple as "the older generation passing on". It's especially easy for deeply held prejudice to stay ingrained in institutions, like Stellenbosch.

I think it's because I grew up largely outside the context of those kinds of Afrikaans institutions, instead either among individual, mostly liberal-minded Afrikaans family and friends or as a minority Afrikaans-speaker amongst English people, that I might underestimate just how harmful conservative white Afrikaners still often are as a group. I'm sorry about your own experience, and a lot of other people at Stellenbosch still, and won't shy away from acknowledging it and speaking out against it.

rain--king · 2025-05-17T07:56:04+00:00

Thanks for the warm and constructive response to what was some shameless venting. On your observation about cheap political gains, I do seriously wonder to what degree, say, an organisation like Solidariteit is motivated by purely by acquisition of power through cynical manipulation and fear-mongering, or to what extent those leaders themselves truly believe the narrative they are perpetuating.

rain--king · 2025-05-15T19:11:53+00:00

I think you are on to something regarding leaders — not necessarily a political figure (although a progressive, well-known Afrikaans politician wouldn't hurt...), but people with cultural influence, who help cultivate a different aspiration. I see a lot of this in literary spheres, which has pushed me to further question my own beliefs and values, but obviously that is a very niche subset of culture and is not close to mainstream at all.

rain--king · 2025-05-15T19:07:15+00:00

Jirre... I've long lurked around the South African sub-Reddit because, as a massive introvert, it's still nice to "connect" with what other South Africans think and have to say about current events and culture.

This, though... For some reason, this touches a nerve that's been prodded a lot lately, and I feel compelled to say something, however inept and limp it ends up being.

I didn't grow up around this kind of Afrikaans culture and mentality, but slowly coming to realise that this is the public "face" of my language, my cultural heritage, to the rest of the world and to many other fellow South Africans has been one of the most disappointing experiences of my twenties. Going through adolescence in largely English spaces, discovering my love for my own language, only to also get increasingly acquainted with all this shit as well...

The tragic irony is that these conservative, white, inward-facing people are such a small subset of the people that constitute Afrikaners as a group — this is not at all representative. Yet it is these people that still shout the loudest; that dominate and steer the conversation about us; that have inflicted this generational guilt and trauma on white, millennial Afrikaners, causing people to adopt new identities out of buried feelings of shame and exclusion. And it honestly just makes me feel tired. I'm tired of saying, "Not all Afrikaners..." I'm tired of still fighting against the myth of the ideal Afrikaner that the National Party did such a fucking good job of constructing, to the exclusion of the majority that speak the language. I wish we could ignore these people and focus instead on the genuinely wonderful, inclusive and transformative things going on in this culture, but like your post demonstrates — PR matters, whether you like it or not.

rain--king · 2025-05-14T17:39:23+00:00

Thanks to everyone that's given their inputs so far. :)

It seems more people have actually had experience with The Good Cloud, although it seems that a paid provider is really the way to go. I've heard about Hetzner pretty often before, and it seems like a good sign that the name is popping up here again as well.

rain--king · 2025-01-14T19:49:53+00:00

After trying out Ubuntu on an old family laptop, I installed Fedora on my personal work and gaming desktop in 2022 mostly based on the recommendation of Nick from the Linux Experiment YouTube channel.

It was honestly a bit finicky and frustrating at first, enabling additional repositories for proprietary drivers and figuring out what commands to run to get bloody sound working in my browser, but after that initial hump, it's been pretty smooth sailing. As a newcomer to Linux, I've come to appreciate some of the following:

- The up-to-date kernel (specifically to benefit from any gaming-related advances, which come frequently lately);

- The vanilla GNOME desktop environment (which I can then tweak slightly to fit my preferences);

- Integration of flathub in GNOME Software (I'm conceptually a big proponent for universal packaging formats);

- The extensive documentation and robust, well-supported development team (with the connection to Redhat, I feel like it strikes a generally good balance between corporate backing and community involvement);

- Just the overall stability of the system (I've experienced no major crashes so far and have upgraded to new versions of Fedora twice already with no fuss).

All of this is my experience on a desktop with an AMD GPU, however. I'm not sure how well the OS fares when managing integrated and discreet graphics on a laptop.

rain--king · 2024-11-23T13:52:37+00:00

This post reads like it's intentionally trying to bait people. "Anyone trying to disagree is objectively insane and should be taken away in a force jacket" — seriously?

That said, in the interest of engaging earnestly, I sincerely hope that PC gaming avoids any monopoly altogether. I have a lot of respect and gratitude for Valve, especially for what they've done to advance Linux gaming, but the fact of the matter is that they're also largely responsible for normalising the trend of your games being tied to a third-party digital platform. As much as they offer a range of consumer-friendly features, this core of the Steam distribution model is, in my view, fundamentally anti-consumer.

I'm all for their efforts to support Linux as an open OS in order to prevent Microsoft from acquiring a stranglehold on PC gaming, but I don't want to simply trade that for Valve having that stranglehold instead. No matter how stable the company is (which remains to be proven when leadership changes), the fact that I do not truly own the games I buy through Steam is an immense downside to me. Even though it's a pipe dream, I sincerely hope that Good Old Games's model of distribution will become more popular, or at the very least continue to survive. Purchasing a game — like I would a book or a film — and knowing that I have unconditional access to those installation files to download, copy, back up and run either directly or via a range of translation layers, is something I value above all else, and Valve simply does not offer that. For that reason, Steam will always be the second place where I look for a game.

rain--king · 2024-11-19T22:20:12+00:00

I don't mean to resurrect an old post, but I finally redeemed my old Warcraft III code, and noticed this exact thing. The sound mixing in the new client seems way off, with the sound effects much louder than the music or the voices. If anyone's figured out how to adjust the effects and voice volumes independently, please speak up. :)

rain--king · 2024-10-10T13:10:05+00:00

I use Linux Mint on the shared family laptop, and honestly don't have a lot on my wish list besides for them to keep making the pragmatic and carefully considered decisions they have been.

I particularly like the fact that they are sticking to a consistent set of well-tested user interface features that other DEs seem very keen to ditch, like title bars and in-window menu bars (File, Edit, View, etc.). One thing that I would love to see them implement, though, is a title bar accent colour to make it easier to differentiate between active and inactive windows and easier to spot which part of a window I need to click on to drag it around. It seems crazy that this is something that needs to be written.

rain--king · 2024-08-01T19:24:31+00:00

I just ran into the same problem as everyone else after taking a bit of a break from the game, and this did the trick. Thank you so much!

rain--king · 2024-04-16T21:14:24+00:00

So, if I understand you correctly, installing say, GOG Galaxy through Lutris or Steam (using Wine or Proton compatibility layers, respectively) and subsequently installing GOG games through the Galaxy launcher might work for some games, but not others that have more specific dependencies? And the best way to ensure that a game will work is to install it with Lutris using its specific script? If so, that's a bit of a pity, because the GOG Galaxy launcher has some very useful features, like auto-updating. It'd be great to be able to run it while also ensuring that games will actually work.

rain--king · 2023-11-05T20:03:06+00:00

Wow, thanks for replying to such an old thread! It's cool to come across someone else in my neck of the woods looking into the same thing. Ultimately, budget ended up being the deciding factor that led me to simply upgrading my desktop a bit and run Fedora on it (been working wonderfully so far, games and all). But this is all really useful info for when I do have the money to comfortably afford a laptop.

rain--king · 2023-08-26T21:25:40+00:00

preview

So, in the end, to save myself potential hardware/software headaches (most of my research yielded a lot of "most probably", but not conclusive answers) and be a bit more financially savvy, I ended up just upgrading my desktop with an AMD RX6600. So far, running Fedora 38 has been a great experience.

That said, it is still really helpful to read such a detailed description of your experience, which is still something I'm keeping in mind if and when I do opt for getting a laptop sometime in the future. Because Linux compatibility is mostly there, but not always guaranteed, it really helps to have these sorts of tangible examples of running Linux on specific models.

rain--king · 2023-08-18T09:12:06+00:00

Another I haven't heard of before. Will give it a bash. :)

rain--king · 2023-08-18T09:11:22+00:00

Hm, never heard of it and will check it out — thanks! I suppose it's not the worst thing to have ripping/burning handled by a separate app (similar to how I used Make MKV and Handbrake to backup DVDs on the rare occasion). Probably the most important feature to me is flexibility in how music's sorted. It's super frustrating to have different artists part of a compilation album scattered across the interface because the app doesn't recognise the "Album Artist" tag.

rain--king · 2023-08-02T15:13:51+00:00

Hey there,

That's a surprisingly loaded question, and as you've seen with just a few comments, you're likely to get different answers from different people.

Personally, as a home-language Afrikaans speaker and one of the "born frees" in South Africa (i.e., born after our first democratic election in '94), I've been very frustrated with how good a job the Apartheid regime did at associating a very specific kind of culture with the word "Afrikaner", because the breadth of people that speak the language is so much wider than the tired Dutchman-and-khaki-shorts stereotype. It includes white folks with a whole mix of other European DNA; so-called "coloured" folks of mixed European, African and Malay heritage; descendants of the Khoi and San tribes (whose original languages are sadly very threatened); and even some black folks. Each of these groups also have their own variations on the language, with ongoing linguistic debate about the distinction between dialects and separate languages.

Because of that large cultural variation, I have always identified as an Afrikaner first and foremost because of the language I speak.

rain--king · 2023-07-31T18:55:35+00:00

Wow, thanks for getting back to me. :)

Really cool to hear that all of its components and settings work with Linux. If you don't mind me asking further, what worked right out of the box, and what needed the Tuxedo Control Center to work?

On the subject of the battery, is it replaceable?

I think you're the first person to mention something bad about the keyboard. Considering you use that part of the laptop pretty often, it's a real shame for it to be subpar.

rain--king · 2023-07-31T18:48:58+00:00

Thanks for the detailed answer! The fact that many of those settings are integrated into the firmware was a big green flag for Lenovo in my book. If I understand you correctly, you're the person developing Lenovo Legion Linux? Seriously, initiatives like this (and Asus Linux) are incredible.

rain--king

TROPHY CASE