linux rambles

im bored. here are some assorted opinions i have with linux and some related foss:

wine- im amazed that wine has managed to make some programs run better. or rather program cos i haven't tried a huge range. but my main example is CDxtract, it's an old program that extracts samples from old patch CDs that most people plugged into a scsi cd drive to read into their akai samplers and stuff. you've heard a lot of these samples in old video game soundtracks if you're one of those folk. on windows 10, it crashes if you browse through samples too fast, but for some reason it does not do that at all on wine. it still has some occasional issues but the fact that somehow whatever makes it crash is completely prevented just through a compatibility layer is amazing.

i3wm- i seem to have this weird desire to try and compel myself to use i3wm. i don't know why though. looking at it it seems like it's more for sysadmins/programmers, neither of which apply to me. i could probably bother with the textfile config because i could see that being kind of fun but i don't understand my desire to use it even though i'm dead certain it would not increase my productivity in anyway. i've been looking at standalone window managers like fvwm and window maker and mango and qtile, but i3 is the big one. i think i'm partially put off because on the website the screenshots are old and so it looks cool and retro and awesome but when i tried endeavour's default setup of i3 it looked fuck ugly modern. this leads me to two things:

use case- i do suspect part of linux's struggle with dominance is that a lot of idiots (me) have a weird stereotyping of it as something that only furry twink programmers and people who run huge servers (and now people who want to use steam decks) use. it isn't, it can do grandma's web browsing, some photo manipulation, some audio stuff, and it's so good for gaming. my old 2nd gen i5 pc that couldn't run opengl, when i put it on linux, i could finally run minecraft because it switched to vulkan or something. absolutely amazing, plus with steam's proton compatability and stuff like scummvm, you can play like virtually every game on a linux machine alone. so it's really good for gaming! i think libreoffice is definitely a decent program and could certainly replace microsoft office if people stopped using clipart and stuff (and also stopped buying up those yummy business licenses). i think maybe we need to steal some venture capital money to advertise linux or something, or some kind of MKULTRA program.

modern desktop design- why does everything want to be smooth and modern? this is a problem outside of linux but like good heavens, the worst offender is the newest version of GNOME. i hate to say this but i think the new version of GNOME is more fuck ugly than windows 11, and i think windows 11 is fuuuuuugly. but gnome is just like. when i was briefly using debian with gnome because i picked it as the default i barely knew how to even open applications. that's bad. but my actual annoying ramble is that a lot of modern desktop environments are too flat and too smooth and too devoid of gradients and their fonts are too aliased. i really like the look of the debian installer, it has a nice vibe to it, and i like stuff like CDE, windows 3.1, mac os 8/9. yeah, you can theme like xfce and stuff to look like this (you can still pick up fvwm and motif which definitely get you close to that CDE vibe, nsCDE uses fvwm as a base) but i still just hate how smooth things look. i want my computer to look like a 2advanced website, damn it.

use case again because i forgot what my point was with it- my use case for linux i think makes me a pariah. i don't want to use windows, but i want to use windows programs. now wine does exist for that, and it is fairly decent (already sang its praises) but the pariah part is because i kind of... avoid some foss software (free and open source software software). i very much subscribe to the philosophy of it, i think open source is awesome, and i like free shit because i'm a penniless cheapskate. but a lot of what puts me off some software is the gui or the design. this doesn't apply to command line applications (though people are certainly elitist about it) but i think you see this in like the free music software. lmms has gotten better over the years but it still has a few fugly bits to it, i think ardour is kind of awful, everything is in dark mode which i think is boooooring. to be fair, i get why some people use dark mode, because a lot of websites have an ugly light mode, but that doesn't make dark mode automatically better. most of this is just because being that stuff is usually made by one developer they don't really have the ability to hire designers and they're not necessarily supposed to do design, they gotta focus on the programming. which i get, but it just kinda blows. the demoscene produced fasttracker 2 which, afaik, was free, and is maybe one of the most intuitive and pleasing to use pieces of free software ever. idk. my point is i'm a weirdo because i use windows apps on linux because i'm an insane person who insists on using software from 2004

cachyos's version of mate was buggy and crappy. it made all my wine programs jump to the forefront, sometimes the panel would just disappear. i'm on cinnamon now and like it is sooooo much better. i am amazed that was so broken. though it didn't make me unable to boot into my computer like installing nscde on sparky did. i also think the whole flatpak vs aur vs build from source vs deb vs appimage (no one uses appimage) might partially scare off some people. building from source isn't that bad but i think some people suck that dick waaaay too much. i also don't like a lot of arch users because i feel like they think they're superior to me, but i feel that way about a lot of things. i tend to think people like to think they're superior to me when they're not because i am insecure. maybe. i actually wouldn't mind doing a manual arch install, i just don't care for the whole manual partitioning. i get i need swap but like man just figure that out yourself, i'm gonna use 98% of the drive for files anyway dumbass

tl;dr i am really good at being dumb. please groom me into why i3-wm would significantly improve my sony acid pro-ing